I saw a tweet from a friend this morning about how he got in an argument with someone at a bus stop because she jumped a queue of 5 people to get on the bus. He rightly pulled her up on this, and she showed no remorse. You may think this is because plebs travel on buses, and to a certain extent you would be right, but that is no excuse for poor manners. I have been travelling by bus for a solid 4 years, having previously been a Northern Line boy. I didn’t think anything would ever be shitter than the Northern Line, and in the main, bus travel isn’t, but there is still a lot of it that really pisses me off. So below, for once and for all, is my rules for bus travelling.

1)      The queue. Sometimes, when it is raining, it can be a bit of a melee at a bus stop. As such, this is the one time when I would say if the bus stops opposite, jump on with no remorse. However, if the weather is fair, surely you should always let those who have been waiting longer than you on first. We as a nation love to queue, yet bus travel seems to be the one place where it is being rapidly eroded.

2)     Seat cock blocking.  This is the most annoying part of any bus journey. There are three flash points when this happens. 1, the bus is stupidly busy, and you can see a seat at the back, but there are 8 people between you and the seat. You can either shove people out of the way to get there, thus annoying them, or you can look at it longingly, like a love struck teenager who has just been dumped. 2, Some tosser standing on the stairs, making it look like there are no seats up stairs. This person will be either a young white female, or young professional. They still think they are at school, and the people at the back of the bus will beat them up. I often walk past these people, cursing under my breath. One time I was on a bus, and it was rammed. I didn’t trust the gutless looking person on the stairs, asked if there were seats upstairs. They said no, but let me past, so I walked up, and there were 6! Sure they were near the back, but I am a 32 year old man, and I am not scared of a 15 year old…EVER! I snapped, I was walking to the seat, turned back, leant over the railing and shouted that there were 5 seats upstairs. 5 people came up. 5 brave people. 3, those people who put their bags on the seat next to them, and when you ask them to move it, look at you like you have come into their house on Christmas day and pissed on their kids! Your bag is not more important than a human!

3)     People who dive to an open double seat. Why do people do this? They are so obsessed with their personal space that they have to sit there. I remember once seeing this woman do it once, moving away from someone, and then give the person she moved from a dirty look. I thought that was harsh, but what happened next was karma in speedy action. A nutter got on the bus, and you could tell from his stained beard, wild eyes and the fact that he was carrying a can of special brew, that he would be the last person anyone would like to sit next to. And he sat down next to this prissy woman! It was brilliant. The look on horror on her face was epic!  This is also linked to those people who are sitting in the aisle seat and they don’t scooch over, but force the person to squeeze past them. Just scooch, it is easier for everyone!

4)     People who eat stinky food on a bus. Right, I am pretty certain the rules say no food. But if you are eating a sandwich that is all fine by me. M&S salad, sure, why not. But fried chicken? Some fish dish? WHY? You know it honks, and I know that you, back seat chicken muncher, you aren’t taking that Hot ‘n’ tasty box with you. I know you are going to leave it on the seat, like some horrific left over parcel by a serial killer. And it stays there, greying in its own fat. There are certain buses (any that travels through Seven Sisters), the 43 or 271 that it is actually impossible to get on without there being at least 2 separate chicken carcasses on it , hidden somewhere. Only signs of them being the smell of congealed grease and trickles of juices running along the top deck.

5)     Groups of yoof.  I have been a knob on public transport. When I was younger, I know I took part in public transport gregariousness with my friends. But we were never ever threatening. Yet when a pack of feral street kids get on, all Blackberries blaring out tinny music, screeching, swearing and unintelligible burblings, you can visibly see fear course through other passengers. As I have said, as a 32 year old man, I am not scared of them, just annoyed. But kids these days seem so much more brazen. They’re misunderstood I hear the liberals cry. Holy texts are misunderstood, some kids are just little turds who will say f*** off to an old lady when she asks them to turn their headphones down. On an aside, how can all these kids afford BEATS by Dre headphones? They are like £250 a pop.

6)     People who don’t cover their mouths. No one, and I mean no one wants to see another person yawn. I have never wanted to look at another’s epiglottis. But covering your mouth whilst yawning seems to have gone out of fashion. But the people who don’t cover their mouths when they sneeze or cough, they are the real focus of my ire. It is bad enough that buses are basically an incubator for variants of MRSA, but we can all help one another. An example was when two 15 year olds got on my bus, and the one sat behind me proceeded to sneeze at least 7 times, not covering her mouth. On the 8^th time, I snapped, because some phlegm hit the side of my face. I turned around and shouted, ‘cover your f****** mouth when you sneeze!’ She came up in my face, spouting a few racist slurs, and how she was going to get someone to ‘stick me, y’feel me bruv’. I pointed out that she needed to be taught some manners, and to jog on. Yeah, that story has a shit ending. Sorry.

7)     People who elbow you as they walk past. Why are people so desperate to get off the bus? If you have pressed the bell, they will wait till you have gotten off. Yet people get up early, and then do that drunken walk down the aisle. It is worse on the top deck, and invariably someone at some point will elbow you in the back of the head. Most the time, they actually walk on, maybe raising a conciliatory hand. Some people over apologise, which is fine by me. But those who don’t really piss me off. So the rule should be no moving about until the bus has stopped.

8)     The people who feel the need to talk to the driver. At our school there was a boy called Vishal Depala who was friend of the bus driver. Lord knows why he did it, maybe he wanted to become one. To be fair, he never delayed the journey, but it is the people who talk to the driver for like 5 minutes, trying to figure out something or other, or people who pay with £2 in coppers and string! They are the ones who really chap my arse! It is bad enough that buses are slow, we should do all we can to make them less slow by having topped up oyster cards and know where we want to go.

9)     Buses that terminate early. God I hate this. It is bad enough that you are probably late for something, but they then dump you 25 minutes away from where you need to be. A whole bus empties and the only thing the driver can say is, ‘there is one behind this one.’ YEAH! One behind me that will now need to double in size to take 2 buses worth of people you cretin! And then they look at you like you’re a turd when you ask for a refund. You’re lucky you’re behind that flimsy plastic pal, or I’d punch you right in the kisser!

I am going to stop there as this is just winding me up! There is lots more that annoys me, maybe I shall do another one about people who open windows when it is raining, umbrellas, women with prams who are shouting at their kids, people who don’t give their blue stickered seats up to pregnant ladies and the elderly and people who jump on the back doors and fare evade. But I think my left eye would implode from rage if I did.

Breathe…

-        Anand

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Is that it?

As the tide of introductions to women continues in my family’s relentless quest to get me married, I started thinking about dowries, and what a shitty and outmoded thing they are. My mum and dad were talking about them this weekend, and I went off on one about how it was like some weird medieval fiefdom, and that they’d start asking for prima nocta next!

In India, dowry (known as Dahej in Hindi) is a payment of money or gifts from the bride's family to the bridegroom's family upon marriage. It isn’t bad enough that the bride’s family pay for the whole wedding, but now they have to put down some sort of ridiculous deposit for the groom himself. The dowry can also include jewellery, electrical appliances, furniture, bedding, crockery, utensils and other household items that help the newly-weds set up their home. Because nothing says I love you forever like a pressure cooker and John Lewis vouchers!

My mum was telling me about a couple of disturbing stories about how families treat women in regards to this. She told me about a family who had a son who was a doctor. When the couple were introduced, the boy’s family stipulated that the girl’s family reimburse them the entire tuition fees their son spent, brought x amount of gold, and y amounts of clothes and accessories. As if that this daughter marrying this bloke was a business transaction, and that this girl should make reparations to the boy’s family for THEIR choices.  I just sat there, somewhat aghast, and then she gave me the gut punch with the second story.

That was how a mother in law of a well to do, middle class Indian family, saw that her daughter in law had given birth to a girl, and so, without remorse, chucked it from a balcony to its death. Fortunately, this child survived as she was wrapped up in swaddling and a blanket, but to think a woman would do that to a little baby just shows you the mass mental delusion that seems to permeate Indian society,

In India the dowry system puts great financial strain on the bride's family. This has been cited as one of the reasons for families resorting to sex selection, favouring the birth of sons over daughters. This has distorted the sex ratio in India (933 females per thousand males) due to sex-selective abortion. Now I am a hundred percent behind pro-choice of the woman. But I cannot imagine a mother to be would want to ever abort their child because they are a girl. Surely that pressure comes from others. It comes from the evil mother-in-laws from the soap operas, and men with sinister moustaches and beige shirts, who are so desperate that their name survives they destroy these young women’s lives.

I will never, ever, understand this weird notion that having boys is somehow better than having girls. And I shan’t bash just Indians, it is the same in most cultures, as if having a boy who will carry on the family line is better than a daughter. What happens when there are only boys? Who will they marry? Who will they sire children with? Or will they have perfected the whole premise of the Arnie film Junior?

-        Anand

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When I first got sent her (Samantha Brick) original article about how amazingly good looking she was, I was like pretty much most people. AGOG! Yes, I was something that you would expect a pirate to be when they saw a sea monster. My brain could almost not comprehend the article. Why would anyone write an article about how attractive they were? Especially when the photos attributed to that article were of her looking decidedly average. Look, I am no oil painting and so this blog will not be about how unattractive she is, because she isn’t, and also that isn’t the major issue with the whole thing.

The major issue I have is her betrayal of her entire gender, and for what? Some hits on the Daily Mail website. I was spurred on to write this blog after her recent article ‘Mary Beard IS too unattractive for TV’ where she goes on to espouse crap about the nature of television and the such like. I wrote a whole blog about AA Gill and his misogyny, but to hear a fellow ‘sister’ make such a statement seemed beyond the pale! Why would you do that? I keep coming back to this idea of why?

From the Daily Mail’s point of view, they love it. The more controversial crap that gets forwarded to people means more hits on their hate peddling website, which means more money for Paul Dacre and the other pieces of faeces who pass as people that work there. But it isn’t just that, it is the fact that the Daily Mail hates one thing more than immigrants and the poor, and that is women.

Article after article about women being too fat, too skinny, the next diet, anything to make women feel awful about themselves is fair game. If you have a look at Brick's previous pieces for the Mail, these included one saying she had always employed flirtation to get what she wanted, especially at work, and one detailing her obsession with her weight, an obsession so great that it made her balk at the prospect of pregnancy. Putting all this together, it's easy to see Brick is actually insecure about the way she looks, to the point of neurosis. So why let the Daily Mail encourage you to write such an article? It couldn’t have done any good for her when the expected vitriol that came out of the fingers of various keyboard warriors manifested itself.

