Blowing Bubbles

Dopes in soaps

Will someone explain to me why people watch soap operas? I've tried to understand, really I have, but have failed miserably, like a Jack Russell trying to shag a Great Dane. Few things boggle me more than the collective national collapse onto the sofa at certain times of the week to witness fictitious northerners and cockneys screwing/ punching/ gossiping their way through their drab lives.  
It's not that I'm averse to telly. I watch bags of the stuff: Seinfeld, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, The Apprentice, The Killing, Homeland, The Bridge and even the screeching insanity of America's Next Top Model. But soaps? Jesus, I want drama, glamour, idiocy and intrigue from my viewing pleasures, not fishwives caterwauling at each other over pints of stout.
Point is that if I wanted to see the grim lives that soaps portray I'd take a walk around the frigging block. Cheaply dressed, badly tanned, tattooed loons (and that's just the wimmin) are ten-a-penny in these here parts. I don't need a fistful of scriptwriters to show me what they get up to, ta very much. A Saturday night suicide run through town'll do it.
And what the fuck is it with these magazines about soap operas? Excuse me? Features about non-existent people and non-existent lives? You have got to be kidding me. Even as someone who adores reading fiction it is utterly beyond me that any sentient human being would buy one of these excuses for hacking down another tree. 
Perhaps I'm missing something big here. Perhaps I need to put aside the part of my brain that thinks and tune in for half an hour one evening. You never know, I might discover that my life is in serious need of a dose of wet cobbles or some light criminal Eastend activity. It could solve everything that makes me rage on here every 48 hours. 
Then again, if Ken fucking Barlow is the solution to my problems I'm even frigging madder than I thought I was. In fact, I'm probably beyond saving. Like that Jack Russell assaulting the Great Dane I may as well give up. Betty, love? Make mine a pint.

And Another Thing...

Brit-alert

...the Jubilee celebrations. Well OK, not the Jubilee itself, just the way the nation has been suddenly smothered with the Union Jack. Jesus, it's what the country would look like if the BNP won a general election.
I stumbled into Asda on the weekend and was greeted with such a blinding display of red, white n blue that I thought I'd had a brain haemorrhage. The clothes department looked as if it had suffered an explosion of nationalistic rage. There were dresses, t-shirts, shorts, shirts and kids' clothes all adorned with Union bloody Jacks. No doubt this is in readiness for the street parties that will slither across the land on the big day itself but to me it looked like all the essentials for a stag party to Benidorm. 
And yeah, yeah, I know this is a big year for our country. Yet just as I feel about the Olympics, by the time Her Maj has aired her bloomers to Knees Up Mother Brown in celebration, I'll be so sick to death of our bloody flag that I'll probably set fire to it. 
Perhaps there's a bright side though. Just in case there aren't already enough reasons to never vote for the BNP, this could be a little taste of what could happen if you put your cross in the wrong box. Imagine constantly living with this nationalistic fever? Being permanently surrounded by margarine tubs and ties patterned with the Union Jack? 
If this were the case I'd be the first to indulge in some decidedly un-British behaviour. And it would probably involve flagpoles. Oh, inserted in strange places. It'd be one way of marking our heritage if nothing else.

Jumping through Hoops

Seeing it in your sleep

You know what's really getting on my tit about the Olympic Games? The infuriating way in which every business in the land is forcing the event into their advertising campaigns. The Olympic bandwagon has now become so fucking enormous that its in danger of losing all four of its wheels and careening into the bloody Thames.
Yeah, yeah, there are sponsorship deals aplenty and the usual names are all up there: Visa, Coke, Panasonic, Acer, Omega...but what really grates is how the likes of Heineken UK and Trebor and fuck knows who else is managing to get its mitts on a piece of the action. God forbid that the Olympics should carry absolutely any correlation to the product being foisted on an unwitting public. And forget that the companies in question are sometimes the enemies of the very values at the heart of the Games. What in the bollocks does that matter when you can sling the logo on anything from bags of bird seed to super plus tampons in the hope that some idiot somewhere will equate their purchases with athletic success.
Problem is that by the time opening ceremony cranks into action the nation will suffer from such enormous Olympic fatigue, where it becomes so sick of having the ring logo rammed up its, well, ring, that it wouldn't care if Usain Bolt set fire to himself on the blocks.
What the fuck does that matter though? The advertising juggernaut will continues its filthy journey through the British Isles until we're doing all but ingesting Jessica Ennis' toenail clippings in the name of a bottle of bloody lager. 
Olympic stamina, strength and determination? Fuck the 100 metres. That's just what it's going to take to survive the advertising campaigns alone. And I've an idea that I'll be needing that starting gun for something other than running...

