Bête de Jour

Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans is a joke. And I don’t mean that necessarily in a bad way. I mean, that’s the only way to explain it. It’s not a comedy – not exactly – but it’s Herzog’s joke at the expense of Hollywood. It must be.

Herzog, of course, is mad. Not mad in the same way that Lars von Trier is mad – not bad mad. He’s just a wild and crazy guy who rails against Bonanza and eats shoes. And now he’s remade one of the most disturbing films of the nineties as a Hollywood pisstake.

Unsurprisingly, Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant has very little to do with Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. It has a corrupt, drug-addled cop at the centre of it, but that aside, it's more like a wildly distorted echo than a direct remake.

Ferrara’s film is genuinely shocking – still shocking, almost 20 years on. In it a nun is raped by two men. They also use a crucifix. Harvey Keitel’s lieutenant meanwhile is genuinely disturbed. Aside from the drugs, the sex and the gambling, the cursing of Christ and the standing around naked whilst whining like a wounded dog, there is also the infamous masturbation scene, which brings a whole new meaning to the term 'carjacking'. The man is a moral train-wreck and the film as a whole is uncomfortable and difficult.

Herzog’s film, by comparison, has more in common with a made-for-TV film, piling cliché upon cliché, plot-hole upon nonsense, and topping it all off with a caricature of a happy ending.

The drugs in Ferrara’s film are grimy and hideous. The script was written by Ferrara and Zoe Lund, who died of an overdose in 1999. The shooting-up scene is as realistic as any you’ll see and lasts forever.

The drugs in Herzog’s film are silly. When Nicholas Cage smokes crack he tends to turn into a buffoon, laughing hysterically, overacting enormously.

Keitel’s lieutenant takes drugs because he is a moral latrine.

Cage’s lieutenant takes drugs because he has a bad back.

Keitel’s lieutenant hallucinates a bloodied, freshly-crucified Christ.

Cage’s lieutenant hallucinates singing iguanas.

The one scene in which Cage’s bad lieutenant gets anywhere close to the badness of Harvey Keitel’s bad lieutenant is when he shoves a gun in a sick old lady’s face, cuts off her oxygen supply and calls her a ‘selfish cunt’. But even that got big laughs at the screening I was at. And rightly so. It was played for laughs. In fact, the tone is set at the beginning of that same scene when Cage picks up a giant teddy bear and throws it on the floor. Yes, sir, that’s how bad he is.

Ferrara’s film ends with Keitel smoking crack with the nun-rapists, giving them a box of money and putting them on the a bus out of town. The nun they raped forgave them and so must he. Then he’s gunned down for his gambling debts.

Herzog’s film ends when each of Cage's three serious problems is resolved in very quick succession, literally one after the other while he sits at his desk. Then the very last scene of the film has Cage looking at the camera and laughing. I imagine Herzog’s direction was: ‘OK, keep staring into the movie camera and then slowly, you realise – as the audience must realise – that the whole film has been an elaborate joke. You start to laugh. That’s it. Keep laughing! It’s ludicrous. Hollywood is ludicrous! With this film I can finally destroy it!’

Unfortunately, no one else seems to have realised it’s a joke and it actually garnered good straight reviews on its US release.

Herzog must be depressed. Hollywood's in worse shape than he thought. He's probably throwing himself into a cactus again as we speak.

There is of course the possibility that I have got entirely the wrong end of the stick and the film is not actually a joke at all. In which case, um... it's bollocks.

The iguanas are fun though.

When I was first offered this job I'm now doing, one of my primary concerns was that I wouldn't be able to find the time to write anymore. I had to take the job, and part of me almost even wanted to, but I knew that it would mean big changes. So I immediately decided that what I would do was this...

When the job started, I would wake at 5am every weekday. I would slip into my Slanket and make myself a pot of coffee. Then I would write my diary till 5.30. This would mean starting a diary again. This I would do. Then I would write something else until 8 o'clock when I would turn off my computer and do twenty minutes of vigorous exercise, stretching like Armstrong and saluting the sun like a militant yogi.

When I informed certain friends of my intentions, they were doubtful. Some of them mocked me. I was furious. 'O ye of little faith,' I chided, believing wholeheartedly that they would be laughing on the other side of their filthy faces when I slipped silkily into my new routine.

So. This is my third week and sadly I have not once managed to get out of bed more than ten minutes before I have to leave the house, often ten minutes or so after. It seems in fact that I am incapable of getting out of bed, even at 7 or 8 o'clock, let alone 5. Now I come to think of it, I have always been incapable of getting out of bed. What I'm wondering now is, why did I ever think I'd be able to do it? Am I an idiot?

Idiot or not, the fact is, I still genuinely believe myself when I make myself these promises.

For example, back in May 2008, I decided that I was going to run the London marathon the following year. I believed that too. Someone at work is doing the marathon this year. I was talking to them today and I was thinking, 'I'm going to do that. I'll do it next year.' And I believed myself then too. I believe it now. I really will do the marathon next year. You see if I don't.

You see? I'm incorrigible.

When I finally got an iPhone a couple of weeks ago, I was really pleased that I could download the app that would monitor my sleep patterns and wake me up when I was sleeping lightly, thus enabling me to greet the day feeling refreshed and wide awake. Really pleased.

It doesn't work.

BALLS.

The thing is, when I absolutely have to, I can do it. When I had to write my book in a very short period of time, I got up every day at 6am and I did it. Mind you, I wanted to do that. My heart was in it. My heart isn't in this poxy fucking job, thinking up shitty puns and being treated like a fucking prawn by people who clearly consider themselves vastly superior to me.



Seriously, for 200 days I have to tolerate this? That's over 93,000 minutes essentially wasted. Must I? Really?

Yes. I must.

With that in mind, very genuinely I beseech thee, do you know, is there anything I can do to instill in myself a little self-discipline? Or more simply, how the fuck do I get out of bed in the morning? I would really appreciate your advice if you have any. Please bear in mind, however, that I have already tried the following: hiding alarm clocks; laying out clothes next to alarm clocks; sticking abusive notes to the wall next to alarm clocks; going to bed early; going to bed late; drinking heavily the night before; visualising a successful awakening; bullying myself; loathing myself. And none of it works. Not even close.

So. How do you get up in the morning? What's your secret?

Please help me. You're my only hope.

So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I was growing increasingly tired of masturbation. Then last Friday I received an email from a sex worker. Is that what they’re called? Women who work for sex toy companies? Anyway, Carly works for LoveHoney.co.uk and by way of solution to my problem, she offered me free sex. In a can. Specifically, this one:



As you can see, it’s quite odd. For one thing, it has a mouth. Now I know I’ve not seen that many vaginas, but I’m sure even Seymore Butts hasn’t seen one with an infranasal depression, or - it always takes me ages of fruitless head-searching then a quick Google search to remember this word - philtrum. (Hmm. I just spent ten minutes checking Wikipedia’s etymology of the word philtrum against the entry in volume two of The New Shorter Oxford. Interesting. Veeeery interesting. And they say masturbation ruins your vocabulary. Paff.) Anyhow, in the words of the popular song, any hole’s a goal.

Now, before I go any further – I think I should just … one moment, please.

Right. I have to say, having used the thing twice now, it is really very, very good. Which is to say, it feels excellent wrapped around your engorged Johnson and it does facilitate some splendid and relatively powerful sensations on fruition.

I did find it much easier to use, however, when I removed the superskin flesh-sleeve from the can. The reasons for this are twofold.

Number one. It’s a bit tight in the can. Out of the can, the superskin flesh-sleeve is able to expand to take your girth. In the can, it’s like trying to fuck a frighteningly robust moth. I think you know what I’m saying. Also, out of the can …



… the superskin flesh-sleeve becomes eerily animated, almost lifelike. It flops about in your hand like a dazed rat, freshly shaven, or like the panicking infant of some alien animal species, lost and frightened and helpless.



There's something sweet about it. Vulnerable. Not at all prurient. And when I bathed it in warm water, washing the sperm out of its unquestioning throat, I was amazed at the paternal instincts it inspired in me. I know it might sound a tiny bit odd under the circumstances, but I thought I felt like I might if I were washing a baby. I felt protective, fatherly. I think it was at this point I christened her Jenny.

[Idea: film about a mild-mannered sub-editor who is transformed into a slavering psychopath after becoming emotionally attached to a pretend vagina.]

Number two. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTS TO FUCK A CAN??!!?!

