Slummy Mummies

The current Mrs M and I happened to be reviewing the latest conception statistics to be released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) used to monitor progress towards the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy’s target to halve England’s under-18 conception rate by 2010, from a 1998 baseline. Interesting reading I can tell you, even if it only reinforced the current Mrs. M and my own despair for the future of this once great and rightly proud country. As the relative proportion of new births shifts ever more towards the dull witted, future generations of snot nosed thieving little scumbag children will soon outnumber those born to decent hardworking families who only produce offspring they are prepared to support and educate.

In 2006, the last date for which figures have been widely published, the London Borough of Lambeth had the highest number of conceptions for its under 18’s at 78.1 per 1000 in the country. So what is it about Lambeth that makes it top of this most dubious of leagues? Lambeth appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Lanchei. It was held partly by Lambeth Church and partly by Count Robert of Mortain. Its domesday assets were: 2½ hides; 1 church, 10 ploughs, 22 acres of meadow, woodland worth 3 hogs, 19 burgesses in London paid £1 16s 0d. It rendered £15. So apart from the loss of the meadow and woodlands nothing much has changed in the last 922 years by way of its prosperity. (A more accurate name for the Domesday Book is actually the Book of Winchester – rather odd when you consider that someone forgot to include the data from Winchester in it). Lambeth or rather Lambeth Palace is also the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury a fact which I am sure has no relevance when considering the high levels of teenage pregnancy.

The place with the lowest figures – Rutland of course at a shade over 18 per 1000. Rutland also happens to be the only county in England that doesn’t have a McDonalds. Again I am sure that this has no direct bearing on the low rate of teenage pregnancies. Whilst I can only speculate on the reasons for the high levels in Lambeth I do know the reason for the very low levels in Rutland. The fact is that no one in Rutland has sex, teenager or otherwise, they simply maintain their numbers by raiding local pigsties and raising them as their own.

Most famous ‘slummy mummy’ Brittany Spears.

Is it just me or…

Well folks I started writing this post to voice my incredulity at the continued stupidity of the American Border Control Authorities and arrogance of Homeland Security when it comes to the mindless ‘vetting’ of normal law abiding citizens when they attempt to enter America. Why should I, a perfectly normal person, no previous convictions, no idea what moral turpitude is, and never having had cause to claim immunity from prosecution should be made to feel like I should be oh so grateful to be granted the honour of being allowed entry into such a stinking cess pit of a county. Like I say when I started this article I was thinking about border control but then I started to think about gun control, or lack of it.

So you make me sign all kinds of forms, want to know where I’m staying, how long for etc, etc, in fact ladies and gentlemen to US Government currently requires 40 separate pieces of information be submitted to them for each passenger before a plane can take off on its way to the US. Just in case I might pose a threat to US interests or citizens. Well folks 49% of Americans live in a household that has guns, the FBI estimates, because it doesn’t know, that 200 millions guns are in circulation in the US. You think I might be a threat –take a look out your fucking window buddy!

Crime and Disorder

 

The true scale of Labour’s control over its citizens has been revealed after recent figures showed that more than 3,000 new criminal offences were created during Tony Blair’s prime ministership. During the first nine years of his leadership of the country, Labour ministers created a new offence at the staggering rate of almost one a day – prompting accusations of ‘frenzied law making’. The more surreal offences make it illegal for anyone to enter the hull of the Titanic without permission from the Secretary of State or to cause a nuclear explosion. Meanwhile, it is also a criminal offence to sell grey squirrels, impersonate a traffic warden or fail to nominate a neighbour to turn off a noisy burglar alarm. The tally is all the more extraordinary as it comes at a time when violent crime is soaring and Britain’s prison population is bursting at the seams.

Here are just some of the laws brought in:

Polish Potatoes (Notification) (England) Order 2004. No person shall, in the course of business, import into England potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.

Oh my God! Not POLISH potatoes! I wonder in heavens name what is wrong with polish, or indeed any, eastern European root vegetables.

Learning and Skills Act 2000. Obstructing an inspection by the Adult Learning Inspectorate.

One wonders exactly how much of that goes on. Plenty I would guess if the government sees fit to make a law preventing it.

Care Standards Act 2000. Obstructing the work of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales.