Martin Clarke, Mail Online's editor, recently explained his editorial ideology. When asked why Clarke decided to run a story of a young actor suffering from acne, Clarke replied: "Well, we all just looked at the picture and went 'Yuck'. Look, she's an actress in 90210, and she's spotty."

Hang the consequences of this young woman and her self-esteem! Hang all the women out there who aren’t ‘attractive’ enough to be in 90210 and have acne! Let’s all use the Victorian freakshow way and point and laugh and mock and sell our humanity for the price of a click.

According to the Daily Mail, a woman's role in life is to be pretty, thin, get married, quit work, have children and, ideally, disappear or die before getting embarrassingly old and fat (it is no wonder the paper loved Diana so much.) The paper is full of scare stories warning its female readers about the terrible repercussions of diverging from that course, usually written by female columnists who regret the terrible life choices that have led to them being childless and unmarried at the shockingly geriatric age of 40 plus. And don’t even get me started on Lowri Turner. A woman who had a mixed race child and was ashamed of it. I am surprised the Daily Mail didn’t just explode with excitement when they got that story. That was a perfect storm!  

At the end of the day though, it is just trolling in the most public way. They post these articles, we all get outraged, we send them on, we comment, and at no point does anyone say, ‘Oh piss Samantha Brick, piss off Paul Dacre, and most importantly f**k the Daily Mail and its hate peddling ways!’

-        Anand

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Let me give you an example. Some poor old crone comes up to you. she has spent her entire life in a loving marriage with a man who recently died. They failed to have children, and so the only person who matters to her has now shuffled off this mortal coil. Now, she comes to you, and asks, ‘Is my Harry waiting for me beyond the veil.’ Now, I would love to be honest to her. I would love to tell her that in my opinion there is nothing beyond death.  Instead I say, ‘Of course,’  he is standing by her right now, he watches her as she cares for her garden (mud under her finger nails). She cries as I tell her how much he loved her. How he is up there, always looking after her, but how he wants her to move on. He wants her to have new adventures, and how it doesn’t matter, because when they are together again, nothing will have changed. She cries, and leaves with the strength to see the rest of her days through with happiness and hope.

Does that make me a bad person? If had told her that I don’t really hear the dead, and that she shouldn’t search for closure because there is none, just a massive festering sore where the people we loved used to be, that would kill her. The lack of some structure in our existence is a terrifying idea, and the older you get, the scarier it gets.  

People turn more religious when they get older, maybe to atone for the sins of their life. Or maybe they weigh up the pros and cons of believing, and as falling from their horse, they ask for forgiveness. Surely it is a better that you say something, than not. If you are wrong in that belief, who cares? But if you are wrong in atheism, God will love sending you to hell, where devils insert various things into your anus. Various hot things at that!

I don’t care what happens at the end to be honest. If I die and there is an afterlife, and I meet my maker, my belief in him or her is the least of my worries. I lie for a profession, I drink, swear and certainly covert my neighbour’s ox, only in this case it is his wife, his apartment, and actually his car is pretty neat too.  I don’t think you should feel sorry for me, because that is how I choose to live my life. The moralising of strangers is like piss off a drunk’s shoe to me, forgotten by the morning.

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Right, some things, sometimes, really annoy me. Actually, that sounds like I am some reasonable person. I think you could ask most people, I am not. In fact, I can get annoyed by the most monumentally stupid things. My irrational fear / hatred of wire coat hangers being a case in point. So you can imagine what happened to me when I read AA Gill’s comments about Mary Beard.

Now, a disclaimer. 1) Mary Beard was my sister’s tutor at Cambridge, so maybe there is some inherent bias in what I will say, and 2) I didn’t watch Mary’s show, mainly because I think it clashed with some football (cause I am a ruddy bloke!).

Neither of those things prevent me from spilling verbal shite into the ether, ironically just like AA Gill. So what did he say?

Professor Mary Beard, "really should be kept away from cameras altogether". Why? "Because she's this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating documentary."

Gill was referring to Channel 4's recent series The Undateables, about people with disabilities and their quest for love. Now I didn’t watch this either, why? Because I can’t stand watching this body horror stuff that channel 4 pump out. Where we are expected to sit at home, mocking the morbidly obese, the skinny, or the disfigured.  Gill himself described the show as:

"mocking freak show of grotesques and embarrassments".

So now we know, in his own words, what his view is on Mary.

Mary herself took it quite well, and wrote an excellent rebuttal, mocking Gill in a reserved, if slightly Oxbridge way. If I were her, I would want to know what gave Gill the right to review her programme and even mention her looks and not purely the content. If he were to review the work of his good friend Jeremy Clarkson, would he say that Clarkson had all the wit and charm of a drugged, shaved, gorilla scrotum? That he, and that human asexual Labrador James May should never be allowed on telly because of their looks? No.  So why do we allow this? Sure there was the usual Twitter outcry, and you can’t help but feel this kind of sensationalist crap is good for only one thing, driving traffic to the Telegraph’s website.  I am half expecting an article tomorrow saying something like Alan Sugar molests swans, to which he will reply:

“I don’t molest swans, I love them. How dare <insert journalist’s name> say such a thing. When I was a barra (sic) boy, I only had 3 bob in my pocket, and I dreamt of owning a swan…etc etc”

But the 3 million hits will make the warning and the rap on the knuckles from the press commission all worth.

If I was Mary, and it is easy to say this, I would have tried to ignore it. I suppose it is hard when the internet is in outcry,  but maybe she could have and it all would have blown over. I mean at the end of the day, he is a telly and food critic. So he writes about what most 5 year olds do.

“Last night my mummy made me eggs and chips and then she let me watch Knightrider”

AA Gill aged 6 ½

She is a Cambridge fellow, this guy has to watch Peter Andre: My Life.  Whilst she was helping Tobias Hill write The Hidden (one of the most affecting things I have read in ages), AA Gill was probably being served some gastro-monstrosity . As he chewed, the realisation that he has brought nothing to the world other than light mirth, should have caused his soul crumble like a sandcastle.

Also, he isn’t even the best AA in the world or history.  Even the actual AA roadside assistance is better. AA Milne takes the best AA crown though. A man who created Winnie the Pooh, the most winsome of all children’s literature, whereas AA Gill insulted a woman because of how she looks. As Eyore wouldn’t say, what a dick!

Maybe it is because I grew up in a family of strong women, or maybe my mama just raised me right, but I know better than to insult women like that. If you don’t like them, judge them on their character, or body of work, not on their looks. To be fair, if you are even remotely attractive, the press jump all over you saying they are dumbing down. How dare Liz Bonnin or Alice Roberts be pretty, smart, and not obsessed with shoes (maybe they are, I am guessing there…and also making an offensive stereotype…no doubt a feminist will abuse me for it.) Scandalous.

Basically, what I am saying is, if women care what people say about them, or how their gender is viewed, they should boycott the Sunday Times. But they won’t, and men will continue to be misogynists and say stupid things.  People could argue that it is just an act, like Rod Liddle or Clarkson, but that is just coming up with crap excuses. We shouldn’t tolerate it.

-          Anand

PS – I appreciate the irony that I am being particularly horrible about Adrian Gill, in a more focused and concerted way, but as I am not a Cambridge graduate, I can happily say, ‘he started it!’

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What am I? I am sure most second generation immigrants ask that at some point or other. Am I English? I am sure some racialists would say not, even though I was born here, lived here my entire life, pay taxes here and speak the language. Am I Indian? Same racialists would say yes.  I am happy to think I am both. I wouldn’t pass the Tebbit test as I support India in the cricket (the test was a controversial phrase coined in 1990 by Conservative politician Norman Tebbit. He was referring to the 'loyalty' or 'lack of loyalty' of immigrants and their children from certain parts of Asia and the Caribbean to the England cricket team. Tebbit suggested that those immigrants who root for their native countries rather than Great Britain in sports might not be sufficiently loyal to their new country), yet I whole heartedly support England in all other sports. See, I am conflicted.

Why am I waffling on about this? Because often around Patron saint days this sense of identity is thrown into stark relief. Today is St George’s day, and unlike many other days, like St David’s or St Patrick’s, St George’s day, or to be more specific celebrating ones ‘Englishness’, seems to have negative inferences, whether real or merely perceived.

I remember when at school, early on in an art class, we were asked to go home and do a drawing that represented us. Lord knows what that actually means, what 11 year old knows how to accurately search their insides and draw something that truly represents them? None, that’s how many! So we all went home and drew things like footballs, or trees, or whatever we could draw. When we went to hand these in, a black friend of mine (his colour is relevant) handed his in, and was shouted at by the teacher in front of the whole class. She was a right on hippy, and when she saw he had drawn a union jack in his picture, she blew a gasket. She said she saw what it was like in the 70s and 80s for ‘our types’, and he had let down his race by drawing that.

What a ridiculous woman! Surely the fact that he identified with that flag, with none of the connotations that came along with it, was a good thing. Instead he, and by proxy all of us, now saw the Union Jack as sign of hate. As if this flag was evil. Such a stupid idea, but the seed had now been sown. I still feel utterly weird when I see it, when I should get a sense of pride.

Yet now we have a very strange battle for our sense of national identity. I am sure there are many people out there who wish St Patrick’s day was remembered because of him driving all the snakes from Ireland, but at least people celebrate. At least they rejoice and are proud of being Irish. St David’s day seems like a low key affair, but you see people on telly wearing daffodils, but that could be for some charity for all I know. Yet the campaign for St George is muddied by nationalistic iconography, and the appropriation by fringe political groups who see him as their banner.  What does it means to be English in a time of political correctness? Should we even couch things in this manner? Political correctness and other buzzwords merely cover cynicism, fear and hatred of the different. Also it annoys me that people think that being politically correct is a bad thing. You know what, calling someone a paki, a spastic, or poof or anything else is not on. It isn’t politically correct to think that, it isn’t an attack on your freedom of speech, it is merely correct, polite and civil. Your sense of national identity has nothing to do with fear or hatred of others, but should be about your sense of self.

