Because he can
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November 30, 2006
Scaphism, noun
An old Persian method of executing criminals by covering them with honey and letting the sun and the insects finish the job
"Seriously," said Nipper. "Are you absolutely sure you'd rather have this done to you than watch another episode of The X Factor?"
"Yes," said Zeds, squinting as the sun came up.
November 29, 2006
Picture the scene:
You are 11 or 12 years old.
You've just had your first snog during the slowies at the end of the youth club disco.
After hour or so dancing to stuff like You Can't Hurry Love by Phil Collins and Dolce Vita by, um, that Italian bloke and quite possibly that dreadful Agadoo-style Superman song but you're buggered if you think I'll be telling you that.
In your skintight jeans.
And piano tie.
And ever so flash tie-pin.
The clanking teeth snogging thing has suddenly opened up a whole new world of feelings for you.
You walk NT to the bus stop.
Where she waits with her mates.
You have to go because your mum is likely to call out Jack Bauer and Co if you are any later than the not-at-all-estimated-but-set-down-in-stone ETA.
So you're walking away from your new, first girlfriend.
Waving and grinning foolishly.
And still waving.
And still grinning.
And, because you're walking backwards, suddenly disappearing into a roadworks hole at the top of Leasowe Road.
Classy mo'fo, I was.
November 29, 2006
Giddhom, noun
A frantic galloping movement made by cows when plagued with flies
"Nipper?" asked Zeds, as they both stood calmly at the fence watching the herd inside the field go completely beserk.
"Yes?" said the buzzard, without turning his head.
"Was it absolutely necessary to smear their arses with honey?"
November 28, 2006
Borborygm, noun
The noise made by gas in the bowels; a fart
The buzzard had been bending half over for up to an hour, cheeks puffed, eyes bulging, matted wings holding onto the bannister.
The noise, when it came, was akin to the sound of a sharp, serrated knife plunging down the back of a stiff leather chair.
"Crikey!" squawked Nipper. "That's a ripper! What a bloody borborygm!"
But Zeds was unimpressed. "Doesn't anyone just say 'boff' anymore?" he wondered, gloomily.
November 27, 2006
Rantallion, noun
One whose scrotum is longer than his penis
"I don't care," said Nipper. "You can say whatever you want, but I am not taking that bloody dog for a walk ever again."
"But why?" asked Zeds. "He's not that bad, surely."
"Maybe not. But he's got nuts the size of cricket balls and he's not afraid to use them."
* In the interests of research for the making of this post, I went to Google Images and punched in "bassett testicles", without the inverted commas. What happened next was a bit of a shock. Apologies to anyone considering doing the same.
November 24, 2006
Three wise men arrive at a stable to visit a child that is lying in a manger.
One of the wise men was exceptionally tall and, as he entered the stable, smacked his head on the low doorway.
"Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed.
"Write that down, Mary," said Joseph. "It's better than Derek."
November 23, 2006
Snail's mutterings of last night reminded me of a certain time in my life when a mother's love was very definitely not required.
It is February 1989, and I've been working on my first ever newspaper for about sixteen months. The newspaper was in my home town, and the office was in the high street about half a mile from our family home, where, at barely 18, I was still living.
Then the phone rings one day, and a company in Liverpool offers me a similar job that is a few rungs higher up the ladder, slightly better money, and - gasp! - a company car. So I accept it, naturally.
The next day, a Tuesday, I walked into the office and handed in my resignation to the editor, a strange little man with a comb-over, built up heels, and supposedly with a Parisian girlfriend called Nicole whom he would talk to in an Allo Allo-style French accent over the phone, or emerge from his office at midday after talking to "her" and declare: "Ooh, it's the middle of the night over there."
After shaking his head sadly, and telling me I'm "just not ready" and that I'll "never, never, never, never, never, never make it", he waves me back to my desk, and closes his office door behind him.
Approximately three and a half minutes later, he rings through to me (at my desk, nine feet away from his) and asks me to enter his office.
"I'm afraid the company has taken this very badly," he squealed said. "You'd better go right away."
And so that was it. Off I went. I was even in time for lunchtime Neighbours.
The next morning, at around 11am, I am sat in the kitchen reading the paper - Daily Express, fact fans - when my mum returns from shopping, her tartan shopping trolley trundling in behind her.
She is looking a little flustered.
"Erm," she says, and instantly I know I'm going to hate whatever she's about to tell me. "I might have done something that you might not like very much."