I am assuming that it is perfectly legal to obstruct the work of the Children’s Commissioner for England, Ireland or Scotland

Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. In relation to certain invasive non-native species such as the grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed, selling any animal or plant, or eggs or seeds.

Bugger! I was just about to set myself up in the very business of selling grey squirrels, ruddy ducks and Japanese knotweed. It should also be noted that Grey Squirrels were first introduced to Britain from North America in the 19th Century and that current estimates put their numbers at over 2 million.

However, the real issue here is perhaps the introduction of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 by Charles Clark which introduced this unsuspecting country the notion of the Anti-Social Behavior Orders or Asbos as the tracksuit wearing, tower-block dwelling, dirty thieving pikey scum like to call them. Because, until recently, it was taken for granted that in order to be sent to a British prison one had first to breach a clearly defined law. That all changed, however, with Asbos, which made it possible for the courts effectively to invent imprisonable offences at whim. In passing an Asbo, magistrates simply have to be satisfied that an individual has committed behavior ‘which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more people’. Upon receiving an Asbo, which can be imposed for a lifetime, the individual must abide by stringent rules, personally tailored for him. Any slight breach can lead to the recipient being jailed for up to five years.

In order to illustrate the complete absurdity of the Asbo, or rather how it was being applied, I would like you to consider a number of genuine Asbos first described in a May 2005 article in The Spectator magazine (FindArticles – Asbo madness). The first concerns that of Mr. David Boag, who at the time of his crime was a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian. Mr. Boag likes to watch the film An American Werewolf in London, not a cinematic classic in the same sense as The Shawshank Redemption for example but not in its self a criminal act one might think. Now David is, I would have to agree a man of strange habits but worthy of 5 years in prison; I think not. David’s problem is that after watching the film he spends some time howling. Not only that; neighbours who have taken to watching him through his curtainless windows have spotted him climb up a step ladder, leap on to his sofa and then dance around the room with a Christmas tree. Whether Mr Boag is a little mad or just eccentric I don’t feel qualified to say. Perhaps he needs to meet some girls, or at least broaden his taste in films a little. What Mr Boag certainly didn’t need was prison, but that is where he ended up. In December of 2004 he was jailed for four months at Linlithgow sheriffs’ court. There is, it turns out, no specific statute in Scottish law against howling, still less one against jumping on to your sofa or against dancing with a Norwegian spruce. But that mattered not a bit when it came to imprisoning David Boag; not when the police, egged on by Mr Boag’s neighbours, had at their disposal the catch-all powers of the government’s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.

It has been pointed out by Asbo Concern, a pressure group launched by a group of charities recently, that it isn’t so much thieves, vandals and drug-dealers who get caught out by Asbos – they can be prosecuted under existing laws where there is the will to catch them. Rather, most of the thousands of people who have been served with Asbos since they came into force on 1 April 1999 fall into six categories: the mentally ill, the elderly, young children, drug addicts, prostitutes and beggars.

Typical of them is 23-year-old Kim Sutton of Bath who three times has been fished out of the River Avon after attempting suicide. On another occasion she had to be rescued after being caught dangling by her fingers from a bridge over the Great Western railway line. The result? An Asbo which bans her from jumping into rivers, canals and railway lines. The absurdity of this order defies belief. If Ms Sutton feels suicidal again, she is unlikely to be deterred by the threat of jail. But even if she were, there is nothing in her Asbo which bans her from casting herself off a motorway bridge – or for that matter into the sea. One foresees Ms Sutton being pulled shivering from the Bristol Channel, to be followed by several days of learned argument in court as to whether at the point of her immersion that body of water constitutes a river, which would mean Ms Sutton being sent to jail, or the open sea, which would not.

No less bizarre was the case of a man served with an Asbo which prevents him sniffing petrol anywhere on Teesside. Clearly he needs help, but he isn’t going to get it from an order which prohibits him practising his addiction in Middlesbrough but leaves him free to do so on the forecourts of Durham. One youth was served an Asbo prohibiting him from congregating with three or more people. Deciding to reform himself, he went to a youth club – only to find himself arrested for being caught in the company of several dozen youths.

Must dash – I’m off to obstruct the work of the Children’s Commissioner for England.

