CAGEY TIGER

He woke up without an idea in his head. What to do next?

He knew what he should’ve done. He should’ve told her exactly what he desired. "You’re so wonderfully wonderfully pretty and I really want to kiss you, love cat." Love cat! Who was he kidding?

He’d already been warned off romanticizing. His allies had told him not to go there. A kiss? Too intimate. Even working girls didn’t kiss. No. Better to touch her arse and see how she reacted.

Instead he shot off an uninitiated double entendre that misfired. A surprise invasion up the Ardennes! What the…? A face full of smoke, the bullet slid out the end lamely. Plop! He should’ve created a moment. Instead he painted a picture. Adverbs and adjectives hung like canned party string over the bloody raw flesh of missed opportunity. He longed to scrape them off the prose and fill the page with mood music.

Ba-ba da-da da-da da-da. Ba-ba da-da da-da da-da. You missed, hissed the love cats. The cure? Recreate the moment here and now like it should’ve happened then.

This is nowhere near D-Day. Not by a long stretch of concentration. Yet the planning is critical. Over-planning leads to piss poor performance. Under-planning, though potentially perfect, is imperfectible. The plan then is to appear unplanned, spontaneous and relaxed, even as the unilateral sexual tension runs across the muscles in the tops of his shoulders.

He asked her how she felt."Unrelaxed", she told him tellingly.

Choice lexical item. Not tense or nervous, but unrelaxed. Like it was his fault. Like he’d put the prefix there personally. His machinations, his manoeuvres, his manliness. His men’s work prepared him for testosterone depletion, but not for this.

The subtlety of persistent low-level paranoia was all part of the chase. It had been so long he'd forgotten. He remembers now. It was ok. This wasn't psychosis; this was mild obsession with a younger love cat. Purr-fectly healthy purr-suit. Pussy footing around the tender centre, an old leopard with spots in front of his eyes.

“I know the cure for that,” he mewed.

She looked back at him, narrowing the eyes and smiling. The smile said one thing. The eyes another.

Then her mouth said, “More alcohol”.

No. No. Not that. Massage. Making love. More cream. Mmm.

He remembered how he hadn’t looked at her mouth. He’d been too verbal as usual. The invasion tactic had been intellectualized and turned into a bon mot, un esprit d’escalier in the moment that would sweep her arse off her feet and into his bunk.

She drank too quick. She got drunk too quick. She sobered up too quick. She told him all this. Not stable. Unrelaxed. And other negatives he couldn’t remember now. Now that he re-engineered the moment. The lost moment. She also told him the name of the man she actually desired, but that passed well under the radar.

In the actual lived moment, it'd been good enough. Improvising, he'd pressed the gentlest of explosive devices against her cheek. Their faces close, their noses approached intimacy. All was not lost. The bomb was primed, or so he thought.

The dips into the armoury of paranoia have so far been fruitless. Good. These days his mood is lighter; his modus operandi in transition. Yet like the cat that paws at the jelly, he has to let go. Sooner or later.

He left the pub, took an anchor from a different reality and reflected. Another younger male was on the prowl. At this stage of the campaign, compassionate leave works. Dignity is a vital weapon in the war for peace of mind.

Later he stumbled through some apologia along the lines of intensity and depression and cannabis not being a good friend, which doesn't help because the brain doesn’t hear the word not, since you can’t say no to negativity, better to say yes, and you cannot be serious about levity, so it's better to wipe a smile upon its face, trip the light fandango, Fernando and be happy.

Her gaze glazed over, however. By definition, definitions fail to impress. She sought instinct. Intuition. Animal. Body. Thrust. Power.

Instead he overcompensated with physical prowess in front of the dart board. He felt sleek poised confidently over the oche; his forearm arched in smooth muscularity; his round-the-board dexterity more deft than his love cat chat-up. He hit the target as often as not.

This is what he would do. Next time. Hit the target. Hit the beach. And turn Dunkirk into Normandy. The happiness of conquest. D-Day inevitable. After all it had already happened. A mere re-work. A historic historical re-enactment. Simply a matter of chronology.

She said she'd maybe picked up whatever it was that was going round the office and couldn't come. That she'd phone him the next day, if she felt better. That much was true. It had to be. Trust is important; unrealistic ideation of conspiracy unhelpful.

Maybe she was just sensitive, bashful, insecure… or bored more likely. Read the signs. It does exactly what it says on the can. Unrelaxed she’d said. Take her at her word. Then take the words, wrap them up in a blanket and throw them in the bottom of the river. With innocence and wonder. Because the cagey tigers thrive best without the guilt of words to clog up the cream.

- What’re you writing, daddy? asked the only child of the ex-wife’s second broken marriage.

- Nothing, little man.

D-Day planned, the bionic piano man played out as he padded into the pub. Back to launch a renewed attack. He'd grab her heart and see what happened. Fuck the flak. This time baby he'd be bulletproof.

HOUSEY HOUSEY

On the day that Pingu joins Hezbullah and one of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s grandsons shoots an Elvis fan outside a trailer park in Great Yarmouth is the same afternoon Dorothy Du Mauriac realises, on her way to the bingo - whose erection a central government subsidy has enabled, so as to slight Muhammad in the battle for hearts and minds in the latest round of public-to-private cash giveaways in the class war of terror - that she’s only just understood the central premise of Pierre Reverdy’s cubist poetics.

Phew! The sheer weight of irrelevant detail in the opening sentence makes Dot feel queasy. She stops for a king-size cigarette. Leaning against the town hall wall opposite Mecca, she puffs away on Messrs Lambert and Butler like a good ‘un, finishing her fag in a new personal best of two minutes 35.75 seconds. She still has it. There are chimleys in late 19th Century Lancashire that smoked less. Her GP, a lexical fascist who objects to the variant to chimney more than he does Dot’s smoking, is secretly displeased that new legislation means the chances of borderline bag ladies like Dorothy being around a few more years longer has gone up exponentially. It's hard enough having to control his Shipmanesque tendencies as it is.

- Hiya Dot. Comin’ the bingo? asks a neighbour from Dorothy’s part-privatised council estate.

- No, I’m off to get plated by Robbie friggin’ Williams, comes the foul-mouthed reply.

- Ha ha ha! Good one Dot.

Her fellow punter hangs back at the entrance to the Mecca, allowing Dorothy to go in ahead of her, no doubt in the hope of meeting an acquaintance with whom she can share Ms Du Mauriac’s latest expletive. Dorothy’s foul-mouthed diatribe is legendary. It sets her apart from most other women of her milieu by its sheer masculine intensity, despite the media-constructed post-feminist laddetteness amongst the gambling classes.

Dorothy’s fetid tongue comes from a misandry borne of an adult life of domestic drudgery. It isn’t that she doesn’t like penetration, cunnilingus and a well-turned out sideburn. It's more that she loathes the entire male sex with all her tobacco-damaged heart. All of them, except her husband and her nine male offspring, and even then the breaks in her contempt are only intermittent. Mostly they're indolent, self-regarding, pompous fuck-wits, only good for one thing, and then for not very long.

Leaving a trail of epithets worthy of a university-education in her working-class wake, she goes into the Mecca, buys five quid’s worth of cards and settles down with her usual companions halfway down the central aisle.

There is a general air of pre-bingo jitters, made all the more acute by mass nicotine withdrawal and caffeine replacement therapy. The polystyrene tea is flowing like biblical wine as the bingo caller floats to the front of the auditorium like a metaphor in need of a seat.

- Five and seven, was she worth it? A bit of misogyny in the afternoon, ladies. Legs eleven, sexist wolf whistle. Nine - Oh: Blind prejudice

The bingo caller has said nothing of the sort. It's all computerised. He misses the old patter. But not as much as smoking. He stares into the vast cosmos of the Mecca auditorium and waits for the numbers to show themselves on the giant screen behind him. All he has to do is press a button.

All these advances in technology and they still haven't made a machine to wipe their arses. Do everything for them I do. Not one of my nine lads has ever once cleaned the toilet bowl or bath. Thoughtless pricks! thinks Dorothy.

The bingo doesn't quite do it for Dorothy anymore. She pines for the leather tables in the University library. Her cleaning job in the evenings enables her to maintain a covert interest in European literature. As unfulfilled as she is self-educated, one day Dorothy longs to emulate Gunter Grass, Miguel de Unamuno and Francoise Sagan.

If her dope of a husband is never going to finish his second novel, then she'll have to do it for him. Dozy pig. He was exceptionally lucky getting his first one published. Luckily for Malcolm Du Mauriac, the publisher was in his class at Balliol College. The Surrealistic Journey of Eliot Weinburger has sold 237 copies to date.

On her way out of the Mecca, she feels the need to eviscerate. She shouts over to the assistant manager.

- Oi! Shit for brains!

- Here she goes again, he mouths.

- You'll have to speak up sunshine. I can't lip read an arsehole from here.

On the bus home, her lower back pain, constant rheumatism, continual sinusitis, painful mother's knee and bleak humour provide little in the way of light relief. She consoles herself with language. Homemaker sounds much more liberating than domestic slave. Why isn’t that PC gone mad? muses Dot as she puts her Yale key in the door.

He'll be sitting at his PC, half-asleep and half-cut, as per. The cock.

CLASS WAR & ULTRA-VIOLENCE AT THE ALEKSIA SLOANE BOOK CLUB IN 14PT BATANG PUTNEY

Undercover in 14pt Batang at the Aleksia Sloane Book Club, an exclusive anti-social event near the banks of the Thames and even nearer The Banks Of The City, Boyd Liberation bides her time, as the Putneyed professionals peruse her membership credentials.

L'objet du exercise chez le salon de Ms Sloane: ostensibly, it is books that are critiqued, but a darker agenda lurks, stalks and prowls beneath the subtext like a string of stereotypes in a pub joke about three men from representative parts of the British Isles and a Celtic tiger. Toothless, but all more the dangerous for it.

