Cracked Back.

Generally, I've had a shit January. I caught the worst cold I'd had for ages. Having a bright red nose and streaming eyes isn't really much fun, and the look doesn't really suit me, either. When I recovered from that, our boiler decides to commit suicide, and I spent most of last week shivering my nuts off. It's fixed now, and my house is now warm again.
But now, worst of all, I've managed to royally injure my back. It's my shoulder, mostly, but I've trappped a nerve and it's killing me. After spending possibly the most gruelling Monday at work I can remember for a long time (they're all pretty gruelling, actually, but this one had the element of serious physical pain thrown into the mix. Fun!), my lovely girlfriend booked me an appointment at a back clinic, which, luckily, is just around the corner from where we live.
This was the first time I've ever been to a chiropractor, and I was kinda nervous about what torture he was about to put me through, but as I was in so much pain I couldn't even sit down to have a poo (sorry to be brusque, but my bowels are a big deal to me!) I thought it can only help.
Also making me nervous was the fact that there was a running machine in the waiting room. I don't like running at the best of times, and the thought of doing it in the waiting room in my debilitated state didn't fill me with joy. I was imagining the receptionist laughing at this limping Quasimodo figure trying to jog along on this treadmill like a disabled gerbil. Then the lady who'd been in before me came out. She was walking very gingerly. My girlfriend, who had accompanied me, saw my worried mug and started laughing. This amused me too, but we had to keep straight faces in case the poor woman thought we were laughing at her. Trying not to laugh only makes me want to laugh even more, though, but I managed to keep it together, mostly because I knew that laughing would probably hurt. Everything else I did hurts, so it stands to reason that giggling would probably kill me, too.
So, it was my turn, finally. The chiropractor asked me a few questions, ascertained how much mobility I actually had and then he told me to take off my shirt and lie on the massage bed he had, on which you lie face down, and your face goes into a specially built-in hole. (I've seen a similar bed in the terrible Jackie Chan film The Protector, but Jackie's bed had a naked chinese girl lying under it for him to look at. No such luck in my case, I'm afraid. Just the floor. Luckily, though, unlike Jackie, no-one tried to stab me while I was lying there either, so it's swings and roundabouts.) The chiropractor pours some kind of lube on my back and gets to work. This hurts. I thought massages were supposed to be relaxing!
Then the really fun bit happened. He asks me to turn over and then he cracks my back. Ow. He does it again, higher up. Ow again. Then he puts his arm around my neck, grabs my head and twists it so my neck cracks. Fucking mega ow.

(Those James Bond movies lied to me! 007 always gets a blonde buxom masseuse to give him a rub down when he's injured, and he gets to shag them afterwards in the steam room. I get my neck cracked by a bloke called Steve. Not fair!)

Now, I'm a fairly big guy. I'm over six feet tall, and I weigh about sixteen stone (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a fat bastard.) but he was throwing me around like I was nothing. He said I had a high pain tolerance. Nice chat-up line. Normally, if I was in a situation where I've got my shirt off, covered in lube and a man is wrestling me, him saying 'You've got a high pain tolerance' might've worried me, but it made me feel cool. Yeah, I have a high tolerance of pain! I'm a rough, tough real man! This all evaporated when I winced and gasped as I struggled to put my shirt back on.
It turns out I have no spinal damage, but the stresses I put my muscles under at work are affecting my joints. So I have to do exercises. The main one involves putting my left hand on my right shoulder, my right hand on my left shoulder, like I'm hugging myself (I was doing that all last week anyway when I was fucking freezing!) and then I have to move my upper body in a figure-of-eight motion. Now this exercise is the first one you learn in junior school when you pretend to be mentally handicapped. If I stick my tongue between my lower lip and my teeth when I'm doing this, I'd look exactly like I did when I was ten and one of my classmates had just done something stupid. So, anyway, I have to keep doing this before I go again, next week.
I'm still in pain, though. I haven't been back to work since Monday, but it is improving. The fact I'm sitting here typing this is a sign of how improved I am. And I've managed to have several poos since. Hurrah!
I'm so bored, though. As I haven't been able to move out of my seat, I've just been sitting there watching DVDs and daytime telly. It may sound fun but it does get tiresome, especially when I'm watching shite like Tarantino's Death Proof or Cash In The Attic. I don't know which is the most gruesome!
Also, because I know she reads this blog (someone has to, I suppose) I'd like to thank my wonderful other half for looking after me. She wasn't really expecting this level of care until we were both in our seventies, but she's doing a wonderful job, and it's good practice for when I'm a septuagenarian with dodgy joints.
Right, gotta go. It's Homes Under The Hammer in a minute, and I need to see how that guy who bought that town house in Weymouth is getting on.