If it’s good enough for the Americans…

The current Mrs Monkey and I read with great interest the latest attempt by this government to beat some sense into the youth of today by filling the current shortfall in teachers with ex-soldiers. A bunch of mostly psychopathic, post traumatic stress suffering, social misfit’s ill equipped to face a world where people have to make choices for themselves. More used being told when to sit, stand, eat, sleep and shit than encouraging youngsters to learn and develop I can only assume that the intention is simply to frighten the crap out of them. We have taken a bunch of people who, let’s face it, probably couldn’t find a proper job, and taught them to be ruthless and vicious killers. Now we want these folks to be the role models for our youth. I presume that ‘water boarding’ will replace lunchtime detention for late homework, and that the hallways, class rooms and assembly halls once filled with the happy and excited chatter of the young will soon echo to the sounds of drill sergeants barking ‘by the centre…quick march…left, left, left, right, left…Tomkins, yes you boy – thrust that bayonet. That’s it lads – thrust and twist…’

But I read on and all becomes clear; this system has been used in America, land of the truly and utterly dim witted, to great effect. School kids their seem to be killing huge numbers of their class mates in seemingly ever more frequent mass shootings so the switch to using ex-marines for teaches has at least taught students to shoot straight.

Drink Up

I read an article recently in the Economist stating that the good people of Luxembourg glug more than 15.5 litres of alcohol per person in a year, more than any other country on earth. Quite an astonishing fact given the enormous popularity of binge-drinking in this country, indeed the current Mrs. Monkey and I often wander down to our local town centre of a Saturday evening to indulge in a little of it ourselves. Mrs. M and I find the antics of the gangs of short-skirted, white stiletto wearing trollops particularly amusing. A little hesitant at first we were soon ‘necking back’ the sweet sherry like there was no tomorrow. Indeed the hangover Mrs. M and I experienced the following morning was we awoke in the next door neighbours hedge plastered in our own vomit made us wish that there had been no tomorrow. Mrs. M looked a frightful mess, her hair and make-up reminiscent of Robert Smith (lead singer of post-punk band The Cure), mind you I was hardly in any position to point the finger as I myself had managed to quite literally have been dragged backwards through several hedges and had lost one shoe and both socks at some point during the evenings revelry.

But I digress, back to our wayward European chums the Luxembourgers. Not even a real country Mrs. M has just informed me but a Grand Duchy. “The worlds only sovereign Grand Duchy it has the highest GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita on earth” she said looking sternly over the top rim of her spectacles. So who came second in the poll of the inebriated; Ireland of course, but that was only to be expected. Britain, we managed a measly 10^th and the United States with all her industrial and economic might could only manage a pathetic 40^th place. Mrs. M and I will at least be able to take some comfort from the fact that if the ‘Armageddon Button’ is ever pressed it will be pressed by a sober idiot rather than a drunken one. Didn’t Luxembourg declare war on America once and actually win? I can just imagine the entire population of Luxembourg staggering home after yet another drunken night out and invading France to buy up all the kebabs.

Luxembourg’s motto is “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” which translates as “We wish to remain what we are” (pissed I assume).

Celebrity Chefs

Is it just me or are others perplexed by the rise and rise of the so called Celebrity Chef? What exactly is a celebrity chef anyway? I don’t know the answer to that question but I do know that for the most part I can’t stand them. The BBC Food website describes one of my particular favourites; Ainsley Harriott, as the ‘charismatic, larger-than-life presenter of BBC Two’s Ready Steady Cook’. Well I would describe him as a buffoon and you know what he looks rather to me like he might just be prone to dribbling.

The site goes on to describe Antony Worrall Thompson actually Henry Antony Cardew Worrall Thompson; known fondly as AWT or Wozza (apparently), as a ‘restaurateur and TV chef. He presented Saturday Kitchen and was a regular guest chef on Ready Steady Cook’. Well for a start Wozza you have way more names than is good for anyone and a beard. A beard! Now don’t get me wrong I am not against beards in their right place, Father Christmas, odd looking ladies in the circus freak show, etc; but not on someone involved in the preparation of food.