It makes me think of Ernest Rutherford, who was a physicist from New Zealand, who spent most his life here. He is widely considered as British, maybe because he helped discover radioactive half-life, the nuclear structure of atoms and brought glory to the empire and wasn’t viewed by people as a ‘parasite’ on the tax payer. Anyway, I digress, back to St George.

The following is what I know.  It is likely that Saint George was born to a Christian noble family in Lod, Syria Palaestina during the late third century between about 275 AD and 285 AD, and he died in Nicomedia. Now straight off the bat, that doesn’t sound like he was English, but I shan’t judge. He probably never really killed a dragon (as dragons never existed) and didn’t do any of the fanciful things he is purported to have done. These aren’t my words, but the words of the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

But he is supposed to have existed, and that is that. Yet now he is seen by far right groups in this country as some sort of icon who the nation will rally around in its battle against multiculturalism, or to be more specific, Islamification. Here, another problem arises (and proves that racists should do a bit of research),  Saint George is somewhat of an exception among saints and legends, in that he is known and venerated by Muslims, as well as Christians throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to Asia Minor.  His stature in these regions derives from the fact that his figure has become somewhat of a composite character mixing elements from Biblical, Quranic and folkloric sources, at times being partially identified with Al-Khidr. He is said to have killed a dragon near the sea in Beirut and at the beginning of the 20th century Muslim women used to visit his shrine in the area to pray to him. So the far right of this country want us to celebrate the martyrdom of St George, patron saint of England, but also venerated saint of Islam. That sounds like embracing multiculturalism to me.

I think most people who have issues with our dying sense of nationalism, and a lack of pride in one’s country is that they still cling to a dream that some fictional ideal of their country has been eroded away. Like John Major and his obsession with village greens and a rose tinted view of the 1950s. 

So what am I? I am a British citizen, that is what it says on my passport, so that’ll do me.

-        Anand

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I am currently playing a game with a friend of mine. Each week we get a random word generator to spit out a word, and then we are writing a 500 word story about that. The word this week was Torpor. This was my entry.

***

The Torpor

It crept up on us without anyone really noticing. It startedwith pins and needles in the tips of our fingers. I remember dropping a pencilat the onset and then struggling to pick it up.  Then we started to feel colder. Theextremities first, feet and hands, followed by our legs and arms. If you werestill able to walk, you’d have seen people huddling where they were. Drawingtheir legs up to their chests in a hope to keep their trunks warm, arms wrappedaround knees like a mother’s embrace. They’d drag themselves into alcoves anddoorways, and would rock and gasp for air, not sure of what was happening. Leaningagainst the window frame of my apartment, I watched it all unfold on the streetsbelow me.

Then the tiredness came.

In waves that crashed over us like an anaesthetic, therocking slowed, and instead a nodding of our heads became the only movementmade by any human. I fought every urge to close my eyes, but it was futile.Breaths were long, and heavy, each one pulling further behind our eyes, intothe all-encompassing blanket of sleep. The last thing I remembered, was lookingup, drawing in all the oxygen I could, and seeing hundreds of shooting starsfalling straight through the sky to the earth, and then nothing.

***

When I opened my eyes next, the world had changed. Where outof my window there used to be a river of tarmac with concrete and steelbuildings banking it, now there was a meadow of mountain flowers. Dabs ofcolour gently swaying in the wind, the hard greys of man long gone. Thebuildings had been encased in vines and branches. The world sparkled like anemerald as the light streamed in at low, seductive angles. I saw other peoplestirring as whilst I watched a flocks of birds flying in between these new vegetationcovered titans. Bushes and climbers tumbled off their roofs like waterfalls,with buzzing clouds of insects humming and filling the air with their song. Ibreathed long and hard, and it was a clean breath.

I couldn’t tell if it was just that my eyes had been shut solong that I was seeing stars of the eyelid, but I saw hundreds of them dancingup into the pale blue sky.

My body ached, and the time being sat motionless came into starkrelief. Years must have passed, and looking around my apartment, I saw amixture of dust and life. Plants were pushing themselves through thefloorboards, whilst the light fittings had come loose, and the vines weredangling down. I put my feet on the floor, and it was cool. I walked down intothe street, and joined all the others looking at the world in silence. My feetclawed at the grass a couple of times, to feel the soft ground beneath them,and my hand instinctively rested on the flower heads, the soft petals giving tomy touch.

It was so very beautiful.

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As a kid I was never allowed to play with guns. My mum was 100% against it. She thought that even though it was a toy, it would somehow normalise them in my tiny brain, and at any time in the future, I could go mental and shoot a whole bunch of people.

I would hope that she raised me with better morals, but as a precaution, I cannot begrudge her thinking. So whilst all the other kids were out there playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, I was drawing cheetahs instead. (On an aside, when I did play Cowboys and Indians, I was always an Indian…bow and arrow for me! God bless early 80s racism.)

As a result of this hippy like upbringing, I am staunchly against guns. I am glad I live in a country where it isn’t easy to get hold of a gun. I like that. I think anyone who wants a gun should have to go through some gruelling psyche test which basically fails all but 99.9% of people who take it. Why? Because people go nuts and shoot other people. I mean, at the end of the day, why does anyone want a gun at all? They want one, so as and when an opportunity arises, they can shoot someone, maybe in the face!

A friend of mine went to Lithuania for a stag do, and there he fired several guns, and he said the power was incredible, and he could see why people are seduced by them. I think that statement alone shows that we shouldn’t have them. You shouldn’t be seduced by metal killing machines.

I often think about the line in the song Paperback Bible by Lambchop.  

I have always thought

That hand guns were made for shooting people

Rather than for sport

Yeah, that is all hand guns are for. And people who say, ‘what about self-defence?’ Well how have you gotten yourself in the situation where you need a gun? As a coward, I know you can avoid conflict if you want. I think this is a weak argument. Everyone should be allowed a gun to protect themselves vs no one should be allowed a gun thus not needing any to defend oneself. I know it isn’t as simple as that, but let’s look at the numbers.

In 2010, 12,996 people were murdered by hand guns in the United States. California and Texas being the highest gun crime rate states. Home of cowboys and gangsters, two of the most overly glamorous depictions of having a gun. Compare that with the UK, with its gun laws, which had around 40 in the same period of time. I know that it isn’t right to compare them directly due to population sizes, but it does show the benefit of more stringent rules on such a thing as gun ownership. If we were to scale the numbers, we’d still only have 145 odd to their twelve thousand.

Why am I talking about this? Well there has been another mass shooting in Oakland. Add to that the recent murder of Trayvon Martin, and you get a picture that maybe America should have a look at its constitution, and see if maybe another amendment might be made. Currently, the second amendments states the following:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

The intended meaning of the amendment has long been disputed between supporters and opponents of gun rights, with opponents arguing that "well-regulated militia" allows firearms regulation, while supporters placing emphasis on the second clause. Either way, is it a relevant in the modern world? Sure, the NRA would say that it is, and it is about their freedoms etc. But they forget that guns do one thing better than almost anything else, and that is take freedom from the world. Whether it is on a nation against nation, or on a street corner, someone’s freedom will inevitably be taken from them thanks to a gun.

I don’t know enough about gun politics to even comprehend the complexities of the stuff that they argue. So I am going to use Occam’s Razor, which states that all things being equal, the simplest solution to a problem is usually correct.

Problem: People go bonkers and shoot people because they have access to guns.

Solution: Stop people having guns

It isn’t about regulations, or tougher laws, or anything else. It is about stopping them getting into the hands of those who believe to take a life is a freedom they are afforded by a document from 1787. But they won’t change, because the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the US, so as long as that continues, they will have school shootings, and a ridiculously high murder rate.

-        Anand

PS: Whilst at university, I became incredibly good at the game Time Crisis 2, which was a light gun based arcade. I mention this because even with my upbringing, and my staunch dislike of them, I still enjoyed playing with a fictional one…which is part of the problem. They are too seductive, in whichever form they take.  

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Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

He has almost stopped walking, as he feels his paw into each new step. The snow cracks, and then goes silent as his foot is enveloped by the cold. Then, as the wind picks up for a brief moment, he smells her, and he turns from steps, to a trot, to a run.

Scht scht scht, the noise of the trees whip past his ears. He runs not looking back, he knows nothing is there. He is the king of this land, he is lord of all the naked trees and the brittle hard ground.  He doesn’t look back for nothing chases him, he alone lives without fear, without doubt in his actions. His paws splay, and sink into the snow, it saps his strength, and he slows to a canter again.

It is late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees stretch towards him like a baby’s reach to its mother.  They slide over his smooth, white fur, echoing the stripes that are chocolate and dripping down his side.

A short noise, like a breath, followed by a thud and he stops still.

His pale grey eyes scan the ocean that stretches before him, his tail dropping, lowering to rest just above the snow. His own shadow, a demon, that undulates over the ground behind him, little puffs of condensation plume from his nostrils. 

He waits with infinite patience. Time means nothing to him, he has no sense of his own mortality.

Then, after an age, he moves, it may have been nothing but snow falling from a tree. Now there are just the creaks in the pine, and he moves on.

He picked up the scent of the female 3 days previously, and has called for her, but he has heard nothing in return.

The sky is darkening, darkening far quicker than normal, and looking up, the tiger sees the sun is slowly being devoured by the moon. He watches it for a while, a strange and peculiar thing, but he has seen strange things all his life, and this is merely another. He would eat the sun if he found a mountain tall enough for him to reach it. He would tear the moon from the sky if he could jump that high. The sky is continuing to darken, and he can see all the new blinking stars in the sky. Their irregular patterns, and blinking so differently to those who stoically watch him every night.

He walks on.

He comes across her laid in a clearing. The trees form a respectable guard around her, obedient sentries standing watch. He looks about, it could be a trap, however in all directions lie nothing but trees and the rasping wind. They peel apart for him, or so it seems, and the full horror of her comes into focus. Her eyes have fallen back into her skull, and there are only empty sockets to see the eclipse. They were her mother’s eyes, and she will pass them on no more, and he will never see them again or be seen by them. Her lips are peeled back and dried, her teeth showing to all the world. A defiant and angry smile for her death, that unblinking quality only an elemental creature can show. Something that must be ripped and torn from the ground, for nothing else will quell it, nothing will ever tame it.