There are these posh kids see. Annabella is attached to lacrosse, Roderick is embedded on the river, Lucinda is chained to a cello and another off-shoot ending in a feminine vowel is engaged in another overachieving endeavour, overachieving, and yet another is gestating prodigiously in an incubator known as Pre-prep. Meanwhile, the least advanced sections of the proletariat whine about immigrants, and/or toxify themselves with imported produce from Helmand Province, having benefitted handsomely from a half-arsed career in miseducation.

She does not remember the delicious sarcasm of the stressed auxiliary and the marker then that time in the green tech workshop when, while she was painting a Black & White! Unite & Fight! banner, the homeless and only latterly re-housed bicycle mechanic in the body warmer and dicky goatee declaimed that he didn’t drink or do drugs!, and she’d asked, what did you do after you left school then?

The title demands a she. A she, like Swastikas, golf and Royals, shifts units. She, of course, should've swashbuckled in, SMASH! Bang! Wallop thank you BIG MAMA! through the upper case of The South West London Diaspora: a pony-tailed, armed-to-the-sinewy athletic/balletic bronzed-bodied, jump-suited, jumped-up, in-yer-face, Riot Grrrl!! with a Tank Division of Pre-Romantic Poets as back-up.

- I hate you Butler! Says William Blakey to Samuel.

- .....

- That’s my opening riposte as representative of the working class rebel arts direct action vanguard.

- ....

- Do you stuck up aspirationalist fucks even get the reference?

Solitary bush blows across their class horizons. There is a time and place for flighty fancy and Putney isn’t it.

Instead, Liberation makes mental notes, as well as actual physical notes, disguised as an OCD compulsion to record any exchange of information containing figures and statistical data. Data that she might well have recalled weeks later with near-total accuracy, had she been a full-blown carrier of testes. Binary Bollocks! as she is wont to brandish. She hankers after guttural Anglo-Saxon with black heartache.

Concentrate. Set up first. Action later sister.

Convention demands the assembled familiarise themselves with the ready-sketched character outlines purposefully yet casually strewn on the furniture around the lounge.

Aperitifs and canapés are served. Reading her own first, Boyd scans for inconsistencies of fact. Boyd Liberation is almost a he. At 27 going on 47, s/he shifts layout parameters, uses brackets and exploits “......“ in her fertile resistance to the sexual posturing of the Dominic Strauss-Khan/Polanski chic of midlife male fantasy. An iconic totem of five feet four and half inches, squatter than most monetized model bodies, and with added humanity, s/he is hotter than a tequila-slugging ketamine-toting, sten gun-blasting Zapatista/Pasionara bullet sash-wearing full-colour-tattooed amalgam of a modern woman who loathes Pepsi advertorials and carves Baudelaire poems into her arms and thighs with raw razor wire fresh from a quarter life crisis she left in Cambridge for a part in A Bike-Powered Kumquat, a Workers' Theatre Co. Production abandoned after the opening sentence fell apart through lack of bums on seats and/or deterioration of Arts Council funds.

Liberation has micro-engineered her entry into the UMC club like a woman of her station (Cityline) via the appropriation of job, husband, accent, garments, accoutrements, borrowed children (boarders all, naturellement), ear-rings, pearl sets, waxed Burberry et al. Deep undercover is a matter of acquiring the right superficiality.

Yet something other exists, persists and insists: the indefinable fine line between the expansive vastness of middle and upper. The class chasm is a gash that no amount of Oxbridged socio-cultural capital can fill. The only way across is by dint of faithlessness. Such an act of faithlessness as might be undertaken by a grocer’s daughter.

Faith Constance (née Snotty Roberts) had come from somewhere Up North. She had concealed her North Country roots so thoroughly even she believed her father to have been an alcoholic property solicitor just outside Durham-near-Posh, or rather an impressive but overlooked landscape gardener from Skipton-upon-its-kness, or rather... any number of re-inventions her bifurcated identity dreamt up. It matters little. Such is the shared self-absorption of the group that members refrain from talk of The Third Aged. The elderly are referred to fleetingly, and almost exclusively in relation to their capital assets.

In any event, Faith usually deferred to Aleksia in all matters conversational, hierarchical, and indeed menstrual, being the least steady on her upper-middle class Edwardian legs.

Aleksia Sloane is herself self-evidently, and like all great self-publicists is ordinarily the first to insist she be introduced last: the hostess with the upmost sense of propriety. Her defining characteristic is her vacuity, a vacuity at her heart that throbs as a paper bag in danger of ripping apart at every beat. The fragility of identity is gift wrapped in propriety.

Propriety is theft, thinks Liberation.

Having established a sense of class enmity as per her brief, Boyd craves atmosphere. The decimation of the Sloane and her range of cohorts on the unsuspecting is auspicious. Hyper-violent choreography requires careful placing in the outer body of the meta-text that passes for socially constructed verisimilitude, don't you know.

The ladies defer to precedent and convention, and reject Boyd Liberation's application. Her impatient, creative drive to self-knowledge is unnerving, lateral, anathema. Anathema? Now that would have been more apposite. Whoever heard of a Boyd at the Aleksia Sloane Book Club?

The residents of 14pt Batang Putney know they belong. They aspire not to the light programme on the BBC, but if dear Dominic will insist, well one hates to refuse, though one is loathe to bask in the Devon surf of super-ego driven goldfish bowl lives framed by valorising editorial decisions one has schooled with, even if some portrayals reek of liberal/left-leaning post-class ironic tosh.

Bang! There goes the first. A pre-emptive Chinese fire cracker of a precursor. The ladies, mais bien sur, choose not to heed the winds of change.

At times like these ladies, more radioactive Earl Grey, vicar...

Malificent Martyn-Jones steps up to the saucer and observes the scene with just enough disdain as to bring its actuality into doubt. Aleksia Sloane’s immaculately kept Edwardian home and status symbolism remain aloof. Eyes return to Malificent's Brodie's notes.

Malificent acquired her misogynist moniker at the Chambers. Somewhere under her caricature of a shell of a personality on loan there stirs a competitive streak... but postmodernist Trixie & Dixie jinks rumble behind Liberation's back... intervention is inevitable now... there is another loud bang... and Boyd's rucksack blows apart... Edwardian decorum is shattered... pages fly hither and... there are notes... suspension points... unfinished canapés... and cocktail sticks...all over the gaff...

Boyd Liberation undercover @ Aleksia Sloane Book Club/exclusive Putney-based VUMPires = V. Upper-Middle C. vampires/under discussion: THE BOOK CLUB MASSACRE. Boyd as Liberationist heroine (cf Ripley) ... paradigm shift in Black & White like Lindsey Anderson's IF. Do hyperviolence in note form/ Boyd's bag explodes/Lib sprays room with high-powered machine gunfire, but ladies retaliate with heavy weaponry... claret everywhere!

There are three alternate endings so far:

1. Fluffy ending resolution/liberal compromise

2. Black Bloc /Dikes on bikes

3. Daily Mail/Harper’s

Boyd can stand no more and pipes up. Again. Afghan. Black. Very black. Up all night on vodka and ketamine. So she feels normal. Or is it that she's been up all night on k and vodka so that she feels normalised? Normality. Normalcy. The dictatorship of the normals. No inner turmoil. No psychological enquiry beyond the implanted memes of their socio-cultural hamster cage. Do I demand the impossible?, she thinks. There was a time when she refused to countenance such a possibility, but these days... she lives in the cracks in the pavement.

Liberation detonates the third movement of her suicide symphony. An afterbirth of discarded satisfaction descending over her cosmic horizon is the best she had ever hoped to sensate, psychically. In the significant event, it feels better. Her default setting changes instantly from Slaughter House 5 to summer.

An analgesic for the few, it is a moment of bliss for the many.



WIKILEAK!

... the British upper middle class can be subdivided in two, distinguishing a socially liberal but fiscally conservative professional subclass, and the more conservative leaning managerial, executive subclass. The managerial/executive wing of this class tend to live in the outer suburban areas, while the professional wing is often more urban, preferring instead, the stately old terraces and semi-detatched houses on the streets of such south-western London neighbourhoods as Richmond, Kew, East Sheen, Twickenham, St. Margaret's, Teddington, Surbiton, Kingston and Wimbledon. Single and younger members of this class prefer places like Parson's Green in Fulham, Putney, Clapham Common, and Balham. Politically this is also reflected in the professional wing often voting more along Liberal Democrat lines and the managerial, executive set voting almost exclusively Conservative. A minority of upper middle class families may also have ancestry that directly connects them to the upper classes. Armorial bearings in the form of an escutcheon may denote such past status. A lesser status historically directly relevant to the upper-middle class is that of squire or lord of the manor, however, these property rights are no longer prevalent. Another distinguishing feature of this class is a noticeable prevalence of double-barrelled surnames.

(ONCE UPON A TIME... THE END.)

Sold cow.
Slew giant.
Happy now.

Huntsman’s merciful.
Miners accommodate.
Stepmother’s foiled.

Hair descends.
Prince ascends.
Couple absconds.

Porridge cools.
Goldilocks squats.
Bears evict.

Grandma’s sick.
Wolf’s hungry.
Woodcutter improvises.

Pigs 3.
Wolf 0.
Brick’s best.

I'M RUNNING THIS MONKEY FARM NOW FRANKENSTEIN!!...

