Queen's Honours

Today's rant is inspired by the third most objectionable thing I read in yesterday's Daily Mail.

The first most objectionable thing I read in yesterday's Daily Mail came from whatever it is that charmless cunt Richard Littlejohn has where regular people have their brains, and was on the subject of the 2011 Census form being available in 57 languages. The online form is only available in English and Welsh, which shouldn't piss off Mr Bigottypants at the Mail, but should someone want to fill in the long and complicated form, which you get fined if you don't complete, in their own language they can order it in 57 different languages. These languages include Tagalog, which Littlejohn hilariously tells us is the language of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. It isn't though. It's the Philippines. Unless Richard Littlejohn is secretly involved in some kind of bet to appear to be a bigger waste of skin than Piers Morgan, for the lols, this just makes me want to punch him in the dick. What annoys me isn't so much the casual racism of the joke itself. I think there are people who could have made that joke work. But Littlejohn isn't them. You can imagine him feeling all smug about it. "Stupid Filipinos with their stupid language, coming over here, being in our Census. Tagalog. Sounds a bit like flobadob. I'll use that. They'll piss themselves." Worthless, worthless cunt. Also, somewhat out of synch with the times - I'm not even sure how I know what Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men sound like, it's not like that little pop culture reference really touches anyone under 50...

The second most objectionable thing I read in yesterday's Daily Mail was something professional trouty old cow Jan Moir wrote, but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. It says on her column "Jan Moir - are you thinking what she's thinking?". No. I am quite literally never thinking what Jan Moir is thinking. I reckon she'd like us all to be thinking what she's thinking. Not in a "Jan Moir - voice of the people" kind of way, but more in a Doctor Who villain mind control kind of way. Yes, yes - I shall harness the power of the mobile phone network and control their thoughts so that everyone will agree with me that Jennifer Aniston's new hairstyle makes her look like a desperate bint! There will be a new dawn! A new dawn of bitterness! The nasty old harpies shall inherit the Earth!

The third most objectionable thing I read in yesterday's Daily Mail, and the point of this article, was an actual story that happened as opposed to the opinions of one of their frankly mental columnists, so it wasn't the Daily Mail's fault, probably, but it was in there. Catherine Zeta Jones was receiving the OBE from the Queen. Catherine bloody Zeta bloody Jones. Now I've got nothing against Catherine Zeta Jones - who knows, we might be related - I don't wish the woman any specific harm, but what the fuck business does she have getting the bleeding OBE? The only things I've ever seen her in was that show with Del Boy in it that was on when I was a kid where they lived in the countryside and it looked horrible, a movie I saw on a plane where she was getting divorced from George Clooney a lot of times which made me wish you could bring knives on the plane so I could jab them into my eyes and ears, and another movie I saw on a plane where she was Julia Roberts' sister and she was mean, which made me wish you could bring guns on the plane so I could blow the heads off of anyone who fucking laughed at the jokes in it before taking my own life. Oh and Entrapment, which was just fucking stupid. Plainly, she isn't getting the OBE for her illustrious acting career then. Is it perhaps for services to increasing the population? I have no idea how many babies she has had but every time I see a picture of her she seems to be all puffy and pregnant and gross. But there was a woman in the Daily Mail with 17 kids and she hasn't got the OBE - just 600 quid a week in benefits, which if you think about it you'd actually probably rather have than the OBE - so that can't be it. Maybe it's services to the Welsh economy. Apparently she buys cannisters of Welsh air to breathe in America where she lives. She has to be the biggest, if not only, importer of Welsh air. Is that worth an OBE? I don't know. What are they even for?

So who else has got honours off the Queen? Obviously you only get a knighthood if you do something really quite impressive like win three Olympic gold medals or a World Cup, or pretend to be a wizard in a Peter Jackson movie, but there's all those other, lesser ones, the OBE, the MBE, the CBE, that some quite random people seem to have had bestowed on them.

Duncan Bannatyne off of Dragon's Den. He's got one. And he's my second least favourite one after that prat Peter Jones (hope I'm related to him too though, he's minted). Floella Benjamin, that kids presenter from the 80's with the creepy dancing doll. She's got one. So have the Beverley Sisters, whoever they may be. Barbara Cartland, who writes filth for old people and looks like a male pug in drag. She's got one - and not just a poxy OBE, she's a full on Dame (obvious jokes about pantomime dames and how she is one or looks like one or whatever withheld due to obviousness). Paul O'Grady, who for most of his career actually was a drag queen but now appears on ITV at about 4pm or as I like to call it "stupid fat unemployed people prime time". He's got one. Fred Dibnah, a very old northern man who talks about steam engines and the industrial revolution and other such northern old man stuff, probably while wearing an actual flat cap and feeding some bitter to a whippet like he's been employed by a museum to stand around looking all Yorkshire. He's got one. Olly Murs, who came second in the X Factor in 2009. Obviously he hasn't got one, but it's only a matter of fucking time at this rate.

For a normal person to get a recognition like this they have to do something really good for charity or the community, basically devote their entire life to it. But if you've been on bloody Last of the bastarding Summer Wine, the worst TV show of all time ever, then you can have a knighthood. It doesn't even seem to matter if you're truly awful. Sebastian Coe only got the MBE for his athletic achievements, but since morphing into a really despicable politician, basically the Tory Peter Mandleson, he's got a god damn knighthood.

Which brings me on to the whole concept of knights of the British Empire. No wonder we don't have one any more if our knights, who should be defending it, are all Elton John and Tim Berners-Lee. Good at making seventies music and wearing funny wigs and inventing internets, probably absolutely crap at jousting. Why are they called fucking knights? Why not call them, I don't know, "dudes" or something? Dude of the British Empire.

Whatever, I do absolutely bollock all for charity and I've never been on TV, so I won't be getting one.

Incidentally, the fourth most objectionable thing I read in yesterday's Daily Mail was that Kate Middleton showed she had the same rapport with common people that Diana had when she met with some common people - eerie it was. So, Diana and Kate are both able to hold conversations - wow, talk about natural successor! Ugh, I need to lie down.

Food Writers

Today's rant was inspired by a piece I read in today's i, you know, that new newspaper from The Independent that, according to the commercials where they very hilariously got a Geordie bloke to go "why i?", delivers quality newsly news in bitesize chunks of newsy goodness, and none of that celebrity shizz. I am a big fan of newspapers, because news websites get on my nerves by trying to give me all the news in video clip or user submitted camera phone picture form.

The other day I wanted to know what the skinny was, because a lot of people on my Facebook had statuses that indicated something undesirable had happened in Christchurch - but obviously with this being the usual wanky Facebook "look at me and what a good person I am for caring about those poor people" attention seeking crap for the most part, none of them had indicated what it was that had occurred, or indeed whether it was the Christchurch in New Zealand or the one near Bournemouth where I once had "lobster 'n' chips" in a very nice restaurant. A quick look at the BBC's news website indicated that it was the New Zealand one, and that what had occurred was a particularly bad Earthquake, but that was it. There were untold numbers of photographs of wreckage, but a distinct lack of actual journalism. They say a picture can paint or say or somehow represent or whatever a thousand words, but it can't - at least not useful, factual words of the sort I was looking for.