The Stuff I've Been Up To. (part one)

Apparently, sometime this week, this blog had its 10,000th visitor (well, since I started counting, anyway) so I thought I'd better put something mildly interesting on it! I've been busy the last few weeks, not updating as much as I'd like, so I thought I'd give you a brief round-up of what I've been up to. I'll leave out all the boring day job stuff that's taken up most of my time, as a post which just says 'I've been working harder than Janet Street-Porter's toothbrush' isn't very interesting. So anyway, here's part one of 'The stuff I've been up to':

Hiking weekend:

A few months ago, whilst out drinking with my dad and brothers on my birthday, we all drunkenly decided we were going to go on a big walk around Kinver Edge. My dad's other main hobby, besides drinking and passing wind, is hiking, but he hadn't gone on a walk for ages and talked me and my brothers into going with him when we were all pissed enough to say yes.

This was against my better judgement as I spent quite a big chunk of my childhood traipsing around canal towpaths behind my father. That's the thing, you see, my dad didn't really do the pretty walks, he liked walking along 'the cut' (that's what canals are called around here. You know how the Inuit are supposed to have four-hundred words for snow, because they're surrounded by it? That's a bit like us Brummies and canals; We've got a whole two words for them!) and subsequently knows how to get anywhere in the West Midlands by towpath. This isn't so bad these days, because Birmingham has been regenerated like Doctor Who, and the council has spent money cleaning up and renovating and prettifying a lot of the canals, but when I was a kid marching alongside the cut with my dad (this was the the early Eighties) it wasn't so groovy. Walking along a muddy towpath dodging overgrown nettle bushes alongside a canal full of shopping trolleys and used johnnies looking at the backs of semi-demolished empty factories in Thatcher's Britain wasn't really my idea of fun. But, my brothers and I all agreed to go on a walk with our dad because it sounded like a great idea at a quarter-past pint number seven.


Anyway, we decided to go for a walk on August Bank Holiday. That got changed as it was my brother's wedding anniversary that weekend. We didn't go to Kinver, we ended up going somewhere else in Worcestershire. (I don't want to put where we did go in case the guy that owns the B&B we stayed at happens upon this blog. You'll read why soon enough.)

My brothers, my father and I, my dad's mate and his son had a nice walk along the river Severn in the pissing rain, (it was torrential, most of the time) stopping in every pub along the way and taking the piss, swearing (mostly at the weather), talking football (mainly about how shit Birmingham City are) and swapping jokes and funny stories. My dad and his mate are very scatological in their humour; anything to do with farting and shite are incredibly amusing, so much so, every anecdote I heard from either of them during the weekend tended to be about all the amusing al-fresco shits they've had in years gone by. So, among the stories I heard were: Slices of bread being used as emergency toilet roll; bread which was subsequently eaten by a dog. I heard about the time my dad's mate accidentally shat in the hood of his cagoule, and the time he was dying for a crap but couldn't go because his wife's sister was using the bathroom, so he went and did it in a bucket in his shed, but he missed the bucket and crapped all over his lawnmower. These stories are base, not very clever, and yes, disgusting, but I love them! I also found out, from my dad's mate's son (who's a soldier) that, despite Hollywood telling us otherwise, people make a lot of noise when they've had their throats cut. Nice. We finished our walk in good humour, especially after seeing my brother Matthew go arse over tip in a muddy puddle, and avoiding the escaped cow that was running at us along the riverside.We ended up sitting outside a pub in the rain sinking a few more pints. Although hiking isn't really my idea of fun, I did enjoy it. It was a good craic, and all the other hikers we met were nice, always saying hello, and the views were great. It's just a shame, because of the rain, I had my head down for most of the walk and didn't really appreciate the scenery as much as I should have.