I can’t really get over the naffness of it. It seems ridiculous to me. The fleshlight people have gone to such lengths and made such incredible strides in making a fake vagina which, if properly warmed and lubricated, could definitely pass for the real thing in a blind finger test. And yet they have chosen to package the thing like it’s only fit 13-year-old dimwits.

Why does it have to come in a can, for Christ’s sake? And why does it have to be a fake booze can?



It’s rather insulting if you ask me, pandering to that hackneyed notion that men are all Nuts-reading Neanderthals obsessed with sport, tits and lager. This is clearly nonsense. Only a tiny percentage of the male population have anything but intense and caustic disdain for Nuts magazine. (Please let it be so.)

My flatmate Imogen has just opined that the reason it’s like a can of beer is for purposes of subterfuge. So as not to upset your mum maybe, when she’s clearing up your tissues. If this is the case, and it certainly seems plausible enough at first glance, then why not make the design vaguely believable? Any mum worth her salt is going to be onto 'Pink Lotus Lager' in a flash.

The fact is, this product is branded for boys. And mental men-babies. Look at this, from the side of the can:


‘Government Warning: According to surgeons generally, if your wife is pregnant, this product just might be your best friend.’


Their target demographic seems mostly to consist of men who possess all of the intelligence, sensitivity and sexual savvy of Jim Davidson.


‘Frequent use may prevent births.’


As if anything more than 2% of their customers are actually in a relationship.

They're not. They're teenage boys, Nuts retards and a few justifiably embarrassed wankers. All of them single. This is why the reviews on the Fleshlight website are like this:


‘i probably fucked this thing for 10 of the last 40 hours. i have amazing stamina from masturbating for hours at a time, and this is so much better.’

‘its only been one day and my penis made me pound it twice already! this thing is AMAZING. i have a girlfriend and let me tell you this thing feels just like sex or even better! … two words. POUND ONE!’


So the problem really, is entirely in my head. It’s a matter of class. Snobbishness if you prefer. I just can’t imagine Cary Grant resorting to Sex in a Can. And that puts me off.

There’s room, of course, for the pounding yahoo - I’m sure it’s an enormously healthy market - but where are the sex toys for the auto-eroticist with a touch of refinement? There are masses of tasteful toys in a woman’s pleasure arsenal - as well as the garish veiny cocks, there are sleek and elegant vibrating love sticks so lovingly designed that even as they’re buzzing and teasing, they still manage to be aesthetically pleasing. They're classy. And cool. And offer no reason at all to be ashamed. So why must men have to put up with toys branded by Bernard Manning? I mean, what the fuck is this supposed to be?




Even Vulva, a terrible, laughable, repugnant product, granted, but at least they had the good taste to attempt to brand it as something sophisticated and erotic.



They failed, clearly, but at least they tried, goddammit. (By the way, that is definitely one product that would benefit from an exclamation mark. Vulva! See?)

Ooh, and I’ve just been looking around and I've found this. This is fairly tasteful. Well, ish. You couldn’t pass it off as an objet fucking d’art though.

Anyway, that’s my review.

In summary …

Efficacy :: 9 out of 10
Aesthetics :: 0 out of 10
Overall Branding Strategy :: 0 out of 10
Possibility for japes and silly photographs :: 6 out of 10

So, to end. Last night Imogen and I took some photos with little Jenny. Imogen got right into the spirit of the thing and applied some lipstick to Jenny's mouth. I didn't say but I thought this was a bit weird. I didn't want to sexualise her. That's also a bit weird. Anyway, Ben ran out of the room squealing like a girl and Imogen and I took photos. They weren't very good. Or were they? No, they weren't.

Still, this is Jenny smoking a joint, the naughty girl:



And here she is with a piece of ham for a tongue:



Eeeeeeeh, we have a laugh.

Anyway, enough now, I think. Thank you, LoveHoney Carly, very much, but I think it's time to move on from this nonsense. Time to meet some real people. Right now in fact.

Wish me luck.

I thought it might be funny to write an account of a date I had on Valentine’s Day - a date with myself and a bottle of Vulva. It would have been a silly thing, you understand. I was going to pretend that I had someone over for a cosy dinner. I would tidy the house and cook a meal - fish pie maybe, or a nice New England clam bake. And then I was going to make a clumsy lunge at myself after the coffee and hopefully go all the way. But not necessarily.

There is every chance I might not have put out at all. After all, I’m a sensitive not to say needy individual and it might very well have taken a good deal more than the scent of synthetic nethers to bring me to fruition. More important still, I feared that if I got into that whole self-love thing again, there was every possibility I might actually disappear right inside my own bottom.

Thankfully, the Vulva didn’t come till Monday. (I would normally have used the word arrive in that sentence, but I am a sucker for a vagina gag.) (!)

So, in order to fulfil my end of the bargain – to wit an honest review in exchange for a free sample of the product – I was forced to go to the hustings. Is that what I mean? Let’s say yes.

On Monday night, I held my first woefully unstructured focus group, telling my guinea pigs exactly what I was smearing on their hands. I asked them to score the product out of ten for vulvacity, arousal and overall pleasantness. The results were not good.

For vulvacity, Vulva was found distinctly lacking. Which is not a good sign. A product called Vulva, describing itself as a vaginal fragrance really ought to smell like vagina. If not, it can only be considered a failure. But then again, as a few of the people with whom I have engaged on the subject have pointed out, surely not all vulvae smell alike. Well, in my limited experience, I would say yes and no. Of course every foo-foo has a different odour, just as every Johnson has a different odour, just as every human being has a different odour. However, it's surely also true to say that there is definitely a ball-park smell.

Anyhow, here are a bunch of thoughts from the first session:


'It smells like wee.'

'It's a bit toilet.'

'It smells a bit like fish and chips. A bit musky … It's not unpleasant. I wouldn't want to smell of it but I wouldn't be really upset if I did ... It doesn't smell of my vulva, but does my vulva smell of everybody's vulva? Is my vulva everyvulva? … That doesn't smell anything like a vulva. Oh, maaaaaaybe – maybe there's a tiny hint. It's too perfumey though. It's got that kind of Copydex quality … I feel like it's burning my wrist. It feels simultaneously hot and cold … It smells a bit of honey as well.'

'So you put this on and masturbate? And it's meant to help, is it?'

'It smells a bit like cardboard.'


So there you go. 'Not unpleasant' is about as good as it gets. Personally, I don't agree. I think it's very unpleasant. For me, it does smell of vulva, but it smells of a vulva that's been trapped in a chemical toilet for six days. It has ammonia front bottom notes, reminiscent of those awful pineapple chunks you find it men's urinals.

Anyhow, on Tuesday night, I did a blind test in a pub with three new rugged male friends. They weren't impressed. The best quote came from Paul, a 45-year-old man from Macclesfield. 'It smells like old man,' he said.



That's not good.

So there it is. Vulva is basically a novelty item that no one in their right brain would ever buy twice.

And let that be an end to it.

In other news, I'm almost finished my first week of proper work, and yesterday, I got an iPhone.

I feel like an adult.

I'm not though.

Have a super weekend.

I hate the way that the only way you can complain to a lot of institutions is by filling in prohibitively long-winded and poorly-worded forms on their website. Never a person to speak to. Without wishing to sound cynical, or wildly paranoid, I must say I fear the non-user-friendliness of these forms might actually be deliberate. There’s nothing more likely to make a griping punter shut their traps and forget about it than a website that keeps logging them out. But I was determined. This was a serious issue. This was theft. And I didn’t see why the Royal Mail should get away with it. So I persevered, and in the section asking me to describe my grievance, I wrote the following:


‘The item in question was a small bottle of Vulva, the erotic vaginal scent of a desirable woman. This is apparently a feminine, tantalising, intimate scent and I was very much looking forward to it enhancing my increasingly dull fantasy life.

This is actually the second time that my Vulva has disappeared whilst in the care of the Royal Mail. The first time the entire package went missing, this time merely the Vulva itself. You must admit, it doesn’t look good. Take a man’s Vulva once, and he’ll put it down to carelessness. Twice and frankly, it starts to smell fishy.

Please investigate this matter at once and if you cannot find my Vulva and return it to me intact, I would like to know that the postman in question has been thoroughly ticked off. It really is a sad state of affairs when a man’s Vulva is not safe in the hands of a humble postie.

I am dismayed and seek immediate reassurance.’


The Royal Mail replied, and fairly promptly, but with a stock response. It's all ‘robust processes’ and ‘appropriate action’, and the concluding paragraph pretty much sums up their attitude toward my missing Vulva.


