Here are a few suggestions for possible responses for when one of them annoying fellas tries to force yet another free fucking newspaper on you with the words 'But it's free!!!!':
That's because it's worthless.
So are all the others (accompanied by filthy look).
So's cancer.
So's dogshit.
So's tap water.
So are plastic bags from Asda.
So's a kick in the teeth.
So's South Africa (in theory anyway).
So's Willy the fucking whale.
So was school milk.
So's the Polish Express.
So are adverts on the Gumtree.
So's this.
And also this.
So's what pigeons eat.
And my own personal favourite (although I'm yet to try it out myself): So's my choice NOT to take your piece of shit free newspaper, you overzealous purple-t-shirted fucking fuckwitted TWAT!!!
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It's just a mad wacky idea at the moment, but if a few people are interested it could be really good fun!
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Dear Lambeth Council,
I am writing with reference to the following statement contained on your website, which I came across while searching for a municipal swimming pool in the borough:
We are committed to the provision and development of sport and recreation. There are four leisure centres and a community sports centre in the borough, and facilities in our parks and green spaces. We also run a healthy lifestyles programme.
Upon further investigation (ie. clicking on the link to 'Clapham Leisure Centre') I found the following website:
http://www.leisureconnection.co.uk
Another great offer to help you make 2006 your healthiest year ever
There are thousands of reasons to join Harpers Fitness and now you can try us for 7 days for just £7
Reduce cholesterol
Help manage your weight
Reduce levels of stress & anxiety
Protect against osteoporosis & arthritis
Reduce the risk of heart disease
Lower risk of high blood pressure & diabetes
In fact if exercise came in a pill, it would be the most cost effective medicine in the world today!
Contact your local Leisure Connection facility to find out how you can start a healthier lifestyle.
It turns out that there are no public leisure facilities in my borough whatsoever, merely some expensive private gyms which benefit from a huge amount of public money!
Whoever is responsible for this state of affairs should be burnt.
Yours sincerely,
R. Willmsen
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Often, in my role as imparter of the English language to the overprivileged wastlings of the wealthier non-English speaking nations of the world, I am called upon to donn the mantle of George Orwell and to defend British food. I usually draw the attention of my students to the fact that, although British food is Not Up To Much, there is in the UK a huge variety of international food on offer due to our cosmopolitan multiculinary heritage.
More recently, however, and especially given that I now have to live here myself, I have decided that we are in fact simply schizophrenic when it comes to food. For all that TV chefs have been kind enough to share with us the benefits of their hard-earned wisdom, the end result is a nation of people wandering round oversized, catastrophically overpowerful and overpriced supermarkets feeling very confused and depressed about the prospect of what they are going to have for tea.
Understandably, a lot of people stick with a) what they can afford and b) what will fill them up as tastily as possible without giving them time to think about the nutritional consequences. This is of course all based on the widely accepted but basically erroneous understanding that the only people in the country who can 'cook' are the TV chefs and Nigel fucking Slater and his über-middle-class chums.
On a very recent trip to my local Walmart subsiduary to pick up some very low-fat turkey rashers for a friend, stuck as I was in the queue behind some large, gingerish people, I took the trouble to inspect the contents of their somewhat overladen shopping trolley. It contained:
6 boxes of Asda's own brand ready meal Chicken Kievs
A bag containing 6 bags of six different flavour crisps, making a total of 32 packets of crisps
Four tins of Asda's own brand Baked Beans
A breakfast cereal which appeared to be called 'Breakfast Boredom?'
Some more crisps
Several bags of Extra Special Chunky frozen chips
Four frozen Asda's own brand Lasagnes
A £6 DVD copy of the film 'Dude, Where's my car'?
A large number of frozen pizzas
Four frozen 'Indian style' nan-breads
A multipack of 'German-style' twiglets
A two litre bottle of Tizer
A six-pack of Smirnoff Ice
Another six-pack of Smirnoff Ice
A third six-pack of Smirnoff Ice, which seemed to be black in colour for some reason
A six-pack of Bacardi Breezers
A second six-pack of Bacardi Breezers (to be fair, they may have been planning some sort of celebration)
An apple (I am not making this up. Oh, okay, there wasn't an apple).