Newspapers give you the words, but sadly there isn't a single one that isn't in some way annoying, so my solution is to read all of them (except for the Guardian - fuck that). This could get expensive, but happily my local pub gets them so I can read them all for free - win! I like the execution of the new i paper. It is pretty easy to read, and it does fulfil its objective of delivering the news, business and sport stories in as concise a form as possible (well, probably not as concise as would be literally possible - but a lot more concise than say, one of my especially rambling sentences) however it does kind of take away from the thing I enjoy about reading the paper - the fact you can make it last a really long time. I sometimes sound like an old man.

Because of this, after 10 minutes with i I'd caught up on all the news (Gadaffi, eh? What a knob.) and was finding myself drawn to the lighter stories. On the front page (obviously not as the actual front page story because that would be mad, just along the bottom where they tell you what there is inside the paper) is a picture of some tasty looking fried chicken, I mean really tasty looking, some Haribo and some beans on toast, and the promise that inside chefs are going to reveal their guilty pleasures. This sounded quite good. Guilty pleasures, in the food sense, to me would be not the stuff that you know is a bit bad for you but which tastes nice. How boring a life would you have to lead to actually be arsed to have feelings of guilt over a fucking Twix or a packet of Lineker's finest Cheese 'n' Onion. It has to be the really filthy, really wrong stuff you would never want anyone to picture you eating. Stuff like pork pies, or as I like to call them "testicle puddings". With that crunchy, suety, darts player fatty pastry, encasing the grey, gristly meat of the worst parts of the worst pigs (would guinea pig meat still be called pork?), surrounded by that yellowish catfood style jelly - christ knows what that shit is - oh, the testicle pudding is so very wrong. Buying a testicle pudding makes you feel sleazy, like you just shoplifted a copy of Reader's Wives from a newsagents, in Sheffield. But you still eat them because somehow, by some strange alchemy, this object which should be an affront to the sensibilities of a cultured person like you, tastes fucking lovely. It's the same with pork scratchings. That is fried pig skin right there, with chunks of dried up pig fat attached to it. Sometimes you get one with a hair on it. Bloody nice though, aren't they?

So, I was hoping this was going to be right down there in the gutter. Maybe Jamie Oliver would reveal he likes to shovel Doner Kebab flavour Pot Noodle into the space in his mouth that isn't occupied by his gargantuan tongue. Maybe Delia Smith's favourite "cheat" of all is just scarfing down Spam straight out of the tin, seasoned with her own fucking tears. Maybe Ainsley Harriot's eyes are that googly because he accompanies his meals with lashings of Frosty Jack's white cider (that shit where if you drink it, you wake up with a crowd around you). I was expecting it to be a lot better than it was, anyway.

First of all, none of these were people I'd heard of, though next to their names, which were, without exception, ludicrous - one of them was called Gizzi - each was lauded as being either a chef or a food writer or chef cum food writer (sorry, I just like writing "cum", because I am very immature). Each one of them revealed their oh-so-naughty guilty secret, and each one of them made me feel a different shade from the spectrum of violent rage. I wasn't alone - the person I was talking to while reading them asked me when we got on to the bone marrow one (we'll come onto that in just a minute - hope you are feeling suitably teased by the words "bone marrow" there though) if there was blood coming out of his nose. Because it had annoyed him so much he was sure he had had an aneurysm, not because it had annoyed me so much I had lost it and punched him in the face, I mean.

Some of them were just rubbish. One guy, who claimed he had to avoid guilt due to being a Catholic (huh? I thought that was what Catholics ran on? That and gold.) said he liked ice cream - "usually vanilla". Vanilla ice cream. Vanilla. The flavour so plain and generic that it has become a byword for porn where nothing all that dirty happens. How fucking bland can a person's immortal soul be that the best answer they can come up with when a national fucking newspaper asks them to say something a little bit interesting about themselves is that they sometimes, not often mind, like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Stupid Flanders.

One person had, predictably, said that their guilty pleasure was McDonalds. OK, so that seems like something normal people could relate to - most people enjoy a McDonalds, that's how come despite their efforts to alienate their customers by adding very bad looking salads to their range they are still a somewhat successful business. It seemed quite right that even someone with the lofty palate of the food writer, to whom things undoubtedly taste a lot better than they do to me with my tastebuds deadened by a decade of delicious Marlboro Lights, might like to have a Big Mac when they're off duty, you know, maybe just on Friday nights or something. No. What it seemed was actually the case, was that this woman had eaten a McDonalds once. One McDonalds. Because her kitchen was being used for a photo shoot the next day and so she didn't want to mess it up, and her kids were hungry. They all had a fucking McDonalds. Christ. I wonder if the kids fully committed to this amazing opportunity to replicate an authentic working class experience by talking like Vicky Pollard, making out they didn't know who their dads were and pretending the maid was mummy's lover. "Tarquin! These goujons are called McNuggets! What fun!"... Bet she didn't even have a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder. I bet she had that thing with the 100% grilled chicken breast and the foccacia and whatever the hell a "balsamic dressing" is.

So what next, someone's guilty pleasure was watercress, or communion wafers? Nope. Toast. But don't worry, not that infidel white toast with the heathens' own marmalade on it. Toast made from rye bread, with unsalted butter. Lord, if you feel guilty for eating toasted rye bread with unsalted butter what the hell kind of emotion would you experience if you ran over someone's dog? If anything, I feel guilty for the fact that anything other than white bread feels like it's sucking all the moisture out of my body much like the drug in that awful Jackie Chan movie The Tuxedo, and that to me unsalted butter is just like smearing the flavourless flab of a dead obese boring guy on your food, so I will probably die at 38 of something white-bread-and-Olivio related if the fags don't get me first. How pretentious do you need to be that all you will admit you eat in your moments of weakness is the kind of shit most of us would feel quite smug about eating if we were sticking to some kind of heart attack prevention diet?

And this is where we get to the bone marrow guy. This is where the pretension hit a level I just wasn't prepared for. One of them, I am not fucking kidding, and if it wasn't for the fact that it was the pub's paper and I had to leave it there I would tell you his name so that forever, when he Googles himself he will see this amid all the stuff he's supposedly done as a world famous chef-cum-food-writer, said his guilty pleasure was "bone marrow". He didn't specify which animal this bone marrow came from, which made me think maybe it was some proper dark shit he was owning up to here and the animal was "white babies", which really would be a fucking guilty secret. Guilty in a life sentency sort of way. Instead I will assume of course that he means some kind of animal bone marrow, like you get in dog biscuits, the ones called, cleverly, Marrowbone biscuits. The ones we left well the fuck alone that time me and my mate were so stoned with such insatiable munchies that we ate some of the other dog biscuits in her kitchen cupboard. He was on about smearing it on stuff. Steak, toast, Thai prostitutes. He described it as "gloopy". Fucking hell, where would one even buy bone marrow? That just ain't fucking right.

So, my conclusion from analysing the jackasses i spoke to is that food writers are all boring (well, they spend their time thinking and writing about something you have to do so you don't die - you might as well go around reviewing different London underground lines for how good their breathing air is), pretentious, or fucking mad.

Terrible Music - Part 2

Here is the second in an occasional series where I fill in for Beelzebub's private DJ and give you an early look at some of the songs you'll be hearing in hell after the rapture. They may say that the devil has all the best tunes, but he's keeping them for himself. You sinning bastards will instead be throwing agonized shapes to the following:

Blue - Too Close

As is the fashion of the time, Blue, as you may or may not know, have reformed, like so many cans of reformed mechanically retrieved ham. Boybands from days of yore keep doing this, to varying degrees of success, creating a phenomenon that the media in its infinite cleverness has dubbed "the manband". Take That achieved critical acclaim with their comeback, filling stadiums with not only women in their thirties with cats as originally expected, but other (read "less depressing") people too. Blue may be hoping to emulate this, or they may just be trying to pay off the massive debts of interest they owe to Wonga.com, we can't know, but what we do know is this - they are making their comeback by representing Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest. Oh fuck.

