ONLY HALF CRAZY

The last of the baby boomers. 1963. The same year as her mother. Her father is the regulation two years older, of course.

Of course! It is one of Maisy's favoured phrases. She says it with ham surprise on her not-too-pretty-nor-too-plain face; the face that she and President Xi use - in public at any rate. Her indoor face is only ever used at home. The teacher's face is privatised at £15 per hour.

Maisy Maisy, give me the answer do.

Do you want to start a family? Of course! At what age? At 31.Thirty-one? Yes, two years later. There is no single child policy. I will have two children, one boy, and one girl. One of each? Of course. One of each. Communist yet capitalist, country yet western, compliant yet controlling.

Two years from now. In two years' time. She repeats. She is impatient to learn.

Calligraphy and taking photos calm her mind. Once in a while, every now and then, not very often, she likes to draw Chinese characters. To help her to relax. We must make time to smell the roses, Maisy. What is the meaning? Rapid transit thoughts trail the notion along the fast track of her impatience. Why to smell the roses? To meditate. What is meditate? Think deeply about things. Why, teacher? Not important to do this. Give me better English.

The focus is full on, expansive, penetrating, exhausting.

I already tell you. He is businessman, like my father. I do not know what business they do. He has two children? Of course! His wife is a housewife. She is two years younger than him. My personality is acute. Sorry, impatient.

When they married, your mother was 22, and your father was 24?Of course!

Teacher, teacher, give me the answer do. I am half-crazy like you. The patient Johnny Wu, oh how I miss you. What would you do? Would you choose Maisy to be your lawfully wedded... or would you run? Maisy is very Maisy. It is not her real name, of course. She has chosen it from an approved list. Off the peg. Prêt à Porter. Private class in Prêt à Manger. Teacher, prêt à meutre, peut-etre. Not speak French, speak Engrish.

Teacher, t-shirt, I say English not Engrish. Why do people marry, Maisy? I do not feel comfortable asking why. Give me more English. Ask why not important. Teacher must use more better question. More better, Maisy? Of course. More appropriate. Why did you leave China? I quit. You quit China? Of course!I quit my job in public service. I have stayed here two months. I have seven months more. I learn 20 to 30 words every day.

To think more deeply about things. To slow the mind. Like the Buddhists. Like in yoga. I don't understand. Is it to take or to make time to smell the roses? It matters not, Maisy. It amounts to the same thing. Teacher, don't write words on paper. I understand without you write down. I already know. Can I say I married to John? You can say you're married to John, to Joe, to José Feliciano... if you like, Maisy.

I smile. She reads my face. No, teacher, no. I do not feel comfortable thinking about that.

Was there a tsunami when you were on holiday? Of course, I like to eat tsunami. The food in Tokyo is very good. I have never been to Tokyo. What is it like, Maisy? I'm very like Tokyo. I already say, food is nice. Are you more like your father or your mother Maisy? I like my father. He is considerate, kind, ambitious, organised and, like me, has an acute personality. Impatient? Of course!

Would you mind if we stopped now, Maisy? Stopped is past. We are present, why past? Teacher, not stop, t-shirt continue. I like Jane Austen. She represent British polite. Pride and Pre-juices. I am very like. Actually Maisy, I’d really rather we stopped now. It is high time. We must stop.

Maisy, Maisy, any answer will do. I'm half-crazy, now. Maisy, any answer will do.

The planet is not a solid ball of rock. It is a jigsaw puzzle of floating continents on a bed of fluidity. The sea levels will rise, but so will Greenland, Iceland and Finland. As for England, I can't wait for the tsunami to come and carry us away on a beautiful pea green boat to China.






Maybe then, Maisy will let me be. Of course!

THE TIMISTS

TIME CZAR

“…precision, expediency, economy, and thus beauty.” 
Leon Trotsky 

A revolution is afoot. And like all revolutions, it is jaw dropping. 

On the plus side, the surveillance of privacy has gone. On the minus side, the surveillance of privacy has gone. It is obsolete. The Timists are here. 