‘Once again, please accept my sincere apologies on behalf of Royal Mail for the problem you've had, and our thanks for taking the time to make us aware of this. Please be assured that we take letting our customers down seriously and will use this information to make further improvements.’


Yeah, right. Meanwhile, down at the sorting office, two bottles of prime Vulva are changing hands like schoolboy pornographs.

Sniff your letters. And never trust a postman. Or woman.

I need to spice up my self-love life.

There. I’ve said it.

And when I say self-love, I don’t mean cutting myself some slack, thinking positive and giving myself a pat on the back whether or not I deserve it. I mean wanking. Unless of course, I’m being jolly clever and using one as a slightly sticky mirror for the other. Well, I’m not. I’m just talking about wanking.

I’ve fallen into a rut, you see. I just don’t put any effort into the act of making love with myself anymore. You know? I just don’t pleasure myself with the same outlandish vigour and rigour as once I did.

It’s an unpleasant truth but it’s come to pass that in this period of my life, my self-love lacks verve. I do it of course, and relentlessly, but the joy is gone. The sense of urgency is gone. The spontaneity that was at times jazz-like. That’s gone too. All that’s left is a tired, asthmatic glimmer of desire and a dulled sense of weary obligation. I go through the motions: a text-book moribund shuffle, like a dying man rooting through a pile of garbage. There’s no romance. There’s not even any real sense of pleasure. And as for foreplay? Forget about it.

A lot of this is connected to technology, of course, and the proliferation of fat-pipe porn. Erotic images were incredibly scarce when I was young. This meant you had to put a lot more work into your relationship with yourself. It also meant you had to take opportunities as and when they arose. Songs of Praise. Your friend’s mother’s bra and lipstick. Every inappropriate erection was a new, distinctly seedy adventure. These days there’s none of that, and recklessly I have allowed my imagination and impulsivity to become saturated, and desiccated, by porn. As a result, I’ve turned into a lousy self-lover.

And don’t think I haven’t noticed. If you want to know the truth, it’s tearing me apart. I’ve tried talking about it but I just won’t listen. I’ve come to resent myself. Literally. And when I remember how I used to be, back at the beginning when it was all fresh and new and I couldn’t keep my hands off myself….

So, in the absence of the ability to split up with myself, which is what I really want to do, frankly, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to get myself back on the right track. I'm staging a kind of self-intervention, before any really irreparable damage is done.

My first move was to check out the "target=_blank>clever articles you find in magazines and newspapers, the ones full of advice for couples who don’t really like one another anymore because of years of mind-numbing repetition. But they didn’t really work out. Spontaneous hugging met with a limp silence. Surprising myself with chocolates was a lovely touch but then watching me eat them all and calling me fat afterwards was just awful. That was an angry wank, that one. And not in a good way.

Then I thought of buying myself some knickers. It would be deceitful of me to claim that having the sexual smorgasbord of my nether regions coddled in the stretched silk of a woman’s undergarment is not something that gives me a terrific itch in the belly. For it is. Even the mere thought of it threatens to cajole some twitch of appreciation from Cupid’s torch. Having said that, the thought of actually purchasing a nice pair of knickers for posh-wank purposes – and they would have to be very nice – just feels a little sad. Sad as in pathetic. Lamentable. Borderline deplorable. That’s the problem with all of these masturbatory aids: they just seem so fucking desperate. Toe-curling in their desperation. And yet, still, in arid times, in a cold climate, when one’s very soul feels like it’s running to seed, if you’ll pardon the pine nut, it can be very, very tempting.

I mean, there are all kinds of self-sex accessories out there that, when you first hear about them, your mind just boggles and you think, no. You think, that’s just wretched. That’s pitiful. And then some time passes and maybe your circumstances change and maybe you think about it a little more and your mind stops boggling quite so much. I mean, is it really any less wretched and pitiful for a grown man to penetrate a synthetic vibrating vagina in a tin can than it is for a lady to krunk herself giddy on the shaft of a synthetic vibrating lovestick or rabbit-themed pleasuring device? Is it?

Well, it shouldn’t be.

And yet, somehow... I don’t know. Maybe it just isn’t for me.

This, for example:



This is ‘Sex in a Can’, from the same Captains of Cock that brought you the industry leader, the classic, Fleshlight.

I mean, good luck to you if you can grit your eyes and get into that, but I really don’t think I could. I should probably add, however, that I am willing to try, so if anyone’s got one they’ve finished with, do get in touch. For now though, even with the extreme nunliness of the vulva, it just doesn’t inspire me.

In fact, I can think of only two pertinent things less appealing than pushing my roaring jack into the fake plastic undermeat of a pair of canned quim nuts. One is filming the same act and putting it on YouPorn. (I just can’t bring myself to watch those things. It must be the saddest act of pornography in the whole world.) The other is splashing six thousand US dollars on a real doll.

Having said that, one day, when my boat comes in, I’d quite like to run away with this one.



There are of course men who reject outright the easy commercialisation of self-love. These men prefer to bore an unsexy orifice into a watermelon or pumpkin and root out their pleasure that way. Sometimes they layer bacon around the bore-hole.

Although I admire the spirit and inventiveness of these men, I can’t really imagine myself making love to a melon. Not at my age. I'd rather make love to a chicken, to be honest. A dead chicken, obviously – I’m not into kinky stuff. Just an everyday dead chicken from the supermarket. Maybe a bit of bacon around the bore-hole.



I can imagine that quite easily. You know, if I absolutely have to. I can imagine that the feel of the chicken skin, mottled from plucking and sliding back and forth across the cold white flesh of the legs might actually be quite erotic.

I don't intend to do it though. These are just thought experiments. I actually find it repulsive. Honest.

So instead of fucking a dead chicken, I’ve hit upon something else. Something definitely less vile. An idea. A business idea for a new product. Something to enliven the - let's face it - the chore of male masturbation.

I call it FISTMUFF.

Essentially it’s essence of fresh vagina, applied to the back of the hand. A bird in the hand, you might say. But no bush.

Simply apply FISTMUFF to one hand, take your old chap in the other and you’re away. With your eyes closed you sniff at the FISTMUFF, breathing in the erotic fragrance of the mouth that speaks no words, and you imagine that you’re anywhere but where you actually are, doing anything but what you’re actually doing.

Of course I’m joking. Where am I going to find a fresh vagina to tease and milk? Or indeed any vagina.

Unless… unless I reread Perfume with terrifying zeal, master maceration and enfleurage and then launch myself on a murderous yet delectably redolent rampage. Hmm... No. I don’t think so. Important though it is to spice up a dead date with Fisty Palmer, rampant carnage just wouldn’t seem right so close to Valentine’s Day.

Anyway, what kind of madman would deign to distil the bouquet of the bower of bliss? Surely not even a man with a smell camera would be so arrogant as to seriously attempt to simulate essence of vulva. It’d be like trying to recreate the roof of the Sistine Chapel in a bus shelter in Basildon.

It'll never happen.

Or will it?

I'm afraid all of that guff about me inventing FISTMUFF was a bit of a red herring. I was pulling the wool over your eyes, if you’ll pardon the poon. For the fact is, FISTMUFF exists. You may, of course, already be wholly cognisant of this fact; you may, in fact, be drenched in the stuff as we speak, pleasuring yourself to a dervish, spitting hot liquid on the keyboard, rolling on the floor, your tongue lolling from your mouth like a single sad mitten lost in the rain. FISTMUFF exists! Only it’s not called FISTMUFF. It’s called Vulva.

Vaginal scent. For men.

Watch the video and just marvel for a moment if you would, at the wonder of the world in which we live…



Mmmmmm, yes. Finally, a scent to keep the scourge of saddle-sniffing gusset-gannets off the streets and out of the gymnasia.

I’m figuring Vulva could be just the fillip I need to get me through this miserable mizzling month to the sappy spring that awaits. And more importantly, it can help bring me closer again. To myself. I'm convinced of it: essence of vagina will get me through this unpleasant patch.

So, my third consignment of Vulva is in the post. The first two, I should explain, went missing in transit. I swear.

I'm just hoping it gets here in time for Valentine’s Day. I don’t want to be alone again this year.

In the meantime, I'd appreciate a little feedback. I can't be the only one for whom wanking has become a depressing, devitalising experience. Can I? Singletons! Speak to me. What do you do to keep your self-sex life alive?

