May 9, 2006
Gambolling over the fields of snuff whilst playing a Trautonium, singing “We’ll go a-wassailing”
Another mini update – For the benefit of certain oglers, I’ve attached new photos of ‘Pleiades’ for your delectation. Enjoyez-vous.
Mini update-ette – pray you turn your attentions to the photo of a new piece of my art at the end of this entry. I personally bleedin’ love it, I hope you do too. If not, please insert your address below and I will come round with a chisel and a hungry look. You may single-click upon it double-quick to garner your good selves a more fulsome squint.
I went to the Bauhaus exhibition at Tate Modern the other day and one of the exhibits was marked ‘Do Not Eat’, which was a very obvious temptation, and now I have the most appalling indigestion.
In fact I’ve been spitting out plexiglass and canvas all week. But ‘for Christ’s sake shut up about art, Brian’ I hear you belch. Pardon you. So anyway in Tate Modern there were several rooms all dedicated to the same exhibit which was reproduced in a type of foamy scum such as you might find drifting nauseatingly on a polluted river. The curators were replenishing it every so often with scum from their handbags. I approached one and he smeared some scum all over me, apparently not noticing that I was a passer-by and not an exhibit. I received several admiring looks and so I have decided to keep it.
The exhibit in one of the rooms was being rather troublesome, and not cooperating with the curator, reforming itself into the shape of an Ecuadorian priest whereas clearly it was supposed to be from Bolivia. Eventually the curator decided that it looked far better as an Ecuadorian priest and left it as it was. Hours later, the artist Jasper Terror entered the exhibition and espied the Ecuadorian scum-priest. The rest of what followed is considered by the author to be too violent and distressing to describe so therefore be content with the knowledge that Mr Terror pulled off the curator’s head and fed it to his sack of Jackdaws.
This was rather gratifying as I have a great interest in ornithology and the Jackdaw happens to be my favourite bird, so it’s not all bad.
And the trumpet-major never called me back – something he definitely would have done, had this been 1836.
But enough of that, dear oglers. What I really wanted to tell you about was the proliferation of till receipts in my house. I spotted two on the doormat yester-eve, and it seems that by this morning, some nefarious breeding had been happening. I only just managed to open my bedroom door and in they flowed like the Victoria Falls. Not being able to see much about me, I waded through the heap which was on the point of making my house burst had I not opened my bedroom door in the first place. I thrashed around in the heaving mass and eventually felt my way to the front door, nearly ingesting several receipts for things I had never purchased.
That was the most galling thing – as I walked to work, picking them out of my ear, I read receipts for things like crowbars and attaché cases from somewhere in Wolverhampton, to which I might add, I have never been. I could only conclude that they must have been planted there the night before by a gang of Sicilian botanists who were trying to confuse me in revenge for my having pulled up all my weeds last weekend.
As I couldn’t close the front door due to the teeming pile, I left it until I returned home whereupon I discovered that each and every receipt had been stamped with VOID in red across them. I could only surmise that this same band of Sicilian botanists had returned, seen the nice petunias I had planted along with some fine examples of Parthenocissus quinquefolia and, feeling guilty, had tried to make amends.
I have decided to forgive them, but if I keep getting parcels for all these mystery objects I’m supposed to have bought, then I shall jolly well plant lots of Thlaspi arvense and Urtica dioica in their gardens – just try and stop me!
April 25, 2006
Filling my shelves with Marxist antelopes
I now owe ten shillings to the vicar of St. Satan’s church in West Aberystwyth thanks to yesterday.
I was just passing through Aberystwyth, on my way to the Irish Sea to wash my hair which had started to come away at the edges, when I happened upon St. Satan’s.