Timists wield Chronocards. I happened upon my first one this morning, waved in my face like an experimental twin-barrel machine gun. Annihilation of the self is revolutionary sublimation, suicidalism, the Nothing: neither write, read nor speak, simply accept. Tap your Chronocard against the nearest time cell and carry on. The League of Time has abolished inefficiency. Time cells have been set up. The factories, government departments and schools have been synchronised. Wasted motion and talking eat up valuable seconds, as does clock watching. Think of the Nothing and hone your time discipline. They say President Zula has the shock brigade productivity points pasted to the wall behind his desk. 

They’ve had me on the social-engineering machine. The pulleys pull the cogs as I pull the weights. A thing of unfathomable beauty. The machine teaches us how to behave in the robot age. Not a second wasted. Not a step out of place. 

This afternoon I go to class at the Centralized Institution of Labour for group drill. We stand in front of benches, with places marked out for our feet. We repeat separate elements, and then gradually build up our movements into a socially appropriate repertoire. 

The human body must be re-engineered. A new kind of human is to be modelled. Motion capture helps us become more like the cybercasts. As the President says: aspire, achieve, and assimilate. No jerky worker is ever hired no matter how much cheaper than a robot they are. The jerks get category C’ed and shipped out to Mexico – or so the contrarians claim. 

I am no übermensch, but I'm energetic and intelligent enough. On 31st August, I shall attempt to breathe in 102 tonnes of fresh air in under four hours and 45 minutes. On 19th September, my hot air crew and I aim to more than triple the record.

Fellow workers, join me and redouble our efforts. In Derby, a worker in a carbon-neutralizing factory managed to siphon off a thousand lungfuls in a single shift. A hot air-maker in Liverpool cleaned out 1,400 pairs of bellows in a day. Three female fresh-airers from Staffordshire proved they could open and close windows faster than humanly possible. 

Nobody wants to be a tortoise. As long as humans labour as robots do, their repetitivity will rise. The process sets you free from the friction of independent control, and all of its associated stresses. The contrarians are drunken fools, intoxicated on the anodyne of personal autonomy. They would do well to remember the data flows upstream towards the algorithm police. 

Complete monitoring of time and motion is here, making redundant the petit bourgeois illusion of self-determination. It has shrunk to size zero. We live in a world of self-surveillance. It need not be a problem. Trust me. I am a Timist.

THE DOLLARIZATION OF VENEZUELA

As a warmer, correct the English of your nearest multi-millionaire football coach. Pep, Jürgen, Joey Barton. Take your pick. They do. You, you, you, not you, you. The rest of yous lot can give me five laps of the pitch. Lardy arse, sugar addicts do not get in the team, simple as. Boss, I need a hug. Boss, I’m hungry. Boss, I’m lonely. I don’t care, I don’t care, I, read my lips, do not care.

You are now on track for fully-automated emotional support. The awkwardness of human-to-human hugs is a thing of the past. HUGGO lets go when you say and not before. Warm and strong, but not too long, so you keep control. HUGGO won’t get bad breath. HUGGO won’t squeeze you to death. HUGGO won’t stick around. When you’re done hugging, he’s out of there.

All that ticky-tacky, keeping hold of the ball malarkey is all well and good, if you’re any good. If you’re not so hot to trot, kick ‘em off the park, bark in their face and make them wish they’d stayed in Manchester, Leicester or Marbella. There’s more than one way to smoke skat. What’s the matter, soft lad? Cat got your skinning knife? Right, You, you, you, give me five.

Footage from social media is adapted, face-swapped onto celebrity bodies, voices inserted and before you know, no further human intervention is required. You and HUGGO are free to do as you please. There's no need to download images of random women, their throats cut by homicidal creatures with razor-sharp claws.

With HUGGO life is soft, warm and tight, tight, tight, so tight, so tight. Let go HUGGO. Let go of me now! HUGGO!... A young woman pulls a pistol and mutters, “I think I’d like to talk to you? Are you Pep J. Jürgen Barton IV?”

HUGGO, pre-owned by Googlism, does not respond to a request to comment and you shrink back into your shell-suit, the hoodie you sport is your own fashion brand, of course, you are your own man, you are profitable, you are professional, you need a hug. You've been provided with fully-automated emotional support. There's no going back to four-four-two, they’ll tear you apart and feed you to the twitterati.