I had not proceeded more than eleven words homeward
when copyright infringement struck. Apparently
the people had already demanded the fall of the regime
The self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit seller
whose name escapes
the clutches of the amnesia that passes for history
was the catalyst. With an Arab spring in my instep
the inward investment in time on the page continues apace
Cut and paste
Turn the page
and re-emerge
in Govan 1915 during the rent strike
The Rent Strike with anti-capitals
An MBA with balls
Mary Barber's Army. She was the very first Labour councillor
in the days when it mattered. Favoured Zombie quotations
serve as titles in the House of Elites actuellement n'est-ce pas?
Sloppy Doc Kills The King Of Pop!
Give him the painkiller
Give him what he wants. You're paid to provide
for his needs needle boy, with your medical degree
and your deference to celebrity and power and lucre
Richly filthy
The psychopathic healthcare strain has been isolated
You can purchase the antidote from all good chemists
if you know what to ask for. Sign the back of the script
and tell her you're a friend of Michael's. Go on! Marley
was dead too, probably. It was hard to tell though
through the cloud of smoke from the pavillion end
Cricket wasn't his normal game. His normal game was togga
Togga was a game like football, but without the millions
Played on a debris at the back of Charles Dickens' townhouse
Tavistock Square, where
he systemically abused his legally separated wife
while lusting over young flesh...
Judge not the Dickens!!
Lest the judge you booked to judge your book
fucks yo' over too judgement boy
There were rumblngs in the jungle anyhow
If the point of view of the 10 year-old is anything to go by
Then all is either cosmic, random or epic
But prey tell little 'un, what does one utter otherwise?
We just say, it's shit. LOL
The next double page spread goes blank then alliteration strikes
Toxic tycoons tap telephones to the tune of trillions
as toadying tawdry toerags trash Tesco for tofu and tea
Redbush without the social conscience
Five times already Tory boy. American without tears
Resolvement. Hesitancy
The rush is to save the Euro but not the world
The world can go to Chesterfield on a handcart for all the Iron Lady cares
Miners' support groups support clause four. Forever chumrades
The Second Coming promo video. End times
Mayan binary code for the apocolyptically-challenged
Dolly's a global brand. She used to sing Country
but now has plans for worldwide dominatrix
Shurely shome mishtake Mish Funnny Fanny
British Association of Plastic Surgeons
Big BAPS replace empathy
Corporate cash cows crave the milch of humane kindness
London is an off-shore tax haven said Ernest Bevan
to the earnest librarian
with the earnest grizzled beard in earnest grey
He was a man with a salient past and a future he kept to himself
He smiles on the point of climax
Back in the cafeteria
Finnegan's awake and his tart's waiting for him in the corner
under the TV nobody ever notices isn't actually on
despite the BBC's best efforts
All he wants at that moment is to be alone in her company

When all's said and done
in the rock paper scissors of life
hugs and fucking trump talking

ENGLAND REMAINED RELATIVELY CALM LAST NIGHT
(Inspired by Jonny Marvel)

Hear it read aloud: http://www.mixcloud.com/RebelArtsRadio/rebel-arts-radio-22nd-august-2011/

Jonny’s in the basement mixing up a Molotov. I’m in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge thinking about a poem. Thinking about a poem. Get this. Thinking about writing a poem. That’s writing. Not rioting. I think it’s important to make the distinction. Writing. Not rioting. Not Luton. That’s a place in Bedfordshire. Not lute. That’s medieval stringed instrumentation and this is Cambridge, in the grandest of Grand Arcades. And I’m thinking about writing a poem.

The shop assistant in Gant accosts me, as I loiter with poetic intent in the vicinity of two comfy armchairs, in front of a blue mosaic chintzy tiled fireplace and a faux coffee table festooned with appropriate lifestyle magazines with all the studied casualness of a Bananarama hair-do.

- What are you thinking about? I am asked.

- I’m sorry? I reply in my best middle-class.

- You’ve been standing there for some time now. Thinking. And I have to ask.

- Yeah, that’s right. I’m thinking.

- But why are you writing notes?

- Notes?

- Notes.

- Yeah, they’re notes for a poem.

- Well, I have to ask, she says defensively as she walks away.

For all the world looking like I’ve just goosed her with the unrubbered end of my HB pencil.

- Why? Why do you have to ask?

- Security.

- Security?

- Yes. Security. We have to ask.

She doesn’t elaborate. So I do.

- What? In case I’m a security risk. Like I could be EDL, Al-Qaida or a looter planning a riot or…

- Are you?

- Am I what?

- Planning a riot.

- No. I’m planning a poem... ...about a riot.

The last three words seal it. Off she pops. To get a security guard by the look of her.

Next shop. Jack Jones. All on my Jack Jones funnily enough. At ten past four pm on a Wednesday in a high-end clothes store all on my own with two assistants and nothing more than a piece of rhyming slang in my head and a biro and pad.

The assistant does a passable impression of knowing who Jack Jones is. He of the Trades Union Congress, the Liverpool Docks, the Spanish Civil war, pensioners’ rights, Las Vegas cabaret and the rhyming slang. He gets the rhyming slang and the American crooner but has to search for Trade Union Leader in the dark cultural recession of his social history. He leaves the reference hanging in the air.

So, as a parting shot, I note how Jack’d be turning in his grave if he only knew the things that were happening in his name these days…

- Could be worse?

Could be worse? Could be worse? I can’t resist. I turn back towards the counter, as he leans over it, all cocky for the benefit of the other assistant/bouncer because he does know who my Jack Jones is after all.

- Really? Could it? What could be worse?

- What do you…?

- Go on. Name one thing. What could be worse, I goad. Go on!

- Well... he... he... he could be the next Hitler.

Hitler! Jack Jones could be the next Hitler. I repeat at slightly less than soto voce. I leave Jack Jones at that point in order to laugh my freakin’ head off in full view of the shoppers and security contingent now in entourage around a fully aroused Gant girl. Boy, has she been busy. She appears to have told all those gathered that a dangerous and subversive act of poetry preparation is in progress in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge on a Wednesday afternoon.

Two of the security are high-end: smart shirt & ties, walkie-talkies, hi-tech earpiece gizmos, the works. I hesitate to look too closely at an increasingly militant Gant girl, but I’m sure she’s busy checking that the community police lady has sufficient rounds of plastic bullets and tear gas.

The security look at me and laugh. I surmise it is merely nervous neuro-mimicry. Unless. Unless they’ve got Jack Jones bugged (after all, it wouldn’t be the first time Jack Jones has been bugged… by Mi6 admittedly, and not Grande Arcade security, but anyway…) That must be it. They’ve got Jack Jones bugged and they’ve just heard the hilarious the long-time dead International Brigader and fighter for pensioners’ rights as Hitler gag!

Next stop. The Apple store.

- Excuse me mate. What's this shop called?

I am careful not to cross the threshold this time. Suddenly, politically conscious of how much of a threat my 1968 NATO issue Smock Man’s Combat Jacket and 1963 Liverpool issue accent pose in the Grande Arcade, Cambridge, I stay out of the shop, filled with enough hi-tech gadgetry and gizmos to arm a techno-geek’s Berlin bunker should he have Jack Jones-like designs on our precious liberal democracies.

- The Apple Store, mate. Why?

- Why what?

- Why do you ask?

- I’m writing a poem.

- Oh.

He doesn’t say it but I know by now what they’re all thinking. What? And you thought I might be planning an armed insurrection and Apple is where we lift the techs from.

Apparently, Swarvoski isn’t Russian. Though it’s high-end crystal jewellery is just about within reach of the average oligarch’s income. Swarvoski is Austrian actually. As Austrian as Freud, Vienna, Bach, schnitzel and Jack Jones.

Passing Frank Hart’s Gucci custom jewellery and TW Steel, big in over-sized watches, the next stop on the top shop trail is Kuoni. A new concept of luxury travel. Again I stand outside and read the marketized wordage on its high-end façade, doing my best trying-not-to-laugh laugh, at full volume, until the curious and bored sales clerk emerges.

It is surprising how little buying actually goes on in high-end retail on a Wednesday afternoon. He asks the inevitable, predictable, rote learnt question every language student from here to Shanghai knows. The open sesame of international capitalism no less.

- Can I help you, sir?

By now, I have abandoned polite sarcasm for full-blown persecution complex.

- If I wanted any help from you, I’d’ve gone into your store, wouldn’t I comrade?

- Sorry. I was only asking.

I rant something about joining up synapses and being a jobs worth shop clerk to the devil, but by now I am merely an ex-curiosity and no longer a potential threat. I’m fast learning that the threat of a customer looms larger than actual custom in the high-end retail market. You don’t get this much attention in Primark.

Azendi’s sterling silver 925 freshwater pearls remain unlooted as I note down their names. I ask the thirty-something woman in Guess with a glamorous haircut what the name of her store might be.

- Guess, she answers missing the irony inherent in my request for redundant information.

My raised eyebrows do nothing to enlighten.

- A shop! I guess.

- Sorry?, she replies.

- A shop. That’s my first guess. I reckon it’s a shop. High-end I shouldn’t wonder.

She grins nervously as her colleague looks suspiciously at my notebook which I am now brandishing like Sub Comandante Marcos would a sub-machine gun. My biro has become a pipe full of coca leaves in the armed struggle for the liberation of the proletariat and peasantry of the entire Latin American Diaspora, and it’s only Wednesday afternoon in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge.

Rigby & Pellier confirms the unlikely link between shopping mall and Amazonia with their promotional sign front of shop, which contains nothing but bikinis and glamorous, bored women, not selling any swimsuits of any kind and reading glossy magazines.

Purchasing one bikini, announces the promo, purchasing one bikini saves one square metre of the rainforest. There you go. Job done. Put down the machine gun Sub Comandante Marcos and put on a mankini.

Next stop. Schuh. Not a poetry critic. But another store. Shoes. Two shops away from Azendi. By now names mean nothing. Build-A-Bear Workshop could be The Bilderberg Group. The White Shop. (Everything’s white.) The Pen Shop (Yep. Pens) and the ubiquitous Hollister. Someone in a Hollister 22 emerges looking every bit like a Harper Seven in a few years’ time: all gelled hair, vacant smile and retail therapy.

On the frontage of yet another three-quarters empty high-end store, a list of aspirant metropolitan centres. I read out loud including my own additions: Zagreb, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Antwerp, Tottenham. Munich, Moscow, Berlin, Milan, The Arnedale Centre.