Mummified

Joanie: My kinda muvver

Look, I've got to admit something, OK? And if you're a Mothercare catalogue kinda kraken-lover you'd better gird yourself. Here you go: I can't stand talking to other mothers. No really, I can't fucking bear it. Now I don't mean my mates who are mums and I don't mean the few mates I have made through Kraken Junior. I mean the whole school gate brigade. I just want them to leave me the frig alone.
I felt it this morning when I took KJ to her new school for a link-up sesh and I feel it every day when I pick her up from her current venue of enforced labour. Seriously, when there are 30 mums queuing up for the 3pm bell, all nattering about the cost of kids shoes or their vaginal sagginess, I'm the one deliberately standing on my own with anything from a good book to a lengthy nose-pick. It's infinitely more interesting.
Now, I know this makes me look like a standoffish kind of kraken but that's the way I like it. I have no fucking interest whatsoever in any child except my own and those of my dear mates. I really don't give a shit all the others. And the thing is, until their mothers start talking about something of interest, I really don't give a shit about them either. See, I told you to gird yourself, didn't I?
Thing is, expecting women get on just because they are mothers is like expecting all brown-haired people to be mates or all disabled people to forge lifelong friendships. The only thing we have in common is that we've shouted obscenities at a random midwife and that does not a friendship make. 
Anyway, talking about kids over and over again is not what I want from my chumships. Who in the fuck wants an entire afternoon's discussion about the firmness of Little Johnny's turds? I want to talk about politics, careers, music, art, sex and cake and any other subject that actively doesn't get out of bed at 4am just to ask me when Santa's coming back.
Y'know, I recall being coerced into attending a mother and baby group when Kraken Junior had just emerged from her festering shell. It was one of the most hideous moments of my existence. After weeks of fuck all but leaky tits, soaring bewilderment and clambering exhaustion I thought it would be a chance for intelligent conversation with other wimmin. Fuckadoodledo, was I wrong. It was a room bereft of intelligent anything. It was, however, a void into which a collection of females all pitched their random thoughts about feeding, sleeping, nappies, feeding, sleeping, nappies. And as I watched I had the most horrific thought: "Is this it? Is this what I should talk about now that I have spawned?" needless to say, I wrestled the live mouse out of KJ's mouth and took off, never, ever returning to that lair of the damned.
So, yeah, I sound like a kraken hag but spare me, will you? More importantly, spare me the endless kid chat. I don't care now and I never will. Really, readers, you have been warned.

Not-so-Great Pretenders

No, I can't believe your success either

Could you tell me what there is to like about impressionists? No, not the French painting variety, for Christ's sake, I mean the people who put on the voices and twitches of slebs. No really, could you tell me what there is to like? Because I am at a complete and utter bloody loss about why they enjoy national popularity.
I'd rather watch my ovaries being removed via my nostrils than be exposed to un-funny men like John Culshaw and Alistair McGowan. Problem is that their impersonations are nothing less than shite. 
Their voices and actions leave me either bewildered or cold and, worse, they try to make up for it by injecting dull yet explanatory jokes into their acts. You know the sort of thing. The obligatory Bruce Forsythe turn will include references to Strictly Come Dancing and "NIce to see you!" catchphrases because the impression itself is so fucking poor that you'd otherwise have no clue about who it's supposed to be. They'd be better off broadcasting a blank screen and letting viewers use their fevered imaginations. 
In one alleged comedy show - Punt and Dennis, I recall through my frustrated tears - the few attempted impressions were so horrifyingly inaccurate that they actually introduced each sketch with screen captions. What in the fuck were they thinking? Didn't it cross their fame-hungry minds that if their offerings were that poor they should be scrapped? 
This goes for every impressionist, though, doesn't it? They're all laughably bad yet someone, somewhere keeps commissioning the bastards. I suspect that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. There's such a dearth of decent impressionists that any old twat with a passing resemblance to Anne Robinson gets a gig.
Tell you what these guys should do and that's do an impression of being good at something. I dunno, emptying bins or architecture will do. Anything except assaulting the nation with their deluded witterings. Or they could try the French painting. As long as they piss off to France, that is.