Who the hell is these guys' agent? Fucking hell. The Eurovision Song Contest is the absolute worst thing you can do. People in the UK only watch it ironically and to listen to Terry Wogan rip the warm living piss out of everything that is happening, so nobody is going to be actually supporting poor old Blue, but also, it is impossible for a British act to ever win. We could put together the greatest song of all time, a song that you could play in a competition with the devil (what is it with me and the devil today?) and keep your soul like what Jack Black did, and then we could raise Freddie Mercury and John Lennon from the dead and have them perform it, backed by, I don't know, Radiohead, and we'd still get nil points from everyone except Ireland. Some people say this is because all the other countries vote for their neighbours, so no matter what the song is like all those wacky sounding places like Herzegovina and Macedonia will give top points to each other, Scandinavian countries will do the same, and everyone hates us because of Iraq or whatever so we can shove our song up our collective jacksy. That's one view. Personally I think it's more that people in mainland Europe have a very different concept of "music" than the rest of the modern world. It would certainly explain a lot. DJ Sammy and his ridiculous hair for one thing. It looks like he glued a turd to the back of his neck. But he can sure get them dancing with his time honoured formula of taking one line from an 80's power ballad and playing it over and over again over a banging track. Europe is full of an epic amount of wrongness. Blue will come home with nada, nobody will want to download the song, and Blue's comeback will amount to one of those "FAIL" images with just Duncan James' sad little face on it.

Anyway, back to the song. This song by Blue is gross, because of the lyrics. It is a song about dancing with a girl in a club and getting an embarrassing erection, which she notices, and Blue are trying to explain themselves. They're all like, "Baby, when we're grinding, I get so excited, oh how I like it - I try but I can't fight it"... It really makes me cringe. This is an embarrassing thing that happens to people (not to me), and listening to them sing about it forces you to relive, er, I mean, live the embarrassment. Christ, what were the other songs on this album like? "Ooooh baby, I thought it was just gas. But now it's kinda wet down there. Down there in my pants. Oooooh baby. Sorry about the smell. It smells like ass. I like the way you shake your ass. But I can't shake it wit you tonight. Because as we've established I've just shat myself.". Or perhaps just "BAM! You know I usually last longer than that."...

Whether or not the manband incarnation of Blue will perform this one I don't know. Maybe they are so old now that they don't even get erections, so they can't find the place inside themselves emotionally where they can connect with the lyrics and give the performance a work like this deserves.

Time to stop thinking about Blue and the problems they may or may not be having with their ageing cocks now, and to segue neatly into the next song: Blue collaborated with which artist on the song "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word"? That's right - it's national treasure bashing time.

Elton John - Candle in the Wind '97

Firstly, before I get stuck in to the meaty chunks of this track, have you seen what he's done now? He's made a movie where he retells the classic Shakespearean tragedy of Romeo and Juliet using the medium of 3D cartoon garden gnomes. Don't ever change, Elton, you crazy bastard. It does look shit though, as though all the actors doing the gnomes' voices are people who have at some point found themselves in a recording studio saying "Every little helps" in a voice so cheerful it fills any nearby boxes of Prozac with a sense of overwhelming inadequacy, but kudos for the randomness of the concept.

I like the fact that there's Elton John in the world. I like that he used to waste all his money on total crap and that he can take the piss out of himself about it by appearing in that old Royal Mail advert where he'd ordered a load of shit and exclaimed "MAIL!" when it arrived. For a little while, well, maybe an hour, it was fun for everyone to do that when they got an email. He brought us that hour. I also like some of his songs. I like to try and imagine how the "Crocodile Rock" would actually have gone. I like to think it involved doing big crocodile jaws with your arms while skipping around like Snoopy. That would be one badass dance you could do all summer long. Elton John, in conjunction with Disney, also brought the world the pure joy that is holding a cat above your head and singing "The Circle of Life".

What I didn't like was the whole Diana dog and pony show. Bloody hell, those were dark times. I was 13 years old. It was Sunday. I got out of bed, went into the kitchen, put the radio on, and heard something that made me very depressed. Due to the fact that Diana had bought the farm, they were only going to play songs with no lyrics. This was, I guess, so that they could ensure that whoever had lined up the songs for the radio show hadn't put in, say, "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman, or "Crash, Boom, Bang" by Roxette, or "Airbag" by Radiohead, or - well, you get the picture. But because it was a local radio station they weren't exactly well stocked with classical music so basically they had to just play "Albatross" by Fleetwood Mac over and over again.

The TV was the same. It was wall to wall grieving plebs when it wasn't footage of Diana doing the good stuff that she did (but not footage of Diana riding James Hewitt around like a pony, because that would have been distasteful, although unless I've dreamt that it did happen), apart from Channel 5 who unaccountably had a documentary about Peter Andre on, which is what I watched. Can you fucking imagine having to watch that?

I am not saying I was glad she died, or that I didn't think people who admired her had the right to be sad about it, but it was really fucked up. I had never met her, didn't especially like her as a "celebrity", and so it was just a case of, well, it's sad somebody has died young in a nasty accident and left their kids without a mother, but that happens to tonnes of other people I've never met every day and in the grand scheme of things, meh, whatever. The reaction was just so fucking extreme it made you feel like you lived in a nation of dribbling imbeciles. As I recall it, significantly less fuss was actually made about 9/11, which was so many times worse than a spoilt woman dying in a car crash that there isn't a number in all of mathematical theory that is large enough to quantify it. If there was it would be a madcap Dr Seuss sounding number like fourteenty kasquillion.

Elton John did know and like Diana, so it was fitting that he got to play at her funeral, but this rewrite of his original song about Marilyn Monroe was so clichéd and dreadful that I'm surprised she didn't come back and haunt him to get him back for it. Yeah, Elton, good luck making sweet sweet love to David Furnish to the sounds of "Your Song" with mangled Lady Di spectre watching. I think it should have been more honest. It should have gone "And your picture will always appear here/on the front page of the Express/your candle burnt out long before/the conspiracy theories ever did"... In any case, I guess you can let him off, he doesn't usually do the lyrics, just the tunes, and also he was probably sad because his BFF, or, you know, that princess he knocked about with sometimes, was dead, but this shite became the fastest and best selling record there had ever been, and again, that smacks of "nation of dribbling imbeciles and also there are some imbeciles abroad buying it too".

A sane person would say that nobody is all good or all bad, but it seems like the mouth breathing underclass that has come to typify this country recognises one strata of person as being good, pure and holy: the celebrity who they used to say did some questionable things but who has suddenly and unexpectedly become dead. Diana with her adultery, Jade Goody with her racism, and of course, segue number 2...

Michael Jackson - Heal the World

Could have gone with this one, could have gone with "Earth Song". Either one would demonstrate the thing I'm on about here - Michael Jackson when he decided to be really, really preachy.