A young woman in pink and glitz from the shop next door to Guess barges her way through pretend community police in low-end yellow bibs.

She blurts,

- If you do start a riot, I’d like a pair of Prada slingbacks, size 6.

But it is the two full-on female officers from Cambridge Constabulary who I engage in conversation. If I’m going down for writing a poem, I want to be shopped by the law not by a couple of hobby bobbies.

- Aha officers, I start, almost relieved. Excuse me I’m just texting a comrade.

- A comrade?

- Yes, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. We meet for coffee and chat. She’s terribly sweet. Just a little text to tell her where I am, just in case, I add knowingly.

- Now, how can I help you officer?

- Er we...

- ...you wanted to know why I am causing so much consternation and mortification on a Wednesday afternoon in the Grande Arcade, Cambridge.

- Yes, we did.

- I am writing a poem. Would you like to see my notes? Here we are officer.

As I hold them up, I read an abandoned couplet,

- Carluccino’s the first to go/cappuccinos all over the show. What do you think officer? Too doggerel?

- Well, I...

I can see her literary critical apparatus is on temporary suspension due to other pressing matters. I’m certain, ordinarily, on civvy street, she’d wax eloquent about iambic pentameters and rhyming couplets, a small Amontillado, slippers and Radio 3 on in the background. But not today. Not four days in to generalised rioting the length and breadth of democracy. Not with a sarcastically militarily attired smart arse masquerading as a poet and marauding the Grand Arcade, Cambridge planning riotous verse left right and centre. She went straight for the literal, of course.

- A riot? Why have you written a riot?

- It’s not a riot, officer, It’s the word riot. It’s notes for a poem… about a riot in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge on a Wednesday afternoon in August. Rather than rioting, I thought it’d be altogether better to use my creative imagination to write a poem about having a riot. It’ll be cosmic. Firebombs all over the shop. Kurt Geiger’s windows dished in. The arcade up in flames. Glorious. Can you imagine officer?

No she can’t. Instead she adopts the line of questioning she’s been trained to adopt.

- What is it you do?

- I’m a poet. And a writer. And a teacher.

- A teacher?

- Yeah. Of English.

- An English teacher.

Her grasp of language is outstanding.

- Is that a Liverpool accent?

- It is, officer.

She’s quite pleased with her detective work.

- And how long have you...?

- A long time. I’m resident in Cambridge. It’s a lovely place. Completely riot-free. It is my preferred haven of tolerance and intellectualism in my favourite of all the neo-liberal democracies. That’s why I came here to write poems, officer.

- Can I have your name?

- Why do you want to know my name?

- We like to know who we’re talking to.

I’m disappointed. I thought she might’ve wanted a copy of my poetry book.

- Tell you what I’d like officer. I’d like to go and write my poem now.

I turn to the small throng of two cops, two hobby bobbies, four Arcade security and several unoccupied high-end sales staff and scream.

- Is that OK everybody? Is it OK if I write my poem now? Is that hunky dory with all and fucking sundry?!

Later, in the station, they are helpful enough to provide pencil and paper.

That’s where we came in. Jonny’s in the basement mixing up a Molotov.



Based on a true story.
10th August 2011, Cambridge magicphil@btinternet.com

STAATLICHES EXPRESS

Donned in the gloom-laden hosiery of the unliving, shiny patent black shoes and the red-lined iconic cloak he is to be buried in years later (despite never issuing specific instructions for his undead corpse to be draped in the well-worn comedic capery that pursued Messrs Abbot and Costello), having recently fled the Transylvanian White Terror that visits the local population after the Lenin Boys are booted back to Moscow by the House of UnAmerican Activities, Béla Blaskó, aka Lugosi, aka Arisztid Olt, 180 pounds, six foot one, technically older than Dracula, 30 (+7) years old (Hollywood age), ex-president of the Hungarian actors' union, communist and vampire to the stars, enters Staatliches Bauhaus, stumbles slightly, a consequence of the phial surreptitiously self-administered outside the building school, then pounds the steps to the office of Walter Gropius in the hope that rehabilitation awaits.

An overwrought introduction to chill the cockles of Northamptonshire's gothic rock community is typical of the man. He's gotten his decades mixed up again. The 1880's or the 1980's? Must be the methedone. Or perhaps the garlic.

- Ah! Herr Blaskó. Please be seated.

- Please to call me Lugosi, Herr Professor. And if the Professor will permit, I should very much like to lie down.

- Why ...er.. of course. The couch?

- I prefer the floor if it disturbs not the good professor.

- Not...not at all. Please Herr Lugosi, feel free.

Out of instinct Walter Gropius admires the architecture of Lugosi's prostrate form before him. The slight asymmetry of his widow's peak (aka McDonald's hairline) only serves to emphasize its underlying symmetrical intent. The zig-zagging of the folds of the cape hint at an aesthetic that presages Elsa Lanchester.

There is an aura of sulphur matches in the room. The architect fancies it is from his assistant's smoking, or those apprentices from the crafts guild using his office to play cards again. Strange. No tobacco smell. The pungent sulphur and musty tanginess of Frau Gropius's famous strong cheese and garlic on rye is of a different order.

The reflection of his visitor's breath in his shiny patent shoes takes Gropius aback. It is only early Weimar Republic. Why so cold? And then the breath... It comes from nowhere. Gropius turns and looks at Lugosi's lips. They have no reflection in the shoes. But then, neither can he see any trace of cold breath emerging from his now sleeping guest's mouth.

- Professor?

Gropius starts.

- Forgive me Herr Professor. From time to time I, how to say, nod. It is a symptom of my condition.

- Condition?

- I am plagued by the gothic. Doomed to typecast. Assailed by self-doubt. Existence is highly contingent for the commercially undead.

Lugosi's heavy burr is lugubrious and hypnotizing. In his mouth anon, Gropius's heart now beats in time with his visitor's mythical rhythm. Slowly Lugosi rises. The weight of demetrification, English, America's psychopathic healthcare, the debt to Sinatra, Béla Jr, the hospital bills, the mass production of horror, kitsch, unemployment, high camp, the defeat of the 1919 Hungarian Workers' State, sciatica, morphine, eternity, the four wives, lifts. Hope, the last one. Hope.

- Is there to be hope Herr Gropius?

- The bats have left the modernist bell tower. There is nothing but hope.

- How is the cure to be administered?

- A process of detoxification is to be recommended. The ornate, the gothic, the romantic, the decorative are to be banished in the machine-age man. Form must follow function. If we need to bolt a head onto your shoulders, then we engineer a virtue out of the bolt. The aesthetic of the functional.

- Karloff.

- Who?

- No matter. I am in need of the cure. I am in your hands Herr Professor.

- The enrolment procedure has already begun. I need only to see you draw.

- Blood?

- No. Herr Lugosi. Ink will suffice .

THE CREATIVE CLASS

'You should avoid starting a story with dialogue!' said the Creative Writing lecturer, reading from his notes to his freshman class.

'Neither should you use exclamation points, clichés. And,' he continued, ignoring several raised hands, 'you should never start a sentence with and. Or end one with butt.'

Just then, in Dakota University, as in all other all-American educational institutions, no sooner had the class begun, then the bell went off. Each Hollywood academic hour lasts on average 37.5 seconds, making it possible to complete a whole term's course work in one afternoon, which, of course, only brainiacs and nerds do. The tutor's words trail off as the freshmen students instantly collect all their gear and vacate the room with indecent haste, as though their very popularity rating depended on it.

Only the most attractive and most famous member of the class stays behind. She is worried about the only two things she is ever concerned about: her low grade average and not being the most popular girl in the school, despite her telegenic strawberry blonde looks.

' "What are you looking at me for. I didn't come to stay," ' is the first line of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. And you said you oughtn'ta..'.

'Yes, I know what I said. And when you're as vibrantly colloquial as Ms Angelou is, then you too can start stories with dialogue. Until then, it's probably better not too, that's all.'

'It's just that I can't seem to recreate. I tell. I don't know how to show...'

'Write what you see happening in your mind's eye.'

'Maybe this'll improve my academic grades, but what about my popularity rating. I only averaged a C+ this semester.'

'Well, this semester's barely 90 seconds old , so there's still time to improve... Lemme give you a ride home and we'll discuss your options in the car.'

As they headed down the six-lane expressway, the purples and pinks and reds of the Californian sunset spelt out the words Toxic Sludge is Good For You. It was as beautiful as Sellafield on a wet winter's eve.

'Look. I normally spin up a doobie on the way home, Samantha. You don't mind if I call you Samantha, do you?'

'Course not.'

'Call me Dean. If you look in the glove compartment you'll find an ounce of California's finest. Our state may have the fifth largest economy in the world, but those Mexicans sure ain't gettin' high picking strawberries 14 hours a day. Did you know that 80% of the world's strawberries are grown here?'

'I think you're confusing me with someone who gives a shit, Professor. You'll be asking me about Iran next. Where's the Mary Jane?'

Sam opened it and ( 'Oh!' ) sure enough there it was. She started loading up a paper on the dash like an expert, while fiddling with the radio, till she found the local hip hop station. Oh la la by The Wiseguys. Nice. She turned it up.

'Usually I wouldn't dream of smoking illegal narcotics with a student whilst driving. But since this is only a story, and I'm Head of Creative Writing, we can allow for a bit of author intrusion, just so's I can get stoned, I reckon. I mean it's not like this is even South Dakota anymore.'

Fifteen minutes later, they were stuck in traffic on a Hollywood freeway. America's biggest cash crop had the entirely predictable effect on Sam. Particularly since she'd had half an MDMA, three beers and 20 mgs of Diazepam before class, as per.

'What do you mean you want me to buy a War Cry? You're in the Army and you're giving me Salvation. Look kid. I'm already in the Army, what do you think the uniform's for, selling ice cream? Get outta here!'