I stepped inside the porch and was not greeted with the usual notices of carol singing at twilight, but with an unnaturally thin and gaunt vicar, whose eye first addressed me through the keyhole of the rather forbidding oak door. When the door swung open, he offered me his hand which I took. It crumbled as soon as I touched it, and a small stream of powder fell on the porch floor. With his good hand he roughly pulled me inside. I stumbled on the flagstones and banged my head on the font. The daffodils within shook their pollen at me in disgust and I sneezed all over the vicar’s vestments.
He quickly drew a dagger from within his cassock and pointed me towards the altar muttering an incantation in Latin. I walked backwards, nervously looking around me for some means of escape, but there was none, save for the verger who was engaged in a distinctly non-religious act of dancing with a chocolate Jesus.
I stumbled up the chancel steps and backed up against the altar, the sweat pouring off me in rivers that sloshed around the vicar’s feet. He looked down momentarily and I socked him full in the crotch. He went cross-eyed and stuck his tongue out like a chameleon. I waded over to him to apologise and he looked at me sideways, offering his good hand that was now without the dagger that he had dropped in his pain. He told me that could arrange absolution if I agreed to pay him ten shillings a month for the next 27 years. I hastily agreed and ran from the place.
Unbeknownst to me, the bastard had already filled in a direct debit form for me and now I keep getting threatening letters from the bank.
I may have to get legal advice.
April 17, 2006
Hawking creels round the maisonettes of Shanghai
How I became a pirate armed only with an ink blotter and a copy of the ‘New Statesman’.
As the wind lashed the salty waves on the jagged rocks, my fellow shipmates Jake, one-eyed Bill and Doris the parakeet all lumbered up the sand towards the ‘Blue Peter’ in Polperro, Cornwall. The inn was the home of Nell the alewife, and several rats that had made their homes amongst the swabs and land-lubbers, laying about the tavern floor in the sawdust and straw.
"Avast, ahoy, and other piratical verbiage!" I cried, throwing down my kitbag on the bar. I was greeted by Nell herself, still wearing the flower in her hair that I had given her the day we set off for the Spice Islands in search of people to plunder and treasure to burn. We sat down at an oak table with our foaming tankards of Doom ale and the flagon was placed between us as we whiled away the evening singing lustily of old Ichabod and the woodworm that had got into his leg.
"Nell my sweetheart, I have brought thee back a gift from the far reaches of the earth. Near where the seamonster frolics and the mermaids paint their fins."
Nell drew closer and tried to spy inside my coat where my hand was hid. I drew it out and presented here with the gift. It was all wrapped in hessian and tied with strands of tarred rope. I waited for her cries of delight.
"What’s this my dear Captain?" she said. Then she saw it. "What does it say…? ‘My friend went to Indonesia, and all he got me was this lousy T-Shirt…’ "
And in a flash the t-shirt was on the floor, rent in twain and the flagon of ale had been poured over my breeches. I was left dumbstruck and damp. I crept out of the bar and gave up piracy to become an Account Executive to a firm of solicitors.
Best career move I ever made.
Now where did I put that Godot? I saw him round here somewhere…
Alas no-one ever found out. I’ve been searching my pockets all the way home. I found the key to an old cellar and half a packet of Strand cigarettes, which apparently you’re never alone with. Well that’s wrong – as soon as I lit one the rest of the audience left.
The cellar key however was useful. I arrived home half an hour later than 30 minutes before and fumbled about in the dark as the owl’s faint cry mingled with the sounds of shuffling from behind my cellar door. A cloud passed across the moon and I saw the glint of my key as it slid into the lock and melted. Bloody thing was made of water as it turned out.
Yet the door opened with a long, hackneyed creak, and when it realised it was the same hackneyed creak that had appeared in several Hammer Horror films previously, it called its agent and got a different part. The creak is now working in EastEnders, but it’s only a walk-on.
Back in my cellar, I brushed away the cobwebs and felt the mossy, dank walls for the switch. I flicked it on and everything at once turned blue. Even my hand. I suddenly saw a skeletal arm protruding from my stomach with a paintbrush in its bony claw, that was painting the last bits of my hand and the rest of the cellar. I turned off the switch and the skeletal arm poured paintstripper everywhere. It was obviously no Rolf Harris, and I reprimanded it with some obscene references to Hanoverian poetry and arcane Greek legal terminology.
