The Incredible Wordsmith

Saturday, 20 th June 2020 This blog post is a meditation on water and amphibians and The Wind in the Willows. It may or may not make any sense. I Is it just me, or does Boris Johnson increasingly resemble the character of Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows . To confirm my prejudices in this regard (because I only like to have them confirmed – usually by myself – and not dismantled), I found the 1984 stop-motion animation series on YouTube, produced for Thames TV, and randomly chose an episode to watch. This was television from a gentler time, without the garishness and noise and hectic cutting of current children’s television. By chance, Episode 4 was called ‘The Compleat Bungler’ and it began, as all the episodes began, with Mr Toad reading or writing his memoirs: ‘Another week crammed with events, which yet again has demonstrated the wit, courage and nobility of we Toads. Sad to say, then, that the family has not always appreciated it, as it should be.’ All weeks are c...

Saturday, June 13 th 2020 Just to be clear, in case you stumble upon this blog, what I have written below is satire. I am not a member or sympathiser of EDL or any far-right group. I am an armchair anarchist and this is my contribution to showing these people for what they are: ignorant, violent, and afraid. *   Diary of an Anti-Antifa protester Fucking grand day out that was! Makes you proud to be British when you see your mates standing in Trafalgar Square with a Union Jack wrapped round their shoulders, a bottle of beer in one hand and Sieg-heiling the shitting-themselves-all-day-long antifa snowflakes. After Tommy Robinson’s shout out for London action, we started mobilising on Facebook. I wanted to make a sign but couldn’t decide what to put on it. I got the crayons out and made one said, ‘White Pride’ but the missus said it sounded fucking gay so I went with ‘Mad in England.’ The wife said, did I mean ‘made’ but I couldn’t squeeze in the ‘e’ so left it as it was (she’s a...

Sunday, 7 th June 2020 Do you remember when you were halfway through writing a novel about some made-up people in a made-up place doing made-up things, written for an imaginary readership of people who existed in a time somewhere in the future? And then the whole world was shifted on its axis and writing about imaginary people doing imaginary things was somehow dwarfed by the very real but invisible monster pounding across the land. So here I am, stuck between the past, where I had plans and dreams, and the future, where no plans can be made and dreams wither on the vine. I imagine this is the same for lots of people. What is there to mark the days without the celebrations, large and small, that dot the calendar? What is there to look forward to? How do we distinguish the days, one from another, when time is not pockmarked with events, moments that we refer back to in our memories, special times? As an old git, my calendar was pretty empty. We had booked no holiday because we kn...

Friday, 29 th May 2020 Remember when the whole world and every living human was out to kill you? Even communal surfaces – door handles, supermarket trolleys, dog poo bin lids – seem to have lost their radioactive glow. Going outside no longer contains the same frisson of danger and excitement as a few weeks ago. Our distant ancestors knew that a day’s hunting of large dangerous beasts was a matter of life and death. Now, after several visits to Lidl during the height of the pandemic, I feel some kinship for my fur-clad brethren. Obviously, I didn’t need a sharpened spear to claim some halloumi and a pot of Greek yoghurt but I felt exposed in the aisles like my ancestors might have when crossing open ground. Does anyone know what the govt’s new ‘Stay Alert’ message actually means? I can’t help interpreting it as ‘Let Your Guard Down A Bit’ or just ‘Chillax.’ Whereas before I knew not to lick any toilet seats, now I’m thinking it’s okay to lick some toilet seats (as long as I’m payin...

Wednesday 27 th May 2020 Do you   remember when we all did as we were told because there was that residual part of ourselves that, despite 10 years of being dragged into the Tory whirlpool of lies and deception, really believed that in times of major crisis our government would try to keep us alive as a bare minimum? Yeah, of course you do - it was last week. Now, whatever spider filament of trust might have existed between yourselves and this govt. hangs broken in the wind. The evidence was everywhere to be seen last night on Shoreham Beach. * I had tried and failed to tease the Screenager into some form of activity for all of yesterday. ‘What do you want to do today?’ I asked eagerly. ‘There’s nothing to do,’ he said morosely. ‘We’ve done it all.’ There is an element of truth in this. Trying to muster up the enthusiasm to play another board game or drag the pallets onto the road to play short tennis no longer carries any weight. Even the grass on the ...

Scoooop! Thanks again to Wikileaks for passing on to me Dominic Cummings' diary entries for the period of time still in question. Behold! The truth, straight from the horse's mouth. And there's oh so much more to his movements than you could have imagined... Friday 27 th March Fuck! The Bozz has got the hot fever. Had to scoot out of there pronto and run to safety. In the taxi, I got one of my weirdo data scientists to run the numbers on the chances of me being Prime Minister by the end of the summer holidays. 63% apparently, even more if I started to distance myself from him right now. I told Mary that we hadn’t seen my parents for a while and did she fancy a trip up north. She hesitated, muttering something about ‘lockdown’ but one look from me and she was packing our bags. I bent down to talk to the kid and ask him if he wanted to go and see Gramps and Grandma. Funny little fellow asked if that was allowed. He can be a daft cunt sometimes. ‘Don’t you know ...