'Dean! Come on. We need surprise and irony,' shouted Sam trying to bring him round.

Luckily, they'd just gotten off the freeway, and Sam was able to slap him back to himself with coffee and kindness. It would take more kindness than she had ever known. She had had to do Hollywood movies since she was fourteen. She remembers very little of it. It became kind of a mechanical thing for her, divorced from any pleasure or pain. Best way really. Just plough through. Get through the punters. Quick. Get out of the rain. Get the bag of brown and then get home to the kids. The Drew Barrymore of Bootle, they called her.

As for Dean, he'd turned into Sgt Bilko on a British Legion night out on a Wednesday in Tooting Bec.

Goddam escapists.

GOBBLE DEGOOKSVILLE ALABAMA FREE FALL

Pure unbridled tripe like a bastard
fun for eleven minutes on day 8
cos if I stop to think too much
the phone goes off in my head. Full stop.
No time to think or scratch my nose
She wrote it on her fucken arm man
She wrote what I said on her arm in tattoo
No one has ever done that before
Not my wife, not my brother, not my anyone
Wowser wowser
See if I trail the juice in the corner
only the cat will tell if I'm dreaming
Sub optimal prime relief
Too much caffeine in my blood cream
and a lack of real pie in my quiche
A face smashed apart by hyper masculinity
until new vocabulary hits the mainline
like a smacker on the kisser up the mush
round the Elephant & Castle up the arsehole
Jesus saves in the ethical investment trust
he doesn't have faith in anymore
since the hedge fund managers
- who get a terribly bad press btw -
kicked the living shite out of the temple dwellers
who Occupied London in a vein attempt
Smacked off their tits with debt
and crisis and ethics
and Bing Crosby
It ain't easy being a frog in a shellsuit
standing up for the accused
since he's been and gone and left
a trail of redundant past participles in the deep fat fryer
like a turd in a Tesco bag aside a collosus of random detritus
in the back of a Datsun Sunny
with the go-faster Starsky & Hutch stripe
that his Dad painted on until he was black and blue
with expletives and normative male conditioning
til the plastic-coated pretend rubber bullets left
hits and exit wounds round the back of the bike sheds
where the cigarette butts are trod into the oft recounted
bored truisms of six two foot rugby players
who beat up leaders of fascist parties
in order to impress five foot two blonde princesses
who think that stinks
Think. Think again. Levi Strauss's tears fall down my face
Is here to make it all ok with you
One dark day he came home from the Socialist Party meeting
to tell her he'd met someone
She had a beard like Trotsky's granddaughter
but her new Brazilian stubble meant Ayrton Senna's iPod
made her cream her jeans with the word jizm
which he misspelt and she had never heard of anyway

Blob

VIOLINS OVER RAMALLAH

Israel has warned international observers to leave. Completely spasmodic, if you ask me. There are F-16's and choppers hovering over me as we speak. Are you going to Fifi's BBQ? There are large numbers of tanks throughout Rafah and Gaza. Why would I not want to go to double Latin today? The sonic booms of Israeli warplanes are deafening. The next station is Letchworth. Fear comes with the night. My piano teacher's not even giving me half my lesson. The sonic booms are making pregnant women give birth prematurely. Choir practice. The border to Egypt is closed. Sheet music by Handel. These are not military objectives; they're targetting the civilian infrastructure. You shouldn't let her get away with only giving you half of your lesson. The film went out on all major Western news channels. She used to do the same thing with me. The bridges that connect north and south Gaza have been destroyed. It's an impossibly difficult piece for the viola. Hezbollah said they had not fired the first missile. Is Alice still going with Mahmoud? Zuhair Ali Al-Mansouri of Hezbollah said the Israeli footage, meant to 'prove' that 'militants' in Lebanon fired at Israel first, showed nothing of the sort. Is he from Iraq or Iran? Al-Jazeera carried this denial, as did BBC World Service radio, briefly. He shouldn't really smoke if he's a strict muslim, should he? The television showed shots of injured Israelis, but Lebanese and Palestinian casualties went unseen by tea time audiences. He doesn't eat pork or drink. The spokeswoman accused BBC radio of being part of an Arab propaganda plot to undermine Israel and drive it back into the sea. He drinks cardamon coffee and eats dates in the afternoon, after smoking his pipe. She sounded like my piano teacher.The concert for peace had been organised before they fell for each other. The Israeli Army aren't coming to Fifi's barbecue, are they? They would have been better to have the concert at Ely Cathedral like last year. Just four chairs right in front of the wall. The accoustics are much better. They managed to play beautifully throughout. A quartet of Apache helicopters moved in on the players. Only one of them could speak English properly, don't you remember? The IDF are completely spasmodic for messing up the peace concert like that. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. They called Mahmoud a terrorist. Apparently, the cellist had been to Finsbury Park once. The first bullets ripped through the double bass and violins; the second round sprayed across their faces and chests. Mind you, the General had to admit the music had been beautiful. Pity they killed everybody before they reached the end.

The next station stop is Ramallah.

DAY 7 AWAITS

Day 6. It was as per. Usual wasn't the word. It was far from that. But it was as it always was... disorientation, distortion, distemper and... something indefinable. Sticky humidity. Sweaty palmistry. The quickening in the chestal membrane. Sane in the brain. Far too linear. Too much chronology, not enough psychology. It wouldn't get any easier, but it might get simpler. Time to look in the book for hooks. Lines to be taken for a walk along The Watchtower with Jaime, a witness of Jehovah with a letter of dismissal from Fort Campbell, Kentucky fried licks from Satan and a dopey look of irreverence in his eye.

Then the beep beep of intertextuality revealed an sms. Cheryl might go zebra later. The blacks and whites of trapped conventionality. A pantomime horse in pyjamas on double bass. A white rastafarian on public school grounds for prosecution. A Southend singer songwriter with curbed Essexist tendencies and a predilection for beetles and The Beatles. An epidemiologist from Braintree. Surgery hours only.

Hook line and sink. Of course, it's a disaster for our shareholders. He has lead an unprecedented response in the Mexican Gulf. The positive spin spun a web of deceit in his gall so apparent it made his ligaments cramp like hamstrings. Not enough muscular relaxant. Patchouli is no substitute. Tales of THC withdrawal from the river bank. The advertising standards in the industry aren't brilliant. That's code for: They lie. Greenpeace switched on the safety handles at the pumps. An irresponsible and childish act of political posturing and piracy. Pissing trillions of gallons of toxic black crap into an ocean is an act of maturity. It is only a calamity when the shareholders lose dividends. This is a given. Consensus manufacture for the masses.

I can stand it no more. Tired eyes. I take them out, wash them and pop them back in. Playing games with metaphor is akin to speaking if you are deaf to the deception of propaganda. The words faded colonial glory drift across, as 16-year-olds from Sao Paolo learn the language of cultural imperialism known as globalisation. I want not to listen. I switch off at the ear. I switch off at the temple. I wish not to ruminate. Act. Show. Do not tell. Do.

From out of the nebula there is a bridge standing under the man. At once the man is, and he is short. The left hand indicates size, the right sex. It is tempting to make the sign of the wanker, but this is too open to misinterpretation. Typical thumbs-up hearing fucker. These days British Sign Language raises its middle finger in recognition that they are not better, just aurally impaired. How do they live in a world of sound effects? Silence is... Noise annoys.

I think, therefore I scam. The philosophy of the tea leaf. Marketised time for the employed pays the rent, but not everybody has rent to pay. Opt outs are optional, but perfectly doable.

R.E.M. is strong. Mornings are woozy. The lack packs a punch drunk sleep in the eye that is hard to shake off first thing. I was trapped in a shared house of multiple occupational therapists, a close friend, a manic depressive, random members of Pink Fraud and Uriah Heap and a supergroup anxiety complex. Wakey wakey Boodah Bobbah. One of the heads aboard Gilbert The Narrowboat's door buddhas is missing. It imploded with enlightenment. Apparently high-functioning sociopaths embrace orientalism as a cover for their nefariousness. There are more of them than we think. Paranoid? Paranoia is a cinch compared to full-blown ideation persecution, sister. Two pints of IPA, a line of Carlos and a smidgen of BZP, please. What the fuck is passive aggressive anyway?

Jean Paul is my spirit guide out of the mist. He hangs around the rim of my consciousness like a Tangiers male prostitute in a Today Is A Good Day t-shirt and a copy of Huis Clos next to a lame stick of Wrigley's in the back pocket of jeans that one of his clients has given him in return for rendered servility and half an hour of lusty wrestling.

There goes the bell. Time out. Time to turn the page. Day 7 awaits. Magnificent. Lord knows I need the rest. The act of creation is knackering. I should have made a Genesis Device and let it do all the work.

No matter. Job done. Good night, God bless.

A CONTINENTAL DOG'S BREAKFAST

The two Frankfurters entered the diner first, followed by the Hamburger, the Berliner and finally the French toast. The thinner of the Frankfurters, bathed in eau de Cologne, considered the German chancellor's stance vis-a-vis the American-Belgian Waffles crisis with the curious detachment of a captain of industry at three removes away from the Munich beer hall putsch of 1923. The fatter of the two Frankfurters, his deliberations consumed, was more than happy to accommodate US-style additions, provided the syrup agreed to be one of his myspace friends. All four had gone Dutch to spite the French toast. Buttered on the untoasted side only, she was actually British and proud of it, no matter how many sprouts Big Brother Brussels left all over the plate.

To scotch the Welsh rabbit's plans, the Danish pastry had saved everyone's bacon by squeezing orangemen till the pips squeaked in each of the Six Counties. As part of a negotiated settlement, the Ulster Fry was to be covered in haricot beans and artificial sweetners. Pound for pound, it was still a full English whichever way your baguette was buttered. The Celtic Tiger roared. He had more important fish to fry: kedgeree for starters, then depleted cod stock and finally skate on a bed of thin ice, topped with a neo-liberal sprinkling of tax breaks for business class customers, all at M3 motorway prices. No self-respecting Pole would touch it with a bhaji.