The sum total of this high-fat bounty came to £47.13. I wanted to try and get hold of the receipt but at this point I was too busy trying to get the bleedin' plastic bag open and getting slightly annoyed by the impatience of the woman behind me (contents of trolley: Sixteen rolls of kitchen, erm, roll and four two-litre bottles of Asda's own brand Still Water for fuck's sake). I did pass them on my way out of the shop. Fatty Bum-fluff Football shirt Boy was perusing the receipt avidly. I think perhaps he was planning to eat it. I did briefly consider grabbing it out of his hands and making a run for it, thereby gaining a more detailed and specific record of their anti-nutritional shopping expedition which would allow more scientific analysis, but I was scared that they might catch me and put me on the front page of the Daily Mail along with the words 'Student Type Caught Red-Handed in Terror Plot to Mock the Lower Orders!'. Or, you know, something.
It might make an interesting art project to go round Asda buying the most unhealthy week's shopping available, and seeing if you could make it match up to exactly £47.13. I suspect that the contents of such a trolley would be exactly the same as those I've listed above. Mind you, I dread to think what toll those low-fat turkey rashers will enact on us all one day...
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An evidently confused woman walked up to me une fois in the centre of Dublin and asked me something in French with what sounded like 'cherche' and 'GPO' in it.
Now she might just have been asking 'Vous cherchez le GPO, n'est pas?', in which case the answer would have been 'Sí (it's true, it's proper grammar and everything, look it up), je suis pas Joseph Connolly et nous ne sommes pas dans l'an 1916'. I evidemment presumed that she was asking me where the General Post Office (which was about 20 yards behind us) was, so I told her immediately. By pointing.
My French has become much better now, danke schön very much. As for other foreign languages: I can do every word in Chinese except for tree, politics and, er, word, and I will hopefully soon very much impress my girlfriend during our Mystery Holiday in Berlin next month (NB: THAT BIT MEANS I CAN SPEAK GERMAN - R. Willmsen 22/03/07); I can speak almost as much Spanish as every other smug fucker out there who just happens to speak fucking Spanish. Oh yes, and I am also learning Italian. Very, very slowly.
More significantly, I speak better Portuguese than José Saramago, and will one day have a job to prove it. Which is partly why, in Battersea Park on the Hottest Day Ever (does that mean it's going to start getting colder now?!), sparsely surrounded by lots of people speaking the less passionate, more bored-sounding variety of the Portuguese language, on seeing a young black family walking towards me along the path, I, thinking that they may well be Angolan or maybe Portuguese or something, thought that I might say to them in a smiley fashion 'Fala-se português por aqui!' (they speak Portuguese round here).
I didn't say anything, thereby soundly killing off any possibility that I might a) the same day become the subject of an entertaining 'This sweaty guy we didn't know said something to us in a language we didn't understand!' anecdote or b) become the firmest of friends with some people for about 2 minutes.
About sixteen seconds later another young black family walked past me, speaking Portuguese. In the treasured words of Alanis Morissette: You live, you learn.
Incidentally, has anyone else in the imperial capital noticed that every single cafe in the centre of London (with the honourable exception of 'Brasil By Kilo') is suddenly run by Portuguese people?! They're everywhere all of a sudden, especially around here. Especially since I, you know, moved house. Quite a lot less Bangladeshi people too. That is not why I moved, by the way. I wonder if, one day, 'the Portuguese cuisine' will enjoy the same elevated position in our gastronomic hierachy as does that of our Polish communities. But as for competing with the Bengalis for a larger share of the cheaper end of the restaurant market...nem pensar!
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Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:
Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation's dimbos to wear dunce's caps in public. No one would stand for it. There'd be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We'd see rioting in the streets - badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.
Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea - but they shouldn't be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they're flags. And flags are rubbish.
I'm not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer's concern about recent displays of my country's emblem:
Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George's flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month's World Cup - which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.
In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their "victory" and celebrating their racial pride?
I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country's flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick - or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with 'MY MUM'S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM' written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren't white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those 'look at me I'm queer!' reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so. ( Read more... )
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I have nothing whatsoever against Polish people; although I can't claim that any of my best friends are Polish, I have met some charming Poles over the years. In fact at the moment I have a couple in my class who I like enormously. And years ago, in my very first teaching job, on a glorious summer's day in Dublin, I was given a class of 14 Polish au pairs, who seemed very sweet, outgoing and broadminded. Or at least they did until I happened to mention the word 'gypsy'.