We headed back to our B&B to get clean and dry and to change into nicer clothes so we could head into the town centre for more drinking. My dad and his mate left us to it at about half-ten, but my dad's mate's son, my brothers and I carried on into the wee small hours. I've subsequently realised we drank something like sixteen pints that day (we started drinking very early and finished late), and we moved on to spirits at the end of the night. Staying out late was a bad idea, because we realised when we got back we couldn't get back into our digs. We weren't given a key, and we all tried phoning up our fathers but to no avail, they'd gone to bed and turned their mobiles off. Bugger. we ended up having to break in through a small open window on an upstairs floor. Let me tell you, trying to scale walls and run along rooftops like a staggering Matt Murdock when you've had sixteen pints is both difficult and, in hindsight, bloody stupid. Anyway, we got in and after me and my brother Marc stopped giggling like twats about the ridiculous situation we'd just found ourselves in, finally got some sleep.

We got back to Brum the next morning via the Severn Valley steam railway, and ended up in a city centre boozer (more drink; bloody hell! My liver was aching until at least the following Wednesday) putting the world to rights until we decided to go home and get some proper kip. All in all, a good weekend.

Local rivalries.

The best header of that particular season!

There's a weird atmosphere at work this week. It's weird most of the time, but this week it's worse. Everyone's tense. The reason? Derby day. Birmingham City are playing the mighty Aston Villa at St. Andrew's on Sunday. (this is referred to in the media as 'The West Midlands derby', but it isn't. It's the Birmingham derby. If we were playing Coventry or Wolves-that's a West Midlands derby! Right-that's off my chest.)

You see, I am and always have been a Villain ( 'Villa', apparently, was the first word I could write. After that, I was taught to write 'Elvis', so I had V's and L's down pat pretty quickly. This was last year. (c) shit punchlines limited 2007 ) and so are a few of my colleagues. The majority support that other shower and are known locally as 'Bluenoses' (or 'wankers' by us Villa supporters), and most of the time, I get on okay with the noses. I might even call some of them 'friends', but all that goes out of the window for ninety minutes on Sunday.
I enjoy the banter, the piss-taking and the rivalry, most of the time. There are tossers from both Blue and Claret-and-Blue who can give it but can't take it shouting their mouths off. There's monetary wagers being set-up (a recipe for disaster). There are the rogue colleagues who support West Brom who watch from the sidelines with amusement, and there are the odd total fuck knuckles who support Man U or Liverpool who don't really give a toss about what's happening locally, as they're glory-hunting bastards.

Like I said, I enjoy the banter. But only when we've won! The stick I got when we got beat 3-0 a few seasons ago was unreal. My clock card and locker had '3-0' written on them in permanent marker. My coat was covered in royal blue plastic and I had to listen to 'Keep Right On' all fucking day because someone had brought it in on CD. This is on top of all the verbal abuse I had to suffer. But what can you do? You have to take it, knowing that one day you'll have your turn. And we did.
Anyway, it's tense this time round, as Villa are playing like shit lately. We've not won away from home all season. Even with a 4-1 lead at Spurs we managed to draw! Blues are losing a lot, but they played well against Liverpool and Man Utd, but they were absolute shit against Everton, so both sets of supporters don't really have a lot of confidence in their teams for the big match. But, that said, I'm looking forward to it, as it's the only proper local derby left in the Premier league these days (all the other ones are blighted by the prawn sandwich glory hunting bastard supporters who are from other parts of the country than the club they 'support', so all that 'local' rivalry isn't that important to them. Villa and Blues tend to have mostly local support-probably because neither of us have won fuck-all for ages-Blues never!).

Right, no more football talk now, I promise.

UP THE VILLA!

A fine line?

Today, at work, there were two collections going round. One for the recently dead colleague, and one for the recently married colleague. We've always had collections for illnesses, retirements and deaths, but the one for weddings is a recent phenomenon. I don't mind giving (if I've got it, of course) but the groom is a relatively new employee, and there's been lots of previous weddings while I've worked there, with longer-standing employees who have had zilch in the way of whip-rounds. Anyway, while I was signing the card for the happy couple ( a boring 'all the best to you both'. When it comes to writing on cards, I turn into Carla Lane ie. I can't think of anything funny to write!) my Humour Tourette's kicked in. All I said was that I hope they don't get the cards mixed up and the happy couple get the card that says 'Our Deepest Sympathy' and the dead colleague gets the card that says 'We Hope You're Happy In Your New Home'. I was surrounded by about five or six colleagues shaking their heads and muttering 'I can't believe you just said that!'
I don't think it's in particularly bad taste, and if I was saying it to my dead workmate, if he was still there, of course, he'd have laughed. It's a good job the offended colleagues weren't there when I said (to another colleague who gives less of a fuck) I'd hate to be one of his pallbearers. He was a rather large chap, with the biggest beergut I'd ever seen. Bigger than mine, even! I'm glad the offended workmates weren't there when I was explaining how the undertakers got the lid down over said gut. I know, that was bad taste. I'm sure it's a coping mechanism. I'm not really a sick bastard. Honest! Anyway, after working there for twelve years, I'm sure my colleagues know me well enough to know I don't mean any ill-will. Hope so, anyway.