Like most people, I recognise that Michael Jackson did some really cool stuff back in the eighties. Slash. The Moonwalk. Zombies. Enough words have been written on this topic by everyone ever. Of course, in a universe that operated by my rules none of these songs would ever have come to be, because all of the members of the Jackson 5 would have been murdered execution style in the seventies for doing that fucking stupid song about birds having a disco. Songs featuring the words "Tweedily deedily deet" are among the many things considered an abomination in a universe that operates by my rules, which is why I'm afraid Eliza Doolittle (the singer, not the character from My Fair Lady) would also have to be shot in the middle of her quirky face. This is why a universe that operates by my rules is not as fantastic an idea as it sounds - sometimes if you let people get away with the odd transgression it pays off. In this case with "Smooth Criminal", "Billie Jean", and the greatest televisual moment of my teens: Jarvis Cocker waving his arse at Jacko on the Brit Awards. Jarvis didn't much like the preachy phase of "The King of Pop"'s career either, evidently.

"Heal the World, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race.". How Jacko? For a start, how can we make it a better place for you? You are already richer than god and live in a theme park and have a pet monkey - what can we give you? Well, I guess one of us could have given him a less fucked heart, but we weren't to know that back then. Surely he was in a much better position to heal the world than we were, you know, he could have maybe used the money he spent on buying the elephant man's skeleton to instead build a well in an African village if he really gave that substantial a fuck that he felt the need to bang on to us about it like a big weird looking buzzkill. Come on Jacko, you couldn't take it all with you, could you? And whoever inherited the elephant man's skeleton, well, that was probably just awkward for them. "Ooooooh, er, gee, this is great. Elephant man skeleton. Er, guess I can't sell it, cos, you know, it was bequeathed to me and all that but, you know, it just doesn't go with my furniture. I've gone for a kind of, cosy, homely feel with the cushions and throws and whatnot, this is more your nightmarish Victorian freakshow kind of vibe. I'd have to redecorate, maybe get some deformed dog foetuses in jars and stuff. And I'm not entirely sure what my feng shui guy would have to say about that... Best just chuck it in a skip."

I have no tenuous link into the next song, if you can suggest any way I could have connected Preachy Michael Jackson to Twatty Shania Twat then please let me know what it is so I can provide a smoother, more flavourful reading experience in future...

Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much

Shania Twain. I know it's not very clever or inspired to change it to "Shania Twat", but in my head that's what she is called. She does that really pap music very boring women do in karaoke when they are letting their hair down with a shared bottle of fucking rosé because it's somehow empowering to frumpy administrative workers to self consciously belt out "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" to the other patrons of Yates's Wine Lodge. Or rather she used to about eight years ago - happily she seems to have fucked off - presumably because she is now very, very old - she already looked like she'd been ridden hard and put away wet back then.

What's annoying about this song is the sheer arrogance of the woman. If you sum up the verses she is taunting some guy who has the intelligence of a rocket scientist, the looks of Brad Pitt, the coolness of Elvis, and a really sweet car, because that's not good enough for her. That's not good enough for Shania Twat, the ropey looking Canadian wearing a full length leopard skin hoodie. That's no lesson to be teaching the girls with the glasses in the Yates's. They can't afford to be that fucking picky. Jesus woman, you are such a fucking bitch.

So, that was the second set of terrible songs - as always, leave me your thoughts and suggestions or, if you're those guys who commented on my article about cyclists feel free to call me "an unpleasant piece of poo" and debate how small my penis might be. I quite like rowing with people, which is why I promoted that article on all those "I love cycling" groups on Facebook.

Creationism

Hello. Yes, I realise I have not updated this shit for a very long time. Seasons have passed, in which there was a World Cup where a level of ineptitude and outright fuckwittery far beyond that which I predicted last spring was displayed by the England squad. Cheryl and Ashley got divorced, so I guess we won't need to be hearing anything much about them ever again. The Prime Minister now has two eyes, is called Dave, and has a little butt puppy with a yellow tie. And I didn't write about any of it. I'm not going to make any excuses, but if you choose to, you could imagine that I was somewhere where this would not be allowed, like in prison or rehab or China or something.

In any case, the subject of today's rant came to me when earlier on, it was explained to me that there are people in America (they're called Republicans, I think they're essentially like the BNP with God-knobs on) who strongly, you know, murderously strongly, believe that kids in school should be taught creationism instead of evolution and whatnot in their science lessons.

Now, science at school, as I remember it, was a bit random. I have never since encountered a bunsen burner, or that fucking thing that makes static that the teacher makes you touch so you can have your hair look shit and get mild shocks off your locker for the rest of the day. Like the musical instrument that is fundamentally two cylinders of wood that I guess you hit together like a happy little retard, the Van der Graff generator does not exist outside of schools - because what fucking Earthly use would anyone have for it. There were experiments, which of course were not really experiments at all, because you already knew what unremarkable thing was supposed to bloody happen, whether it be some water frothing up a bit or some bread going mouldy, and then there was the dissecting of some bit of a cow. I wonder who in the school employee pecking order has the job of going to beg those cow eyes and hearts off of the local abbatoir or the meat counter at Morrisons or wherever the fuck they get them. I hope it was the dinner ladies - they were disgusting people. I'd like to think that as part of their remit the foul, cellulite bingo winged harpies had to go and do that. Beg a bloke in Morrisons for cow eyes. Then take them back to school in a paper bag, oozing all over their fucking car seat. It pleases me. Regardless, if you were to split everything in the world into "stuff that is scientific" (the glomerulus, semi-permeable membranes, meth production) and "stuff that is not scientific" (Rasta Mouse, cushions, the benefits of the Toyota Prius), all of the stuff in these classes was scientific.

The concept of creationism is that thing out of the bible where God makes the world in six days (like Craig David, he chilled on Sunday), and makes Adam, the first man, out of some mud, then makes Eve, the first woman, out of one of Adam's ribs and some mud, and then Eve eats a forbidden apple because a snake tells her to and I think she gets Adam to put his chops around it too, and then they have to wear clothes and snakes don't have legs and having babies is painful. It isn't really very scientific, because science tells us that people can't be made out of mud and snakes can't talk and apples are good and childbirth hurts because it involves squeezing something that is big out of a narrow tube that is part of your body and therefore has nerves. Also, what the fuck did a snake look like when it had legs? Fucking mental, I'd wager.

This stuff is right at the start of the Bible, so most people get at least this far in. Consider it the biblical equivalent of the bit with Tom Bombadil and his weird rapey forest at the start of the first Lord of the Rings book, which is as far as I got before the fact the fucking hobbits had to fucking sing about every fucking single fucking thing (and with it being a book obviously the songs have to be represented by very gay poems about walking and eating toast) annoyed me sufficiently to stop me reading the rest of it.

I did learn this creationism malarkey in school, when I was very young, much like I learnt the nativity story, Noah's Ark, and all the other well known Bible stories. It would seem kind of ignorant not to know the beliefs on which a major religion is based, after all. But much as when you get into "Big School" the teachers stop letting you take naps and reading you George's Marvellous Medicine in daily installments, that stuff doesn't really come up any more once you're of an age where you can be trusted with naked flames. If it does, it comes up in Religious Education alongside all the equally elaborate stories from the holy texts of all the other significant religions (not Scientology though, you have to learn that later from a weirdo on the street or from Wikipedia after you were wondering what the deal was with Cruise - aside from the obvious I mean). The point of teaching you this is to equip you for dealing with people from diverse backgrounds in your adult life without inadvertently coming over as a bigoted Prince Philip style cunt (ah, Phil, I love you really), or, should you end up in a position of power, causing a really stupid war. It is not to teach you how mankind came to be.

For that you got Darwin. In science lessons.