My grandmother thinks Jonathan Ross is obscene. That’s the word she always uses whenever he comes up in conversation. ‘I don’t like that Jonathan Ross,’ she says, the slits of her eyes oozing dry contempt, her scowl stabbing like shit-hooks into her jowls. ‘He’s obscene.’ What gets her goat of course, is the bad language, the kneejerk infantile sexualisation of absolutely everything and the wilful, pervasive inappropriateness. Basically all the good stuff, all the cheeky stuff that makes other people watch. But then my gran is from a different time, bless her, and consequently she's rather old-fashioned. She’s still not entirely happy with the idea of homosexuals adopting children, if you want to know the truth. But she's a good woman despite that, and I love her very much.

Also, I like Jonathan Ross. He can be overbearing at times, of course, and childish, and self-indulgent, and, frankly, borderline creepy - but Jesus, who can’t? He’s still on occasion well worth watching though, and that’s saying an awful lot. At his best, his lack of respect for propriety and showbiz protocol can be jaw-dropping. I will love him always, for example, for asking this country’s next Prime Minister whether or not he pleasured himself to thoughts of Margaret Thatcher. I think it’s actually testament to the gargantuan irreverence of that question that all traces of it have been removed from the internet. (Fiver to anyone who can find it for me.) (Video, that is - not mere mention. Tsk.)

For these reasons, when I was recently offered the opportunity to go see an episode of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross being recorded, I thought about it for a moment, then I took it. After all, if I were lucky, something amazing might happen, something magical, or at the very least something temporarily memorable.

I would have to be very lucky though, because, let’s face it, not only are chat shows in the main horrible worthless bilge, they are also, in essence, evil. With no pretensions to artistic endeavour, they are powered one hundred per cent by PR. They’re essentially live adverts, relying entirely on the public’s bland acceptance that celebrities are, by their very nature, interesting. However, even without someone as potentially unseemly as Jonathan Ross at the helm, chat shows can occasionally deliver wonderful moments of human nonsense. The various drunk appearances by Oliver Reed stand out. Serge Gainsbourg
insisting to Whitney Houston’s face that he wanted to fuck her. Muhammed Ali’s idiotic paranoid meltdown on Parkinson. Barry Gibb’s humour bypass on Clive Anderson. Tom Cruise on PCP on Oprah. David Icke giving Godhead to Wogan. These moments probably just about make the format worthwhile, but naturally, sadly, they are few and far between. Realistically, it was probably unlikely I’d be there the night Matthew Kelly shot himself, for example, or Mel Gibson revealed the new Hitler tattoo across his back, but maybe I’d be lucky and bag a devastating raconteur.

I wasn’t lucky. If you happened to have caught the show last week, you’ll know by the fact that you’ve already forgotten who the guests were, that the guests were crap.

They were, in order of sheer pointlessness, Kim Cattrall, the pubescent cast of something called Misfits and fucking Jedward. (It is, I believe, now a legal requirement that whenever John and Edward are mentioned in the showbiz compound, their name must be preceded by the repulsed intensifier fucking. Like Gregory F Peck.)



Before the horrific torture of the guests, however, there was the ignominy of queuing outside for over an hour in the drizzle. Then there was the unpleasant awkwardness of the warm-up guy. I was hoping for some budding stand-up. Instead there was this monstrous mediocrity who had members of the audience removing articles of clothing in exchange for prizes which never arrived, whilst all the while leching really inappropriately, and deeply unamusingly, over a beautiful girl in the audience. He was like a combination of redcoat reject and charmless Ted Bundy.

Embarrassing and incompetent though he was as an individual, however, it was his role on the show as a whole that was really depressing, bringing home as it did what an unmitigated crock of excrement television really is.

I remember thinking, 'let me get this straight, you’re telling me that when fucking Jedward, this pair of empty-headed showbiz suppositories walk onto a gaudy set, you want me to stand up and applaud? But that doesn’t make sense. We shouldn’t be screaming and shouting our approval at these arse-candles. We should be pelting them with effluent.'

Speaking of effluent, before Kim Cattrall’s extraordinarily dull interview, we were treated to a screening of the trailer for Sex and the City 2, which is, it has to be said, truly truly amazing. I honestly never thought I’d ever see anything that would make the original film of Sex and the City look like anything other than the celluloid tumour that it is, but this trailer actually makes it look remarkable.

So even though Ross repeatedly professed great fondness for the cast of Misfits and fucking Jedward, surely he would let Kim Cattrall have it for her part in the atrocity that the Sex and the City franchise has become. Surely.

Nope. Not a bit of it. Renowned cineaste Ross claims to love the crime against humanity that is Sex and the City, part one.

It was at this point that I properly gave up. I had been hoping for a glimpse of the no-bullshit Ross I’d seen in the past – the same man who tore Kevin Smith a new pimhole for the execrable Clerks 2 - but he seems to have moved on. He’s probably content to just sit out his BBC contract, hyping every piece of cack that comes his way and even sucking up to fucking Jedward when necessary. Well, I'm not. I'm done with him. I know, I know. He'll be gutted.

Finally, after a suitably crap performance by The Editors, it was over.

When I shuffled back out into the drizzle at around 9 o’clock, my hands buzzing with shame from all the fake applause, I actually felt good. Mostly I felt good because, apart from Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, I haven’t watched a single TV programme actually on television since I moved back to London in September. Good for me.

It really is crap.

…

And you?

Have you ever seen a TV show recorded live and if so, was that crap too?

I was just curious and I'm trying to source the Twitter crowd but my charisma is wearing a testicle suit. And it might not be the best time.

I was just wondering, what would you say is your all-time favourite chat show moment of all time? If you had to give one example of why all chat shows should not be consigned to the bowels of hell nowforth and forevermore, one moment that renders their existence worthwhile if not essential to the health of mankind, what would it be?

This blog post will self-destruct in less than 24 hours by the way. And if you read this sentence here, all memory of this blog post will evaporate from your mind the moment the post itself is deleted.

You're back in the room.

I'm a bit wrecked. I spent the weekend with my gran and then brought her back down to London today. It was fun. She's funny. She hasn't been to London much. Her foot is good and she was hopping up steps on the tube like a winter chicken. Complaining all the way of course, but she couldn't hide the excitement. It was fucking great actually.

Anyway, answer my question if you would.

I miss you.

Or is it just me? You can tell me. I can take it.

‘I’m of the opinion that comedy should be all about depression, and should be about life being shit, and bonding in this misery. The uplifting stuff – it’s for kids. Adults don’t want to be uplifted… “You can tickle a gibbon, life’s great!” Pfft. Is it?’

- Jim Jeffries, in conversation with Marsha Shandur


I first heard of Jerry Sadowitz when, aged four, I read a book about the history of alternative comedy called Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-law? Actually I may have been a little older than four. And it may have been a different book. But Jerry Sadowitz definitely made an impression on me. Apparently, what he did, he went on stage and said, ‘I hate everything.’ Even at that age, whatever age I was, the idea of making comedy from misanthropy appealed to me enormously, because essentially, I hated everything too. I remember thinking, who is this courageous man who dares speak the truth?

As I grew older, Sadowitz would crop up in my peripheries every once in a while and invariably in the same context, invariably with someone asking the question: is this the most offensive man on the planet? So naturally, I’ve always wanted to see him live. Finally, last Thursday night at the Leicester Square Theatre, I did.

Prior to seeing him, I did a little research to prepare myself. One of the most recent online reviews of Sadowitz was published on the comedy website Chortle. It was written by a comedy producer named Bethan Richards, whose Twitter profile begins with the words ‘I love comedy!’ (Already, that exclamation mark is a bit of a giveaway.) Her review was entitled, ‘A tirade of racist, sexist, borderline-psychopathic bile’, but before she got into why she was so easily offended, Richards pointed out: ‘I am not easily offended. I’m not a girly girl who only likes watching My Family and repeats of The Good Life.’ However, Richards did not enjoy Sadowitz. In fact, she seemed genuinely baffled. Clearly, for her a man swearing at the audience and hating everything was not comedy. Where was the adherence to timeworn comedy formula? Where was the comedian’s crucial craving for the audience’s love?

‘I felt sure we were being filmed for a reality show,’ she writes. ‘When was Davina going to pop out and tell us it’s all OK?... Truly and utterly shocking. I wanted to walk out. But I was a bit too scared.’

I must admit, before I actually went to see him for myself, I was a little scared too. I was scared that I’d be disappointed, scared that like Richards, I too would see nought on stage but a bitter old misanthropist with no comedy value.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the case. Rather, for the duration of his 100-minute show, I was captivated.