What I've Been Up To.

Ahhh, there you are. Not seen you for ages! It's about time we caught up with each other. I've been a very busy boy in the last couple of weeks, so I didn't have the time to tell you about the man at my Favourite Bus Stop with his hand down the front of his jogging bottoms having a good five minute scratch and then having a leisurely sniff of his fingers. Man, I love Digbeth!

I didn't have the time to tell you about the four or five really sexually explicit messages I received through a dating site from a mad woman from Worcester. She went into really graphic detail (it was almost like a biology lesson) about the things she was going to do to me. Seeing as a lot of it involved shoving things into my anus, I politely declined her advances.

Worcester's too far away, anyway! Can you imagine having to walk back with a sore arse?

I also didn't have the time to tell you about the sudden death at 57 of one of my colleagues at work this week, which was a real shock, and strange to think someone you were talking to only the day before is no longer on the face of the planet. The next day, another colleague annnounced that he'd secretly got wed at the weekend (stupid pillock!) so a big portion of the workforce had a big lunchtime combined drink to the happy couple/dearly departed.

I didn't have the time to tell you that I might have a new flat, and I might have a new girlfriend(it's early days, yet) and therefore, might be moving on!

I didn't have the time to tell you about certain cartoonists I know (and work for the kid's comic The Beano) who, when had a few, find it highly amusing to draw tits and cocks on the photographs in the Guardian. I've kept the evidence. I wonder how much they'd give me to keep it out of the hands of D.C. Thompson? We can see the headlines, now: 'Beano In Tits And Cocks Shocker!'

We don't want that, do we? Actually, I'd love it if the Beano was a bit ruder! You could have Minnie The Minge, or Little Plums! Brilliant! (any more suggestions for rude versions of Beano characters are always welcome, I'd thought of Dennis the Penis, which doesn't quite work, and Plug, which already sounds disgusting, and reminds me of the Worcester woman.)

I've also been busy drawing away at Septic Isle, which is going well, except for a panel that's going to be redrawn, as it was rubbish! But that's no biggie, and I'm enjoying drawing it immensely, well, as much as you can enjoy drawing a story about suicide bombers and Neo-Nazis, anyway! Ah, well, back to the drawing board...

Sore Thumb.

Today was not a good day. Today, at work, I managed to set fire to my right thumb with a blowtorch. It wasn't one of your girlie ones that chefs use to brown a meringue with. It was proper blowtorch which was attached to a five-foot tall bright orange canister full of propane. The lighting mechanism (a spark like you get on your cooker) wasn't working, and we needed fire to do the job we were told to do. I borrowed my colleague's cigarette lighter, turned the gas valve and proceeded to light it. I didn't get my hand out of the way in time, and cooked my thumb. I think I beat my record for the amount of times I can say 'fuck' in one sentence, which is a lot. (although I don't think you can call it a sentence if it mostly consists of one repeated expletive.) It was one of those accidents in which you're scared to look at the wound for a good ten minutes after it happened, but when you do, the injury is a bit rubbish. I was afraid I'd totally melted my wanking spanner, but I don't even have a good blister to show anyone! My thumb looks a little bit like a pork scratching (one of the good ones with a hair still attached!) a little bit red and puffy, but it doesn't look that bad. It hurts like fuck, but it doesn't look bad.

All in all, a good start to the week, especially after the weird weekend I've had, which I might talk about one day.