We bloody love a bit of Darwin in England. He's on one of our bank notes (I don't know which - looking in my wallet is frankly more research than I ever put into these things), and when there was that poll of the greatest British people he either came top or near as damn it - certainly he came above Princess Diana and she was the actual queen of our actual hearts. Granted, this poll was done before we knew about Cheryl Cole so obviously things would be different now, but nevertheless, it would be bloody weird if someone said they didn't like Darwin. He was clever as shit.

Apparently, this is not the case with the American far right, who don't like Darwin and his evolution theory very much at all. A guy who was simultaneously performing an abortion, a gay wedding and a family planning clinic for teenagers would probably be more popular with the Tea Party Teabaggers or whatever the fuck it is they're called (is it actually Teabaggers or is that just a joke I've picked up somewhere? Man, I hope it really is Teabaggers). And to be clear, that guy would be popular only as a hunting trophy. These are the people who want that first bit out of the bible taught instead of evolution to the children of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Of course, this sounds fucking preposterous, and any sane person would say that whilst Christians have every right to use their faith to suppress the giant "BULLSHIT" sign that the creationism story throws up as soon as one gives it more than a millisecond's thought and believe it if they want to (not all Christians do, some see the story as a metaphor, which besides being to my mind a lot more bloody sensible, seems like a rather convenient way of explaining away a lot of the "embarrassingly stupid" stuff in the bible), by doing so they are choosing to reject the theories of science. And that in order to make that choice a person needs to know about both. This is the point. Creationism is not science. It is an alternative to science. It has as much in common with science as the ocelot has with the Soda Stream (hey, remember those? Man, I miss getting busy with the fizzy. My mate had one. Good times.). If this was a PowerPoint presentation I would now hammer home this point using a Venn diagram with two circles that don't touch at all. The evolution circle would have a monkey on it and the creationism one would have Marge and Homer as Adam and Eve, in case you want to draw it in your head. If you teach kids this horseshit as "science", depending on how much independent thought the poor bastards have left they are either going to a) never trust anything else they ever hear at school, which, to be honest wouldn't be a bad thing if these freaks are controlling the curriculum or b) grow up with some really fucked up ideas about the world.

Obviously there are dangers to this. For one thing, these kids would be robbed of that phase most normal kids go through where they think dinosaurs are the coolest thing ever, because dinosaur bones were placed under the ground by the devil to test our faith so you definitely shouldn't say, try and piece them together to see what the dinosaurs that definitely never existed looked like and then make cool exciting films of them crashing around killing stuff. But I suspect the consequences could actually be even worse than that. Armies of fucking crazy ignorant people, basically.

I find it literally impossible to understand how people can accept creationism over evolution as the explanation for the, well, for anything at all, but if people want to believe it that's their lookout. It is my duty as a lovely and beneficent person to inform them that everyone is laughing at you, you know, just in case they thought people thought they weren't mental, but hey, knock yourself out, you crazy kids. What I find even harder to believe, even harder than that really mad bit with the rib, is that anyone would accept the insistence of some fundamentalist crazies that people aren't given a chance to make up their own minds (and decide that it's bullshit. Obviously).

Incidentally, my favourite dinosaur is the brachiosaurus and sometimes I like to pretend my hand is a brachiosaurus, with the middle finger as his neck and the others as his legs, and walk him around my desk. What is your favourite dinosaur and why?

Terrible Music - Part 1

Why Part 1? Because there's a lot of terrible music out there. And by next week, there will be even more. All we can really hope to do is tackle it in little chunks of awfulness, a bit at a time.

In a bid to go a bit multimedia, I have created a playlist on Spotify, so, if you have Spotify and are feeling masochistic, you can listen to the crap discussed in this article at Pony and Tracks - I was going to call it "Now That's What I Call Pony vol 1", but instead opted for "Pony and Tracks". That's right. It is a terrible, terrible pun.

If you don't have Spotify, just print off this list and give it to the "DJ" next time you're at a wedding. He will have all of these songs, guaranteed, and will be more than happy to play them for you, although he will babble incomprehensibly far too close in to the microphone at random intervals, like the guy from Phoenix Nights who goes "Shabba!". Everybody will thank you, because at least none of these songs actually have their own special dance...

This first list only goes as far back as the mid nineties. As I said - little chunks of awfulness, a bit at a time.

Track 1: Girlfriend - Billie Piper

What is really fucked up, and what a lot of people forget, is that when 15 year old Billie Piper brought out the truly awful track "Because We Want To" in the mid nineties, which somehow got to number 1, a then unknown from the States was about to release a single called "Baby One More Time", and she was billed in the paper as "America's Answer to Billie"... Now you have to admit, that is fucked up.

Billie's records were all, without exception, dreadful, and with the horsey teeth and denim, and the weird black eyebrows (she still has those), she was no match for Britney as slutty jailbait either, which explains why she went a bit fucked up long before Spears did.

OK, so she didn't lose the plot quite as spectacularly as Britney, but she did marry freckly ginger Chris Evans, spend all her time in the pub, and get a bit fat. I suppose actually that's not really that bad or that interesting. Not in the age of Winehouse. But still, the songs really were turds.

The one I have selected is "Girlfriend". This is about Billie trying to chat up some boy by going "Do you have a girlfriend? You're looking real cool!"... Yeah, about as cool as my arse. You could make a mash-up, if you had mad mixing skills, of this with "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne, and make a song basically so bad it could probably be used to train attack dogs.

If you look at the Spotify playlist you will see that the album this comes from is called "The Very Best of Billie Piper". Not just "The Best", but "The Very Best", as if there were a load of other Billie Piper songs that were really good but not quite "The Very Best", this is la creme de la creme, the first pressed extra virgin, special reserve of Billie Piper's music. Bollocks.

Track 2: Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol

Hey everybody! It's Self-Harm Sally's favourite song!

This turgid, miserable thing was on the damn radio all the time. At Christmas, as well. There would be like, Wizzard, then that horrible cover of Santa Baby by Kylie that makes you feel dirty and wrong, then this.

It sounds all depressing and that, but if you actually listen to the words it's utter nonsense. Like, to the same degree as David Bowie when he used to make up lyrics by getting random words out of newspapers. "Let's waste time chasing cars around our heads" (yes, it does take about thirty seconds for the whiney gimp that sings it to get that sentence out, but that is what he says). Chasing cars you say? Like dogs? Only in our heads? What the fuck are you talking about you cunt? Can't we waste time by, I don't know, going on the XBox or Googling ourselves instead? Christ even Farmville sounds more fun than what you're proposing there.

"If I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?". No. I would kick you to fucking death you lazy shit for brains twat. Now get up, this is fucking Primark (honestly, in the video where he's just lying in places. What a fucking knob).

Track 3: Dance The Night Away - The Mavericks

In putting together this list, I listened to most of the tracks, you know, to remind myself how bad they are and to help me think of things to write about them. This one I couldn't make it past the intro. If this song comes on I get that same horrible sense of panic one gets when one's head is stuck in something. Like all that matters in that moment is making it fucking stop. Neutralising the situation. I once shoplifted from Asda because it came on and I ran out of there, still clutching a bottle of Diet Coke. THERE WASN'T TIME TO PUT IT BACK.

OK so it was only a bottle of Diet Coke from Asda, but it could have been anything of any value and I maintain no judge in the land would have sent me down for that if my defence played him this song.

What is quite so bad about it I can't quite put my finger on, I mean, sure, it's really annoying, but so are lots of things, and for some reason I would rather have three hours of the Crazy Frog, the Macarena or even "Teletubbies say 'Eh-Oh'" than three minutes of this. Honestly, it makes me want to bite people.