I have one more celebrity, Gary Rhodes, to discuss before I get on to the most obviously evil of all personalities Jamie Oliver. Gary’s biography states that ‘more than any other chef, Gary Rhodes has reinvigorated British cooking with his own modern twist on the traditional’. For a start Gary your sixty eight years old – get a proper hair cut. For me Gary typifies the pretentiousness of the celebrity chef. I just don’t like the way he handles the food, hunching over it like some wizened crow. And why oh why do they all place one thing on top of the other making a kind of culinary Tower of Babel, attempting to cover as little of the plate as they can. A bit like Gary’s own hair style really pilled high on his head taking up as little surface area on his head as possible. It must be a miracle of a balancing act to get the plate to the table without the three foot high meal toppling over. How do you eat it, stick your fork in and shout ‘Timber!’ I guess.

Last but no means least Jamie Oliver – where do I begin. His biography describes him as ‘The hottest young star of TV cookery programmes, Jamie Oliver has wowed all generations of food lovers with his fresh, no-nonsense cooking style and his inspiring recipes.  The first series featuring Jamie cooking was the Naked Chef. Viewers were treated to a glimpse into his world, zipping about London on a scooter and hosting parties for all of his friends, all to a rock’n’roll soundtrack. The food was reassuringly hearty, but not too fiddly, and Jamie always seemed to have his hands full of fresh herbs and olive oil. It was an overnight success, attracting an audience that wouldn’t normally watch food programmes. The book that accompanied the series became a bestseller and the young chef, always fully clothed, was catapulted into the limelight’. I’m with Al Murray aka The Pub Landlord when he said that if you ever find yourself driving around London and you see someone on a scooter knock them down because ‘you never know it might just be the Oliver boy…‘ Jamie is a twat a word that is defined by many as ‘One who behaves in a childish, extroverted manner to the annoyance of others‘. Anyone who would call a child Daisy Boo or Poppy Honey and uses the word ‘pukka’ over and over again is worthy of all forms of derision. His biography mentions inspiring recipes. If you follow the link ‘Try some of Jamie’s Recipes’ on his biography page you are presented with, wait for it, ‘Tasty fish bake’. Truly inspired – pukka!

Oh yes one last thing what the fuck is a Jus. If it’s got gravy on it, say, it’s got gravy on it, not au jus.

Gullible as Fish?

Nice to know that the god fearing folk of Petersburg Kentucky now have a brand new $25 million dollar privately funded natural history museum. But wait, a wander around these exhibits and you’ll soon spot some pretty fundamental differences between this and most other museums. For this is a ‘creationist’ museum. For those of you who don’t know ‘creationists’ believe that the earth is only around 6,000 years old, evolution did not happen, basically that god created the earth, universe basically everything in just 6 days. We didn’t evolve from more primitive ancestors, the Grand Canyon and all other geological features were created in an instant, and oh yes – you’ll love this one, that we shared this earth with the dinosaurs in peace and harmony in the days following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Indeed Noah took them with him in the Ark. And there was me thinking it was only the silly old Unicorn that missed out on a place on the world cruise. Noah by the way also invented wine and lived to the ripe old age of 950, he was already 600 years old when God tipped him off about a spot of bad weather headed his way.

I was going to attempt to make light of the utterly preposterous notion of creationism until I started to dig a little deeper, no paleontological pun intended, only to find how wide spread this believe is in the US. Only a few weeks ago three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution, and polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. Half for fuck sake! They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke. Similar numbers of people say the world’s age should be counted in the thousands of years, not billions, as established science would have it. For the record, mainstream scientists currently estimate the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years, but don’t try telling that to Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist and former high school science teacher who heads Answers in Genesis, the organization behind the Creationist Museum. Strangely enough Ham was one of Noah’s sons, not our Ken Ham, but the father of Canaan who Noah cursed to eternal slavery for seeing him laying naked in his tent after a particularly heavy night on the newly invented vino.

However I digress (as usual) so back to the lunacy that is creationism. Like I say I was going to try to lampoon this utterly farcical notion until I realised how prevalent it is in the US. Now I’m just shocked. No actually I’m afraid, because these people are not just your normally loonies they hold positions of power and authority (no change there I hear you cry), they teach our children for God sake!

So who cares what they think. I do because it is this blind determination to either ignore or selectively interpret genuine research to suit a hard-line fundamentalist religious belief that will strike fear into the very heart and soul of any scientist. How long before these dangerously deluded individuals hold the purse-strings of colleges, universities and research institutes?