Tramps-Elysées

About a year ago, the bus I used to catch home stopped virtually outside my place of employment. It doesn't anymore. It now stops about a ten-minute walk away, on the lovely road known as Digbeth High Street. Think of the Champs-Elysées, now imagine its polar opposite. You are now seeing how Digbeth is. The walk to the bus stop is, most of the time, dull, but every now and again, the traipse chucks up something shocking, like the time I saw a fight involving a broken bottle, and a man taking out his dentures in readiness for the punch-up. There's the woman who uses the same stop, but thankfully, catches a different bus, who carries around childish watercolours under her arm, and keeps asking other patrons of Travel West Midlands their opinions of her work. They're rubbish, but no-one wants to say so, as she is obviously mental.

I only bring all of this up (pardon the pun) because on Monday afternoon, I was trudging towards the bus-stop when I saw an elderly woman at another bus stop. Her head was down, and I thought she was inspecting her ankle, because it looked swollen and was covered in scabs and sores, and must've been giving her gyp. As I walked past her, though, she made a horrible wet retching noise and vomited onto the floor, narrowly missing my shoes. I could see now, that, she wasn't as old as I thought she was, and she was what's known locally as a 'pisshead'. Lovely. I'm sure they breed people who regularly drink in the afternoon in a tank somewhere. They seem to be a different species to everybody else.

When I finally got to my bus stop, I noticed that the phantom scribbler had struck again. Every now and then, the bus stop gets covered in racist graffiti by a kind of gonzo Jim Davidson. He sometimes lists all of the minorities he hates, with 'kill all' on top of the list. Nice. Well, on Monday, he put a speech bubble by one of the silhouettes on an EasyJet advert saying "I hate pakis". This was obvious, because they're included on the list on the reverse of this advertisement hoarding. I was standing by this when two Asian lads came past, read the graffiti, and shouted " You hate pakis? Well fuck your mother up the arse!"at me as they were walking past. This was probably because I was the only caucasian at the bus stop.

I shouted "I didn't fucking write it!!" back at them as they went, but they weren't interested in a debate.

Digbeth is a shithole, and if people come to Brum by National Express, it's the first thing they see of the city, as the bus station is there. (Like New St. Station, another shithole, is the first thing they see if they come by train) It's no wonder people think Birmingham is a dump. Thing is, Digbeth is the site of our annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, which is, apparently, the third biggest in the world, which brings in a lot of visitors, who would be far from impressed if they see the kind of shit I see every day. I believe there are plans to flatten it, and redevelop, and if that's true, the sooner the better. Let's hope they flatten the cunt who keeps writing on the bus stop as well.

Changes and Shit.

This, generally, has been a tough week. I don't really want to go into it, but the result is that me and my glamorous other half are no more. She wants to be my glamorous ex-other half. Shit, ain't it?

Still, I could throw myself into my work. I'd rather throw myself into a threshing machine, but seeing as I live in the ultra-urban conurbation known as Birmingham, threshing machines aren't exactly ten-a-penny. There is Thresher's, however, where you can purchase a whole range of stuff that your sorrows can learn to swim in.

My work is shit. Literally. We had a meeting last week where all us fully-grown shop-floor employees were called up to the canteen and were told by our foreman and shop-steward that we're not to shit on the seats of the toilets. Thanks for the advice. I've told you all before about the knuckle-dragging cro-magnons I call my colleagues, and their toilet habits. Well, apparently, our cleaner has had enough and she's refused to clean up the big chunks of faeces that have inexplicably ended up stuck to the bog seat. Fair play to her. It was at this precise moment that I decided I really, really don't want to work there any longer (if it wasn't for the Jane Eyre fiasco I wouldn't have been, by now.) I've decided to re-train myself. I don't know what as, yet, but like the cleaner, I can't put up with this shit any longer.

In other news, the Arts team at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (The people I did the ArtsChampion leaflet for, last summer) got in touch with me today and told me thay want to give me another three hundred quid, as they're going to put the above image on the side of a couple of vans that they're using to promote the scheme. Though it's probably not the work I'm most proud of, it has earned me a fair bit of cash, and given me some free publicity. Thank fuck for the ArtsChampion! (despite the fact Jonni called him the ArseChampion!)

So, if you're in the sprawling Second City at any point in the future, and you see an ArtsChampions van, you now know who did the picture. For what it's worth.

Invasion UK?