Jerry Sadowitz is phenomenal. He’s like a Tasmanian Devil, or like a plague of comedy locusts, devouring everything in sight with his all-encompassing disgust.



Unlike most human beings, there is no subject Sadowitz will not make not light of and defile. The Haiti earthquake, for example, was mentioned in the first minute and cropped up a few times throughout the evening. Although he didn’t actually utter the words ‘I hate Haiti’, that, as always, was his gist. ‘They need food. I need a fucking iPod. That’s how it fucking works.’ And who but Jerry Sadowitz would dare open a set with a magic trick involving the persistently elusive Madeleine McCann?

You often hear people say, ‘there are some things you simply cannot make jokes about’. High up on this list are usually rape, paedophilia and natural disasters. Other people argue, however, that the darker and more unacceptable the subject matter, the more reason there is to make jokes. Indeed, it’s almost like we have a responsibility to make jokes, to laugh in the face of the unremitting odiousness of human existence. Laughter is a coping mechanism, and for a lot of people it’s absolutely essential.

Let us not forget, it is a relentlessly dark and distressingly ugly world, packed to the gills with cancer, child abuse, genocide, suicide bombers, mutual assured destruction and Miley Cyrus. These things can be overwhelming. At times they can feel impossible to deal with. Some people accept them grimly, with silence and fearful respect, granting them power in the process. Others laugh in their face and tell them to fuck off.

Comedy is often described as a kind of pressure valve for society. It allows us to let off steam. This is probably more true of Sadowitz than any other comic. He says the things we wouldn’t dare say. If we’re of a dark bent ourselves, we might think them, or if we have friends of an equally dark bent, we might on occasion even voice them, but one thing we would never do is stand up in public and shout them at a room full of strangers.

Stewart Lee said of Jerry Sadowitz: ‘There's a part in every show of his where a little piece of me dies and I think, I wish I'd never heard that.’ The part of this show which had me feeling something similar was his short rant about what he’d like to do to the TV presenter Christine Bleakley. He didn’t even have the decency to pronounce her name correctly.

Sadowitz describes what he does as a ‘cancer of entertainment’, but in its relentless obscenity, it somehow feels like the opposite of that. It feels like the antidote.

Furthermore, just to clear something up, Sadowitz isn't remotely racist. Racism - as Michael Richards proved a couple of years ago - isn’t funny. Racism is stupid, and it comes from a brainless place, from fear and ignorance. What Sadowitz does - even when he’s calling Barack Obama ‘a black cunt’ - is the opposite of racism. It’s comedy.

At one point in the show, Sadowitz is recounting a visit to his GP when he lapses into a Pakistani accent. Then he breaks off for a second to explain: ‘He wasn’t even a Pakistani. I’m just doing that for sheer fucking devilment.’

Devilment is the perfect word for what Sadowitz does. He makes mischief. He pins propriety to the ground and, before your very eyes, he buggers it. And a lot of people don’t care for that.

Speaking of which, Bethan Richards might be pleased to hear that her review of the Sadowitz preview was mentioned in the show proper. Unsurprisingly, Sadowitz didn’t care for it. Mostly what rankled was her description of him as merely borderline psychopathic. ‘Borderline?’ he screamed. ‘What the fuck does a man have to do?’

Relentless, fearless, infantile, ridiculous, repugnant and utterly vile, Jerry Sadowitz is really quite brilliant. And in a world where Michael McIntyre is king and the incessantly pun-heavy and desperately needy tweets of Peter Serafinowicz are widely regarded as some sort of sacred text, it’s clear that we need Sadowitz more than ever before.

The cunt.



Go on, see for yourself. I dare you.





Update Wednesday :: I'm an arse. I forgot the best bit, the surprising bit. The best bit was that he really seemed to be enjoying himself. There was a warmth to the performance. Almost. It was sweet.

‘You find a lot of the other websites, you know, there’s a lot of - to put it nicely - riff-raff. With Beautiful People, I mean, there’s - they’re just, you know, sort of, more people like us.’

- Ashley Peaulac, Beautiful Person


There is something distinctly unsavoury about BeautifulPeople.com, and I swear this is not just sour grapes.

I first heard about ‘The sexiest website in the world today’ a week or so ago after they'd apparently kicked out 5,000 fatties after they'd beefed up over Christmas. I wondered if it could possibly be true. So I went along to the site.

Sure enough, it really is a club where only the beautiful may gain admission. Now, like Groucho Marx, and pretty much anyone else with a healthy streak of self-loathing, I find myself automatically suspicious of any club that will have me as a member. At least to a certain extent. However, there is also the flipside to consider, for like many practised self-loathers, I am also, in part, enormously conceited, and the idea of being excluded from a club, from any club – especially on the grounds of something so superficial and arbitrary as my outward appearance – really grates my Johnson. So what I did, I stole the face of a hunky Turkish footballer and set up a fake account. Boom! Eat that, my pretties!

And once I was in, I have to say, I was disappointed. To be fair, there are an awful lot of loltards everywhere on the internet these days, and if you go to any live chat forum on pretty much any dating site, there will be a scarily high number of these excitable fools communicating primarily in punctuation marks. Beautiful People, however, is crawling with the fuckers. In retrospect, I should really have left immediately, but I was determined to give it a fair crack of the whip, so I hung around, an ugly man in a sexy mask, and I made notes.

The first thing I discovered is that BeautifulPeople.com is, ironically, a really ugly website. It has a pseudo-slick veneer, for sure, but it handles like a drunken bison. Exotic similes aside, it just doesn’t work very well. It’s like it was built by ham-fisted toddlers who’d never actually used the internet before, but had heard that there might be money in it. Every click opens a new window. New windows sit on top of the old windows like damp firewood on dying embers until - after five minutes, or maybe twenty or so clicks - the site crashes and you’re automatically logged out. The whole thing is buggier than a mattress in a crack-den, and somehow less comfortable.

After a short while, you come to the conclusion that every feature of the site seems deliberately constructed to aid non-communication. None of the admin works consistently. None of the glitches are promptly, if ever, addressed. And to cap it all, the damn thing’s full of fakes! I’m sure I saw a Catherine Zeta Jones on there, and at least two Jonas Brothers. Consequently, trying to get to know people is like trying to make a paper swan out of a baked potato. Whilst blindfolded. And wearing an oven glove.

Of course, the crappiness of the site doesn’t necessarily make it worthless. Some of the greatest clubs in history have convened in the most insalubrious of venues - probably - and a large part of what makes any club great is the collective character of its members. Sadly, after just a couple of hours meandering around the grounds of BeautifulPeople.com, my initial impression that the site seemed overwhelmingly populated by dullards was confirmed.

The live chat forum is a dire, hollow experience. Aside from feeling exactly like the internet ten years ago, and aside from recent rumours that the feature is a breeding ground for spam and malicious site redirection, it offers nothing more than a cacophony of inanity. Really. Like monkeys in a tumble drier.

Then there's the personal profiles, which are flimsy flimsy like a chocolate mimsy. There are only half a dozen questions you’re invited to answer – these include ‘do you smoke?’, ‘do you drive?’ and ‘what star sign are you?’ Pointless. If you actually want to get to know someone, you're better off at checking out which groups they’ve joined. Groups which make Bebo look like a Chomsky fansite. Groups such as this:



It’s like being in a room full of people who send angry texts into newspapers.

There is one group, however, for those beautiful people who maybe feel they’re being misrepresented by the less cerebrally advanced members who roll backwards and forwards through the site, mainly backwards, like confused but well-groomed tumbleweeds. This group is called Beautiful But Smart. Sadly, it hasn’t really taken off.

To be honest, the whole site is moribund. Reading a few of the threads in a few of the groups, however, it seems that a few years ago, it used to be quite good. Oh, well. Not anymore.

The nastiest part of the site, however, is the rating system. This is how the site works, or rather, doesn't. Basically, once you’re a member yourself, you get to decide who else can join you in your ivory tower.

In the About section of the site, the rating process is succinctly described:


‘Beauty is subjective and BeautifulPeople Network believes that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The rating module was born from this very principle. By giving the power back to the members to define their ideal of beauty in a democratic way. Essentially, by applying to BeautifulPeople Network applicants are being beholden by thousands.’


The worst part of this process is that the ‘beholden’ can then see just exactly how they’ve been beheld.



It’s not nice. No matter how little you really care, rejection is never a pleasant feeling. Apparently they've had death threats. It’s surely only a matter of time before BeautifulPeople.com claims its first rejection-related suicide. I imagine when it happens, the site founders will whoop with joy at the free publicity.