At the border, the Peruvians insist on actual passports, photo ID will no longer cut the cerviche, no way José Barton, you no got the gringo, you no go nowhere, cabrón. The economic death spiral of Venezuela, not your fault, can only be stopped by dollarization.

The adverts have frozen, the kids are bloodied, screaming, phones smashed, Lego all over the kitchen floor, nanny nowhere to be seen, father in Marbella, again, the plot is unfathomable… and you adopt the greenback, like it is some kind of solution.

However…

The tension… is… successfully built…

On a whim from the boss, who insists on being called God.

Zone out, go online, lose yourself, smooth away the frictions of being a human being by accepting the natural progression of technology. For the first time ever, there are more telephones than people. What's App? Boss, I need a hug. Boss, I’m hungry. Boss, I’m lonely. I don’t care, I don’t care, I, read my lips, do not care.

Standing still in the rain, chewing the cud, the bovine await their moment. In the UK alone, seven people a year are killed by cows. Unless they've got semi-automatic weapons, they're unlikely to make a comeback in the second half, boss. We must be about two and a half Birminghams to seven up.

Ok, sell the cow, put the magic beans in the ground, and while the Border Patrol are chopping down the gigantic, out-of-control, bean-stalk, cross the frontier. When you get to Strawberry Fields, start packing that fruit away and they might let you stay.

The end of the training session ends with the boss blow drying HUGGO. A disembodied female roars with laughter. The dialogue is unsurprisingly disjointed, but you think you hear Pep say: “We arrive to do every time the same thing.” You have absolutely no idea what any of it means. Menos mal.

 

NESTLED

Nestled between Nadine Dorries and John Donoghue,
he leans to the left,
he longs to be taken humorously,
to be looked upon,
to be mused over,
to be read,
to be re-catalogued,
to be placed into the system,
to be consumed.
Do Not Stand On Ledge
Police officers should act in good faith. Ha!
Those with ramp access shouldn't necessarily fly the plane
A four-drug protocol won't be any more humane than a three-drug protocol
when Alabama pumps you full of death
As economic theory predicts, Mrs Arbuthnot has retreated into her world of pain
Citizens should hold police officers to account. Ha!
From zeroes to help for heroes
Patriotism, immigration and the military:
the three-drug cocktail works on some.
Let's pretend inequality is geography
It's grim up North... everywhere else is hunky dory
As Elsie continues her probe to the Sun
Amazing Fashion at Amazing Prices
baffles the finest minds available to NASA
How do they do it?
Fly past Venus and reach optimum speed
The strap-on boosters will kick in. We hope
Made in Bangladesh
It used to take three days
Now you can get to the Moon in half an hour
Ryanair can drop you off at a quasi-second moon
for next to nothing
Do Not Stand On Ledge
There are Apollo astronauts scaling the fourth wall
in official t-shirts
Made in Bangladesh
Mrs Arbuthnot has had a lasting distaste for Americans
Ever since one impregnated her mother in the war
Sacrifice anything and anybody for the sake of success!
Just drop them off at the nearest mini-moon
They'll never know the difference

SCHNOOZE

Baskerville Old’s face collapses into the end of the sentence. He’s lost his bloody beard snood again.

- Bugger, blast and damnation!

Now he’ll have scraps of scone in his whiskers, and Mrs Baskerville Old will have a pretext to nag, and Baskerville hates shrewish fishwife carry on more than he dares admit to, even at the coffee shop, when the misandrists have sloped off to hone their cure for cholera, or whatever it is they do in their kitchens in the late afternoons, after they have packed the children off to Ceylon with a lump of coal and a cheese ration.

Baskerville’s views like those of most of his companions are fixed, strong and wildly inaccurate.

Mrs Lillian Florence Martha Old does regularly imbibe. Indeed, her homemade prophylactic of laudanum, camphor, red pepper, opium, rhubarb, peppermint and cayenne tincture is infamous. And while it is certainly true that neither she nor any of her sisterly visitors has ever fallen prey to the cholera, it seems apparent to all except Baskerville that Mrs O’s celebrated kitchen remedy is to be commended on several grounds - not least of which is its power to loosen the bowels of even the most retentive of gentleman at the coffee shop.