At first he barely notices. As he lowers his face to the carcass, and gently tries to move it with his head, he can’t tell that the hairs on his face a retreating into his skin. He doesn’t feel his skull changing shape. It is the nature of magic that it is almost imperceptible, and as the moon edges across the sun, his nails turn from mountainous claws to flat land masses. His stripes disappear, and he shrinks till he is no longer the last tiger, but instead a frail man.

He is old, much older than the 12 years he has been alive, as if his heart has always beat faster, keeping a different time. A thin pale wisp of beard falls from his chin, and his eyes, which were so piercing as a tiger, are cloudy, and full of regret. He looks to his hands, the skin is bunched and almost clear, mottled with pale blue and brown spots. Veins he has never seen before branch between his knuckles, red and blue highways, he turns the over to see his scored and dry palms. He goes to call, but there is no roar to come from him, just a heaving sob.

Gently, as if he might wake the tiger, he places his hands on her chest. It is cold, as you’d expect in the snow, and there is no heart beat, no bellows like breathing. Just a heavy, leaden certainty to her death. He looks around, to see if her murderer is present, and he is. The cold suddenly comes for him, through the trees, scratching at him in the unnatural gloom of the eclipse. He instinctively draws himself closer to her, her fur becoming the closest he will get to a cloak. Thick, fatty tears leak from his eyes, mottling her fur as they bleed from him and become part of her embalming.

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand the sun disappearing, but more important, he doesn’t understand her being taken from him. Again, he goes to roar, but a wail of anguish is all he can muster. The wind takes it away, thin and reedy as it is, and it is lost in the whistling between the leafless branches. He scratches at the snow with his hand, till he gets to the soil, his kingdom of rust. There is an inevitable decay in his world now, a timer and terminal disease.

He looks up, and the stars look down on him, they weep for him. Their slow, blinking tears dropping from light years away. He knows nothing of suns or stars. He knows only the corpse in front of him, and the cold. He hasn’t smelt any other tiger for over a year, and his chance of mating now is zero. There is only him. His world has always been a shrinking domain, it has always been something that people have taken from him, and no king wants to sit idly by and allow it, but what else could he do? In the beginning, he’d seen many splashes of blood on the snow. Rorschach blots spilling out in a dark red, but it had been many years since he’d even seen another tiger. Now, with creeping certainty, he knows he is last. Is he scared to be alone? Is he scared to be the last?

It is unbecoming of a tiger to fear its demise. It is unfitting for something as magnificent as he to fear his own mortality. Like his love before him, he will not cow down to the reaper. No tiger has feared death, nor he, not he king of all the ice and trees. Even as a man, he stands, looking down at the one he loved, and he feels the spirit of all the tigers that have come before him. He is not this man’s body he now fills, he is a tiger. He is the final tiger, and he will not go quietly, he will roar, and tear and make the world fear his kind.

There exists a space between all of us, but not for this tiger, not for this man. They are both one and the same. This eclipse was some peculiar god’s final gift to him, a triumphant salute, a fanfare for the last. He feels in his bones what the future holds in store, and he looks hard at her stripes knowing there will be no more after him.

This is an idea he cannot comprehend or mourn, and which merely is. Can something so precious, so rare, ever be lost? The tiger cannot answer this, for it isn’t his place, and as he looks at the hollow skull of his mate, he hears her cry in his heart. It swells louder and louder, until the tundra shakes with it. Crows miles away turn and lower their heads, for it is he who is now roaring, it is he. This man, this tiger, and as the sun is reborn from behind the moon, he falls to his hands and knees, and slowly his teeth grow and lengthen. His tail sprouts, and fur bursts from his skin. Again, a painless transformation, but this time he roars and roars so all the world knows, he is the last, and they should all weep, howl and cry for this.

Strange that he should come to the end of his life in the forest, and no longer be certain of the road ahead. Then, on the horizon in the returning light, he sees her, made of echoes and sun rays, and she turns to him and he begins to walk to her.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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I bet £100 that the apocalypse will not involve dragons in anyway! 

I can’t remember the film I was watching, maybe it was The Road, or more likely it was Independence Day, either way, it made me think, I have absolutely no survival skills! If tomorrow, the dead rose up from their graves, I wouldn’t have the first idea on how to stay safe. I would live off all the food in my cupboards, and then slowly but surely starve. Could I be bothered to venture out into the wilds to forage? Could I bollocks, who wants to be ripped limb from limb by hungry feral undead?  Especially the hungry feral undead of Finsbury Park and Holloway.

This thought gave me an idea, could I write a book about what to do in specific apocalyptic situations? Then I decided that a book would be too much, and who wants to spend that much time thinking about the end of the world? It can’t be healthy for you. So I decided to do a real top level blog about it instead.

I am going to use the zombie apocalypse as my case study, but I feel most the rules are universal. Telly is all about the Zombie apocalypse, you can’t move for all the reanimated dead bodies craving brains (the cast of Geordie Shore are safe, lucky bastards!) These were the tips I could find:

• ·         Head to the mountains, you never hear about zombies in the cold, unfortunately for us in the UK this means probably going to Scotland, and I doubt that is cold enough.  Yet I imagine if we all did that, issues would soon arise, see my point about learning sociology.
  
• ·         Avoid infection of the Zombie virus by just hiding out, and not getting bitten. But what if it is airborne? Well then make sure you have those masks people wear on trains in Japan.  And lots of hand sanitizer. And maybe a hazmat suit, you can buy them online for like £50! Well worth your preservation if bombs have dropped and the world is all radiated. (This is what happens when you read the book Z for Zachariah when young!)
  
• ·         Learn how to make a shelter  with home defences. I live on the 3^rd floor of a block of flats, with a balcony, come and get me you undead douche bags! Unfortunately I don’t have much that I could hurl at them from there, but I could watch them, milling about. Actually,  I live near a school, last thing I could stand is seeing lots of zombie 6 year olds.
  
• ·         Don’t go to work! Look, I am looking into alternatives to travelling on public transport during the Olympics. Can you imagine what would happen if the apocalypse came? That is basically a giant P45 for the whole nation. Although maybe if you worked in ASDA, you would go in, and set up some society where you are king or queen, and then use a bartering system with people who came to you for help. You probably want a gun though, because people in the apocalypse will go feral, and bartering is an idea that probably won’t stand up in an ‘each to their own’ way.
  
• ·         Safe food and water gathering. Stock up on tins of peaches (people love tinned peaches in the apocalypse, because seemingly that is what we all miss the most!) and those bottles of water you can get for cheap in PoundLand.  Also, get some soap, not shower gel, that gets used too quickly. Get some Coal Tar Soap, sure you end up smelling like a man from the 1950s, but you will also be clean. Word of caution, if a nuclear bomb has been dropped, the chances are that the water in the taps is radiated, as are rivers and the such like. Don’t go for a dip! Sort of related to this, you might want to buy some chewing gum, as halitosis will still be an issue.
  
• ·         Weapon and trap creation. You need weapons. Try and remember all that stuff from the one archery lesson you had at school. Make sure you have some sort of long pole in your house so you can prod people with. Have some knives, although I imagine a knife is only good for murderous intentions which is disturbing on every level. Maybe stick the knife onto the end of your mop pole making a spear, that is blatantly for self-defence.
  
• ·         Make a plan with your friends.  My friends and I mentioned that if anything ever happened, we would go to the Cock and Dragon pub in Cockfosters,  and wait there for 7 days,  if no one comes, they are dead, and it is time to move on. Now, I think that pub has shut down, which means we need alternative plans. Also, it is only men, which is no good if we need to repopulate the human race at some point! Although that takes me to another possible scenario…
  
• ·         What if a plague hits that wipes out a whole gender! What if we are left with only women, or only men? Only women would be ok, there are sperm banks and the such like, and I am sure they would be a collaborative bunch. Only men is barely worth thinking about!
  
• ·         Learn sociology. Now I know it was always one of the crapper a levels or degrees you could take, but learning how people react in a pressure situation is vital. For example, if I am hungry, I snap at people. Ask my mum. Imagine I haven’t eaten for 3 days, I may bash someone in the face with a cricket bat for a Kit Kat. I would like to point out here I would never bash anyone’s face in with a cricket bat, unless society had crumbled, the undead were walking the earth, and the other person had started it. It is a specific scenario I hope never occurs.
  
• ·        Get a dog. Why? Sure you have to feed it, but it is a good early warning system, and will also help you not go bonkers as you roam the irradiated wasteland.
  

I think the above should help keep you safe and happy, however, the big question I have, is why would you want to survive anyway? I mean, if bombs have made existence hard and horrible, or all your friends and family have become ravenous flesh munchers, why would you want to survive? People have this romantic idea that everything will be ok, like we as a society will rise from the ashes, but I can’t see that happening, curse my dad for making me a realist!

-          Anand

P: Actually, I think there is an appetite for a proper survivalist guide, written with some humour. A lot of the other guides seem very serious!  

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Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,

An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story,

Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,

An' Aa'll tel ye 'boot the worm

In the inns of County Durham, when the skies are grey, and the rain batters down like a blacksmith’s hammer, they tell the story of John Lambton, heir of the estate he is named after, and conqueror of the Lambton wyrm.

They sing of a young man, who was impetuous and glib, who never went to church when told too, and who danced a merry jig. This is his story, from when he was young all through to the sadness that befell his family.

***

Many years ago, when most of the folk of County Durham could neither read nor write, lived the young man in question. John Lambton had no time for the wittering of holy men, and on Sundays he would travel down to the River Wear to fish. On this Sunday in particular, as he bounded to the river, he came across an old man under an oak tree.

‘A penny for an old man, and a future I will tell you.’

John rummaged around, and finally found some copper for him, and placed it in his dirty, wrinkled palms.

‘John Lambton, no good will come of you missing church, for if you do not go, Old Nick will take hold of your family, and not let go.’

‘Old Man! I don’t believe the bunkum of the bearded men in Church, I fear no demons, or dragons, or the flames of hell. Surely it would be wiser to fear the actions of men?’

‘Very well, but heed my warning nonetheless. You’ll catch nothing in the river, till the Sunday sermons have finished.’

With that, John turned and walked away.  He was annoyed at the words the old man had spoken, and that rankleded in his belly, for he had given him money in good faith. He turned to where the man had been sat, only for him to be nowhere to be seen.  Puzzled, John went to the river, took off his boots, and rested his feet in the water, rod in hand, and waited.

