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SAUSAGE LIFE
Bird Guano
The column that squeaks when you bite it
MYSELF: Watsh up doc?
READER: I’m very angry. Have you seen the rubbish piling up in my street? All this fly tipping has got to stop.
MYSELF: Why? It helps supplement their low wages, and encourages them to give you better service.
READER: Sorry? What are you talking about now?
MYSELF: It’s PC gone mad. In my day we just gave the flies ten bob at Christmas and they would happily clear up everything. You could get a Rolls Royce in those days, a weekend in Venice and a small painting by Breugel and still have enough change left out of a fiver for a hamper of black Périgord truffles, a moderately-priced prostitute and a taxi home.
READER: Do you seriously expect me to…….
MYSELF: Kidsh today? They don't know they were born. A good spell in the Foreign Legion would teach these uppity whippersnappers a lesson or two. In my day we just had a cold bath if we disagreed with Brexit, otherwise we'd be caned by the house master and given anti-depressants.
READER: Are you drunk?
MYSELF: Watsh it to you?
READER: Well, I have my readers to consider.
MYSELF: Your readers? Whatsh been going on behind my back?
READER: Calm down. Why are you drinking?
MYSELF: I’m drinking to forget if you musht know.
READER: To forget what?
MYSELF: To forget that I can’t afford it.
MARCH SEASONING
Violence broke out in the town centre last week when a march involving David Icke’s Anti-Lizard Rainbow Alliance Party clashed with the annual Jack in the Green Unionist Solidarity Morrismen procession.
Stunned witnesses described angry morris dancers with terrifying bells who tore at Mr Icke’s elaborate komodo dragon costume shouting We know that’s you in there Elvis! ….Do Suspicious Minds!”
Police, who sped to the scene on solar-powered electric bicycles, attempted to disperse the mob by hosing them with a mixture of super-strength lager spiked with valium and elephant tranquilliser - “better than crack” as one rioter described it.
Hastings’ Chief Inspector Hydra Gorgon said she had never witnessed an affray like it in all her 30 years in the force, nor even, for that matter, in her previous 20 years as head walrus trainer with Bertram Mills’ circus.
FILM FESTER
Hastings annual international arts feast continues this week with Festival Of The Unwatchable, a barrage of undistinguished films guaranteed to turn your brain to jelly. My must-not-see recommendations would be auteur Julian Carcrasher’s Why Do Eskimos Like Fish? if only for for its subtle pointlessness, but please do avoid at all costs Wensleydale Parsimoney’s fabulously bland two hander, Vocational Phobias.
FASCINATING FACTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD OF ITEMS
Notorious career criminal Arthur "chopper" Tumult, who, in 1985 was found dead in extremely suspicious circumstances on the ghost train at Margate funfair, would surely be spinning in his grave were he still alive today. Ironically, although Arthur’s promising extortion business never recovered from his sudden death, that very same ghost train sold on Ebay recently for £232,000! The buyer was retired carpet shampoo millionaire Hiram J. Leverage, a republican senator from Paranoia, Texas, who’s hobby is collecting ghost trains in which people have actually died.
CULTURE SHLOCK
My network of government spies and whistle blowers has passed me this shocking excerpt from an interview, secretly taped during Hastings’ abortive application last year for the title City of Culture. The voices have been electronically disguised to prevent identification. I make no comment and leave you to judge.
Blurred voice 1 (not culture secretary Oliver Dowden): The first thing I have to ask you is this; do you have a cathedral?
Blurred voice 2 (not Hastings mayor Derek Windfarm): A cathedral? Not really, no. But we do have an art gallery
Blurred voice 1: That doesn’t count as a cathedral I’m afraid.
Blurred voice 2: It’s a very nice gallery, huge, a cathedral of art in fact and in my opinion much better looking than, for example, Coventry Cathedral.
Blurred voice 1: But a gallery rather than a cathedral. No cathedral, no city, you see? They’re very strict on that. So I’ll put not actually a city.
Blurred voice 2: Not actually a city? OK, ok….In one sense perhaps. Yet in another sense, probably.
Blurred voice 1: So…how can I put it….why…..I mean how did you imagine Hastings, which is not actually a city, might qualify for the title of City of Culture?
Blurred voice 2: (heated) Look mate, we may not ‘actually a city’ according to your ridiculously exacting standards, nor, in a strictly cultural sense do we have any culture to speak of, but what we do have is outside-the-box blue sky thinking, radical plans and a raft of proposals which, after due consideration, we will be reviewing in due course, alright?.
A chair can be heard overturning along with the sound of heavy desk accessories being swept to the floor. The rest of the conversation is obscured by muffled thuds, and an exchange of vile and uncultured insinuations of a sexual and scatological nature far too sensitive for reproduction in a family newspaper.
BRUMLESS BRUM-BRUM
Hastings prolific inventor Professor Thinktank has developed an engineless car.
“In ecological terms, it has no engine and therefore no harmful toxic emissions.” he explained, “A single AAA battery will power a small water cooled atomic reactor, which will be capable of accelerating the vehicle from 0-60 in 1.5 seconds, with a net carbon footprint of minus 0.007.” he told us proudly. The inventor, who is currently in talks with major international car makers, expects to have a prototype ready “within months”. Critics however have pointed out that the car’s 3,000ft re-enforced concrete chassis and massive twin cooling towers may present practical and manufacturing difficulties.
International Poetry Month lingers on like a bunch of artificial golden daffodils, which prompted me to invite travel writer, explorer and exotic jam maker Hasselblad Van der Voome to contribute something. He has sent us this topical vignette:
THE LEXICAL SWAMP
In the lexical swamp of today
There are things which
we can’t do or say
Like “I feel a bit queer.”
Smoke a fag with my beer
Or cavort like a bachelor gay.
In this difficult literary era
We don’t know if we’re
Victor or Vera,
The N-word, the C-word
Or the wedlock-free B word
It’s all in the ear of the hearer.
The first ten thousand copies of Hasselblad Van der Voome’s autobiography Hawaii Marmalade will be given away free with family packs of Dawson’s ready to eat luxury wild boar sausages at all branch’s of Lidl from November.
READER: That’s a very moving poem.
MYSELF: Almost Freudian in its suggestion of dystopian anthropomorphism.
READER: Exactly.
Sausage life!
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