Suddenly, the room seemed a lot wider.
Like there was a lot of space below me to fall into.
"What?" I asked, possibly without making any noise whatsoever.
"Well, I saw RA," she said, referring to the editor. "At the office."
"Eh? You mean at the office I used to work in until yesterday? That you don't walk past because you never ever go that way home, unless you wanted to walk past and wave at me through the window in that embarrassing way you insisted on doing? That office? And that RA?"
"Yes."
"Oh. God." Heart thumping. "And?"
"Well, he was outside getting someone to rearrange the pictures in the window."
The first lie.
"And so I just thought I'd better tell him what I thought of him. And that you'd been treated terribly."
The second lie.
But these lies would not emerge until the following night, which was, of course, my leaving do.
When my delighted former colleagues, one of them a certain D Dagger, and a certain editor, named RA, regaled to the loud, braying guffaws of everyone else in the bar how my mother had barged into the office, complete with trolley, made stabbing motions with her finger at the bemused boss and with a furiously red face, told him:
"You. Are. A. Toad. And my Justin is worth ten of you!"
Quite understandably, the bastards still dine out on it to this day.
November 24, 2006
Zonesthesia,adj
The feeling of wearing a tight girdle
"Ouch," complained Zeds, "that's far too tight. It feels like zonesthesia."
"Try this one instead, then, it's more your size," said Nipper, passing him a bigger tieback.
November 23, 2006
So a friend of mine is on his umpteenth visit to Afghanistan to report on the war.
Having just had his book about Iraq published to much critical claim.
Tabloid hacks are hanging out of trees outside Kate Moss's house as you read this.
Broadsheet men and women are smoking pipes and sipping tumblers of cognac at their clubs off Whitehall.
Bill Neely will be doing an urgent, fervent report for ITV from somewhere involving either floodwater or fires.
Nick Robinson will be rocking on his heels doing a live from Westminster.
Paxman will be limbering for a fight with John Reid.
And John Humphreys will be filing his teeth nice and sharp for tomorrow's ministerial mauling.
So what, I hear you cry, is yours truly doing this evening?
What onerous, brave task has his editor assigned to him?
What reportage mission has he deemed capable of only my attention?
Oh yes.
I'm telling you - it's a long way down.
November 23, 2006
Fenks, noun
Leftover whale blubber used as manure
"Sorry, mate," said Zeds. "But I'm afraid it's what remains of last night's Moby for breakfast this morning."
"What?," said Nipper. "I'm not eating that shit. Fenks for nothing."
November 22, 2006
PART FOUR
1
ONCE, around fifteen years ago, when my grandmother used to live next door to my mother (cliched northerners? us?), my uncle came rushing in to say she'd collapsed onto the kitchen floor. He didn't think she was breathing. Call an ambulance.
At the time, me and a friend were the only people in. My friend phoned the ambulance and I rushed next door with my uncle. We went into the kitchen, which, as with many older people, was a sparse, old-fashioned affair. Free-standing kitchen units, a top-loading washing machine complete with mangle, an old teapot that probably had hybrid teaplants growing inside, sat on the sideboard with a stripey cosy snugly around it.
And there, on the cold, brown-tiled floor, was my grandmother, pale, unconscious, small. Her skin was almost see-through, her eyes closed, her mouth slightly ajar.
The words fell out of my mouth: "Have you checked for a pulse?"
And then her eyes flickered open, revealing a scared, bewildered expression - though not half as scared as I was when I thought she'd come back from the dead.
We got her to hospital where the doctors told us she'd suffered a massive heart attack, and that it was touch and go. My mother, who was down south visiting my father, was contacted.
And so me and my uncle stayed in the hospital for hours, sipping coffee in the waiting room and for some unknown reason getting an outrageous laughing/snotting/hysterics attack when we were approached by a well-meaning and sombre Indian doctor who wanted to update us on her condition.
And as is so often the case, she then rather brilliantly went on living for almost another decade, in rude health, all the while complaining, of course, that she'd had enough and wanted off this mortal coil.
Still, it was enough to make me think I'd seen a "dead" person in the flesh for the first time. And when my uncle eventually died at the turn of the millennium, and I went to see his body in the funeral home, the sight didn't distress or disturb me. If anything, I saw just a shell that had a face and beard just like my uncle's.
I don't believe in God, or life after death, but that day I did believe he was better off where he was, in that state, dead and peaceful, than he had been in life. Either way, I'd seen death for real, and it didn't frighten me. And I thought that would always be the case.