From that moment, as they skies outside the classroom suddenly filled with dark clouds the atmosphere in the classroom quickly turned to one of unadulterated racial hatred. Everybody had a bitter tale to tell about the filthy, lazy, scrounging scum plaguing their land. I was genuinely shocked as noone seemed to have the slightest reservation about advocating violence against an evidently fairly beleaguered community - 70% of Poland's gypsies were murdered in the Holocaust.
Of course it would have been churlish of me to point out that six of the main extermination camps were located in Poland, especially as so far as the Nazis were concerned it was all part of Germany anyway. But it just so happened that at the time I was reading a book about alcohol consumption around Eastern Europe, which mentioned that there is a very potent myth about the number of Jewish people living in Poland. Around three million died in the death camps, it said, and although official statistics state that there are now only about 15,000 remaining, most Polish people would apparently state with confidence that the real number is more like a good couple of million. So in the midst of this firestorm of racist attitudes I decided to find out if this was really the case, and my students, who before had seemed perfectly good-natured and tolerant, obliged by letting me know in detail about the scandal of Poland's hidden jews. I don't think they were talking about Anne Frank.( Read more... )
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I have decided that I am going to Save Shoreditch Station, which, it has been announced, is to close in June. Partly because it’s just so difficult to actually say ‘Save Shoreditch Station!’, but also because I feel somehow that I can. I would be genuinely interested to see what kinds of people would get involved in such a campaign these days these days – especially with the BNP poised to sweep before them the votes of whoever can be bothered to vote next Thursday – and it might be a useful way of getting to know some of the nuttier and some of the more boring locals.
I did use Shoreditch Station once, a few weeks ago, and I must say I was most impressed by how clean and empty it was at 7pm on a Thursday evening. Maybe, in fact, that’s why they want to close it! Hmm. Nevertheless, I am more then pleased that there is a tube line running straight from my house to Brick Lane, and I am quite prepared to stand alone before a bulldozer or a tank and in front of the cameras of the world’s press to save it, even if it does mean that I will never, ever be able to go back to China.
Ahem. On the subject of tube trains, just what the flaming fuck is a ‘Train Destination Describer’? The one at Whitechapel has been out of action for some time, but even when it was working I’m sure it didn’t actually describe the places where the trains end up. I’m willing to bet it never read "This train is for Ealing Broadway, a fairly bland, nondescript stretch of West London with too many Polish people and nowhere particularly nice to go for lunch", or "This train goes to Wimbledon, which stars Paul Bethany". Or even "Customers are advised not to board this train, as it is a Hammersmith and City line train and to be honest, guv, you’d be better off walking, alone, through those long, dark, cold rat-filled tunnels".
I digress. Maybe I should just go and apply for a job with Transport for London. Maybe it, like the National Health Service, is enjoying its best ever year! Ho ho ho. They pay thirty grand, apparently, according to that song. And the perks – special red Oyster cards that glow in the dark, a snazzy yellow jacket and a non-standard accent – are quite remarkable.
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Council provides al fresco drinking for alcoholics
In a secluded corner of parkland, a circle of benches provides a pleasant spot for a drink. The side tables are ideal for a can of strong cider. A bin has been provided for the empties.
Welcome to Britain's first purpose-built drinking den for homeless alcoholics - in a London park popular with families. It is seen as such a success that it may be replicated around the country.
A council spent £1,900 creating the "alternative drinking area", which is intended to keep drinkers out of sight of ordinary passers-by. It was prompted by complaints that drunks were loitering at the entrance to Brockwell Park, south London, shouting abuse at locals.
Not that I usually read the Telegraph, I should add.
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...or so I've been told (and experienced from time to time) my whole puff. But it's come to my attention (during a phone conversation with my mum in which it was revealed that my sister and my future brother-in-law is, are getting married), that I haven't heard a single anti-tube rant so far this month, and that luego it must be de facto better than it used to be.
Discuss.
ps. Incidentally, Enduring Love is a good film.
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