So it is that Mrs O stumbles into the wild notion of a minor experiment upon her hapless hubby. Baskerville, or Basketful, as she is wont to call him, and his wayward temperament is too choleric by far! What is needed is a good dose of sanguinity administered by way of a cocktail of potions concocted to prevent pusillanimity and bolster resilience. 

After many hours of toil in her kitchen-laboratory, which goes completely unpaid and unnoted as per the norm, she combines two previous compounds into a new synthesis that she is sure won't kill him at least.  It is best ingested through the snozzle - hence, the absent beard snood. 

One sniff of the said synthetic substance and her spouse is supposed to slide away from the snide sneaks and sneering snitches that patronise the coffee shop to embrace a cheerier outlook towards all and sundry - and especially her.

On a cautionary note, when mixed with liquor, Mrs Old’s notorious compound is said to be incendiary. However, this point of detail is lost in the small print of the face-paced voice over in her head.

So it is that, on his return from the coffee shop, Baskerville stumbles upon his beard snood in the parlour, next to his chaise longue, on the occasional table among his snuff box, opium pipe and pedicure tank filled with minute, toothless Garra Rufa fish. As the aquatic creatures tend to his feet, and the papaverine, codeine and morphine nibbles at his nervous system, Baskerville, to celebrate the recovery of his favourite beard snood, has a hankering to sink a nifter of porter, something he very rarely does.

He rises, ambles over to the mantelpiece and peeks inside the Toby jug. It isn't particularly clean, but since it smells only of porter, Baskerville chances his arm. He fills it up to the frothy brim with fine mild London porter, fetches his beard snood and places it over his head. It has the comforting smell of a snug old friend. 

First, he sniffs his snuff. Then, he snuggles in his snood. At last, Baskerville Old snorts on his porter, and

...BOOM!

Suddenly, like a Barrett Estate on a flood plain, green and yellow bile spills across the parlour floor, sloshes back against the wall, submerging Mr Old in a sea of his own making.

With a little help from her indoors, of course. Sometimes experiments go awry; sometimes they can proceed favourably.

Lillian has decided to leave the cleaning today.

 

POSH FREDDIE’S DROPPED

Freddie waits. It’s been half an hour at least.

They tick all the boxes. Caffè Nero. Next. Audi. Espresso Bar hipster-lite designer Dad, strong but gentle, muscular but mild, sits feeding baby. She is very very recent. He brings up her wind. He holds her with care. He has finished his chocolate chip muffin and double Macchiato.

Mum. Blonde. Hair up. Gold chain. Nails. Latte on table. Half consumed. She enjoys free Wi-Fi and watches various versions of her newly born motherhood. Time’s up.

He swaps, grabs his phone instantly and starts to enjoy free Wi-Fi too. Billie Holliday is sad. No Strange Fruit here. Light low volume dinner jazz. Summertime.

Posh Freddie is not sure he can handle life off the airwaves.

If nobody is listening, then what’s the point? It was a few pills. Hardly worth raising the lid of the sarcophagus for. Shine the light, roll back the shroud, take out the golden effigy and stamp on it. The rootenest, hootenest, tootenest, Khamoon of them all!... What did they expect? Disney.

It would help us a lot if you self-identify as a dealer. Where did you obtain the drugs? Is there anything else you want to tell the officer, Freddie? Try a bit harder… Freddie? Freddie? We’ve lost him again. Stay calm. Don’t panic. We need a plan.

Turns out that the twin sister isn’t to be real either. Probably not even related at all.  Looks like a common-or-garden case of fictionality. Get too big for your boots, start believing in your own actuality, and before you know it, the superego’s running rampant all over the coffee shop and the id’s having none of it. Giving yourself side, who do you think you are, Professor? Show me one shard of evidence, one splinter of proof, one micro-dot of mojo…

Once again, where did you obtain the drugs? It’s not as if they’re openly on sale at Caffè Nero.