Meanwhile, Asti Spumante was drinking expresso au terrace with an off-duty cigarette who had been forced alfresco by the frying pan, so the French poodle could give his "Make the Trades Unions Bleed" speech in all major European languages, except English. Tipped off by the waiter, the creme Catalan caught wind of the US subprime market collapse in good time to rake off 8.5 billion Euros for gateaux re-construction in the Black Forest. The Portuguese man-of-war, full of Middle Eastern promise, nevertheless continued to swat the Spanish fly. The cheap Sicilian red, who was never up at this time of day, had spent the night on the bio-diesel with the famous Russian salad, who had got the Venetian Blind drunk and left the Greek cross under the table, totally shished off his kebab, much to the delight of the Turkish coffee, who never ever touched a drop of the Tatar sauce.

The waitress, who wore her hair in a French roll coated in egg and milk (lightly fried), a style more suited to Southern Mediterranean than Nordic tastes, asked in her best dog, "Is there anything more you desire, monsieur?

She was addressing Rex the Dog.

Rex, the biggest canine star of his day, was known as the King of Dogfooding. In the advertising game, he was the dog who always ate the dog food. Rex would never turn up his nose at the product. Back in the day, there was nothing more embarrassing, or costly, on a live TV commercial than the dog not eating its Lassie Chunks. But this really wasn't his cup of tea at all. Even though he'd never been much for sheep herding, he hated wordplay with a passion bordering on collie. It was time he hightailed it. He'd already waited far too long for the waitress to notice him in amongst all the sticky puns.

- I don't suppose you could fetch me a bone and a people bag to go, woofed Rex softly.

As he pushed open the door to leave, a dispute over the provenance of the idiomatic infusion broke out between a couple of inebriated English peers, who had been down and out in Paris, London and other world-renowned European capitals more times than Rex had had dog's dinners. Lord Lipton of Lambeth Walk insisted the brew was rightfully his, while Earl Grey of Essex claimed the oil of Bergamot entitled him not only to possession of the dog's cup of tea, but to full droits de signeur over the waitress too. Pretty soon they were at it like humans. Rex was best off out of it. Pity. He'd been looking forward to that Vienna sausage.

42ND ST BURGER

"There can be nothing more mistaken than to assume that the Russian proletariat, or even its leader, the Communist Party, came into power with recipes prepared in advance, of practical measures for the realisation of the dictatorship."
Lev Kamenev from The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 1920.

I will miss very much your Old Speckled Hen. It was the last thing he said to me before going back to Moscow. The hangover got by way of too many Mad Monk Vodkas would pass, but I’d remember his fondness for English real ales - rough, self-assured, but not without subtlety, much like his sense of humour. His reactions were quick and acute. It was evident that he was no friend of long explanations. He regarded Molotov as very close comrade and only member of Politburo who could make decent cocktail.

He ate food in quantities that would have been enormous even for much larger man. He usually chose meat, sign of his mountain origins. He also liked all kinds of local specialities, but I did not notice that any one dish was particular favourite. On his last night he tried his first American-style burger from British Chinese chip shop take away.

- Enjoy yourself, get fat and never stop laughing. This was Comrade Lenin’s maxim. Gorky Park was great place for Kuhlich picnic…

-… before the Bolshevik putsch swept the hopes of the February revolution into the gutter, I interjected.

But it was no use: after the local schoolchildren’s musical performance, Stalin was in party mood.

- McDonald’s. McDonald’s. Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. Is catchy tune, no?

- Yes, Josef. That’s the point.

- I thought Healthy Eating Week launch was point of evening show.

- Me too… You couldn’t hear anything at the back, apart from that advertising jingle. The whole show was a mess.

- I thought you liked, how is it said, chaos.

- Structurelessness is tyranny, not anarchy. Co-operation need not be chaotic.

- Psst! Theory. Don’t give me theory. I want two double 42nd Street burgers made from purest cuts of beef just like it say on capitalist poster.

- Capitalism is pants.

- Ah! You anarchists always complaining. Vladimir was right. So infantile. Grow up. Be man. Eat some meat.

The meat looked insipid. The poster was red and shiny and promised a new world order devoid of salad and joined up thinking.

Fast Food's Most Decadent Burger Arrives
Triple Ultimate Cheeseburger for purists.

Three beef patties, two slices of American cheese, one slice of Swiss cheese, mayo, onion sauce and a jumbo bun. It’s a clench-fisted burger sure to satisfy the fool-hardiest of appetites.

Remember: real men don’t do salad.

[Meets and surpasses the new meat laws]

The newspaper on the counter says the FSB put Polonium-210 in Sasha's tea. Do not believe a word. Putin knows from his grandfather never to mix radioactive isotope with liquid. For sure is classic pirozhki ingredient. Now shut up and let me eat crazy dead cow from Mi6 in peace.

THE GINGERBREAD MANAGER

Once upon a time, there was an elderly retiree, barely endowed with adequate finance to survive the week, let alone the fiscal quarter, but among whose core competences included the fabrication of gingerbread mini-figures which she pre-planned to consume in tandem with her long-term partner, going forward.

One day, while the elderly retiree, female, (a.k.a ERF) was up-scaling in her rocker, shooting the blue-sky, she fancied that she detected an odd noise coming from the oven. Fairyland performance indicators dictated she investigate further, going forward.

- Assistance! Assistance! I require assistance in this space, looped back a voice from the interior of the ageing Aga.

Mother ERF's ginger confection was evidently human-type capital in crisis. Opening the stove door, the incentivised elderly service provider discovered her product launch had sufficient proactive functionality to conversate. A cinnamon stick had attached itself to his thorax, and sprinkling its folkloric magic had miraculously materialised a half-baked talking gingerbread boy with a Masters in Business Administration, a high-altitude overview and enough bandwith to capture the vertical market, going forward.

Blind to the unrestricted opportunities this serendipitous synergy had blended into the marketing mix, Mother ERF's silo-ed thinking was focussed on immediate consumption rather than the strategic staircase, up which the gingerbread MBA was pre-fated to hop from the get-go. Had she not been living the values of the impoverished fishwife, she would have got her fingers down the throat of the ginger nodule and grasped the granularity of the situation. However, bereft of 360 degree thinking, of the kind that separates the rhizome from the ginger root, she was destined to let the lemongrass grow too long on this one, going forward.

Wiping her hands on her holey apron, she placed the bipedal biscuit gingerly on the rustic table and stood agape, arms akimbo, frowning like a fairy faced with paradigm shiftage. The gingerbread youth straightened his marzipan tie and gave her the heads up on her swift intervention, going forward.

- Much obliged to you Ms, interfaced the gingerbread manager to Mother ERF, who had the sensation of being seriously out of the loopage.

- Don't mention it, love, communicated the ERF.

- Mother ERF... you don't mind if I call you MERF, do you? Look MERF, clearly we need to tic-tac here. Seems to me you misoverestimated the ETA on this project, not to mention failing to feed the product through the sales and delivery pipeline.

- I only had enough to make one biscuit for me and my old man, son.

- Give me some context here. Is it your intention to pursue short-term objectives and chase me down the street as per? Or would it not be preferable to leverage our talents and go forward together, out-foxing our competitors and giving the key stakeholders an option to buy into something more long-term?

- I'm not sure what you mean, young man. I don't...

- What I mean is, instead of targeting the domestic market, have you sounded out the emerging vertical? Maybe even go down the road of divesting, outsourcing the pre-preparation to the Far East, freeing up you and your partner to focus around marketing and procurement. Production is so labour intensive. Wouldn't you like more time to yourself MERF?

- But...

- Time is the new black. A luxury we can all enjoy. Time to kick back on the old rocker and watch the coinage roll in. Looking around, I'd say you need all the financial leverage you can get. You ought to be pushing the envelope here. We're talking low-hanging fruit cake. The brand alone's got to be worth squillions. 'S all about branding these days MERF.

- Branding?...

- Look, without the Gingerbread Man brand, I'm just another runaway lippy cookie with an attitude problem... Problem? Did I say problem? I meant challenge... Listen, my oven door is open on this... We need to look under the bonnet... Let's deep-dive an ideas shower and touch base offline... If you wrongside the demographic, then nobody's coming to the party... You got to develop a high-level overview... I'm committed 120%... the human touch MERF... need to connect ear-to-ear with the Chinese... and also, in addition...

As Mother ERF listened, her voluble creation was so intent on feeding it back, she was able to edge towards him, clutching her gingham dishcloth between the thumb and forefingers of both gnarled hands like an arthritic matador, going forward.

Before he could say "You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music", the cloth had cascaded down over the anthropomorphic gingerbread figurine so that not only was the hungry housewife able to furnish herself and her husband with a nutritious appetising snack, midmorning, but, more to the point, she also managed to shut the little gobby fucker up, going forward.



THE END (of capitalism in fairyland.)

FOR A FISTFUL OF THORAZINE

The Ho Chi Minh Maoists came around the corner. Late, but impeccably turned out in huge sombreros with matching Red China flags, carrying little pictures of Minh, Marx and Mao. The PKK were already making moves on Churchill. Unfinished business you might say. La Bestia de Bagdad wasn't the first to WMD the Kurds. On the other side of the road by the Cenataph, Indymedia were filming the federales and the Press, who were filming us filming them. Nobody, however, was filming The Man With No Name. He sort of appeared from out behind the Maoists, just as the last of the young revolutionaries was being planted in Parliament Square.

- Hey amigo. Is this where I can find the one they call El Cabrón?

-Sorry mate. No idea.

- Hey compadre, you show me respect. I want to speak with the boss man.