Beautiful white clouds rolled over themselves in the sky, like gypsy tumblers he’d once seen, as John sat with nothing was biting on his line. Finally, when the bells of St Cuthbert and St Mary began to peel over the hills, he caught something powerful and large. He wrestled long and hard with this creature, till finally he wrenched it from the water.

What a ridiculous sight met his eyes, for on the end of his line was a salamander the size of his thumb. It had a flat, wide head, with little holes down the side, with four squat legs along its thin torso.  He gave the fishing up for dead that day, putting the beast in his pocket, and began to wander home.

On his way, he came across the same old man, stood at some cross roads.  John approached him, whistling.

‘Old man, everything you said came to pass, but for one thing, no misfortune has befallen me. For if anything, I have caught the devil himself!’ with that, John took from his pocket the small and slimy thing. It wriggled and wormed whilst the old man recoiled.

‘Foolish young boy, that tiny bewitched creature will be both the making of you, and the breaking of your family! It will want your family’s milk, and your friend’s flesh. It will bring terror to all those who encounter it, and a terrible wyrm it will become’

‘Pah!’ John proclaimed, holding it by its tail ‘I shall toss this into the well near Biddick’s Wood and we shall hear nothing more of it!’

With that John went to the well, and did just that.

***

Years passed, and John and his family forgot that day. But the wyrm did not forget, and it lay in its well, growing, and plotting and waiting for its moment in the sun.

John had became a grown man, and Christ entered his life, the holy spirit his soul, and in penance to his rebellious and foolish ways when younger, John joined the crusades. 

And whilst he fought his way to the promised lands, to save it for all Christendom, the wyrm continued to scheme and fester.

At first farmers noticed that their cattle numbers were dwindling, and when rustling and blight were ruled out, they realised something more monstrous was to blame. One night a militia of men, with pitch forks and flames, wandered the lands of County Durham but few of them returned home to their loved ones. The wyrm fed on their insides and on their cries for help, growing ever bigger with each meal. It had grown large, with pale white skin, which was covered in a thick, oozy poison, and it was said that if one was to cut a piece of it from it, in would reattach it with some dark magic. It had left its well a long time ago, and so large was it that it wrapped around Fatfield Hill 7 times with its coils.

The wyrm was a beast of no remorse, and it went from eating sheep, and cattle, to small children and women from the land.

The villagers would give that hill and wide berth, and soon, it became a place no one went.

Lord Lambton, father of John, went to the wyrm and begged it to stop, to which it replied,

‘I will only stop if daily you fill a trough you keep for your horses with milk from your 9 best cows.’

And so with a heavy heart, he agreed, and daily, Lord Lambton would watch as this hulking abomination crawled up to his estate, and supped from his trough.  Soon all the lands in County Durham were affected, and no matter how many knights went to vanquish this creature, none returned alive.

A blackness befell all of the north east, as they lived under the tyranny of the Lambton Wyrm!

***

John Lambton returned from the crusades 7 years later, to find his father’s estate in utter ruin. The fields were neither planted nor ploughed, and the buildings in a ruinous state. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he ran to his family home.  

On his way, he met a wise woman, a witch, who recognised him.

‘Ah, John Lambton, father of the accursed wyrm! You have returned from the crusades to find this horror!’

‘What has happened here crone!’ Said John, angry at the name she had called him.

‘That little beastie you caught all those Sundays ago has grown, and has brought misery on all those in these lands!’

‘Then I shall tear it limb from limb, and my sword will cut and hack till it is nothing but bloody lumps on the floor!’

The old woman laughed, and told him how those pieces would merely reattach to the wyrm, how it was 7 times the size of Fatfield hill, and how all the knights in Christendom couldn’t stop it.

‘There must be a way to stop this infernal creature! Wise woman, tell me what I am to do.’

‘I shall tell you, John Lambton, but when you have quelled the creature, and taken the heart from its chest, ensure you kill me the first thing that meets you, and bring me its heart. If you do not, I bind thee that no Lambton, for 9 generations, will die peacefully in their beds!’

‘I promise, so tell me what to do.’

‘Gather yourself the heads of spears and arrows, and bind them to your armour, making one of thorns! Fight the beast in the River Wear, so that every blow you make will carry away its body, and it will never be able to heal. Let it wind around you, and cut itself to ribbons, and you will surely win.’

‘I shall do just that.’ John Lambton ran to his father. He did not tell him stories of the Crusades, only how he must kill the wyrm, and the promise he had made with the hag. The Lambton’s plotted themselves, and decided, when the creature was dead, that John would blow his hunting horn 3 times, and his father would release his dog. That way no human need be harmed.

So John had his armour made, his metal helmet like a crown of thorns, and with sword and axe he went to the beast.

‘Come fight me in the River Wear, devil of Durham, come and be vanquished so you can return to Lucifer’s bosom!’

‘Hah, young John Lambton, my rescuer from the squalor, I shall devour you, and make this tragedy whole!’

With that they went to the river, and fought a brutal, and bloody battle. Sword and axe rained down like lightening on the wyrm, which screamed and roared in pain. It coiled itself around John, but was sliced into strands as thin as a fair maiden’s hair, and the River Wear did carry its pieces all away. Finally the wyrm fell down dead, and John, triumphantly blew his hunting horn 3 times.

Alas, his father, who had suffered 7 hard summers, and 7 hard winters at the hand of the creature, forgot their plan and ran to his son.

Woe befell them, as they realised what had happened. But John could not bring himself to kill his father, and so they took the heart from his dog anyway, and went to the wise woman.  

But the women who are wise, who know and see all things, are queer and malevolent. They play games with all of us. She took the heart, and threw it in the fire, and barks rang out in her mud hut.

‘So the first creature to come to you was your faithful dog, how tragic that was. Go on to your homes Lambtons, and what will come to pass, will be.’

As they left, they didn’t hear her whisper,

‘You may lie to me, but you cannot lie to the words we both spoke’

***

So they returned to their family home, and before long the fields were green, the cattle fat, and the bells rang out from the churches of County Durham.

But then, whilst out riding one day, Lord Lambton fell into a river a drowned, and the curse of the witch began to take hold. 9 generations of Lambtons had no peace in death, and died far from their beds. 

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The sun was an infrequent visitor to the fjord, much like the bees in summer, or the postman. The minutes of the day in Per’s life were a series of fleeting moments, opportunities he tried to grab hold of, and keep for himself. Opportunities that never lasted.  Orphaned at a young age, he lived in his small hut, fishing, hunting for food, and keeping himself to himself. Seasons would bleed into one another with little to no incidence, and after a while, he expected life to be nothing but that.  A low grey sky of an existence, featureless and cloying. That was until his 15^th birthday.

He’d heard of a well, hidden up in the hills, and was told that it belonged to a troll. This troll was said to have been drawing all the love from the world like a poison. The story he was told was that anyone who could steal a pail of water from him would be granted a wish. However, if he was caught by the troll, he would have a curse put upon him, or worse eaten. Feeling brave and foolish, who were themselves excellent bedfellows, he headed out to well.

The climb was neither daunting nor demanding for a boy of 15. He all but skipped over the rocks and uneven ground, whistling whilst he went. Occasionally he would stop for a moment, letting the light that streamed through at angles between the branches, play over his closed eyelids. The world and he both felt very much alive that day, and as the dewy grass sprayed the back of his legs with droplets, he bounded onwards and upwards.

The sun grew fat and bloody like an orange, and was waddling downwards to the horizon when he reached the well. The air was cooler here, and as he approached, he saw the skulls of men and women who had foolishly ventured to the well.  The courage drained from him like water through a sieve, and the bones on the floor whispered to him, run away, they said, runaway Per of the fjord, for no good lives here.

‘Of course there is good in all the world,’ he spoke aloud to no one in particular, and from the branches above him, some of the birds smiled and sang for him. This filled his chest again with a fire that moved his arms and legs till he was at the well. By it, on a tattered rope, hung a rusty bucket, with dark, congealed globules of what must have been blood. Per was not scared of wolves, trolls nor the blood of the dead, and he picked the bucket up and threw it in the well.

Time slowed as watched it fall into the darkness. It fell for what felt an ice age, the rope speeding through his loose grip, finally, he heard a faint splash, and the rope went slack. Jerking it, he began to pull. Arm over arm, hand over hand, he pulled. But it felt so much heavier than a small bucket should, so as he drew it up, he peered into the darkness. At first he saw nothing but blackness, and he couldn’t think for the life of him why the bucket was so heavy. Then, he saw, as he was bringing the bucket up, a terrible pair of glinting eyes.

The troll.

‘I see you troll, son of Hel, child of darkness, bane of the damp and squalid well, I bring you up to grant my wish!’ With that, the bucket went slack, and the troll exploded from the well. He was corpulent and grotesque. Saliva fell from his slack jaw like a mountain stream, his teeth like granite boulders in a river. Hunched, his knuckles grazed the earth, his legs bowed and squat.

‘You are clever young man, Per of the fjords. Many don’t realise my presence until it is too late. So I chomp and chew on their bones and their marrow, and bring to their families nothing but sorrow. But I see you young Per, an orphan and alone, your wish I shall grant.’ He bowed his head, but smiled within, for the wishes of men were always the wishes of fools.

Per thought for a while, pondering what could possibly be worth a wish. At first greed swelled in his chest, and he thought of treasure, of goblets encrusted with jewels. But none of these would fill the hole in his heart. The hole that years of solitude had weathered till no matter how much gold he had, it could never be filled.

‘I wish to never be alone again, I wish to be surrounded by those who love me.’ The troll smiled at these words, and he said,

‘Look up and around you, Per of the fjords, the birds sing and smile for their love of you, so they will follow you till the day you die, and you shall never be alone again.’ With that, the troll lumbered over to his well, and threw his flabby form to the bottom. Per looked up, and on every branch, of every tree, birds sat and called to him, and as the troll laughed from the bottom of his well, Per laughed too. For this wasn’t a curse for him, he thought, but a blessing.

So he walked to the his hut, and by him the birds sang and called, and flocked around him whilst he whistled.

But as with all these wishes, Per could not see the curse of the troll. Per of the Fjord became Per of the birds, and for many a village and towns around, his name was talked about, not in awe but in mocking.