You may have heard through shitrags like the Daily Mail that Britain is being invaded by Eastern Europeans. It's alright for the middle class to worry and moan about these things, but generally, it's the working class that has to deal with it, after all, we have to work alongside these people and if there are any jobs at stake because of cheaper imported labour, then it's ours.
Recently, at my shitty job, we've had half-a-dozen Poles and a Czech start work, and so far, I've got no problem with them. They work hard, don't annoy me and keep themselves to themselves. If only my English colleagues were the same. One of my old (English) colleagues said to me :"We're being invaded by Poland! It's supposed to be the other way round!"
I told him that it wasn't us that invaded Poland, it was the Third Reich, but, judging by his comments, he was probably on Hitler's side. There seems to be the attitude that it's OK to be racist towards Poles, as they're white. (Although, saying that, a lot of them seem to think it's okay to be racist out loud to blacks and Asians, as well.)
The Czech bloke is great. He likes Metal music ( All the Eastern Europeans I've met tend to, and are genuinely impressed when I tell them that Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Napalm Death all come from Birmingham. Not so impressed with Magnum, though.) supports the Villa, and is much brighter than the English tossers he has to work with. He can speak four languages and has been all over the world. He genuinely loves it here in Blighty.
Despite all this, though, I think there has to be a thorough debate on immigration. If the supposed thousands of Eatern Europeans are coming here, then the NHS is going to need more beds, we're going to need new schools, and the recent furore concerning the overpopulation of our prisons is going to get worse if the immigrants are going to start transgressing. Don't get me wrong, I think immigration is a good thing, it enriches our culture, brings us new skills, and if they are all working, they're all paying tax, which will help with the aforementioned problems eventually, if not right now. But this is a small island, and we have people born here who are sleeping in hostels and on the streets, maybe we should worry about them before we have to worry about housing foreign nationals.

Cheerio, Milan.

At the moment I'm working on a six-page comic strip. But I can't tell you anything about it. It's a top-secret project and I've been sworn to secrecy. All I will say is that it's based on a real person, and this is a pain in the arse. It's really difficult to get facial consistency anyway (which is why I reckon the superhero costume was invented in the first place; especially Spidey's.) but when it's based on someone real, it's bleedin' obvious when you haven't got it right. I must've used up at least half a rubber (eraser, if you're a Yank) on just one panel. Still, I'm enjoying it, and it's lightyears away from 19th-century Yorkshire, and that can only be a good thing.
Aston Villa finally won on Saturday. It was only Watford, and we struggled, but we got the result. We struggled mainly because of the woeful finishing of Milan Baros, A dud Czech we finally got rid of today. The shit I've had to put up with at work! They're mostly Birmingham City supporters (or Bluenoses, as they're called around here. I prefer the term 'tossers') who have been doing well lately. They beat Newcastle in the F.A. Cup 5-1, and to hear them talk, they'd already won the fucking thing. I'm not one for predictions, but I will say this. The only way Blues will get on an open-topped bus this year is if the club goes on an outing to Blackpool. Did you hear the one about the official Blues Diary having our honours in it? According to the official Birmingham City Diary, they won the European Cup in '82, the Super Cup in '83, as well as seven League Championships, seven FA Cups, Five League Cups and the Intertoto. They wish. All they've ever won is the Auto Windscreens trophy, a poxy wooden shield thing they had to beat the mighty Carlisle to get. Baros might've been shit, but even he could score against the scum. (see picture)
Doesn't anyone want Juan Pablo Angel? He's like a jigsaw puzzle; he goes to pieces in the box. All he needs to do is learn the offside rule and how to go faster than 'walk' and he might do the business for you.
I seem to have digressed. Football again. I apologise. Normal service resumes soon.

"Hell is other people."