It quickly became agitated and scuttled off on its fingertips only to reappear 2 seconds later floating in front of me and slammed the door in my face!
There’s no respect these days…
Through the power of telekinesis, clairvoyance, and jam, I can declare here and now that I will be brushed off the kerb on the Old Kent Road tomorrow by a gigantic ivory hairbrush, wielded by a 121-foot tall stag from Guinea-Bissau.
Luckily for me I will survive the incident, as the car will narrowly avoid my head and swerve into a herd of tourists, all carrying placards that read "Jump into the pond!"
Unfortunately this will cause a diplomatic incident in which the republic’s president Joao Bernardo Vieira will recall the stag and declare war on Venezuela for no apparent reason. The ex-president of Zanzibar Abeid Karume will come to the rescue of Venezuela and challenge Vieira to a rapid game of stone-paper-scissors in which Vieira will lose, get steadily more drunk and cede the Gambia in a rash moment.
The Guinea-Venezuelan war will last only 48 days, but both countries will be ravaged and become half as big when, in a mix-up with the peace treaties, they both relinquish territory to the Duchess of Kent.
However, all will not be lost as the Duchess of Kent will donate this spare land to the Stasi who’ll use it to build wendy houses in which they can breed small greyhounds for racing.
It is entirely due to this chain of events that Walthamstow Dogs will experience the largest crowds it has ever seen.
March 17, 2006
The day the blackberries came
All the way home last week, I was followed by a large square.
Not even the geometric shape (which would have been less disturbing) but by a type of continental piazza if you will, that afforded nice views of the Santa Maria della Salute on the one side, and Mount Rushmore on the other. What was most irksome about the whole thing was that Abraham Lincoln was giving me the evil eye.
I wrote a letter to President Bush about it. I received a charming letter back from one of his Ladies-in-Waiting who informed me that the CIA were monitoring me. I wrote back and politely informed them that it wasn’t the CIA that had monitored me, but Abraham Lincoln (as carved by Gutzon Borglum in 1937).
I’m still waiting for a reply but nothing has arrived so far. Although apparently my telephone calls are being recorded for posterity as I’ve been told they are fine examples of early 21st century recorded speech. Even the head of MI5 has been listening to them and has complimented me on my use of the subjunctive and past anterior tenses.
The square is still sat at the bottom of the garden and is rather blocking the views I had of the Colossus of Rhodes, so I may try to tempt it away with a piece of cheese later. If that doesn’t work I will have to phone the council and see if they can take it away in a skip. Why they would feel the need to frolic whilst removing the offending item beats me…
I do enjoy the views of Mount Rushmore in the main, (apart from Lincoln’s evil eye) but it’s the tourists that really grate. I’ve been up now for 3 nights in a row, making ice cream and selling it on a stall in the corner of the square, dancing the can-can and busking with an accordion. It’s been exhausting. However I’ve made £3.46, half a Slovenian Tolar and a couple of fruit machine tokens out of it so it’s not all been a waste of time.
March 1, 2006
Turning up the trouser leg of iniquity
Art is just pouring out of me at the moment. I’m literally bleeding Picassos! Oops, there goes a Kandinsky before his ‘cool’ period and wasn’t too geometric with lots of nice blues and so forth, blah blah blah etc.
It started a couple of months ago when I grazed my skin on an old pair of iron wellington boots that I hadn’t worn since the Hundred Years War. I was about to stick a plaster over the wound, when out popped a lobster telephone. I thought nothing of this, but a few hours later the plaster became loose and a flatiron seeped out. Stop me if I’m getting too sickening.
Anyway, this went on for days and dais and daze until I lost consciousness after bleeding a rather cumbersome set of pipes. I woke up after what seemed like 38,500 years and 74 days and when I came round I was in Skegness surrounded by 72 feet tall bacteria that all had the voice of Judith Chalmers.