‘Foolish Per,’ they would sing, ‘Instead of all the gold he could carry, or a beauty he could marry, he chose birds who’s wings beat him, their calls nothing but lies which are fleeting.’

Per ignored them, for him, the birds filled him with joy every morning. As the sun rose, they would call to him, waking him from the kingdom of dreams, and he would go out on the fjords to fish. Like sentries they would warn him of awful weather, and with eyes like starlight, they would spy the best fishing spots.

Yet even though they brought him such joy, no woman would come and share Per with them. They were horrified to see them flock to him, and the way they surrounded his hut. So Per, though never alone, was more alone than ever before. Previously it had been a choice of his to be isolated, but as the years passed, he longed to have a wife and a child. People to love, not birds.  His hair was beginning to grey like the wolves of Svalbard, and his eyes, once blue, were too becoming dull.

One night, when the moon was shining like a saucer of milk, Per was looking out of the window, when Harald, the Snowy Owl swooped down and rested by him.

‘Per,’ he said, ‘we are all cursed by that wretched troll, for you will never find love, and we are the reason for keeping love from your world. I know who that troll was, I know all of Norway’s secret stories. I have been told by the oldest pines, and the pebbles in the stream. He was once a man who lost the woman he loved, and so he threw himself to the bottom of the well. I know where her bones lie, and if you were to fashion a club from them, her love for him would strike him from this earth.’

‘Where are these bones?’ Said Per, excited at the idea of salvation.

‘They are lying at the bottom of the fjord, I shall send the waders for you.’ With that Harald called to the night waders, birds with thin beaks and jet black eyes. He set them to the bottom, and a few hours later they arrived, carrying her ribs as arrows, and femur as a club. Per was saddened by the sight, but he had little choice. When morning came, he began his trek to the well.

Many years had passed, and no longer did he skip and gambol, his legs had grown weary, and often he used his weapons as crutches. Even though he was exhausted, the birds sang a marching rhythm, which through elemental magic, kept him moving. Scrambling, sometimes on his knees, he finally arrived at the well.

He was tired, and he knew he couldn’t fight the troll in that condition. Harald swooped to a nearby branch and gave him comfort.

‘Per, this is your one chance, I know you feel weak, and I know you feel feeble, but the love of the troll’s life will quell him, it will bind him, and break his hold on all of us.’

And with that, Per picked up the bucket and threw it to the bottom. It was so much heavier now, and each tug grated in his elbows and arms. Peering down, he shouted as loud as he could.

‘Troll of Hel and of squalor, I come to release myself from your curse’s grip’. There was silence, followed by a laugh of sickening pleasure. Then, the troll burst forth, having not aged, but having become even more grotesque in the intervening years.

‘Oh Per, I thought you’d come back sooner, to beg like all these other souls that surround us in these bones. Now I shall eat you, for you have no wish to ask for. I shall sup on your gizzards, and play with your innards. Oh Per how pleased I am to see you!’

But Per, with the calls of the birds in his heart, brought forth his club made of the troll’s loved one. ‘Do you see this, son of darkness, do you see whose bone I come to bash you with’

‘Freyja!’ The troll said, and for once Per heard fear in his voice, but this did nothing but embolden him, And so he began to swing. As each blow crashed upon the troll, a faint voice peeled out, my love, it said, my love.  Finally, he fell, broken, and dying. Per walked over to him, and his heart filled with pity.

‘Why?’ he asked of the beast, ‘why bring so much sorrow to all those who came here?’

‘Because all the love that was for me in the world was taken from me, so I wished to leach it from the world. But now, I too am free. Thank you Per of the Fjords, thank you Per of the birds.’ And with that he turned into a boulder, and all the bones that lay around the well turned to pale butterflies made of light.

And then the birds sang hosanna to Per, and flew up into the skies, and all over Norway and the world until only Harald remained.

‘Per, I have seen, north of here, a beautiful maiden, who owns a dairy and longs for a man who is brave, and loving and all that lies in between. Go to her, and I am sure she will bring you much happiness.’ And with that Harald took flight, as did Per. 

Per married her, and had many children, each of them named after the birds that still came and visited his hut. And on the day he finally passed from this world, all the birds, in all the world, cried out in sorrow, and it was at once a mournful and joyous sound. 

The birds of Nærøyfjord would never forget Per, the orphan who brought love back to Norway.

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The world will burn if Dawkins gets his way!

I was watching some programme with my mum last night after an impromptu popping in for dinner. Someone had bought, as a Valentine’s gift, shoes for a lady in one of my mum’s favorite Indian soap operas. Now I know for a fact, that shoes should never be given as a gift. What a mug! Doesn’t he know it is against our faith? It resulted in a terse conversation between woo-ee and woo-er. Now as westerners, you might think a pair of shoes would be a great gift for their missus on Valentine’s Day. And you’d be right, because all around the world people give shoes as gifts, and nothing terrible happens! This is just one of my issues with traditions (which I understand are separate to religion, but there is a big overlap!)

Earlier, over dinner, my father was describing to me how Vimto and Pineapple Juice tastes just like a Pina Colada. Ignoring my dad’s fondness for feminine drinks, we then talked about how my mum drank some rum punch on arrival to Antigua and really enjoyed it. She turned around, and said to my dad, you told me it was fine, and not alcoholic…I will never trust you again. I told her that she should relax, and it’s not like it is against our religion. She said it was, and I said religion’s problem is it has a vendetta against anything fun, and no wonder it was dying out as a lifestyle choice. No doubt my mum will phone me up, after reading this, and tell me off for telling this story, thinking it makes her sound like Frank Gallagher in Shameless!

Then I saw that Baroness Warsi was terrified about 'militant secularism'. Militant secularism is an interesting choice of words. Because last time I checked, no one blew themselves up because they didn’t believe in a god. Militant atheists don’t go around killing pro-life campaigners to make incredibly contradictory points. Sure, atheists are getting a louder voice, and sure there are enormous agitating douche bags like Richard Dawkins, but to call it militant is not strictly fair. It is demonizing to a group of individuals who, although unbearably smug, don’t really get a voice because to be honest, none of them cares that much.

Most the atheists I know (and I know a few), don’t hate people who have faith. They are staunchly of the live and let live ideology. My atheist chums don’t go around trying to convert people to atheism, and they certainly aren’t waging a campaign to drive Christianity to the sidelines, as purported by George Carey (ex-Arch bishop of Canterbury)

"There are deep forces at work in Western society, hollowing out the values of Christianity and driving them to the margins”

It all sounds a bit like a crappy Dan Brown novel. Like there are all these secret societies plotting and scheming. No doubt, somewhere, there is some sort of Albino ninja, just waiting, and self flagellating, until he gets a chance to take out Richard Dawkins in the name of God, but actually, he doesn’t realise that he isn’t working for a Christian organization, but an atheist one who wants to make Dawkins a martyr, and the cause all the people of the world to rally around his cause.

That will totally happen, I have predicted it now! (Although I think that might actually be the plot of the Da Vinci Code)

But the issue I have with this idea that secularism is in some way trying to destroy, or merely depose God is that it isn’t. All it asks is that certain things should not be decided on a matter of faith. As I have said before, faith is a wonderful thing, and if correctly positioned, can enable people to do great things for their fellow humans. But equally, it is appropriated by men and women, and used as a cloke and dagger to prevent things from changing, strike fear into those most vulnerable, or commit terrible atrocities.

I often think about how my dad’s view of the world has shaped mine. He is very much a fatalist, in that what will be, will be, and so there is no point worrying about it. If Christianity or whatever religions are on the wane, maybe that is for the best. At the end of the day, you don’t see people parping on about how the Ancient gods of Rome are no longer worshipped. Life and society is constantly evolving, and if people cease to align themselves with some medieval doctrine, and want to align themselves to reason and logic, well then that is just the world around us. Sure stuff will be lost in our collective shifting views on faith, but new things will be gained.

- Anand

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The Island Lies

The sea sashays up to his face, and then draws away. Hissing, it gets closer until it laps at his cheek. His eye opens like a trap!

How did I get here? He can’t remember. He barely knows himself.

The wet sand is heavy beneath him, he puts his weight on his palms and he pushes himself up.  The sky is low and grey, rolling and tumbling. His clothes are damp and he feels a chill, looking out to the sea, he sees a broken boat. It juts out of the gun metal water like a tombstone. Maybe he arrived here by that?

Shivering he looks inland and sees a cottage. It is run down, and from where he is he can see broken windows, pitiless pupils reflecting nothing. But it must be warmer than the beach. Wrapping his arms around his body, he walks towards it, hunched, and head down with his back to the wind that whips lashes across him.

His feet feel heavy, and he cannot remember a thing. At first it is an unsettling sensation, how can he not know who he is? But then the anonymity  becomes a comfortable blanket, he feels reborn. He picks up the pace and finally reaches the cottage.  The gate is creaking in its joints, slowly backwards and forwards, pull and push like a breath. He places his hand on it, and it becomes still and leaden, and he pushes it, and a rusty grinding noise squeals from its hinges.  He walks through and up the path to the cottage. Next to the path, just after the gate, he sees 3 mounds of earth, the final one which has a spade thrust into it, lies next to an empty hole. The earth looks freshly tilled, maybe someone lives here still?

He hears a quiet clattering noise, and looking up he sees hanging from the porch are small skulls. They seem to be those of birds, and rabbits and other unfortunate creatures, their eye sockets pleading him to turn back.  Turn away they whisper, turn away for we died here. He pays no attention to them or his imagination. It is cold, that is all that matters to him. Pushing on the door, it gives way easily, and he goes inside. He stumbles over a raised door frame, and falls to his knees. His hands splay out in front of him, and catch him from going face first onto the floor. It is dusty, and pulling himself up he looks around. He pats his hands together, and doesn’t realise how muted the claps are. Now he is closer, he can see that the windows are indeed broken in places, but also that the cottage seems to absorb all the light with little shining in its innards.

There is a small hearth, next to which a basic bed is laid.  A small paraffin lamp lies unlit by this, along with a scrap of paper. In the corner there is a crib, and as he approaches it, it moves, three shocking, jerking movements side to side. It is violent, and in no way caused by the wind. Then it becomes immobile again.  He knows better, but still he moves to it and places his hand on it. It is empty but for a raggedy doll inside it. One eye remains open, looking  out into the gloom of the cottage. A single grey eye, unblinking, the doll’s hair blonde and matted. He turns away, he cannot touch the doll, he is repelled by it.  A hint of a memory plays across his mind, but it is gone.