It’s a popular weed killer. I would’ve thought an officer of your calibre had heard of it. Don’t get funny with me sunshine. The voice of the people. Toxic chemical compounds. Pounds of the stuff. Everywhere. Let’s err on the side of caution, caffeine’s not that bad. The more bitter the taste, the better the gear, and the less mixer you need to put in. Not all plastic is toxic. Plastic sheets under gravel drives stops the weed coming through. It’s only a bit of cheese. You can’t do me for personal anyway.

In the context of now, dropping in the Espresso Bar might not have been the best idea, Freddie. Out there it’s too dangerous. Seagulls steal chips, crows collect fag ends, baggage handlers crash airliners into historical theme parks. 

She wants the gloves, the rubber gloves, the synthetic summer sensation that Nicole Kidman and Rihanna have worn on instant constant impulse. They cost £385 a pair. It is the start of the end. He can learn to fly a largish passenger plane from off a video game surely.

It is safer to trip outdoors. Too many breakages. People will notice. This is a soap opera. Too much emotional honesty will mark you out as a character, but will ultimately destroy you as a man. Is that what you want, Freddie?

A salt dry relationship, the lasting distaste of mundaneness, the barbarity of family, the wrench of deracination and death, there is no Nobel Prize for living. 

In the end, it is only books that survive - if the gigantic pink rats don't eat them first.

OPEN AS NORMAL

Therein lies the problem. Open as normal.

Trolley's hope has always been that it would have all gone out of business by now, and that the whiff of junky shit in the bushes that goes unnoticed by the locals would have been replaced by something altogether a lot nicer.

The arrogance of assumption has kept calm and carried on. The situation extant remains intact. The on-going static nature of the status quo inhabits the present moment in boots of concrete.

The past lies ahead of them. It is an open Scottish Highland road in a car advert. Their future stalks them from behind. It is a hidden, crouching social worker.

Melon is traditional. He's always considered Sunday trading anathema. Today, the plan is to get roasted and to consume as little as possible, smoking, drinking, and sniffing aside. He's on the Dog beer again. Despite Trolley's best attempts at offering advice, Melon has sank a quartet of the stuff.

"59p a bottle, Troll. Hardly worth stealing at that price."

Trolley wants to unburden himself of the curse of knowledge. Not all untruths are bad. If you're terminally ill, the God lie might be useful. Some live their entire lives in this state. Best of luck to them, thinks Trolley. But his Spanish head Anarchist is having none of it.

Hostia puta!

The gamekeeper has turned poacher, and the poacher's received a CBE. All is contained. But just because D.H.Lawrence has captured its primal force in a sentence doesn't mean it can't escape and tear your throat out. Even in Primark. Especially in Primark.

Compliance is so much melodrama. Authentic theatre has more to do with bowel movements and mucus. Trolley is working on a turd. Another half cup of hot tea and a suck on the can pipe. Cloth is touched, but a recalcitrant turtled-neck sweater is popping its head out. It doesn't fancy its chances. Bagged and binned or left to assimilate and rot in the bushes, its destiny is more or less secured.

Trolley and Melon, on the other hand...

They maintain tranquillity and continue. There're minefields of abandoned marketing to dredge through before they get anywhere. Melon lies down in the road and attempts to lick his own testicles through his baggy bottoms. He makes a move to remove them. This could be good. Luckily, nobody but nobody gives a fuck.

Primark is open as normal for a few more years yet. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.....

ABANDON TROLLEY

Each year in the UK, around one and a half million trolleys are abandoned; as many as 300,000 never make it back.

Twenty Eighteen is signalised by a remarkable event, a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon, which doubtless no one important in the pyramid scheme of things has yet considered.

Trolley is confused. He knows many things. He knows how many starlings make a murmuration – but has no idea of the time. It's 20:18, but it can’t be nearly twenty past eight all year long. In 1949, Big Ben stopped for a bit of a rest. Trolley only stops when the red line is reached and the conveyance bucks like a cowboy riding a nuclear warhead.

SHARE MORE. CONSUME LESS. What does it mean? Why does your city need a Chinese billionaire in league with an authoritarian with an ironically feminine name?

Trolley looks up. The starlings have created a musical score on the telegraph lines. In ¾ time. Tiny black dots bear the message of the narrative. Trolley cannot locate his melodica. He clutches the blue plastic case.