Well I found it most bizarre, as my train ticket said Skelmersdale. There obviously must have been some sort of mix-up. So I loafed back to the railway station that was beginning to melt a little, and spoke to the Conductor-in-Chief Mr Jocelyn Fort Wensleydale. Unfortunately no sooner had I begun my tirade full of choice verbiage and obscene Chaucerian allusions, then Mr Fort Wensleydale became my Aunt Henrietta who scolded me for my split infinitives and use of the passive voice.
Having nothing else to do and feeling dejected, I turned towards the seafront carrying my illuminating radio I had just oozed and sat on the seashore singing old shanties in Persian.
That is until a certain policeman who shall remain nameless, but goes by the nom-de-plume Sgt Roger Finger from the Middlesex Chimney Constabulary, arrested me for causing a breach of the peace.
I await trial at Horseferry Rd Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday. Where’s the justice in that?
If anyone can lend me £37billion for bail, I’d be most grateful.
February 20, 2006
Sniffing out the cheese of destiny
My shirts are torn to shreds!
Unfortunately it was only after I’d finished ironing the last one of the 203 that I discovered my dilemma.
Foolishly I had been using my iron that Man Ray had given me as a gift (see below) and the stupid bastard had forgotten to tell me it was covered in nails. I wondered why ironing was a little more tiresome than usual…
Anyway, after this debacle, I rang up Messrs Muffin, Belch and Snipworthy of Jermyn Street – Purveyors of Finest Twill Garments and Milliners to the King of Latvia, in order to replenish my ruined clothing. Things however were not that straightforward. Firstly I was greeted with a recorded message which asked me to choose one of 7 options. "Press 1 for trouserage, press 2 for collars, press 3 for collar studs, press 4 for gypsy mantillas, press 5 for cuffs, press 6 for cufflinks, press 7 for shirtings."
Well by this time I was more than a little miffed, but I pressed 7 for shirtings neverthless. Then, I was unfortunate enough to hear the following: "Press 1 for laughably large shirts, press 2 for bri-nylon, press 3 for Soviet shirts, press 4 for shirts previously worn by the Marquis of Bermondsey, press 5 for twill."
At last I’d found the very option I needed and was promised by a charming woman whom I took to be a favourite aunt, that my call was important to her and I would be placed through to an advisor momentarily. This cheered me up and I waited about 23 minutes until an advisor was free. But before I could ask for my usual order of 203 twill shirtings with double cuff and nacre buttonage in teal and salmon regency stripe, the advisor said simply "We’re closed. Good day." And with that, he hung up.
I was absolutely apoplectic and marched down to Jermyn Street and rapped smartly on the front door of Messrs Muffin, Belch and Snipworthy of Jermyn Street – Purveyors of Finest Twill Garments and Milliners to the King of Latvia to demand service!
However by the time I got there it was past 4:00 in the morning and they were shut.
I shall have to wait until tomorrow and wear rags in the meantime I suppose!
February 12, 2006
Starbucks Schmarbucks
Having recovered from the all-in wrestling and safely back in blighty, I can at last divulge the horrible secrets of my extended absence.
I’m all CNNed and PBSed out now. Pray have a gander at my photo album to sample the sights and smells of Seattle (Portland to follow shortly). There was no spitting or vomiting on the grave of Kurt Cobain as many of you so graciously suggested, but instead I did give a pretty good sneer at Microsoft and an extended ‘Tsk’ – I meant it to sting. Then like everyone else who goes there, I gave in and loved Big Brother.
Seattle has so much going for it – like terrific views of Mt Everest, the Chrysler building, Lake Eyrie and of course the Great Wall. much of my time however was spent walking round the Eiffel Tower and various other Legoland attractions.
I attach myself to your welcoming bosoms in the fine arms of blighty.
bjbeamish