On the wall hang some skinned hares, they have pale red flesh, with strikes of yellow sinew mottling their haunches, whilst their blank dark eyes stare skyward to heaven.  He isn’t hungry, but he will have to eat at some time.

He sees on the window sill, a small transistor radio. Its aerial is broken, and he goes to pick it up. He turns it on, and there is no noise. He turns the volume all the way up, and turns the dials round and round.  Nothing comes from it, he opens the back and finds there are no batteries, and returns it to the window sill. He moves over to the bed, he is still shivering.

There is a tattered quilt, and a cracked picture frame, it is empty. He sits down on the bed, wrapping the blanket around him, and even though he knows it is a mistake, he lies down. Turning over he picks up the scrap of paper, it merely says,

And he fell to earth

He turns this over in his head. Maybe that is how he got to be here? Maybe he fell from a hot air balloon, or from heaven itself. Or more than likely, it is someone else’s memory which he is trying to take for himself. His eyes grow heavy and before he knows it, sleep has claimed him.

The wind whistles through the broken windows, and the bones clatter away like chirruping birds. He doesn’t hear them. As he sleeps, a hand he wouldn’t see, turns the radio dial to on. At first there is silence, but then the static noise begins to build. It starts as a faint hiss, but as the minutes pass it gets louder and louder, till the whole room is full of the white noise.  

He wakes with a start, covering his ears from the noise, which immediately stops.

It is dark. Night has come in, and a bright moon hangs in the sky, coating everything in a silver light. There is little for it to shine on in the cottage, but in the corner he sees 2 figures. One is small, and standing in the crib, it is holding the doll. Its head hangs at an odd angle, but even in the ethereal gloom he can tell it is looking at him.

The other figure is stood in the corner, with its back to him. He can see the long dark hair of a woman, and this apparition refuses to turn to him.

Then a voice, on the edge of hearing, plays from the radio.

His chest tightens, it is a man’s voice.

You can’t leave me! It says. You can’t, I won’t let you. You leave,  and I will have nothing!

Silence. A cloud passes in front of the moon and the cottage is plunged into darkness. He feels a thousand animal tongues licking at him, it is a sickening sensation.

A creeping cold has come into the cottage. He thinks he hears the skinned hares chattering their teeth, but they are long dead.  Goose bumps trot up his arms, and he pulls the blanket closer round him.

I’ll die the voice says from the radio,  I’ll die and take you with me!

The voice is distorted. He can’t quite make it out.  Then it screams, it screams with an anger and horror that shakes him to his very core.

I’ll KILL YOU!

The cloud passes, and the woman’s face is inches from his, it has been caved in with some blunt instrument, a thick treacle like blood ebbs from the cavities, and from her hollow eyes, he sees a horror he can’t comprehend. The voice is screaming, both animal, and human. I’ll kill you it repeatedly shouts, as the apparition retreats from him into the shadow.

The screaming becomes the static and the horror overwhelms him and he passes out.

He dreams of the same cottage, but of happier times. He sees faceless people embrace. He sees a family who love and share the smell of the sea, the winds breath and all that is simple on the island. But he sees that for them it is not enough. Love will not save them. Clouds roll in, and then it begins to rain blood. Thick droplets cover the flowers and ground and people like tar.  They stand opposite him, and the woman without a face points at him and screams. She screams from her mouthless face  YOU! YOU! YOU! YOU! YOU!

He wakes, not feeling rested at all. He doesn’t feel safe in this cottage, or on this island. Who was this murderous man? This was obviously a murderers house, and he no longer feels warm or safe there, he gathers up the scrap of paper, the quilt and decides to leave.  Before he finally goes, he makes a fire and cooks one of the hares. It is gamey and tough, and provides him only with a feeling of sorrow.  Wrapping himself he goes to leave, as he opens the door, the mounds of earth have moved.  Having been at the gate, they stand by the building now. He almost steps into the hole next to the third mound. His grave it would rapidly become. It is raining, and it is filling with earth and water, thick brown slurry is filling up on it.

This island seems cursed.  Stepping gingerly around it, he goes to the gate and looks around. He sees in the distance telephone box. It is red, like in the picture books of London,  and he thinks maybe I’ll able to call for help.  It looks like it is around a 20 minute walk, so steeling himself he sets off. 

At first he thinks he must have just not estimated correctly, because 20 minutes seemed to have passed, and he seems no nearer to the phone box. Yet he is dogged, and continues to march on regardless.  It stands on a hill, like a beacon, so he trudges on. The path soon disappears and he is scrambling over the ground, it is wet in the rain, and it undulates in deep gouges.  Soon he winds himself in the bottom of one which feels like a devil’s cauldron, it rises up all around him and he can’t remember how he got there. He looks to the rocky walls that surround him, and he notices they seem to almost be bleeding. A trick of the rain, the light, and the lack of sleep. Yet the worst trick is yet to come, he looks down, and beneath his feet is no longer the ground, but an eye. A bloodshot, cataract eye. It seems to be looking both at him and through him. He screams as he tries to understand what he sees. Stumbling he runs to the cliff face and tries to climb. He can’t remember how he even got to be there, he was just going to the phone box.  His nails tear and rip against the sharp rocks, but he is oblivious as he scrambles up, never looking down, never looking at the eye beneath him. It never blinks.

When he gets to the top, he throws himself to the floor and weeps. He wails and cries, I don’t know why I am here, what have I done to deserve this? But no one answers him.

Finally he pulls himself together,  and looking up, he sees the phone box.  It has rained for hours, and he could do with drying off. Scrambling to his feet he runs to it, as if it might disappear or be another trick.

The rain is getting harder, a torrential down pour, and lightening splits the sky in two, looking up he see the two figures, on a hill far away, the smaller one clutching its doll, the faceless woman turning her head away. But with the next flash of lightening they are gone.

He smashes against the door of the phone box and climbs in. He slumps to the floor, and sobs again. How pathetic he thinks to himself. A grown man scared by tricks of the light. Standing he lifts up the receiver.

There is no dialling tone. Of course he thinks. What else should I have expected? But then an anger swells up, he begins to smash the receiver into the phone, and the booth! Again and again, and it feels so familiar to him. Why ?! He thinks what have I done ? He thinks.  The receiver has become detached from the phone. He puts it back into the broken cradle and slowly slumps to the floor. It is getting darker and he has no desire to go back to the cottage. He resigns himself to staying where he is for the night.

A thief’s moon rises, one which is cruelly clear, but before long the clouds come in and devour it, leaving a pitch black canvas through the windows of the phone booth.  Sleep won’t come easily to him tonight, he knows this, so he braces himself for what the island will throw at him next.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

He sees a glint in the darkness, a solitary glimmer, like that of a wild beast’s eye. It flits in and out of the darkness,  and it is getting closer until it is almost on him, then, without warning it disappears.  He searches frantically, looking around in the gloom, but he sees nothing.  He holds his breath, as if the creature can smell it, but it doesn’t still his heart which pounds like a frightened dormouse.

Then the first thud against the phone booth, a dull shake which he feels in his fillings. Then a second, and a third until it is a cacophony of blows, shaking the booth till it feels like it will topple over with him in it, and slide down the hill it sits on. Stop he screams with all his heart STOP! And it does. He is panting and scared, which is when the moon returns from behind the clouds, and there, directly in his eye line is the small apparition. Nothing but a young girl, only just 2 years old, her neck broken and head hanging to its side. Her single visible eye stares at him, unblinking, thudding her palm against the glass.  He recoils, turning away,  why is he seeing this terrible thing? Who would do this to a young child?

And then the broken phone rings.  He looks up in shock, and then back but the girl is gone.  He doesn’t want to answer it, every fibre of his being says not to, but he does. The static is there, but then he hears a woman’s voice. I don’t love you anymore, I don’t know what you have become. Let us go? And then the man’s voice, Never! And then he hears the screams. He hears violence pour out of the receiver and fill the booth. He hears violent yelling, and the thuds of a terrible force. Soon the screaming stops, and he hears just panting. Then, a baby begins to cry. Crackling from the phone, it gets louder and louder till fills his head, and the hands over his ears won’t stop it piercing through his heart. He attacks the phone like a monster, ripping at it with his bloodied fingers, and finally ripping it from the wall.

Silence fills the phone booth.  As tears roll down his face, and he looks at his hands. The darkness and quiet washes over him, and he falls to his knees, quilt over his shoulders. He doesn’t sleep, just kneels there in silence, waiting for the sun to come, for the sun to save him.

It finally arrives, he doesn’t know the time, only that the dark has been banished for now. Standing, he stumbles out onto the island. Heather, and gorse, and grass stretch in all directions. Looking around, he searches for anywhere else for him to run, and he sees, in the distance, a lighthouse at the top of a cliff. There must be some way for him to get help there, a radio, or telephone or something and so he sets off.

The island seems to not want to play games, and it takes him 30 uneventful minutes to get there. It stands there with a phallic brutality, jutting out into the sky as a tower of Babel. The door is open, and entering he sees a table set out with a feast of meats and wine. An inappropriate breakfast, but he doesn’t care. He is so hungry, nothing else matters.

However, as he begins to eat, a slow realisation dawns on him. Each chew tastes more bitter and rancid, and he realises the food is rotten. The food, which looked so beautiful , tastes putrid, and looking down he sees maggots crawling over the meat, and the wine like vinegar. He throws this from the table and wretches onto the floor. Again his temper overwhelms him, and he turns over the table and chairs. He doesn’t understand any of this.  When the rage has subsided, he looks at the mess, and the regret crashes into him immediately and unremorsefully.  He walks away, and begins to search for a radio. Having searched everywhere in the living quarters, he resolves that it must be at the light.

He gets to the bottom of the stairwell, which is dark, and lit by small porthole windows. He places his hand on the wall, and gingerly begins his ascent. As he does, he hears the faint sound of a baby crying, and he begins to run up to it. He cares not that it might be the horror who tormented him in the phone booth, they must know the answer.  The wailing seems to call to something paternal, and so he runs faster till he bursts into the light room.