Cambridge City Council is aware of this abandoned trolley and has arranged for it to be ignored, tagged and eventually removed.

Many were the occasions when said orange tag would've incited his head languages to speak at once. Now Trolley passes over such concerns. His communications with the world are honest, considered and invariably misinterpreted with all implausible deniability by sections of the non-listening population. Human beings love their dogs for the same reason Trolley loves silence. It focuses the senses.

His latest SWOT analysis has quietened the soul. Yet touch has been neglected. Drunken kisses and clutches from Melon don’t count. Years without close contact have helped control the controllable. Sexual nature corrodes the wheels, they go off on tangents. Were a lady to place hand upon knee, long enough to register, Trolley might have to hit the big red knob.

24 VOLT AC WARNING FIRE SHUTTER CLOSING.

Trolley looks up. The starlings have resorted to high-energy proton beams. The former health minister and local Tory MP has apparently come to his senses. Dogs would've detected the cancer sooner than the Daily Telegraph and its impenetrable black dots. Tough tits, Andy. *

Trolley eats shoots and leaves. He is subject to lax gun control, not to mention punctuation; and he isn’t even a cowboy!

H.M. Government is aware of this ironic episode of bowel cancer and has arranged for it to be ignored, tagged and eventually removed.

*subject to council cuts

THE SAVAGE PILGRIMAGE OF NIKOS ECONOMOPOULOS

"The axe forgets; the tree doesn't."

The fish festers as it floats. Flies feast upon its silvery pink flank. The river reflects the world back at itself. Trolley sits and surveys the scene.

A pair of ducks stops sucking moss from off the side of a narrow boat. Making a ten-minute-past two formation, they paddle away to forage elsewhere. The nearest wood pigeon coos. A magpie flaps away from the willow opposite and flies across the river towards richer pickings. A band of young swans approach. The swan that has the skinniest neck paddles faster than the rest. The fattest-necked swan performs his chest-out, wing-flap wash-and-brush-up strut as he reaches the end of his patch. Under the weight of the long hyphenated clauses, he turns around and returns to domesticity.

Head Spanish distracts attention inwards. Trolley feels a Super Poke. Muy bien hecho muchacho! Sigue en tu rollo. He intuits that today's visitor is benign, even if the actual detail of the lingo leaves him cold. The rhythms of Manuel de Falla and Blasco Ibañez give him the thumbs up. Esto va sobre ruedas.

As his day begins, Trolley tries to establish if not mental clarity, some kind of useful focus. Engaged amusement. Oftentimes, the glitches in the programme don't make much sense. Origami with Wladimir Klitschko is better if you take off the gloves.

Today is a gloves-on day, but not in a bad way. Fascinated by inner space, rather than frightened, his wake & bake has left him energized. At the height of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK gives odds of three to one on all out nuclear war. Moscow might still be a good place to honeymoon. Where isn't? Prison. A psychiatric ward. Your parents-in-law. Trolley knows of what he speaks. At least he would, if he ever did.

There is no wipe-clean moment. Psychosis merely restores factory settings, the rest is up to you. Provided you don't overuse the refresh button...f5. The Radio Times kicks off. Trolley tunes in.

There is a voice. It reeks of sociopathy and private miseducation. Trolley's internal translator recognizes the launch of another attack in the open economic war. f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5 f5. It has been officially confirmed by the usual method: outright denial by public-school psychopath. The soothing female tones deliver death messages via the BBC direct to your brain.

"I'm not a robot; everything will be done to protect the vulnerable."

Trolley is safe. He has declared himself immobile, as they say in the foreign office. An impulsive, low empath, easily provoked city council has taught him how to regulate his anger and take responsibility for his emotions. It is not easy, but he has a simple technique. The five-point plan: the four basic points of angry, sad, happy and afraid live in the corners. Trolley inhabits the centre. He is on stay-cation from the right angles that lead to pain, depression, deflation and explosion.

He knows all the vocabulary; stiff upper lip, man up, be more stoic, grow some nerve endings and the brutal Don't bring your shit to the table.

If you have to live in shit, oppositional defiance disorder is not a useful pathology. Dung dwellers need to be squat and stout. It is all very well for insects to rise up against the dominant social order, but if you walk past the flowers to eat crap, there are bound to be consequences. 