I've been suffering with the lurgey now for about three weeks. I thought I was over the worst at the weekend, but the bastard was lying low and ambushed me again this week. I feel lower than earthworm shit. I'm still fit enough for work (worse luck) so I've been traipsing to the living hell I call my job dying with man-flu. Not making it any better is a colleague of mine who has to be the biggest annoying bastard this side of Nick Owen. (Viewers not in the Midlands may remember him from his double act with Anne Diamond. Unfortunately for us unlucky Brummies he reads our local news on the Beeb, and tries to make it "fun" with his crappy puns. I wish Pamela Stephenson would show up again and shove that banana up his arse. I digress.)
This annoying colleague is a fat bastard. I'm not against overweight people (I'm one myself! It cost me the Bond gig!) but he is fat, and he is a bastard. He substitutes shouting for personality, he substitutes repetition for wit, and he substitutes repetition for wit. He likes bullying the temps, and grabbing other colleagues in bear hugs or half-nelsons. I won't stand for any of that shit. He's an arsehole. A fat sweaty, lazy gobshite whose father should have pulled out early. Because he can see I'm poorly, he's made a beeline for me this week, but I won't stand for it, and tell him to fuck off. He threatened to stab me, but that was because I accidentally-on-purpose sprayed silicone release spray in his fat face when he was bothering me on Monday. When he was aimlessly making annoying noises and shouting that same afternoon, I told him to "stick a pie in it" to which he threatened to knock me out. Ooooohh, I'm scared! He's like a fucking pelican ie. all beak. With a flapping bag attached. After our little contretemps I spent the afternoon whistling the Rocky theme at him. I'd like to see him try and knock me out, because a)He'd get the sack and b)he'd get my toecap right under his third chin. The fat cunt.
I feel better for getting that off my chest. Thanks for listening.

Special People; Smarten Up!

The bus I have to catch to get to work used to stop right outside where I work for a living. It doesn't anymore, since Travel West Midlands (they were, until quite recently, called West Midlands Travel until they rebranded themselves. The difference is both subtle and incredible!) revised all the routes and decided my bus route would better serve me if it was less frequent, stopping further away and with single decker buses instead of double deckers. All this means that I now have a ten-minute walk to my bus stop after work, at which I wait for ages while single deckers packed full of passengers zoom past.
During my aforementioned walk to the bus stop, I happen to go past a factory that employs a large number of what are now called 'special' people. People with learning difficulties. They must finish about the same time I do, because there's loads of them at bus stops or walking past me. Now, these people are generally mocked and frowned upon by society, and I reckon it's got fuck all to do with their disabilities, or the fact they talk very loudly about wrestling or bark at the end of every sentence (the two that get the same bus as me) I think it's the fact that they are always dressed very badly. You can't blame anyone for the fact they're yampy, but someone has to be blamed for dressing them in half-mast trousers, or brown Chairman Mao/Ernst Stavro Blofeld safari suits or filthy anoraks that have 'Football '87' or some other bollocks printed on them. Maybe if Remploy or Mencap or whoever spent less time trying to get them into work and more time dressing them smartly, they wouldn't be stigmatised by the rest of the world.

(Phew! I got through that whole post without mentioning the words Mong, Belmer, Spacker, Joey, or Retard! I think I'm getting better at this!)

The picture is of me (before my recent well-needed haircut) holding up a picture (it was a get-together for comics artists, so just drawing a picture isn't weird behaviour. Well it is, but not at this do) of a chicken wearing a hat I did whilst in a 'refreshed' state, explaining the poor quality of said fowl illustration.
I thought it fitted the theme of this post, for some reason.

The Pits.