More disconcerting than being rated and rejected by a bunch of strangers, however, is rating people yourself.

Lots of things go through your mind when you start out. The first of which is that you're involved in something not only odious, and somehow iniquitous. I hate to fall foul of Godwin with such alacrity, but is it really that giant a step from deciding whether or not someone can join you in your clique of beautiful people, to sliding shut the iron bolt in the shower door at Dachau? Is it?

Well, OK, maybe it is a bit of a leap, but it’s a slippery slope, this assumption of superiority. One moment you’re laughing at some deluded tone-deaf sap on The X Factor, the next you’re insisting that people with cleft palates be excluded from society.

Or do I exaggerate wildly? There is after all, a dating site for intelligent people. As it happens I couldn’t get into that one either, but somehow that doesn’t rankle quite so much. Am I just jealous? Or is there really something slightly despicable and Brave New World about the whole thing?

The people behind Beautiful People decided, presumably at the off-set, to make the ambiguous morality of the site its selling point. Although he never actually mentions the word eugenics in interviews, managing director Greg Hodge always makes every effort to make his site sound excitingly controversial and morally edgy.


‘The concept and site was founded on one very simple principle of human nature – the fact that people want to be with someone they are attracted to. It may not be politically correct to say so… but it is honest.’


It may be honest, vaguely, but it's not really the point. You can find someone you’re attracted to on any other non-exclusive dating site. And probably, to be honest, a lot more easily.

My initial impression of Mr Hodge, if I'm being honest, was that he was a slick and manipulative charlatan, callously exploiting the infinite vanity, pride and stupidity of a large section of the human race. Also, mostly because of the quality of the site, I figured he probably wasn’t that smart. Because it’s really not a bad idea, from a business perspective, but it would have to be done well, and with intelligence, and with humour, to succeed. Then I read the following words, again on the About page:


‘The site introduces revolutionary web technologies featuring a draggable-windows based navigation. The intuitive, application-like interface allows you to interact with an unlimited number of features and sections of the site simultaneously.’


And then I knew for sure, the man is merely an incorrigible liar.

When BeautifulPeople.com launched in Canada, Hodge appeared on Canada AM (where frankly, they’ll talk to any old rubbish). There, as well as once again amusingly misusing the word beholden, he explains a little something about the cleverness of Beautiful People:


‘I think it’s so clever because it plays on a clever combination of four things - that’s Beauty, Love, Sex and Money - and advertisers use those four… you know, desires to sell us pretty much everything, and Beautiful People plays on a clever combination of all that.’


Clunk clunk clunk. Slick certainly, and groomed like a gorilla with OCD, but there's something not quite working there. In fact, it’s almost like Hodge is a fleshly embodiment of his own site.

I decided to speak to him myself to see if there was anything more to this whole nonsense venture than greed and incompetence. Turns out, in my not massively humble, yet fiercely long-winded opinion, there isn’t.

Most of Hodge’s responses to my queries felt like they’d been copied and pasted from press releases and publicity material, then blithely trotted out to create a false impression. Rather like tiny plastic three-legged antelopes swearing blind they’re unicorns, eight foot tall.

Some of his claims, for example, struck me as extremely unlikely. Everyone exaggerates numbers, of course - everyone - so that didn’t bother me so much. (Still, 550,000 members? A likely story. Mind you, Wikipedia has it at 5 million.) What was less easy to swallow were his claims for the vibrancy of the community, which were and remain demonstrably false.

Anyway, give the man a chance.


Greg Hodge :: The Interview

Why should the many beautiful readers of this blog join BeautifulPeople.com? What’s in it for them?

‘So they have the most beautiful little back book in the world at the tips of their fingers. A community of beautiful individuals, of which many are extremely personable, friendly, ambitious and desirable.’

Speaking as a self-confessed ugly chap, I take solace in the fact that most of the people who have joined your site seem to be vacuous vain idiots. Do I have a point? Or am I just jealous?

‘Assuming that most attractive people are vain and stupid is like saying that most ugly people are incredibly intelligent and interesting. Personally, I don’t think that people truly fall in to either category.’

Nor do I! I never said they did, you slippery bugger! I was talking about your members....

‘Many of our members started out as normal looking people who have become “beautiful” through great grooming and keeping fit, whilst living a healthy lifestyle. It takes intelligence and drive to want to improve yourself on this level. It is lazy and unattractive, or a sign of defeatism, to take no interest in looking your best.’

Speaking of intelligence, do you think the overall IQ level of the members of your site would be any different to the overall IQ level on, say, Match.com?

‘Statistics have shown that attractive people do better professionally and make more money then their less attractive counterparts. I think the IQ would be the same or higher. We have members from every profession and many are multilingual. Most of the members we have spoken with are upwardly mobile, ambitious professionals and they all tell us that they love the site because from the outset, it appealed to their competitive spirit. When you apply, you have to accept that you may be rejected – so you are going to be fairly thick skinned and determined to put yourself out there. People who are willing to take these risks and who want to be the best tend to succeed in all walks of life.’

If I was thinking about setting up a website for ugly people, what advice would you give me?

‘I like the way you are thinking. Let’s do a revenue share I will link our failed applicants to your site. Sounds like a match made in heaven.’

I feel dirty.

Still, business is business. Apart from the advertising on your site, much of which smells purely reciprocal, what are your other revenue streams?

‘We will soon be offering premium membership services that will give members access to a greater level of communication.’

Well, good luck with that.

Christ, I'm snide. Sorry about that. I probably am just jealous though.

‘I don’t know. You might be jealous, or scared of rejection, or completely disinterested in trying to be part of a beautiful people community. Life is full of groups and cliques and we don’t have to want to be part of everything. If you are happy with yourself already and don’t want to join BeautifulPeople.com, then that is totally up to you.’

Fair enough.

‘Remember however, communities need to be exclusive to serve the very purpose of the community.’

Right. Either that or, of course, inclusive.

Thank you, Greg Hodge.


And so, at the end of my little adventure in the land of the Beautiful People, I have to say I feel a little sad. Mostly sad because I just don’t believe any of it. I certainly don’t believe that 5,000 people were kicked out after Christmas. That would take far too much organisation. Rather, I fear it’s all nought but a hopelessly contrived publicity drive. Just like this story that British people are the ugliest in the world. After all, controversy equals press coverage and an influx of new members and before you know it, some silly bugger’s invested a couple of mill.

Bloody internet.

Disappointed, I logged on for one last time and imagined for a moment living in a world where the lovely Maria fancied me even when I wasn’t wearing my Turkish footballer mask.

Then I deleted my account.

I know my place.

This week’s post is brought to you by Cookware for CSN.co.uk, your virtual one-stop shop for all your cast-iron and stainless steel kitchen-based needs.

I reckon, just a few short years ago, when I was housebound and moribund and near catatonic, a Cuisinart Overstuffed Sandwich Maker would have been just what the doctor ordered. In fact, if I’d had a reasonably-priced and easy-to-use machine with which to prepare quality toasted sandwiches, I honestly don’t think I would have become depressed at all. And I almost certainly wouldn’t have ended up eating cat food. At least not raw cat food. On closer consideration, I think it’s safe to say, the Cuisinart Overstuffed Sandwich Maker is the ideal gift for your least stable, most mentally dyspeptic friend. You know, the one you never hear from. Everybody has one. At least one.

The last time I had access to a toasted sandwich maker - about ten years ago I think - I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't particularly adventurous. Cheese. Beans. That was about it. This time around, at least for the sake of this review, I decided I should probably be a little more ambitious where my fillings are concerned. After all, the internet, much like a toasted sandwich, is not worth a fig without decent content.

However, rather than just prepare some outlandish sandwiches in the kitchen by myself, like a saddo, I had a word with my agent. Oh, yes, I have an agent, you know. Turns out he’s a good friend of Gregg Wallace’s cosmetic guy. This is the guy who had to mend Wallace’s face after another, less skilled surgeon tried to knock a couple of years off his cheeks and left him looking permanenently rictal. Like this:



So I got my agent to pull a few strings and before you know it - bish bash bosh - there’s a film crew in my kitchen and Gregg Wallace and John Torode are passing judgement on my toasted sandwiches. I was pretty stoked, I can tell you.

The show itself won’t be screened till the summer, and even though it's already been cut together, I’m contractually obliged to keep a lid on it till after the show’s aired. However, what no one can stop me doing - I don't believe - is sitting here and transcribing some of the best bits for you. So here you go.