"The sovereignty of the people is sacrosanct."

Trolley must translate the last statement before switching off. His Googlator throws out a definition. Sheeple (pl. noun) blended word.

Example sentence: Sheeple have a savage incuriosity about the essential character of the farmer's power.

Lanky bankers (not pictured) schlepp up mountains in Switzerland. While Amazon predicts a riot, the Pope prognosticates an outbreak of Protestant work ethic. Trolley is sanguine and Fennish. Usual service. Pretend we're not in and they'll Deliveroo to France instead.

Oliver Cromwell is just a statue in St. Ives.

Merde alors!

TWIST MY MELON, MAN

Life is sweet. There has been notable uplift in the markets.

 

Before he shakes hands with any leader of Labour, the Governor of the Bank of London reaches inside his boxers and, in good faith mind, rubs the fingertips and palm of his right hand around the unclean ribbed head of his penis.

 

As for Trolley and Melon, their list of action points remains unchecked. Wrapped up in the glow of hashish and diazepam, the cool of the clearance outlet calls. There is an issue over their aroma, however, and they drift back out into the fried air, clutching their coffees to go from their last entrée into commercialism.

 

Melon has de-clunked the toilet door and emerged cleaner and fresher to relieve Trolley of his extra free coffee. The barista has had to capitulate. Two white filters on the house, so as to halt the build-up of human traffic behind Trolley, whose male gaze holds firm as he raps on the counter: two pieces of hard currency - a 100 peseta coin and an unspecified amount of zloty. He has maintained rigorous eye contact throughout.

 

His broad smile and firm fix of the pupils have done the job.

 

Melon has sploshed. His contribution to the dialogue is typically topical.

 

"Just my pits and bits, Troll. Won't be long, mate."

 

There is only so much Sanexcan do. Melon likes to make the most of every personal hygiene opportunity, now that climactic conditions have come home. Football is in the Adriatic for the time being.

 

"If that's my iced latte, can you go skinny with it?"

 

The head of light entertainment has had to intervene. There is panic on the streets of Finsbury. The Governor's remarks to a jittery, coked-up crew from the ECB, BBC and Children's ITV has led to a run on sterling. 

 

Melon has been spotted in the business section hyperventilating. He wants to have a crack at the lucrative Asian wedding market. His plastic wear has emerged as an unexpected winner in the battle of Big Four: food, clothes, shelter and sanity.

 

Now that the carbon dioxide has fizzled out, everything's back-to-school normal: full steam ahead aboard HMS Consumerist towards the White Cliffs of Catastrophe.

 

Buoyed by the heat wave comeback and the World Cup of losers, the spectre of capital casts a distorted umbra over what remains of civilization. Sun cream and painkillers are much in demand. Only comedy can break the illusion.

 

PARASITISM

Cloaked in contempt, Carter steps over the homeless thing, whose mask has long slipped in horror at the recoil of the housed and the arrogant, skirts around the subject of her pissed-soaked wheelchair, and squeezes his moobs and three-fold bulging gut into the under-sized smart car that announces the centrality of his agency to commerce.

The law of rent has prompted prone bodies to stretch out and wait for death all over the economic dictatorship known as Cambridge. It also demands he drive out to the Fens to do a photo-shoot of the semi-rural retreat of the region’s only famous millionaire Australasian feminist.

He has remembered the tripod and the digital camera, but has left behind the tablet which lines up the picture in the corner office: The Sheep Shop, formerly the site of an all–female middle-class knitting circle. It too has been on the market far too long for Carter’s comfort.

Carter is comfortable with his third-class degree in BS (their little joke) from a third-rate polytechnic masquerading as a university claiming to be an educational institution in the name of profit. Carter is very comfortable pretending to be an estate agent. To the manor born and bred.

His pink pressed shirt and gold wedding band announce detached caricature and two point two children. If he had any more character, he’d be dangerous.

He answers his expensive phone.

• Not yet, darling. Will do later.
• …………….
• Some shithole near Liverpool I shouldn’t wonder.
• ……………
• How is little two point two this morning?