Somehow it is dark, and he realises the island has chosen to play with him again. The baby crying should have been his clue. Dead moths, and birds are strewn across the floor, and the lighthouse light revolves slowly, a weak and feeble yellow light casting a jaundice pallor on him. He sees nothing.

Then, amongst the little corpses, he spies a photo and letter. Brushing the brittle skeletons aside, he picks them up. Innately he knows the answer is within in them. He turns the over and the obvious horror becomes apparent to him. There, in front of him, he sees himself, stood next to a woman who is carrying a beautiful young girl, within whose arm is a small doll. He knows them now, they were his wife and child. He knows, but he can’t bring himself to admit it.

His hands are shaking as he tears open the letter, and pulling it out he reads it. It talks in a pitiful language of what he did. His jealousy, his cowardice and then his crime. It talks of his brutality in murdering his wife, and then, he can barely read the next sentence, how he murdered his daughter. His daughter who knew nothing of hate or violence. And he took that from the world. He did this. And this is his punishment. This godless, grey, lonely place is his punishment! These phantoms will never leave him, never let him forget what he has done. Large, contemptible tears fall to the letter, blotting the letters and making them ineligible.  He did all of this. He did it.

Standing, in the low light of the lighthouse, he opens the door to the railings outside. The moon looks down at him with no pity, as he stands on the railings. He wants it all to end, and as he throws himself from the lighthouse, he doesn’t look back. For if he did, he would see his wife and daughter, as beautiful as they ever were in life, but they don’t smile. They just watch as he crashes into the black tumult of the sea.

It is dark, but the sea moves his body gently till he is deposited onto the beach.

The sea sashays up to his face, and then draws away. Hissing, it gets closer until it laps at his cheek. His eye opens like a trap!

How did I get here?

He can’t remember that he is in Hell.

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I wish terrible things upon this man

I am only going to do intermittent blogs this year, life has got busier in a good way so I can’t spend my evenings writing pap! However I cannot let something that happened recently go by without showering my full ire on it. No, not Yachtgate with Michael Gove (It would be easy to just write a simple 3 word blog about this man, and it would read: Michael Gove - tool), but the inexplicable rise of the adult Onesie

What is this trend of onesies I hear you cry? For those who don’t know what they are, they are what that dick head above this blog is wearing. Something that makes a grown adult look like an oversized baby.

At what point does anyone think it is a good idea to wear the above?!

I don’t know how this trend even started, but I have a feeling some knob from something like TOWIE or some shite like that wore one. Maybe ironically, maybe for laughs, but someone out there thought, ‘that is a great look’. And now, shops are selling them. How long before designer onesies turn up? How long before budget ones turn up? How long before I am on the buss, and I see someone wearing one, and I go postal?

What if it is like wet look jeggings, where lots of people wear them, and they all look awful and no one tells them? Lots of people think it is a good idea, when actually all it means is blokes with slight pot bellies will wear them, and won’t realise they look like Albert Steptoe?

Now there are photos of men and women wearing them popping up all over the net, along with twitter being awash with comments about them. I work in Shoreditch, which is an area rife for this kind of crap. No doubt boat shoes and lumberjack shirts will become par say and will be replaced with the onesie. Can you imagine, ironic glasses, ironic moustache, ironic onesie…jesus there is so much irony there, that it stops being ironic. There is only so much irony one can take before it stops being ironic, and all you want to do is smash the person’s face in with the bottom of a fire extinguisher whilst ironically singing  some vegan crunk anthem in a warehouse where lots of telephones hang from the ceiling because…well just because as it is sooooo Dalston.

Surely any woman out there with any sense of humanity, and I mean ANY woman out there, would say to a man who wore one of those, Yeah, I thought you were cute, but now you are just pond scum. You don’t look adorable in that, you just make me feel really weird being here with you now. Please delete my number, and never call me again!

Why has this happened? Why did all of us take our eye off the ball, and let this happen? Surely what should have happened is that whoever the progenitor was of this trend, should have been seen in public and lynched. We should have taken a collective stand. I know what has happened. Some bloke was going to a fancy dress party as a baby. Turned up at said party and one girl, who was full of gin and self loathing, copped off with this bloke. She probably woke up, disgusted at herself, and made her excuses and left. Oh but the damage had already been done!  That bloke probably woke up, rolled over to his iPhone, tweeting: Gots me a onesie, scored with a babe (sic) LOLZ M8!!!

His mates met him down the pub, and whilst they played giant Jenga, he told them about how he scored dressed as a giant baby. They probably thought about it, saying it was well meta, cause like you dressed like a baby, she probably wanted a baby, then you did sex, which makes babies. Man that is so meta! And then they went home, onto eBay, and bought themselves some. Maybe an ironic camouflage one to show how manly they are, ironic cause they hate war. Then they got a Superman one, and a banana one…and then tweeted pictures of themselves, and their mates laughed. Then one girl ‘liked’ it on Facebook, and all his friends thought they should get one as it could result in sex! And the vicious downwards spiral opened up like the staircase in the House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski!

What is fashion? It is a way for us to part with money, to buy clothes that make us attractive to the opposite sex. So oddly primal is this that people seem to by-pass comfort and any other rational thought, to take part in it. But here is where we should all take a stand against fashion. Against trends. Against this abomination!

Vive la anti-onesie revolution!

- Anand

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I recall a holiday I once took to Dubai with my family, it is the only time all of us have gone on one together. We went to a lovely 5 star hotel, ate phenomenally well, sat about in the sun, and in general relaxed. I still hate the place. It feels like a soulless desert obsessed with consumerism, but it did give me one thing, and that was an utter love of Sherlock Holmes. I took two Penguin classics with me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, and needless to say, I became obsessed.

You can imagine my excitement when I heard that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat were to be making a modern adaptation. Gatiss I have followed since League of Gentleman, and I have also started to watch Dr Who (mainly due to Karen Gillan tbh). After the mild disappointment that was the Guy Richie Sherlock Holmes project (fun, but missing much of the stuff that makes Sherlock such a popular figure) I was slightly wary at first of this reinterpretation. But that was misguided, and I should have had more faith in the writers. It looked great, with lots of nice little modern touches and many tweaks on the Sherlock tropes were given a fresh flavour in the modern setting. As a self confessed geek, I loved spotting the little in jokes, the references to other titles of short stories. The Geek Interpreter being my personal favourite.

They got the perfect actor in Benedict Cumberbatch, with his slightly alien looks, and wonderful voice, to play Sherlock. I hadn’t seen him in anything prior to this, but you can see why he is in huge demand. He was brilliant in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and I am interested in seeing how he fairs as Smaug the dragon in The Hobbit, and as the principal villain in the new Star Trek film. In Martin Freeman the producers had the archetypal everyman, a cypher for all of us. People sometimes frown on actors like Freeman, as if what he does is a lower form of acting, but that is ridiculous. Watching the Office, he was all of us as Tim, and as Watson, he was like everyone else, in awe of Sherlock. And unlike camply suggesting that there was something ‘up’ with their relationship, or lampooning this, the writers wrote genuine affection for the two leads.

On an aside, for those who question whether Martin Freeman speaks for us all, look at his reaction here to the news that The Only Way is Essex wins a Bafta.

I am unashamed to say the final scene made me well up a bit, but I think that is because regardless of what anyone says, guys love a good bromance. We think of all our friendships, and wish that we could be back at school, where you knew you had at least one person who had your back. As you get older, you lose those people, they are whittled away, so to watch a programme about two adults in this scenario makes us all go a bit misty eyed. Or maybe I am just soft. Probably the latter.

Then you have the brilliant Louise Brearley playing Molly. Some would say it is a minor role, but I disagree, the moment she turned up in more than one episode, you kind of knew she would have a key part to play. And I am 100% certain she is the one who <REDACTED TO KEEP SPOILER FREE>

Basically, if you haven’t been watching these, go out and procure them. The dvd of the first series is out, pick it up cheap, and watch 3 lovingly crafted, intricate stories. If not you will be missing out on something that is really special. The new episodes are on BBC iPlayer so you really have no excuse.

Of course you could just watch Celebrity Big Brother.

- Anand

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This weekend, on the Sunday to be precise, my parents will have been married for 38 years.

38 years! More than half their lives have been spent together. They have seen their 2 children grow up, one of them get married and give them a grandchild, and the other one, well that is me.

In 1973 they got married, and my dad tells the story as follows. Now I may make the odd omissions, but this is how the story goes.

My dad was travelling down to Tanzania with an uncle of his. I can’t recall why they were going down there, maybe it was all a ruse to make my dad meet my mum. Whilst they had stopped in Dar Es Salaam, they were recommended a Brahmin families home where they could refresh themselves. Apparently they sat in their living room, my mum came in to serve them all tea, and then left. After a while, my dad and his uncle left. As they were walking away, my dad’s uncle turned to him and said, ‘So, what do you think of that girl?’ My dad, observant like a hawk, replied, ‘What girl?’ ‘The girl who served us tea?’ My dad said he didn’t recall her so they went back to the house. He was cajoled into a room to talk to her, whilst the family sat in the other room. The questions went along the lines of this: Do you like the Cinema? My mum asked, my dad said no…even though he used to bunk off to go to the cinema he loved it so much! Then she asked if he liked reading. He said no, he doesn’t, that was the truth. Then she asked if he liked the Beatles, I think he said yes. That was it. He walked through the doors to the waiting family, and in a miracle of understatement, he just gave a thumbs up.

11 days later, my dad married my mum, and the rest is 38 years of history.

It hasn’t been plain sailing, life generally isn’t. And really, would anyone want a life of non-incidence? Yet through my dad’s chequered medical history, my mother has been his lighthouse. Guiding him through and being there for him. I sometimes think about the sadness we have in our lives, and how they define us more than any joy. I know for a fact that my dad loves my mum more than anything else on this planet. It is a morbid thought, but I have always thought that if my dad goes first, my mum will survive, it will be the loss of something indescribable, but she is so resilient. My dad on the other hand, if my mum goes first, he would collapse like a house cards. Why? Because she is everything to him. She is the reason he wakes up, I honestly believe that. 

So congratulations to my mum and dad. I hope I can find someone who I can spend 38 years of my life with. Maybe it is seeing what they have is one of the reasons I am not rushing into the same decision, I want it to be a one time bet like it was for my mum and dad.

- Anand

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