But back then, I'd never seen someone brutally murdered in front of me.
2
FULL MOON on Koh Samui is great the first time you're there. You spend all day getting hammered and sorting out your boat tickets across to Haad Rin (Sunrise Beach) on the neighbouring island, Koh Phan Ngan. You never get there before 11pm, and even that's too early, because you'll end up dancing like a lunatic until dawn aided by whatever stimulants you can get your hands on (and to anyone planning on going down that route, whatever you do, don't buy "anything" from a Thai at the Full Moon Party itself as you're more than likely buying off a policeman who will then bribe the utter bejaysus out of you...)
The second time's fun, too, because you're more familiar with your surroundings, you know all the pitfalls - (like, just for instance, not going home in just a pair of fisherman's pants and absolutely nothing else, including shoes, or keys, or sunglasses, because you've left them all in that really safe place you found in amongst 20,000 other off-their-face party-types equally seeking safe hiding places, copyright: Me) - and you're more able to relax.
After a while, though, it gets a bit dull. I'd pretty much spent my late teens and entire twenties in a permanent Full Moon Party anyway, so I got a bit blase about it all. And bored. So when I ended up running a beach bar on Samui, and Full Moon came along, I was more than happy to stay put and supply nice drinks to grown ups who didn't want the madness of Full Moon.
It was great, too. I'd play Sinatra and Bacharach and jazz and (weirdly) Cafe del Mar, and serve cocktails on the beach as the customers lay on mats watching the low, white moon and the resulting waves lap up near to their feet.
It wasn't so great when my latest best friends - the tourists who'd been on the island for a week and thought this mad English nutter living in a hut wile stranded a zillion miles from home was just marvellous - would turn up wankered at 5.30am banging on my bedroom door asking me to open the door. But then I'd been one of them at one time, so I'd inevitably end up pouring the Sangsom Cokes anyway.
At the end of the summer of 2004, Full Moon had come around again, and as usual I was to take care of the bar. My Thai colleague, Bum, a cheeky little Rasta with a penchant for marajuana, ecstasy and the contents of Western women's underwear, was devastated. He had no money to buy drugs for the party, which as far as he was concerned meant there was no point in going at all. His friend, Nin, a somewhat dimwitted 19-year-old who worked a couple of bars down from us, apparently wasn't going either. And neither was Ben, a stocky 20-year-old former footballer who'd lost his way through drink, dope and petty crime.
All three were from the southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, generally regarded as an area of malcontents hellbent on a life of slobbery and thievery (Merseyside, anyone?), but with whom I got on like a house on fire. (Well, apart from when they deliberately fed me a curry made out of endangered lizard, anyway, but that's another story).
Before dusk, which in Samui is like the lights being switched off in the sky around 6.30pm, Nin wandered along the beach. He had cotton wool and Band Aid plastered over his right eye and temple. Bum and Ben began chattering away in Thai, too fast and too southern for me to really understand what was going on. They didn't include me. But something was definitely afoot.
The tourists made for the north of the island to drink and wait for their speedboats to Haad Rin. I waved the boys off to go and have fun: the beach was empty and I was happy not to have them sit there and smoke my cigarettes all night. I even found time for a guilty Western-style feast - some leftover rice, a tin of tuna, a splosh of naam plaa (fish sauce, which they use like we use salt) and a thundering of white pepper.
Yes, I was a little poor.
Around midnight, I had just two customers sat on the beach, which suited me fine. It looked beautiful, though - we had lanterns surrounding our patch, with palm leaves planted in the sand, and billowing white drapes dotted around to provide privacy (and not a bit of style, I should add). The moon was high and the sea, though a little rough, was like a vast, shining white plain before us. Idyllic.
Bum reappeared, on his own. Sat down next to me with a beer, and handed me one, too. He was distracted. Stoned, for sure, but there was something else. His eyes, normally bright and open and full of mischief, were black and thin, and full of danger.
We sat there for a while, sharing a few beers, Bum smoking all my fags, wondering if it was such a good idea to stay on a deserted beach after all.
Then, Bum spoke. "Tonight, Dut-Tin," he said. "You see me very angry."
And then all hell let loose.
3
FROM the corner of my eyes, I can see a sudden flurry of movement on the beach, some 200 yards to my right.
Shadows dancing past the lanterns and beachfires.
I hear a scream; a shout. More raised voices.