Paying negligible attention to capitalist patriarchy, and less to his darling, Carter switches to speakerphone so everybody can hear his booming confident baritone and heads for the hill-less Fenlands.

• I’m the global voice of piggery and she’s a sacred cow, said the owner’s agent, referring to the property’s illustrious, brainy Aussie, who is off back down under before she ends up under the daisies in the flattest piece of earth this side of Saffron Walden.
• I’m sorry?
• You will be. Now fuck off! 

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The End.

 

FRANTIC FRIDAY

“Everybody has a plan, until they get punched.”  Mike Tyson 
 

As excruciating as ABBA, the enduring memory of wedlock contains so many contrasting styles, so many complex emotions, across multi-layered vocals, heavy on digital verbs and synths, on a bed of the pissiest lyrics you ever heard, that Trolley seldom accesses its 39 Greatest Hits in his already over-subscribed head space.  

 

Beenyt and Alligator get married and then divorced and then write a musical together and make a film and one of them gets cancer and doesn't die, so they get re-married. Bits and pieces of Cher come apart on the set and the entire metaphor has to be abandoned. 

 

As with all things Abba-esque, one must tread gently with Melon. The mere mention of the A-word will set off a total recall and, in some cases, re-run of the winter of 1976. Trolley's revolution takes place a few years later, when Bilderberg make Margaret head of wage restraint and Frankenstein's mother to Davos Man is thigh-deep in the intellectual sewerage that drains from the free market stink tank. 

 

Thankfully, both anti-heroes are indisposed. That way less damage is incited. The world turns into custard cream and the Sixth mass extinction draws ever nearer. The treadmill escalates towards the cliff edge. A foul-smelling, family friendly soundtrack blasts its putrefying Euro-toss...Mamma Mia Here We Go Again... my my mind control, how can we resist you? Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!  

 

Trolley picks up the radio, a second before an awakened Melon can crack it into pieces with the largest boulder known to beast. Trolley switches track, just in the nick of Greenwich Meantime. 

 

Ahoy ahoy, you scurvy dogs of class war. You be listening to the Pirate Jack Show on 109 in the fm.  Avaste ye now. My good chumrades Trolley and Melon, them not be with us today 'cos them scurvy sons of biscuit dunkers, them bilge-sucking aldermen at the Shire Hall wants to hornswaggle my pals out of their rightful booty...with a hideous thing, them do call a council tax. A council tax! Landlubbing and having to pay for the privilege, whoever heard of such a thing... And now for the 147th time today, here's Johnny Kidd with Doctor Feelgood and the NHS Blues... 

 

Of all the 47 indigenous languages of Peru, Trolley speaks none, but then neither does Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Goddard, the former impeached president. 

 

Trolley lays the sounds out across his tongue. He tastes them. He savours the flavour of the internal rhyme as the delicate plosives pop against his flesh, he relishes each word: former; impeached; president; impeach; ex-president; former partner; bum like a peach; stop. 

 

Trolley triggers a warning: a self-administered yellow card, as bright as the Segovian sun and as clear as climate change. Time for a diversion, time to wake up Melon, in spite of all that that entails. 

 

Trolley shakes his noddy friend. He jolts him sideways. He agitates a small phial of patchouli under his nose. He leans forward and utters the BBC fuzzwords: Novichok nerve agent and for all the family.  

 

Melon nods on, unstirred. 

 

Trolley takes a step back, completes a mental risk assessment, takes another step back, and then a deep breathe, and shouts, proper shouting, like he used to, in the old days. 

 

FUCK ABBA! FUCK ABBA!  FUCK ABBA! FUCK ABBA!  

 

Melon rouses. He is just in time to catch Trolley as he whirls and whips up a frenzy, the frantic Friday feeling, end of term, out of school, off on holiday with the people you most hate... 
 

-Troll. It's ok. It's not real. It's only a movie.  It's me, Melon.  

 

Praise the heavens, thank the holy cow for friends. Melon has already started to administer the antidote. He just needs to add lyrics and mix. 

 

God Save the Queen and the fascist regime, they made you a moron, potential H-bomb...

 

BOOM!

 

Trolley is in pieces of eight all over the dual carriageway. Nobody will get to the beach on time.

 

Least of all, the Gazans.