Track 4: 3 Words - Cheryl Cole and Will.i.am

If you've read this blog before, you are probably aware of the fact that I would really like it if Cheryl Cole wasn't fucking everywhere, all of the fucking time, but that isn't actually the reason this song made it onto the list.

Her first solo single, "Fight for this Love", I don't really have any beef with. It was catchy pop for the kind of people who like that sort of thing, and if you didn't like that sort of thing you could just make jokes about the fact she's a geordie singing about fighting (guess what I did?). Also she wears this fucking stupid sequin tiger skin hoodie at some point in the video and I reckon some wardrobe guy is still sitting pretty on the money he won betting a mate he could make her wear that.

This song, 3 Words, is just weird though. Weird and boring. And a bit creepy. Weird, boring and creepy - not good features to have in a song.

I don't think we need to go into the quite obvious and cynical reasons for collaborating with Will.i.am (who I am going to call William in any future mentions because Will.i.am is a fucking stupid name), who is the guy from the Black Eyed Peas, or one of the Guys from the Black Eyed Peas, I don't know how many of them there are that aren't the woman one.

Would you like to "break America", Cheryl? Oh, yes please pet, I'd reet like that, pet. Seriously? We'd never have fucking guessed...

I think we can expect a lot more collaborations between Cheryl Cole and American artists, who I think we can safely assume will all be black (she carries a little card around with her now reminding her not to call, say, Kanye West, a jigaboo), but don't worry, American readers (ha! Fuck you Cheryl, they like me!), if the standard is as poor as this monotonous offering she won't be troubling you any time soon.

Track 5: Virtual Insanity - Jamiroquai

I know what you're thinking. How do you pick just one song by that madcap cunty hat wearing retard Jamiroquai, given that they all sound the exact fucking same? All in his special brand of withered twatfunk?

Well, I went for this one because this is one of his more preachy ones. Preachy about some sort of sci-fi shit that isn't even actually happening.

"Now every mother can chose the colour of their child, well that's not nature's way"... Well, I can only assume with the rest of the song being about "twisting of their new technology" he means that in some sort of genetically modified babies sort of way, as opposed to just having a pop at inter-racial couples, though I could be wrong. Maybe he is actually just a big old racist. He did go out with Denise van Outen (why, Denise, why?) and she is pretty Aryan master race looking. Hmmmmmm, could we do a collaboration with Cheryl Cole, maybe? It'd be a grand thing, it could be called "I ain't Gonna Bump no More (with no Jigaboo)". Nick Griffin could use it as his theme song for the election like Blair did with "Things can only get Better" by D-Ream. Maybe that should have been on the list, thinking about it, it was diabolical. Anyway, I digress.

Jamirocunt does get a bit carried away with the old sci-fi at the best of times. Singing about cosmic girls from another galaxy, and having to live underground because of roaming herds of Godzillas. It's his third biggest interest after sulking about not having been the fastest celebrity on Top Gear for about ten years and twatty hats. But in this song it's like he's warning us. Take a fucking peek at yourself, people on Earth. All this crazy shit you're doing. It's bad. Jamirocunt has seen the future, and it's bad. Godzillas, man, I'm telling you.

Lay off the drugs, son, and maybe they'll let you have your license back.

Track 6: Heartbeat - Scouting for Girls

There were a few bands like this a couple of years ago. This shower of bastards, The Hoosiers, The Ordinary Boys. Irritating sub indie twatpop. Scouting for Girls annoyed me most because their songs were somehow a bit more gay. It was a toss up, and I mean it, between this piece of dreadful catspunk and "She's so Lovely". That was always on TV, whenever there was a woman who had just had a makeover by Gok or somesuch, or just whenever there was a woman (if there was more than one woman it would be "Here Come the Girls").

This one came out a bit later, when you thought "She's so Lovely" had gone away, and it was, if I'm not very much mistaken, the very self same song! It's about a lovely girl! It has an annoying a-rinky-dinky-dink sort of sound! A shit video of some scruffy art school looking prick playing a piano! It's the same song! It was back!

And it has the same name as that really crap TV show that was on ITV on Sunday nights. It might even still be on, I don't know.

Track 7: Life for Rent - Dido

Are you a boring, slightly frumpy single woman in your thirties, who thinks Bridget Jones's Diary, which was a made up story, is about you? You'll be wanting to listen to Dido then.

Oh, my stars. How dreary is her voice. It's like she's had a stroke and can't annunciate the consonants in the words. If she has, then I'm sorry, fair play to the woman for selling all those records with stroke face, but really, it is not a nice sound, all those words just blurring together like melted cheese. She looks about as dreary as she sounds too. Like some woman that might live alone in the flat upstairs from you who always has a big cardigan on and who you imagine wears pyjamas with animals on in bed might look when she's going to the corner shop. Only she's not going to the corner shop, she's performing at fucking Live 8. Make an effort you bland, bland lump of plainness!

And the song itself. Fucking miserable. She's bored, she's depressed. Her life is going nowhere. She'd like to go travelling but she can't be arsed. Blah blah blah blah blah. This would be boring if your best friend was saying it to you after too much wine, it's even worse coming from someone who you know is actually, for reasons you can't fathom, a multi million selling multi millionaire. Is there also some sort of subliminal new Labour theme here about how if you don't get on the property ladder you "deserve nothing more than you get"? Fuck you Dido. Fuck you trying to get me into negative equity with your dismal song.

Track 8 - Haven't Met You Yet - Michael Buble

Michael Buble was originally know for doing hacky covers of old swing songs, and for being someone your aunt might fancy. He has a pretty good voice, nobody is disputing that, but no one much in the UK gave a shit about this because Robbie Williams had done all those songs years ago, and then so had bloody Westlife.

In 2009, when the X Factor went two nights a week (just so Cheryl Cole could be fucking everywhere, all of the fucking time a bit more, I'd wager), it became compulsory, for reasons I could never quite figure out, to have some act on on the Sunday night show that either hadn't been heard of in years (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Bon fucking Jovi), or that nobody gave a rat's tiny arsehole about (Buble). The contestants would make out that the act was their biggest hero and influence, even though they were 16 and had had to ask Dannii Minogue (the shit Minogue sister - honestly, would you bank on that woman to make you a star?) what a Bon Jovi was backstage.

Buble's appearance on the show was to plug the release of this single. Not, as the world was accustomed to, an old song we already knew, just with Buble singing it as close as he could to the original, but a new song, a new song just for Michael Buble to sing, all of his very own. Seemed like a good plan.

Trouble is, it is fucking rubbish, isn't it?

It's a love song, but with a twist! He doesn't know the girl yet! He's desperate for a bird! He's gone a bit match.com with the whole thing! He's got so much to give, but he hasn't met her yet! That is a stupid idea for a song, for a start. Then, there's the plinky plonk pianos. Did the guy from Scouting for Girls fucking write this for him? It was always going to do alright, because as I said, he does have a decent voice, but if you are going to take someone who is a big star in certain circles for singing covers and try and branch him into doing new material then is this cheap, lightweight crap the best song they could find for him? And that video with the shopping trolley and shit? Crap. Total crap.

Track 9: Wild Horses - Susan Boyle

This song was also debuted on one of those Sunday night X Factor shows, to pad out the bit that only needed to take five minutes where they tell you who has been booted back into obscurity that week to a full hour long programme. But was I the only person thinking, "fuck me, Susan Boyle singing the Rolling Stones? Was that not in the book of Revelations as one of the harbingers of the apocalypse?"?