I can hear, but not see, the frantic running heading towards our beach, thumping along the sand.
Then the shadows are 20 yards away, passing before me, past me.
And Bum is leaping out of his seat, now with a heavy stick used for wedging open the kitchen shutters that I hadn't noticed before.
Now he's gone, like a cheetah, sprinting after the trio on the beach.
He catches them quickly, as the leader has fallen.
Or has he fallen?
I'm watching, transfixed.
Dull, solid thuds of wood on flesh.
Two, three, four, flashes of metal glinting in the moonlight.
Screams.
Thuds.
Slicing noises.
A puncture.
Then nothing.
Then.
Three faces - Nin, Bum, Ben - running towards me, scared.
"Close the bar!" says Bum. "Now!
Then he's gone, with the others, into the jungle behind me. Shadows into shadows.
And then it's quiet again, apart from the waves.
4
I'M RUNNING down the beach to the couple sharing drinks.
Telling them to go.
Refusing their money.
Saying they've seen nothing.
Go. Now!
Then I'm frantically extinguishing lanterns. Leaving out the mats and chairs and tables and branches and drapes.
And I'm diving - diving - into the bar, yanking the electrics from the wall.
I get a shock from the wiring, go tumbling backwards.
The PA dies immediately. The lights go out.
Now I'm throwing all the spirits into the beer chest. Hands shaking, trying to lock it.
Then I'm running away from the bar. Through the hotel grounds to our left.
Out onto the main street.
Where the armed police are already arriving on their motorbikes.
And I'm remembering with an intensity I've never known before that I am completely illegal in this country.
5
"ADAM" was also from Nakhon Si Thammarat. Like so many other people from that province, he had fallen - or thrown himself - on hard times. A former kick-boxing champion (as so many of them are; Muay Thai (Thai boxing) is their equivalent of soccer to us), he is now on the run from the police.
Like so many of his countrymen, he heads for the tourist resorts, where he can get an unpaid but fed and watered job hiding out on the beach. Any money he has comes from tips, or from gambling those tips. Adam is older than the boys. Thirty-something, maybe. He likes the Sangsom Thai whisky. Often drunk, always lazy, always rude and bullish to the younger men.
Then one night, he and Nin - both of whom had been working at Black Coffee Bar - had an argument over who slept where.
Adam was fed up lying on the beach at night. He wanted Nin's bed. Nin, drunk and stoned, had refused.
Nin didn't have a chance.
The bottle had crashed into the right side of his face, almost blinding his eye.
The next night, Adam was dead.
It eventually emerged he had been on the run from the police because he was alleged to have raped a 14-year-old girl.
6
BEN hid out on the island, in the jungle, for two days before he was eventually spirited away by boat to the mainland. He can never return to Samui. Too many enemies with too many long memories.
Bum and Nin took a motorbike and fled in the night, heading for the ferry at Nathon, the island's capital.
But they ran out of petrol.
And so they walked.
And stopped in a 7/11 for cigarettes.
Where a policeman matched the Rasta description and arrested them both, there and then, at gunpoint.
Mikkel and I went to see them in prison. A room the size of a scout hut with about 200 half-naked men inside. No air-con. Half a dozen or so of them westerners. Everyone with shaved heads, and wearing leg-irons.
After four months, Bum was allowed out when a "friend" paid his bail.
A fourth killer, a respectable Thai married to a Westerner, was never even interviewed, even though everyone on the island who knew anything about the murder knew who'd done it.
7
I WAKE up in my friend, Ishbel's, room.
She's English, but she's also gone native.
She goes down to the bar and to her astonishment everything is operating as normal.
So I follow her down there.
The boss is non-plussed.
The body is long gone.
The blood has washed away.
And, most importantly, the tourists don't know.
The couple on the beach will be too scared to say anything, he predicts, correctly.
"So, Juzzz-tin," says my boss, with a wide, toothy grin. "We have a party tonight, no?"
November 22, 2006
Acouasm, noun
A ringing sound in the head
Nipper looked at himself in the en-suite mirror, rather pleased with what he saw.
His feathers were preened, his beak polished, the talons on his spindly feet neatly clipped.
He was naked, but for his monocle and a dab or two of Aramis on his feathery lower belly.
Frankly, he was cooking.
He took in first a left and then a right profile of himself, nodded in lascivious agreement to his mirror image, and then, after one large intake of air and puffing out his chest, he opened the door to the bedroom.