- Well ok. If you mean by boss, the head of the state managers of power, i.e. the executive, i.e. Tony Blair, then .... yes, I replied. Over in that building.

- El Cabrón calls himself Tony you say. Thanks amigo. Hey, by the way, you might not wanna do that quotes thing with your fingers any more. Makes you look like an asshole.

I thought about the obvious reply for a second. Something along the lines of "I'm not the one in brown leather chaps, cowboy hat and poncho", but I let it slide. He was after all armed and American, I think.


* * *

El Ciego had been exiled to the Isla del Hombre. El Gordo was doing better: thanks to the intervention of his mamacita, to her impassioned pleas (of "No, no, don' kill 'im. He'z just a boy from the Global Village.") and to the elevated status accorded motherly love in our New Jerusalem. It had been put to him that his was the greater dishonour since he had betrayed his own people. El Cabrón, on the other hand, had not. He was one of them. He had been handpicked to look after the store by the gringos agentes of La Inteligencia Central. He'd been to a top riding school and had learnt how to handle a horse and how to trick the peones into believing he didn't hate their filthy stinking hides. He was only doing what we expected of him.

- That's a bloody daft argument. I could use the same line. I could argue that you expected me to make amigos with big business. That you knew the laboristas would line up alongside the bandits. I admit it. We never thought this toy town revolutionary nonsense would catch on. It took us all by surprise.

- True. Your lack of foresight is staggering El Gordo. We reluctant revolutionaries have preposterous imaginations. How could you ever have anticipated this present state of affairs? That one day the bandits of the dollar would leave you in la mierda and you'd be facing penniless exile or this: pleading with the Consejo for a chance to live out your last days as a lousy toilet cleaner at the Museo de la Democracia Disfuncional. Anyway, relax compadre, you're in. You'll get minimum wage, paid monthly in arrears in Cuban pesos... Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....

The corridors of Whitehall rang out with maniacal guffawing, made all the more psychotic for being badly dubbed from the original half Spanish-half Italian. At times you could almost not hear The Man With No Name speak: his lips moved so quickly, and not always in synch.

El Gordo had been one of the ones who hadn't fled, and so missed the great accident in the sky. When those yankee gringo, Los hermanos de Wright introduced their weapon of aviation, it was like the time my grandfather took me on the Channel ferry to see a machine gun. But the accident was even more incredible. The hermanos made it so that, not one, but two airplanes would fly into the side of the Palacio de Buckingham. El Cabrón's plane was the first to hit, so closely followed by the plane of los ricos that a mid-air collision was only just averted. But when the two planes crashed, leaving the tail ends of both planes were sticking out of the Palacio like two chocolate Flakes in an helado, we knew they'd meant it to be so.

The government funcionarios, the médicos of spin, the executivos, the fascistas, the aparachiks and the rest of those sons of dogs all perished in the gran accidente. What was left of the old guard, put it down to the air traffic controllers - it was after all half-term. But, since the airplane had only just been invented, most of us knew it was just propaganda. The gran accidente was a snapshot of what had been happening generally, up and down the country, unexpectedly, suddenly. It had started as we drifted back from fertile resistance day on May 1st. The footage of the gran accidente and the Indymedia coverage of what we'd been doing just hours before all seemed to coalesce in the public consciousness, as if we had planned it. I'd been filming happy smiling faces planting Emma Goldmans and Noam Chomskys in the undergrowth in Parliament square: the faces of confident Arab workers, relaxed protestors gleefully setting about the coiffure of the Gran Assesino. We had not been expecting it to end up syndicated on prime time TV and all the news channels. And we certainly hadn't expected what came next. Everybody, or so it appeared, started talking, sharing ideas and making plans. People started to sound as if we'd dreamed them up. Like the one of our pamphlets we used to educate the peones. This was too good to be true.

- Wotcha, Agrippa.

- Alright, Jules. What can I do you for?

- It's just occurred to me that we no longer have to put up with grotesque inequality.

- I couldn't agree more. Did you know that top three richest gringos have as much wealth as the world’s 60 poorest countries?

- Really? We have to do something.

- And so they did. Five million marched on the capital. The federales were taken unawares. Nothing in their gringo intelligence reports had lead them to believe the peones would so swiftly act to demand the middle managers hand over the big golden key of power. The workers closed down the Parlamento. Now it was a museum of their failure and our triumph.

As the delegates from the Quakers, Gringopeace, the Celtic Anarchistas, the Women’s Environmental Network, the Black Caucus, Class War, Workers' Libertad, the Partido Socialistas of Scotlandia and the Children’s Movement took their seats for the gran reunión, The Man With No Name left quietly. The reluctant revolutionary ignored the beautiful woman with the sallow complexion and dark eyes, as she took the cheroot out from between her full red lips and spat at him. He dismissed the latent homosexual overtures of the technologically-minded blond gringo. As he turned the corner and left the Mall, he kicked the dog that had been chewing over the bones of El Cabrón. They say the dog was once blind.

* * *


- That's an interesting parallel though Tommy. Could help you in your present situation. And as a Marxist you're already half way there.

- What do you mean Dr. Klein?

- Well, you believe in the afterlife, you know, the future utopia, as predicted by the prophet Karl Marx. Everything that has happened in the last 150-odd years since Das Kapital has been predicted by him you say. This is theology. Everything has not already been written down. The revolutionary road to socialism hasn't been laid by Herr Marx in Sanskrit for the Leninist orthodoxy to decipher on behalf of the masses.

- So, what are you saying my hallucinations are a kind of Bolshevik Da Vinci Code?

- Ah yes, nicely put. There's that active imagination of yours again. No, your problem is not theology, it's dopamine. The Da Vince Code is a fiction like the teachings of the Catholic Church. I am scientist I deal in what’s provable. When we talk to Our Lord, they call it praying. When God starts speaking to us, you know what it is Tommy, do you?

As Dr Klein left the ward, she took out a cheroot which she put in her mouth in anticipation of being off hospital property. She looked over her left shoulder and winked at the Scottish Socialist Party MSP strapped in the chair. She gave a stern warning to El Gordo and El Ciego as she left.

- Take it easy on him boys. The thorazine's wearing off.

Holy Herbicide it's...JACK & THE GENESTALK

To her first born son spoke Jack’s mother
with as much gravitas as she could muster
crouched over compost micturating
explaining the benefits of crop rotating

Not for the Crown of England, lad
would I get rid of the cow
if I were your dad
but since he took off and had our money away
I’ve had sod all off the CSA

‘Sides the moral climate’s changed my sweet
We’re going free range and not doing meat

Jack loves his mother’s veganism now
so he's off to market with Daisy the cow,
to be passed on to a non-pesticide farmer
for as many loads of muck as Jack can garner

But the way to town is not what it seems
when a spindly old man offers Jack some genes
they’re not normal ones but special and magic
with eco-consequences, potentially tragic

Jack’s wet behind the ears and a wee bit green
But his mum’s not happy with the GM scene
and chucks the magic genes all over the floor
and the very next day, well, you know the score
there’s a bloody great beanstalk ascending to heaven
an irresistible attraction to a boy of eleven

Off the boy goes to the land of the Giants
Up to the castle bold and defiant
- I’ve got a penchant for tofu and yoga
You two are nothing but flesh-eating ogres.

The Giants got angry and growled at Jack
as the golden goose jumped up onto his back
- Fee Fi went Aventis
- Fo Fum went Monsanto
Who’d’ve thought we’d both end up in panto

Jack took flight straight down the stalk
as the golden goose began to flutter and squawk
it spilled the beans to the people’s press
about the insidious nature of the GM business
its plans to terminate seed germinations
in less well developed Third World nations
sowing things up for the agri-Giants
leaving poor farmers over-reliant
on sterile seeds at First world prices
instead of lentils, potatoes, red beans & rices

The twist in the tale for this lethal crop
happened as Jack got set for the chop
with the grim determination of guerrilla ecology
but the stalk dropped dead from termination technology

Aventis and Monsanto fell thereafter
And Jack & his mum lived organically ever after

The End.

www.monsantowatch.org.uk

CRUSTILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS

Once three bears are out for a stroll
in the woods as you do
while the porridge goes cold
In wafts Crustilocks
A bird on the wing
Dreadlocks so golden
And a dog on string
No home of her own
No job either
Boots with no laces
And a bottle of cider

She's proper Hank Marvin
And so's her mongeral
As she checks out the porridge
With predictable doggeral
"This one's too hot!
This one's too cold!
Ah! This one's just right"
Wouldn't you know?

Choosing a seat
It's the same rigmarole
"This is too wee
This is too large
Oh! this one's just right
for my fussy hippy arse!"

'Cos Crustilocks has issues
with the number three
It's the bane if her life
She is OCD

She needs a bit of kip
to relieve her anxiety
But a trio of beds
It's just too much variety
"Which bed's too small?
Which bed's tool lumpy?
Is it bed number three
the one that's most comfy?
Oh! Sod this!" she frets
"I need some slumber"
as she crashes on a beanbag
and spins up a number!

The bears get back
and see Crustie's been unruly
The breakfast's buggered
And the place stinks of patchouli

So if you live in the woods
And your porridge is too hot
And you don't want your pad turned into a squat
And you've got sharp claws
And you're covered in fur

Maybe you shouldn't be living in a house anyway
Maybe you'd be all together better off in a cave.


The END.

The Pie-Eyed Piper

Once, up on charges I never did like going into, I left court with a non-custodial sentence on condition I go straight back to Hamelin. (On foot. No bus fare. )

I had played my way out with a jaunty tune once used to great effect in mediæval Germany, but was having trouble remembering the words. I needed the kids. I had a long walk ahead of me. Another problem. I wasn’t sure I could remember the way. It had been a long time. I have a childhood memory of an orange stone bridge. But in that version of the story, I’d been drawn as an anthropomorphic pussycat rather than a serious rat-catching feline, like I was on Wikipedia. And there were other issues. It was only 10:30 in the morning. And I wasn’t pie-eyed yet. But if I couldn’t recall the route, there’d be nothing for it than to hit the nearest tavern for inspiration. Then who knows. I could go all Geoffrey Chaucer, or else lie around getting tight all day “…drinking of strong wine as red as blood. Then ...talk and shout as a madman would.”