A lot of the appreciation for this, and I may be being a little harsh here, mess of a woman's voice really came from the shock value. It was some sort of mad cat lady from Scotland with a face like melted Lego that had been rolled on a dog blanket to pick up fur. It claimed, and nobody for a second disbelieved the claim, that it had "never been kissed". You were just waiting for her to do some crazy, scary thing on the Britain's Got Talent stage, maybe some sort of nightmarish magic trick that would make Piers "the cunt" Morgan's head turn 360 degrees, or just some very bad puppet theatre. But no, she sang, and the sound wasn't actually hellish. It made Amanda Holden cry, but then she did that when those fat Greek people did some comedy Irish dancing as well - woman needs to get some fucking help if you ask me.

Su-Bo, as she became affectionately known, didn't win the show, and there were some reports that she had gone a bit mental from the fame (but nobody told us whether she had got laid yet, which I felt was most unfair on the public), so it seemed like that was the end of the crazy ride on the Boyle train for Britain as a whole. But then this, the X Factor appearance, and the Rolling Stones song.

The trouble with it was, apart from the fact it is a very fucked up and bizarre choice of song for someone who had only ever done some old thing out of Les Miserables on TV before, that it got played on the radio and sold as a CD and download. It got played in situations where you couldn't see how ugly she was when you were hearing it. And if you listen to it without that whole, wow, it looks like a manatee thing, her voice is pretty mediocre. This is possibly the only case ever of someone's ugliness launching a music career that they would not otherwise have had...

So, that was volume 1 of the most terrible music ever made. Please feel free to make suggestions of tracks you hate. Volume 2 will be released soon.

Local Tourist Attractions

It's still Easter. Everything was shut today, because some people are still labouring under the misapprehension that this day is somehow significant. Well, everything apart from the pubs, happily, and those off licenses with the blue carrier bags that never, ever seem to shut. That's the backbone of Britain right there. Pubs, and blue offy bags.

As a result of this, you are now either off your face, or bored out of your mind, and there's more of it to come tomorrow.

One way you could spend the Easter Bank Holiday Monday, is going for a lovely wholesome day out to a local tourist attraction. This is easier if you have access to children (no, not in the "show me on the doll where he touched you" sense, I just mean like, you have kids or nieces and nephews or whatever), because they are easily impressed and if you suggest any of this to your mates and none of you are high they're just going to mug you off. That crate of Stella Asda are doing for a tenner isn't going to drink itself.

You could go to Alton Towers or Chessington World of Adventures, or if you're in London one of the many pretty cool things they have there, but odds are that'll seem like a bit of a mission what with the hangover and the fact the kids, if you've managed to commandeer any, are going to be unbearably sugared up having spent all weekend gorging on chocolate. You don't want to actually do anything exciting because you will all be sick, so you are more likely to end up heading out to a more low rent local alternative.

There are some pretty staggeringly shit places out there. Usually the prime hunting ground for crap tourist attractions is the kind of places those weirdos who go to another part of England on holiday go to (even though it's cheaper to go to Greece or Spain where you won't have quite such a horrible time and can make the holiday pay for itself by bringing back a load of fags). Places like the South Coast. Places like that. These places, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset etc., are absolutely fucking teeming with really bizarre "attractions". Not bizarre as in they have a cat with three heads and a bearded lady (though if you want to see a bearded lady there's one who hangs around the bus station in Guildford - it's a proper, ZZ Top style beard as well, not just a bit of fuzz), but bizarre as in, why the fuck did they build this?

Cornwall has a place you can actually go to, seriously, I went there when I was a kid and I've checked I didn't dream it and it is somehow, over 20 years later, still in business, called Dairyland. It's a theme park, where the theme is cows. That's right, those big animals that do fuck all. One of the attractions boasted on its very shit, early 90's looking website includes "Milking Clarabelle". Am I just a very disgusting person for thinking that sounds like some kind of very niche porno?

Honestly, there are cultures in the world that believe cows to be sacred and worship them, and even they don't put up fucking theme parks in their honour. How much interest can a child really be expected to have in a bunch of steak stuffed in a leather handbag, crapping, mooing and having milk squeezed out of its weird boobs? It bloody stinks as well, undoubtedly. So, you could go there.

Another thing that they have in Cornwall, the arse end of nowhere, is a place called Flambards, which, again, has been there, somehow surviving, for my entire life. You know a theme park is going to be pretty crap when they boast on the TV about having Britain's "Most Southerly Rollercoaster". How far south it is within the UK is not really a statistic that is important when discussing rollercoasters, is it? Is it the biggest? Hell no! It's fucking tiny! Is it the fastest? Noooo, in fact it is incredibly fucking pedestrian, that is why we put an old lady on the advert riding it. OK, so, er, does it go upside down more than all the others? No, that it does not do, not even once - there is a bit where it stops quite suddenly and you hurt your groin, but we didn't think that "Most likely to render you infertile" was snappy enough so we're going with "Most Southerly".

It's called the Hornet. The only way they could make it scary is to place an actual hornets' nest in each of the little cars. Then, when you collected the photos at the end of the ride (yes, they actually bother with that, as if it's something good that you are going to want to remember happened to you), instead of everyone looking underwhelmed, some people would look all sort of red and puffy as they go into anaphylactic shock from the stings. I'd be scared of that. I fucking hate wasps and shit (another reason why these places all suck, they get very waspy on account of all the ice cream and whatnot. There is usually a candy floss machine with wasps actually crawling around inside of it. Do not want.).

Moving out of Cornwall and the realm of awful theme parks, though these are by no means restricted to the region, you can find something just as piss poor anywhere round the entire coast of the UK I would wager, what if you fancy a bit of nature?

From Poole or Bournemouth in Dorset you can take a day trip by boat to a place called Brownsea Island. The name doesn't sound appealing, does it? Brownsea? Brown sea? Why is the sea brown? Is it sewage? Nice.

The main selling point of this small island as a tourist attraction is, get this, it has squirrels that are ginger.

There aren't many places you get ginger squirrels in the UK. This is because the normal ones, sorry, I mean the grey ones, kill them or some shit. Whether this is squirrel racism or whether some sort of evolutionary thing has just meant the normal ones, sorry, grey ones are somehow better equipped to survive, perhaps better camouflaged, than the ginger ones I don't know. It's probably the latter, although a squirrel race war would make a great cartoon. In any case, if you want to go and walk around some woods looking for genetically inferior squirrels that can't survive on the mainland, and which look exactly the same as the ones in your office car park if they'd been Tango'd, this is the day out for you.

Incidentally, I know someone who thinks ginger people have no souls and when they die they end up in limbo. Even that cute little girl off of Doctor Who and my mate Sarah. A lot of people just say they smell of fox piss. Not me, just you know, other people.

The National Trust also offers a wealth of other nature walks and boring stuff like that. I can see why that might be fun in other countries where they have bears or snakes or fucking tigers and stuff, cool animals, but in England all the wild animals are boring and brown, apart from badgers which are fairly cool and apparently dead vicious, but you only ever see them when they're dying by the road. I don't think they're hard at all, or they would come out and fucking face us like men.