"My dear," he announced, grandly, to the woman lying in the dimly-lit boudoir. "Dinner is served."
But things weren't turning out quite like Nipper had planned.
"I'm sorry," said his companion, with strain in her voice. "I really don't think I can."
"But why? Why, my dear?" said Nipper, doing a passable impression of a sincerely concerned buzzard. "Are you unwell?"
"Yes," she sobbed. "Yes, I am. I've had an acouasm."
"Eh?" said Nipper. "Well you could have at least bloody well waited for me, first."
November 21, 2006
You may (or may not) remember when Tony Blair's Government proudly ushered in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in order to - believe it or not - free up central and local government information to us, the great unwashed.
It works on the basis that, if we ask really nicely, they'll by and large tell us what we want to know (but not what really happened to Dr David Kelly, obviously - that would be telling).
It also works on the basis that they know exactly what it is we want to know, as against - say, in my case - finding it out on the front pages the next morning.
In any case, it works. Not just for the media but for everyone - the man on the Clapham Omnibus, if you will.
(This shining beacon of sensible, adult legislation, of course, came in the middle of the disastrous PFI partnerships, the rampant gathering of taxes, the ludicrously expensive waste that will be ID cards, banning conkers, inventing mass security alerts, going to war in all the wrong places, and banning smoking in pubs (not very Churchillian, that, was it, Tony?) to name but a few.)
Anyhoo - it now transpires that the fact that FOI really does work is causing government at all levels some serious problems.
Not least of all because we are now allowed to find out about a lot of things they don't actually want to tell us.
So they're planning a very stealthy tinkering of the way the Act is interpreted which they hope to push through Parliament before the New Year - and most probably will.
Because most FOI requests are made by the media - asking questions on behalf of their various readers, viewers and listeners - they are planning to invoke a little-known clause to either earn money or clamp down on FOI requests.
You decide:
At the moment, public authorities can refuse an information request if it will cost them more than £600 to find the material (in Westminster, anyway - it's £450 for local councils) - unless the individual asking the question is prepared to pay for the search.
Get this, though - up until now they haven’t been allowed to include in that cost any time spent on considering the legality of whether the stuff should be released.
But the proposal being put forward by the grandly-named Department for Constitutional Affairs is that they now should be allowed to include the cost of all that time.
*Think lawyers in stuffy offices poring over huge leather-backed tomes of legal shite. For hours on end. In between long lunches.*
And as the FOI Act is full of tedious legal jardon (well, Blair and Co are lawyers...) and ploughing through it can take a bloody long time - should a civil servant decide to drag his or her feet, just for instance - it will be very easy to reach the cut-off level where they can refuse to help with any request considered, say, even slightly controversial.
Which would effectively make the FOI Act dead in the water, in my view.
The other thing they want to do is add up all the requests one "organisation" makes in a certain time period - say a newspaper, during a year - and, at the point the collated requests begin to cost more than the cut-off figure, refuse them unless the "organisation" - the media outlet acting on behalf of its readers, viewers and listeners - coughs up.
And never mind the wealthy News of the World or Sunday Times - that includes the BBC, funded directly by you and source of many a good story about governmental incompetence.
So, welcome to Britain.
Where if you ask, you won't get.
Now, mind those conkers...
November 21, 2006
Mechanically Recovered Meat, phrase
A paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue.
"Jeeeee-zus!" cried Zeds, bursting through the front door. "Did I pick the wrong day to wear shorts or what?"
Nipper, who was sat in an armchair by the fire twiddling his surly yellow talons before the flames, lowered his newspaper for a second but deigned not to turn and peer at his shivering companion.
"Beg pardon?" he asked, with a quiet harumph.
"Bloody hailstones, that's what. Thundering down. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. All bloody bastard morning."
"And what of it?" queried the buzzard, anxious, as ever, to return to A Letter From Somalia.
"My ears feel like MRM. And my legs are stinging, too."
But then Nipper fixed him with a hard stare.
"You've been wandering around naked again, haven't you?"
"Whatever gives you that idea?" said Zeds, straightening the curtains.
November 20, 2006
Just a quick word of dripping black hatred congratulations to all those who shared in the bumper £120+ million Euro lottery bonanza on Friday night.
It's taken me this long to write it up because I have been biting my own shins at the sheer injustice of all that makes up this rotten, shitty, penniless, screamingly frustrating life of mine celebrating on your behalf ever since.