The first kid to approach did so with none of the menace that his hooded attire suggested. He was one of those lanky adolescents who’d sooner stand bent double like a fairy-tale old lady than deal with being the tallest kid on the manor, and all that implied. When he spoke, his voice, which had collapsed rather than broke, came from deep under the soles of his trainers. When he spoke. Often he didn’t. A case in point. I had to search for an appropriate opening gambit. With men my own age it was easier, especially with those in the trade. Shutting them up again was the thing. But what do you say to a fifteen-year-old when you’re in hooped earrings, gold-buckled boots and furry ears? The part-pirate/part Puss-In-Boots look. It’s not right. No self-respecting, jobbing, rat-catching journeyman musician should have to.

Anyway. In the end, Hiya? came out. I wished it hadn’t. It sounded so modern. I’d quite fancied a Forsooth yonder youth!

But wasn’t sure of the grammar.

- Wotcha, went the youth, sounding even less mediæval than me.

- I don’t suppose you know what’s supposed to happen?

- You blow. I follow innit? said the youth, as if it was the most obvious thing in the moral universe.
- Yeah but what about the rats?

- Don’t be a muppet? There were never rats. They put that in later.

Just then, my blackberry went off. An email.

From: The Appropriate Municipal Authorities To: The Pie-Eyed Piper
Date: circa 1284 Subject: rodent infestation

To contextualize the horrific event in relation to the child abduction, the chief executive’s office has implemented a whole raft of measures to move forward in the present situation vis-à-vis the rodent infestation in respect of all monies due to be remitted post-haste notwithstanding. A welter of highly improbable collocations of meaningless jargon will follow on from this memorandum of personal stagnation in the name of spiritual growth and economic decline at this time in the early 21st century. The implications of the Piper myth are after all widely known to have been googled both far and wide throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom by now sunshine. Consultancy Fee £5,000

- 5k! You’ve been had mate.

My young companion had it sussed even before I’d unconvoluted a word of it. He had his Babel Frog with him. A cheaper and quicker, black-market version of Babel Fish he’d downloaded as free source software directly into his memory stick. It read councilese like a charm. I immediately appointed him IT project management consultant.

- I’m PDA then? he asked.

- Sure. Yeah.

I’d ask him what PDA meant later. For now there was the recruitment problem. If the tunes weren’t working, then we needed a gimmick. Speed dating? Speed? A rave? Hooded tops with the Pie-Eyed Piper logo? Alcopops?

- I suggest we soujourn to the nearest inn for a brainstorming session. I’ll buy you a shandy. And you can pass out your illegally purchased cigarettes my young friend.

- Sorted, he replied, far too stereotypically for my liking.

THREE LITTLE PIGS

There were once three little pigs who each wanted to own a home of their own.

The first little pig used southern rock to make his home. He thought it would be sturdier than straw and longer lasting than concrete. Though he toiled hard at his three jobs, he could only afford a fixed-rate mortgage over 99 years at eight and half times his annual income. Soon he failed to make all his repayments.

One day the wolf knocked on his door.

- Who is it? asked the pig through the letter box.

- It’s wolf, little piggy. I’ve come to foreclose the loan on this property and blow your house down.

- You can’t do that. This is a home not an investment opportunity.

The wolf was immune to all appeals to reason. The logic of the financial system was as immutable as the hair on his chinny chin chin. So he huffed and he puffed until he repossessed the property.

The little piggy and his dependants went to stay with the second pig. This little piggy’s home was secured on a much more solid basis. Though he didn’t work as hard as the first pig, mummy and daddy pig had ponied up for a deposit on an endowment mortgage to give him a trotter up on the property ladder.

Presently, modernisation lead to liberalisation which was part and parcel of globalisation which in the end meant rationalisation. That is to say, the second pig lost his job. His partner lost her job. And his eldest lost his job. All three were re-employed on new contracts with longer hours for less pay.

One day, the wolf came a-calling.

- Who is it? asked the second pig through the letter box.

- It’s wolf, little piggy. I’ve come to foreclose the loan on this property and blow your house down.

- You can’t do that. This is a home not an investment.

But as with the first pig, he huffed and he puffed until he blew the house back onto the market.

The second pig and his family, along with the first pig and his kin, all moved in with the third little piggy, who lived in a kith in shared ownership house on the margins of the wood. The pigs got along fine, in spite of statutory overcrowding.

Unfortunately, the lack of liquidity in the banking system as a result of the sub-prime crisis had knock-on effects throughout the forest. Fairy tales for miles around were subject to its laws, the third pig included.

One day, the wolf came a-calling.

- Who is it? asked the third pig through the letter box.

- It’s wolf, little piggy. I’ve come to foreclose the loan on this property and blow your house down.

- You can’t do that. This is a home not an investment.

As with the first and second pigs, he huffed and he puffed until he blew the house back onto the market. And there the story ends, at least according to the original, translated by free-lance writer, Maureen Sturgeon, so she could pay her own home loan.

Unfortunately, work has been slack lately and Maureen’s not sure how long she can keep the wolf from her door, huffing and puffing notwithstanding.

KINDREND SPIRIT'S DICK

She awoke
and wanted some ugly

She'd had enough male gaze to last a fuckin' life time
A life time fucking
A life time in the fuck biz

Just ugly enough to stop em looking
stop em wanting to fuck her long enough
to listen to what she had to say

THE POSTHUMOROUS PICKWICK CUTTINGS

Forgive me my impudence, Mr. Prickwick. A matter of form? Quite. Joe The Fatboy Slim. How do you do? Anything the matter? Transient thermal pleasure. Carting your huge postmodern bulk around, please make 'aste with the narration or the Pickwikipedians will not be best 'appy. Prepare to Ballydoran Post Office directly, bill of costs, pop in the shops for a warm, the psychologist expressly said so, on spec' ulashun Mr. Picklewink, they names the baby seal they found 15 nautical miles inland in a barn Gulliver, on account Miss Abigail of his great love of satire, Swiftian plunderings steadfastly adhered to, conversing henceforth more than the law says you need, still now, the state's inflexible resolution, warm port keeps a body a-going, a-misteltoing, a-missing intimacy, a-pining for the warmth of her body, vixenish ladies. The local economy heavy and subdued, demeanour grim. Recollect yourself. Worksearcher, workfarefinder, workhouselodger. Is that how it works? JOBSEEKERS' DISALLOWANCE. What has decomposed you, madam? DEPARTMENT OF WORKFARE & PENURY Let us contract a Hackney cabriolet my good man and despatch to indebtors' prison. GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. DO NOT COLLECT TWO HUNDRED POUNDS. More than you need to live on. The law says. The law? The law is an ass, sir! Arsehole of The Bailey, Mr. Rumpun. Don't try yourself, Mrs Winklepicker. My sister's a saint. We have looked at your claim ladies following a recent change. This is Fleet Prison: a place of debasement in the depths of depression. Stone the Russell Crowes if the whole financial system don't go and get itself in danger of collapse. State capital my dear Mr. Malevolent Bankster. THIS IS NOT OUR FAULT. But now in the run up to Christmas. Sod it. Spend spend spend. Augustus Nathanial Lotterywinkle. You don't snuff, do you? I think not, Ballydoran was produced and recorded in Liverpool. Shopping as drug addiction, beastly energetic, put you in a perspiration. Time for a glass to bid farewell, to celebrate the end of that melancholic adwenture. May a working-class anarchist make so bold as to question, sir? Shopping exertions barbarous. Conspicuous consumption. Consumption. TB1 and TB3 for the little 'uns. The petit bourjoirsee, one in twenty-five of whom are morphine addicts, imbibe five and twenty gallons of porter a chapter, Mrs Winkle. So I goes to insolvency court on behalf of the Halewood debtors' group. NO NO NO POLL TAX. Tax credits. Tax debits. National Insurance pyramid scheme for proles and pensioners. Turn it over in your mind. Obesity hypoventilation syndrome. Very Pickwickian. What an annoyance! Drank copiously port and porter for several episodes while sermoaning temprance. Humungersaurus hypoventilation, hypocrisy and hip-hop, hippy to the hop, took the hippy to the hop, now he love real ale. What's the matter lager boy? A-feared you'll taste something. You do the cumshot for a change. A scene of misery and debauchery Mrs Winkle. We cannot pay you. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS DECISION. The law says you need to live on. to live on. to live. to. live. A little warm water, slice and sugar. The busiest day of the year for our inflexible friend online. FLEET INSOLVENCY COURT (1165) Credit your debit card. Debit your credit card. You're reprobate, Mr. B. Mr. Corporation Tax Virgin. Wery good, Mr Goodwin. Clue's in the name. Wery Dickensian. One in twenty-five are equally sociopathological. You are not privy to ungrateful remarks, my dear Mr. Jingle Jobseeker. Legs shaky. Head queer. Earthquake-y feeling. In the qwuick of double time I'm a-feared he's working on the side, cash in hand for a-misteltoeing? Nourishment. Would you relish another of the same dimension Mrs.Cockleworthy. Sixpenneth for a good half crown Mrs.Winkpickle. Port/East India Sherry from Jerez, Bollywood. YOU ARE LIABLE FOR THE CHARGES STATED IN THIS NOTICE. Old fossils! Your father'll be the dearth of me. I reckon him and his piano don't count as work. I know they ain't wery good sir, so they ain't, Ballydoran so it is. My Dear Mr. Mockney Puckwit. How do you find yourself? Satnav sir. Satnav. Wouldn't be where am I today without satnav, sir. Capital Mr. Puckwith. Capital.