You all probably know by now that I hate my day job. I realised one big contributing factor of that hatred today; a lot of my colleagues stink. Really bad. The notion of deodorant or even soap is viewed as heresy by these malodorous morons.
Lately, because we've been busy, the management in their infinite wisdom have decided to get temps in to help out. We get our temps from a company called 'Best Connections'. Well, I'd hate to see the worst ones. Every one of them is yampy (that's a Brummie word meaning 'mental' or 'daft') and has severe personal hygiene problems. The newest one we have could kill a canary at two hundred paces. He smells like he wipes his arse on his hair. He has a pungency that mere words cannot even begin to describe. I reckon we get the damaged ones because they're a bit cheaper; Kind of like broken biscuits.
It's not just the temps; there are blokes who've been there for donkey's years who are just as bad. Don't get me wrong-everyone has the right to be smelly, but these fuckers abuse the privilege. There's the mud-monster, let's just call him T- when he last washed his hair, John Smith was leader of the opposition. He did it under duress as well. He recently ate a yoghurt with the communal tea-spoon, scratched his filthy head with it and then put it back, unwashed, where he found it. Many a time has he come into work with his dinner down his shirt. He's had an ear infection for as long as I've known him (12 years) which sometimes results in a piccalilli-type substance running out of the side of his head. Once, while eating a kebab, a farmfoods one you have to warm up yourself, a bit of bone in it blocked his passages and was choking him. After lots of wet retching and sucking sounds, he regurgitated what he'd been eating into his hands, flicked out the offending piece of bone, and swallowed it all back down again.
Then there's B, who has wore the same shirt as long as I've known him, but apparently he wore it long before I joined the company. I don't know what colour it was originally, but it's a kind of pale blue now, with yellow patches under each arm. He once told me that deodorants "are for poofs" which precluded him from using it. B also has half a pound of lard in his hair, and grey teeth that resemble Witton Cemetery. B was recently caught pissing in the sink, probably to keep the urinals clean, because he used to leave his sandwich, half eaten, on top of the pisspot, while he was having a slash, so he could carry on eating it when he'd finished. B has a kind of musty smell to him, not as strong as some, but it smells like he sleeps under a tarpaulin in the shed. He's ugly as well; he fell out of the ugly tree and smacked his face on every branch on the way down. Having a wash won't change that, though.
The worst one, though, is no longer with us. (He's left the company-he's not dead; just smells like he is.) He used to just work in his vest, as this was best for giving us, his colleagues, the full benefit of his armpits. His name is funny, as it relates to his smelliness, but I daren't tell you, just in case. He used to do strange things like dip a steak and kidney pie in his tea. His face and legs were always covered in scabs. Once, when he bent over to get something out of a bin, I saw a brown stripe on the back of the underpants that were on show, because of his ill-fitting filthy tracksuit bottoms.Whenever he was near I used to stick my finger up my arse and then hold that finger under my nose. Anything than smell that bastard. (Not really, though I was tempted) What made him the worst was that he knew he was a smelly bastard. He didn't have the ignorance of other stinkers. He'd stand next to you just to drop his guts and do a 'hurr-hurr' laugh like Fergie from Judge Dredd. These kind of farts hang in your clothes and hair for at least an hour afterwards.
How difficult is it to keep clean? How do you tell a smellly fucker that he stinks without causing upset? Lately, I've found out that shouting "YOU FUCKING STINK!" in their grubby boatraces doesn't help.

Sweaty.

It's too hot. I'm dripping like a fucked fridge. I'm like a grizzly with a migraine who can't find the nurofen on "normal" summer days, so you can imagine what I'm like today, the hottest one on record. I'm kind of like the Hulk mixed with Modern Toss' Barney. If this carries on, I'll be just a pink puddle by the end of the week.
My day job generally consists of standing by very hot metal things all day, so today was less than pleasant. I have to keep doing Tom Jones-style hip wriggles, to loosen the testicles that are welded to the inside of my leg. I have to put up with colleagues who do that blowing-out-of-cheeks thing, before they tell me that it's hot. I KNOW IT'S FUCKING HOT! SEE THIS FLUID ON MY FOREHEAD?
The company I work for have sort of heard of air-conditioning, but they think of it as something from the future; an impossible dream from the age of bacofoil jumpsuits, personal jetpacks and meal pills.
Also, getting the bus home is about as much fun as french kissing a particularly pungent parrafin-lamp. I reckon the EU should do something about the conditions humans are transported around in. If I was a veal being moved around in cramped conditions in a container that was hotter than 90 degress fahrenheit, people would protest about it. (Yeah, I know veal is calf-meat. I'm being hot!)
I can't take my shirt off to cool down for health reasons. Other people will get sick if they see my pale chubby midriff.
The most annoying thing about hot weather for me, though, is the fact that my nose gets sweaty. Being a spectacle wearer (I wasn't born that way; years of self-abuse finally took their toll {told you I was a comics nerd}, so I started wearing them all the time when I was about twenty-four), this means that my glasses keep sliding down my face. So I have to keep pushing them up, Chris Reeve-Clark Kent style. The lenses keep getting grubby because of my sweaty fingers, so I have to keep cleaning the fucking things. I hate being a four-eyed bastard. I think I should try contacts. I picked up a contact magazine the other day, to gauge consumers' opinions on wearing contacts, but it didn't help, it was just pictures of greying chubby men with their cocks out. I can get that just by looking in the mirror after a bath! I'm not certain about contact lenses, so I need your opinions. I'll post two pictures, one with specs, the other one without, and I want you to tell me which one is better. Cheers. No, scratch that, apparently Blogger's too hot to do any work and won't upload any bleeding pictures. Maybe tomorrow. Oh no, it's working again now, so here goes:
With specs. (halfway down my nose, as usual.)

Without specs.