The unextinguishable flames of Hellish rage joy in the ragged depths of my tortured soul my heart is liable to kill me, and soon, and by god bring it on unimaginable.
I'm wishing terrible, terrible things glad my prayers came to fruition, and hope you are seared with piping hot branding irons for eternity the less fortunate are no longer so.
I'm not gritting my teeth at all, either, when I say: Well done!
Well done!
WELL DONE!
November 20, 2006
Monday?
Pissed off?
Need a diversion?
Play my favouritest game of all time.
(I suggest you select "small downland" - only takes a minute to download).
I've been addicted to this bloody thing for years along with everything else
Enjoy!
November 20, 2006
Schizothemia, noun
Digression by means of a long reminiscence; repeated interruptions of a conversation by the speaker introducing other topics
"So, TalkTalk," said Nipper, "what's the problem there, then?"
"I'll tell you what the bloody problem is," said Zeds. "They're either plain bloody incompetent or they're encouraging their customer service staff to lie."
"Eh? Why?"
"Well, take, for instance, Zeds' elder brother - Timz, if you will. Got the TalkTalk package a month ago. Everything worked fine."
"So?"
"So just over a fortnight ago it stopped working. Completely. Said there was 'no dial tone'. Hinted at a problem with the phone line, which was fine, or the wiring, which was also fine."
"Er, yes?"
"So Timz gets Zeds round on Saturday to try to fix it. Like Zeds is a bleedin' phone engineer or something."
"And?"
"And we spent about 90 minutes on the phone to TalkTalk, at 10p a minute, to a woman in India who sounded like she was holding the phone as far away from her mouth as possible, and who eventually insisted - after we'd stuffed some stolen roadwork cones into our ears in a desperate bid to increase the volume - that we then spend the best part of the next six or seven hours ripping up carpets, taking out wiring, replacing wiring, replacing phone sockets, reinstalling software (twice, thrice and, um, fwrice), switching down all other programs and deleting half of his hard drive."
"And?"
"And the bastard, bastard thing still didn't work. So then we connected with a bit of mobile phone Bluetooth trickery, and, hey presto, we were on."
"So no problem then?"
"Too right there was a problem. We were connected via my increasingly high mobile bill. And when we looked at a few sites regarding 'TalkTalk' and 'Error 680 - No Dial Tone', we found the problem wasn't at our end at all, but with TalkTalk, ever since they upgraded their service."
"And?" said Nipper, sounding increasingly strained.
"And," said Zeds, pretending not to notice, "it meant everything we'd done was a waste of time. And so we rang TalkTalk back. Got the Indian woman again, the one who works from the bottom of an Artesian well. At the centre of the earth. Middle Earth, probably."
"Yes..."
"And she said they'd have someone contact Timz, in the evening, sometime over the next eight days."
"But he'll get a refund, right?"
"Oh no. It's 'free' broadband, isn't it, so technically you can't even bloody complain."
"Ah."
"Ah, indeed."
"So what happened then?"
"We got slaughtered on red wine, and I eventually went home to find I'd left my mobile there. So good day all round."
"And Sunday?"
"Don't ask."
"Anything else?"
"Well, yes. In other news, I appear to have given up smoking."
"And so the irritation factor is shooting through the roof, right?"
"Yes."
"Ah." Nipper paused. "This is all a bit schizothemic, really, isn't it?"
*zeds eyed the buzzard*
"Don't even think about it," said the bird. "I taste nothing like chicken."
November 19, 2006
Garrison finish, noun
A finish in which the winner comes from behind at the end
"I think I might have missed something, you know" declared Zeds, as Nipper sat ramrod straight at the window, binoculars perched on his beak, one ruffled wing gripping his portly hip.
"Eh?" said the buzzard, cigar crunched in the side of his mouth, Hannibal-style. "What?"
"I thought I'd pulled off a Garrison finish, you see, but now I'm wondering if there's been a steward's inquiry."
"Would you care to eloaorate on what the fuck it is you're talking about?" said Nipper, relighting his Havana.
"Well, I would, if I could-"
"But you can't?" interrupted the bird.
"No," said Zeds. "I just haven't got a bloody clue either."
And so they sat with the binoculars and took turns watching the milk maidens yanking teats, and pretended to feel terribly shameful about their behaviuour.
November 18, 2006
Antigodlin, adj
Lopsided, out of line: askew
"Why are you flying round and round the room at a strange, antigodlin angle?" asked Zeds, puzzled.
"I've got earache," said Nipper.
"Oh."