Dazed and Confused

Just fucking spare me

D’know, there are some things that leave me so deeply bewildered by their popularity that I suspect I’ve unknowingly had a run in with a flux capacitor. Whereas all around me are foaming with excitement at the vagaries of popular culture, I’m this close to being smothered by bafflement. Course, you will be dying to know what these vagaries are so here you bloody well are:

Women’s magazines: Who in the fuck wants to read about Rihanna’s latest nip-slip, baking muffins, dying infants and blow-job techniques? This shit has all the relevance of bloody ra-ra skirts.

Astrology: What the fuck? No, really, what the fuck? Deriving from the position of Jupiter that you’re going to lose your job is so close to insanity that you have to winder why Russell Grant hasn’t been lobotomised yet.

ITV1: You know that quote about religion being the opium of the masses? Well modern Britain has swapping Catholicism for Scott and fucking Bailey. ITV1 produces the sort of telly that you sit stunned bomb victims in front of.

Kate Middleton: Jesus, like we need a new definition of the word ‘bland’. She’s an icon for the hard of thinking and those so fearful of change that they develop raging diarrhoea every time the milkman’s late.

The X-Factor: No, I don’t want to see people being pilloried, out-warbled, offered laughable platitudes, stripped of their individuality or sold to Heat magazine. And I certainly don’t want to see it every Saturday night between August and Christmas.

Marks & Spencer: What an utterly hateable fucking shop. If the seething unoriginality of the clothes doesn’t make me drip with bile, the blank-eyed, thin-lipped, wandering post-menopausal women do. I swear, I’d buy used knickers from a car boot sale before I ever handed my cash over in such a spirit-sapping lair.

Michael Macintyre: No, you toffed-up wanker, musing about toasters and the shapes of clouds does not comedy make. It does, though, make for an arena full of people who have such a deeply underdeveloped sense of humour that they still snigger at their own bowel production.

Sigh. My bafflement continues...

Girl Talk

Go the frig away

I was the distraught recipient of terrible news today, care of a certain Kraken Junior, for she has informed me that when she grows up she wants to be a...princess.
A princess. A fucking princess. What sort of ambition is that for any sentient being? After all the times I've talked about space travel and authoring and construction and athletics she has still decided that she wants to be the equivalent of the horrifically benign Kate frigging Middleton.
In much the same way that I would be mortified if she were to become a Tory, KJ's preferred career choice makes me want to sob into the balled up hopes and dreams that I have for her. I know, I know, she's four and she's going to change her mind a thousand times (Christ knows, I'm 41 and still don't know what I want to do when I grow up), but what if this is it? What if KJ has already decreed that her life is to be one of pouty tuffet-sitting, X-Factor entries and professional vajazzling?
What if this candy-floss career attempt actually pulls off? I blame those horrific magazines she's seen. No, not Heat or Hello but Princess, that schmaltzy and offensive rag that's stuffed with coy looking Princesses from Disney films, you know with names like Belle and Aurora. 
On the rare occasion that she's managed to get her sweaty paws on this ambition-smothering shit I've been forced to take things into my own hands, namely by finding pictures of said princesses and drawing  mortar boards, books, test tubes and trainers on them. I then go on to explain to KJ that only dimwits want to be princesses and why don't we get the chemistry set out now?
Look, it's not that I'm a pushy cow of a kraken. It's just that I can see how, at every turn, girls are force fed these stinking fucking images of what society wants them to be; pneumatic, silly pushovers. It's my job to create a balance by offering KJ the opposing image of women as intelligent, strong and go-getting. Princess magazine sure as shit doesn't do this so I'm having to do it instead.
So I've decided not to fret over this crinoline draped beast that KJ wants to become. I have every faith that she'll be the lucky recipient of common sense and run a mile from anything that involves a lifetime of daintiness. Or she'll have me to answer to and, guess what? Dainty I ain't.