INT. STAN’S KITCHEN.

Brief collage of STAN painstakingly preparing the ingredients coupled with cute voiceover by Julian Rhind-Tutt.


Round One...


...Cheese & Ham

JOHN ‘TOAD’ TORODE (cutting a square of toastie and forking it delicately into his mouth): Mmmm. Lovely distinct flavours. You’ve got the smoky irreverence of that Red Leicester coming through and the mustard tang of the Tesco honey roast ham just setting it off. It’s good, hearty fare, but I’ve got to wonder if it’s interesting enough for this competition, at this level.

GREGG ‘EGG’ WALLACE (breaks the toastie in half and gazes at the insides, drooling slightly): Oh, yes! Gaze upon my succulence, ye mighty, and feast your eyes. Cheese. And ham. Arguably the combination that put the toastie on the map back in the snack frenzy that was the late eighties. Just look at that. It’s got cheese. It’s got ham. Seriously, what more could you ask for? In a toastie. Not cheese or ham, that’s for sure. Unless, of course, you wanted more creamy soft cheese or more pink meaty ham, both of which the Cuisinart Overstuffed Sandwich Maker could handle in a heartbeat. But what does it taste like? That’s the question. Let’s find out. [Takes a mouthful] Mmmm. Answer: it tastes good.


Round Two...


...Cheese & Sardine

TOAD: Straightaway you can see, he’s upped the stakes. He may be sticking with the cheese, but he’s thrown in a fish - specifically a sardine - just to stir things up a bit. He’s saying, ‘Don’t go running away with the idea that it’s all about the cheese because it’s not all about the cheese. It’s mostly about the cheese, for sure, I’ll grant you that. But it’s not all about the cheese.’ And when you bite into it... Boom! It works like a treat, and it’s here to stay.

Serving Suggestion


EGG: Absolutely agree. At first you’re wondering what is this abomination doing in your mouth and then you’re thinking, ‘Hold on a minute. This should be wrong, but somehow it’s oh so right.' It’s imaginative, it’s combative, it’s fish and it's cheese and it puts Stan right back in this competition.


Round Three...


...Banana, Nutella & Peanut Butter

TOAD: Rich. Warming. Spiced chocolate with that cinnamon in there. It’s good. But I have to say, it isn’t great.

EGG (salivating like Caligula): It’s like a lovely, luxurious blanket of sugary sweet goodness washing over your tongue, with the occasional shock of firmness. That’s the banana, like a nipple in your mouth. Suddenly. Like a warning. 'Treat her gentle.' That's good. But at the end of the day, I have to agree with Toad. This is Masterchef after all. This is not kindergarten.

TOAD: Stan’s got to really start pulling out the stops here. He’s got to start thinking with his stomach, and eating - if he can, and I know not everyone can - with his brain.


Round Four...


...Asparagus, Peanut Butter & Red Leicester

TOAD (with great humility): I often say this on Masterchef, and it's definitely true, that here we’re privy to some of the greatest unsung heroes of modern culinary theory and technique. Some of the greatest instinctive cooks – the natural-born innovators. They come on here and we nurture them. Eating this toastie here – I have no doubt, this is one of those moments.

EGG: Whoa. It’s like your palate doesn’t know where to look! There’s the oppressive clagginess of the peanut butter, almost threatening to choke you, then there’s the cleansing, purgative freshness of the asparagus, washing that away the clag and leaving just enough room for the cheese to kind of ooze in and make everything all right.

TOAD: Asparagus. Peanut butter. The cheese creeping up behind you like a grandparent, shuffling into your comfort zone and just giving you a little hug. Nothing sinister. This, my fat friend, is a world class toasted sandwich.

EGG: Traditionally, in a time before this quality brushed stainless steel Cuisnart kitchen product, asparagus would have been eaten in the traditional way...


...parboiled spears laid out on a thick layer of peanut butter on a nest of white bread. Nowadays, why stop there?

TOAD: Nowadays, out comes the cheese, transforming a classic snack into a culinary event.


Round Five...


...Carrot Cake

EGG: This is the second sweet course of the competition and it’s a tricky one. You have to ask yourself… is it a cake? Or is it a toastie? And the answer is, it’s neither, and at the same time, it's both. Make no mistake, this is challenging stuff. My only grizzle would be that it’s too dry. It needs something to lubricate it, just juice it up a little.

TOAD: Yes, maybe a creamy Cointreau custard and just a sprinkling of cocoa powder or something. You’re right, it needs something to lift it. Disappointing.


Round Six...


...Marmite & Nutella

TOAD: Now this is interesting. At the heart of this recipe is of course the stark contrast of tastes. You’ve got the lovely, welcome sweetness of the milk chocolate, and the sharp, salty, unmistakable barb of the yeast extract. The latter comes in, through the window almost, or a hole in the roof, like a sex offender. It shouldn’t work, and it doesn’t, but for me, that’s where the triumph lies. Deliciously inedible.

EGG: Well, I’m very disappointed. And I can see Stan going out of this competition. This is the penultimate round, and he has to be blowing us away at this point. He should be unlocking Pandora's Box, Dr Caligari's Cabinet and the bag with the cat in it. If he has one. The spirit of his imagination needs to be set free. At this stage in the game, I want to be shocked! I want to be amazed! I want to be frightened. All we’ve really got here is an adolescent challenge to our basic gustatory instincts. He needs to let go. He needs to be bold. Or else - I'm sorry to say - he’s finished.


Round Seven...


...Double Gloucester Crêpe Souris

EGG: Wow. I’m lost for words.

TOAD: Well, you did ask him to be bold.

EGG: If I’d known then, what I was letting myself in for, would I still have pushed him? I don’t know that I would.

TOAD: I’m in two minds myself.

EGG: At the moment, Toad, I've got as many minds as I’ve got emotions running wild. Part of me can’t help feeling that, with this dish, Stan has arrived at that taut, frangible, fit-to-burst-with-excitement point where kitchen, gallery and philosopher’s glory-hole all collide and explode. We're at the point where Magical Chaos ensues.

TOAD: This is a toasted sandwich that may actually transcend the form, but what it definitely does, without question, is it tramples on our preconceptions. It tells you to take everything you’ve ever learned about heated snacks, put it in a sack marked ‘OBSOLETE’ and be sick in it. Let's just be clear what we're talking about here. We're talking about Double Gloucester cheese and a toasted mouse. A mouse which has been prepared by being left to decay for about three, maybe four weeks, in a bag of purple wool. Outstanding.

EGG: OK, so we’ve established that conceptually, this is a bit special. But we’re not here to give out arts grants. We’re here to eat food. So let’s find out, what does it taste like? [EGG stuffs an entire half-toastie into his gaping maw and crunches and chews like a mannerless child] Well, texturally it is a conundrum. There’s the stringy, chewy stringiness of the cheese and the sharp, crumbling crunch of decaying mouse bones breaking between your teeth. Then there’s the fur that gets stuck in the back of your throat and… is that nutmeg?

TOAD: Definitely nutmeg. But the interesting thing is that the nutmeg forms part of what tastes like a riot, like a controlled riot of flavours, a riot that’s almost choreographed – there’s dill, there’s chilli, there’s vanilla, there’s black pepper and just a hint of Marmite all moving around one another - and then you’ve got the overriding, overpowering smack of decomposing rodent, tying the whole thing together. Heston Blumenthal must be kicking himself.

EGG: I think it’s safe to say, it’s an acquired taste, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say, if this toasted sandwich doesn’t win both the Turner Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Cooking, then I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

TOAD: Exactly. And whether or not it’s a myth that mice like cheese…

EGG: It is.

TOAD: Well, whether or not that’s true…

EGG: It is.

TOAD: OK, so if mice did like cheese…

EGG: Mice could never like cheese. It's a medical thing. It damages their brains.

TOAD: But what I'm trying to say is, the whole mouse-cheese thing has been turned on its head. This is Masterchef at its most radical and creative. And Kerry Katona is going to have her work cut out in the next round.

EGG: Well done, Stan. Good work.



THE END

…

Jesus.

That was disgusting. And I don’t know why I did it. I felt sick photographing that wretched mouse. I found it in Ben’s knitting bag. His wool is peppered with droppings. I could have just thrown it out but it seemed a shame to waste it.

Please don't tell me I need to get out more. I already know that.

Anyhow, as you can see, the Cuisinart Overstuffed Sandwich Maker toasts sandwiches very well, no matter what you put in them. So, if you want to experience for yourself the exquisite dark magic of toasted foodstuffs, then why not get yourself along to Cookware by CSN, ask to speak to the sweetly pretty girl who answers the phones and emails there...