How long before the creationists, and other believers in the literal truth of the Bible, use the Curse of Ham, you remember it was his son Canaan that saw Noah in the buff, to once again justify racism and the enslavement of people of African ancestry, who were thought to be descendants of Ham (often called Hamites), either through Canaan or his older brothers. How long before they persecute and drive genuine science and research out in favor of the ‘approved’ creationist view of what is and is not acceptable?

John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life.

“Americans just aren’t gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish” he said.

No John, almost half of them are way more fucking gullible than that.

The Great British Barbecue

I read a line in an article by Tom Parker Bowles today that had me sitting with my head held in my hands in sheer disbelief.  Tom said, and I quote

Posh restaurants match each course of your meal to a glass of wine.  Why should your barbecue be any different? 

Well Tom let me explain. For a start, the last time I was at the ‘Ivy’ I don’t remember the sommelier saying

May I recommend the pint of larger with the wild Scottish halibut poached with hollandaise?

There is a reason for that. It’s simple really, a barbecue, why people insist on writing BBQ I’ll never know, is not and has never been about fine dining. A barbecue is about standing around an open fire eating meat and drinking beer. (Glass of white wine or fruit based cocktail for the ladies, beer for the men). It’s not about delicately flavoured appetizers and courses. I’m not saying that it’s about food which is at the same time burnt and raw, something that only a man could actually achieve and worse still be amazingly proud of. It’s about meat; burgers, ribs, sausages, steak. Only Australians are stupid enough to put fish, or worse still, shellfish on barbecues. People from Mediterranean countries also tend to try to cook non-meat things on barbecues but they don’t really know any better and so can be forgiven for that. Please don’t make the barbecue into an outdoor dinner party.

I once went to a barbecue where the food was cooked in an old Silver Cross Pram (a pram is a baby carriage for any North Americans out there) and the salad dished up in a plastic washing up bowl. Strangely enough I wasn’t offered a choice of wine with my meal. Actually I wasn’t even offered a knife and fork. Perfect!

A tragedy but…

I read in my local paper today of yet another death on a nearby estate. A young drunken man kicked to death in a drunken pub brawl. The pictures inside of his distraught and shattered family and their glowing tributes to a gentle, kind and caring father filled the inner pages. It was only after reading a number of the reports that I realised exactly who had been killed. Whilst no one would argue that the untimely death of a young man, or woman, is indeed a tragic thing let’s not lose sight of a few things here. This man, a violent drug dealer and habitual criminal who had spent most of his life in and out of prison, died in a drunken brawl. Those who live by the sword often die by the sword. A tragic senseless death maybe, but please let’s not start to canonize him. I feel sorry for those who loved him but I also pity all of those decent law abiding people who have been terrorised, and made to feel unsafe in their own homes and communities by his like. The fact that his death, and the deaths of so many like him, was brutal and unwarranted does not make him a nicer person. All too often we forget the hurt and pain these people cause throughout their entire lives as soon as they meet their almost inevitably violent ends.

Dirty Thieving Pikey Scum

Let’s get one thing straight, I’m not talking Romany’s here; I hold a special and distinct contempt for them. I’m talking about tracksuit wearing, tower-block dwelling, dirty, thieving pikey scum. These people are a scourge on whichever street they settle in, be it for a minute, an hour or the street on which they live in a semi-permanent basis, their other home being either prison or a young offenders institute depending on the pikey’s age. The common pikey is a nightmare. The places they live are littered with debris, of course the hazard of stray mongrels, or children, for the term can be used equally for both dogs or the filthy snot nosed largely illegitimate offspring of these inbred retards, are an ever present danger.

The most common pastime of the pikey is driving a stolen car. They should be avoided like Michael Jackson at a children’s’ party. Out of their cars and on the street corner the typical gang of young, drunk, pikey teenagers make a tempting target for the driver, but it is wise to steer well clear. Any attempt at approaching these clusters of under-class will result in a hail of abuse, sputum and half-bricks. When it comes to thieving needless to say then that in almost every incarnation the pikey is one of the worst offenders of all. They will even steal worthless things.

Most famous pikey scrum – Jade Goody.