You are probably just going to see more squirrels, some ducks, and if you are most especially unlucky a fucking swan. The swan is an evil bastard. Why the queen loves the fuckers and won't let you kill and eat them I have no idea, she has obviously never had one chase her making that devil sound they make. It's a shame, because it does look like there is good eating on one. Whether killing a swan actually constitutes treason, the only offence you can still be executed for in Britain, I do not know, but I'm not risking it no matter how good I reckon its leg would be. Kentucky Fried Swan. Omnomnomnomnom.

A mate of mine did once get told off at work for bitch slapping a swan across the face because it was blocking his entrance into his office (which was next to a big pond, it wasn't just a random swan). I would love to see that. A man slapping a swan across the fucking face. Break my arm would you? You fucking reckon? Come on then, let's be having you, you long necked bastard! THWACK!

That's how I imagine it went.

So, there's a few options for you anyway. Let me know if you find anything else really pony to do and see near you. I know you won't let me down.

Easter

Well, it's Good Friday, so welcome to the Pony and Trap Easter Egg-stravaganza, or Sp-egg-tacular or whatever. Easter is the most rubbish holiday of the year, so let's pay tribute with a list (I do enjoy a list) of all the things that make it so very pony.

Bad puns involving the word "egg"

You see what I did there? The fucking egg puns. Have you ever seen one of these, like, in the window of Clinton Cards or somewhere (who even sends cards at Easter? Nobody fucking does. But they want you to. They make them, I've checked. But who is buying them?), something about "Egg-citement" or something, and pissed yourself laughing? Like, oh god, that tickled me, that did. It's like "excitement", but they made it say "egg", like an Easter egg. Oh, that was a good one. I'll remember that one for later down the pub. The lads will be in stitches.

I've come up with a few egg puns that could be used to advertise stuff at this time of year, but probably wouldn't be:

"Egg-stortionate prices on all our hollow chocolate shit!"
"Get s-eggs-ual thrills with the new Rampant Easter Rabbit!"
"Sweat your tits off and dance all night on Egg-stasy! Because there's no work for four days!"
"Eggs-crement!"

See, it's quite easy. Please feel free to leave your own shit Easter puns in the comments.

At least once Easter is over you don't get any more awful pun holidays until Halloween, when everything has to be "spook-tacular"...

It moves

You know where you are with all the other holidays. Same date every year. You know everything will stop happening around Christmas but that's OK, you know when it is going to be and there's plenty of warning - from September onwards you can't really go a day without a reminder somewhere. Plus it always coincides with the end of the X Factor.

Easter on the other hand moves around. It isn't always even in the same vague time span, even in the same month. I don't know whose job it is to decide on what arbitrary date it is going to be and how far in advance this is done, but I suspect, like a lot of crazy religious stuff it is done using some kind of highly Christian method like the phases of the moon.

As a result of this, and as a result of the fact Easter is shit so nobody talks about it in the weeks leading up to it, it can sometimes sneak up on you and annoy the fuck out of you. I only found out on Tuesday that it was now. That's not even a joke, or an exaggeration. I didn't even have time to make an Easter Bonnet.

The Easter Story

OK, as well as the swearing, I do do a spot of the old blasphemy as well so, er, sorry about that...

Easter is one of those fucked up Christian festivals that seems to have just sort of tacked itself on to some other thing people were already doing to celebrate some sort of natural thing, like Christmas with the longest night. It seems weirder with Easter though, somehow. On the one hand, there is all the springtime shit - eggs, bunnies, daffodils, lambs, that sort of junk. This is the main sort of imagery and symbolism that if you were to get some people to do some sort of wanky Easter "mind-map", as beloved of corporate away days everywhere, they would come up with. It's a bit primitive, I mean, eggs are pretty much a year round fixture, but it works. Celebrating the end of winter, no more of that snow and ice and shit. I can get on board with that (although spring weather is usually just rain and wind so not that much of an improvement).

But then we are reminded that the real reason for the holiday is actually nothing to do with any of that. It's a story from the Bible. It's a story that, if you are the sort of person that questions this sort of shit, starts off quite horrible and depressing and ends up just frickin' implausible. There are no bunnies or lambs gambolling in the fields, because it's fucking Jerusalem 2000 years ago (when it was probably just slightly less fucked than it is now). There is basically this Jewish guy who gets screwed over by one of his mates, who it turns out is a bit of a cunt. As a result of this the Jewish guy, who has long hair and sandals, gets humiliated and quite brutally executed - yeah, these old stories you hear at primary school are pretty delightful in how barbaric they can get, but kids love all that so it's fine - by being nailed to a big wooden cross with a couple of other local crims. That's the depressing but plausible bit.

A couple of days later he comes back to life - not like a zombie, he doesn't want to eat anybody's brain or anything, he just comes back from the dead. I think some hooker he used to knock about with finds him first or something. This is where it starts getting implausible. They actually want you to believe this really happened, it isn't just something they made up for a laugh. After some period of bodding about freaking people out about the whole being back from the dead thing, he flies up in to the sky, never to be seen again, although he was, it is safe to say, talked about quite a lot in the two millennia that followed.

It's not a bad story. I preferred Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that episode of Doctor Who with the giant wasp that was actually a ginger vicar played by that bloke out of Game On, but it's not bad. I'd give it 6 out of 10, but it is pretty old so, you know, people were more easily entertained back in the day. Mel Gibson liked it a whole lot, at least, though I've never quite got why the whole thing was called "The Passion", that's not what I associate with the word "passion", especially in the title of a movie, at all...

The Easter Bunny

When you're a kid, if you're one of the lucky ones, there are only three entities you believe sneak into your room while you are sleeping. You've got Santa, obviously the best because he brings you the annual mother lode of all presents, the Tooth Fairy, she gives you cash but takes away your teeth for reasons unknown, so she's a bit wrong, but cash is always nice, and the Easter Bunny.

The Easter Bunny is shit. With Santa, over the years the legend has been padded out quite a lot. He's got his reindeer, his sleigh, we know what he looks like, we know he likes a drink, he lives at the North Pole with some elves who make the toys (that's right kids - the Wiis are all made by funny little short guys), and now, you can even track him on the NORAD website and Google Earth. A lot of time and effort has gone in to making what is basically quite an elaborate global lie to make it fun for the kids. But with the Easter Bunny, the adults have just gone, uh, yeah, it's a rabbit that brings you chocolate.

He hasn't even got a fucking name. What colour is he? Is he a normal sized rabbit or some kind of freaky giant Donnie Darko rabbit? Can he talk? Where does he come from? How does he get to all the children? Why does he give them eggs, when rabbits don't have anything to do with eggs? Seriously, nobody can even be bothered to fabricate him into anything, because it's that shit a concept - a magical rabbit confectioner.

Cadbury's Cream Eggs

The only Cadbury product that has a "season" (like it's vegetables and you're one of those knobs that won't eat them if they've been flown in), which is unaccountably from January (why?) to about May, after which you see them being sold off for 10p as they go past their sell by date.

They are fucking gross. That is the only word for that sickly ooze in a chocolate shell. It makes my teeth itch just thinking about it. What even is that sugary mess inside? Pure, solid diabetes in egg form?

I know someone who, for a bet, took one into a chippy and asked them to batter and fry it (he took the foil off first). He then ate it. A Glasgow style Cream Egg. For a fucking fiver. Animal.

Mini Eggs are alright though. Now they don't do those adverts with Mr Cadbury's Parrot on. He was an annoying little cunt.

The next part of the Pony and Trap Easter Egg-stravaganza, here to keep you company throughout the long (fucking interminable) weekend, is going to cover general British Bank Holiday fun... It's out there to be had, apparently.