...and give her merry hell about why CSN no longer stock the Cuisinart Overstuffed Sandwich Maker.

Alternatively, you could always go somewhere else. It definitely pays to shop around with stuff like this and to be honest, even though it was free and everything, CSN did take ages to deliver.

As for the make and model – although I’m sure they’re all pretty much of a muchness – this one does do the job. Wallop. Nice one. Although to be honest, the light that tells you when stuff is done doesn't really work very well.

So there you go.

Next week there will be something beautiful here.

In the meantime, if you would like me to feature your product on my blog, please write to me at this address here and offer me some kind of bribe.



No animals were harmed, inconvenienced or posthumously disrespected in the preparation of this blog post. Except maybe one.

Hello! Happy New Year to you, each and every one! How are you? Are you well? Are you happy? Looking forward to the next year? I do hope so. I am.

There are going to be some changes around here, however. For various reasons. One reason is that I’m done besmirching the web with this half-baked life. I’ve been cutting back on soaping my smalls in public for some time now, and although at time it’s tough - for the urge is strong - by and large it’s working out. So much so that I’ve decided to go the whole hog. For various reasons. And I’ve been led to believe that this is quite common, that it happens to a lot of people who blog. Sooner or later, they go the whole hog. Well, it’s happened to me.



Also. I’ve got a job. Not writing words of my own that I care about, no, but not writing words of my own that I don’t care about either. Not writing words at all in fact. Merely editing them, and making up some headlines to boot, which is basically just playing. I’m looking forward to it. Very much. I think the routine will do me good, and hopefully I can learn something about concision along the way, which, I think we can all agree, would be no bad – or in any way unduly negative - thing.

I don’t intend to stop blogging altogether, however. Rather I will write something once a week, something slightly removed from my stomach and my groin and my heart, but still connected to my brain. And maybe my spleen. A review of something I’ve watched maybe. Or read. Or something else. I’m not really sure yet, and as I grope around for ideas now, in the dark of a dank new decade, where the future drops a banana skin and darts off, fast as a badger through a time hole in the wainscoting, I realise this might be much more of a challenge than I have hitherto imagined. But that’s no bad thing either. It's good to be mentally challenged.

So there it is. I'll post it on a Monday. This is the bridging post. Between the old and the new. Next week will be better. (Or worse.)

If you think your day would be brighter for sharing my dreams or my anxiety or drunken come-ons, then please feel free to follow me on Twitter. You’ll also be privy to provocative reportage, devastating cultural commentary, refreshing titbits of philosophical fingerfood and lies.

Oh, and one more thing – the party I talked about last summer… I’d like to have it next summer. The paperback of the book comes out around June so that seems like the perfect time to try and get the publishers to pay for a tiny party. Or even a medium-sized one. It really is the least they can do. But even if they choose not to, because they are too mean, they can go hang. We should just meet in a pub somewhere. What do you think? I’m thinking Friday 4th June, somewhere in London. Are you free?

Let me know in the comments and I hope to see you then.

For now, for the most part, for a while, cheerio.

x

It’s a wonderful life, don’t get me wrong, but there can be no denying that it’s been a fusty old twat of a year. On the whole. If you don’t mind me saying. This is not a complaint, mind you. Heaven forfend. Just a mild and timely lament. End of the year. Looking back. Looking forward. All that.

I feel like it’s time for a change. You know? I’m bored with myself. I need a new direction and new things to occupy my time.

And what better time for embarking on a new direction than the beginning of a whole new decade? Sadly, however, it’s not as simple as that. Why are things never as simple as that?

The fact is, there are already some pretty exciting changes in the pipeline for the twenty-tens, but - alas - there are also already grumblings from concerned parties who don’t want me flapping my mandibles on the blog. Can you believe it? Can you believe I’m allowing other people to dictate what I choose to talk about? I find it difficult to believe. And monumentally frustrating. I just want to defy them. I want to follow my instincts, master my destiny, plough my own furrow and ride my own melt. But then I don’t want to fuck anything up. Or do I? Oh, it's so difficult to be sure.

One thing I do know for sure though, one way or the other there will be no more of this laborious doubletalk in 2010.

That's a promise.

Also, I’m pretty sure, 2010 is going to be smashing. Good years are like bald men – they skip a generation. 2008 was pretty great. 2009 was barely fine. 2010 will be great again. I feel it.

Last night I realised something quite shocking. I realised that I had drunk almost an entire litre of vodka in just two evenings. Alone. I consoled myself with the fact that I'd also gone through a bottle of Kahlua in the same time, but quickly and thankfully I realised that this was meagre consolation.



Things have definitely got to change.

2010.

My year.

You'll see.

Before we say goodbye for this year, however, I’d just like to share with you a couple of new year’s resolutions which I know I am destined to break almost before I have made them. But I want to make them anyway.

One, I resolve to stop reading film reviews on IMDb. This year I became a bit obsessed by them. Especially the bad ones. I would look up my favourite films and just read all the bad reviews. I'm not even sure why. Presumably I took some pleasure in the fury they gave rise to. On reflection, I don’t think that’s an enormously profitable way to spend one's time. Unless... unless I can make an unconscionably diverting quiz out of it all. Or even a marginally diverting quiz. Or even just a quiz, fuck it. Here it is.

THE 'GUESS THE FILM FROM THE IMDb REVIEW' CHRISTMAS QUIZ SPECTACULAR

Go!

1. 'I have no use for children porn and this is truly a disturbing film. The only remotely normal people are the Homosexuals who live next door. The three main family groups are all living on another planet. The acting is good but the story is a monument to the total meltdown of our culture.'

2. ‘I can't imagine how this could be more depressing. It has no forward momentum. It seems to lack the generous helping of wit that would push the material anywhere near the vicinity of "entertainment." Maybe you had to see it the moment it was released to have a fond recall of it. Maybe being a weed fiend would help. Maybe being British...’

3. ‘The performances here are lazy. The camera-work is not as good as Death Wish. Everything is sub par, including the awful soundtrack.’

4. ‘I mean the ending is so predictable and I guessed the ending of the movie since the beginning of the romance, breakup and welcome back and another (I will not mention the ending)... but you could have guessed.’

and

‘Now I am not one of those ignorami who hate movies made before 1970... While the work of [the leading actors] may have been good for it's time it is insufficient compared to todays advanced standards.’

5. ‘As a somewhat well read person, I thought this movie was a self indulgent poor imitation of a seinfeld episode.’

and

‘The movie crawls at a pace that would make operating heavy machinery while watching impossible’

6. ‘it is silly and immature and anyone who likes it must have the mind of a child. it is really stupid.please if your considering watching this please take caution.oh and if you were thinking of watching the other one please don't it is worse... the humor in it is just stupid i mean i see it on the screen and i just don't laugh it just not funny!!’

7. ‘None of the characters are likable or interesting and the whole experience is like someone being sick on your face.’

8. 'I watched this terribly long, boring, slow, bloody, gory, silly film several times. Why, or why was that so overestimated? What for? It has nothing, but too much blood, sex, more blood, more sex, child molesting, more blood, more child death, child sex, more blood, more slow talks, more long shots, more blood and more molesting. Raping, killing, talking, sex in a car, more fights, more sex... I am not a sick person. This film did make me feel sick. Why was it made?.'

9. 'I was expecting a COMEDY for crying out loud. And I'm just waiting for a funny moment to arrive. All those stupid gags and dumb jokes and situations are so bland and tedious to watch. It gets too repetitive and uninteresting. I don't know, maybe its a European or American thing but this is not my idea of a funny movie. And what more can I say...even the makers of the movie knew that the jokes were so not funny that all those cameos had to be used...and still, to no good result. My recommendation...If u want a comedy movie on rock n roll watch "School of Rock".

and

'This is really not a good movie. I looked on IMDB and saw this movie on the top 250 and thought for sure it was one of the signs of the apocolypse... Please, oh please don't tell me "you must not have a good sense of humor" either, cause I know at least 50 people that have only met me once or twice that could tell you otherwise.'

10. 'This movie made absolutely no sense to me (and I'm not a stupid person...IQ in the 140's) until just before it ended...meaning I just sat there for about 90 minutes wondering what I was watching. '

11. 'I came to this movie expecting smart satire and cinematic invention. The first 30 minutes of this film offended me on every level possible! It is grotesque and perverse and sophomoric. I can't remember hating a film more. I never had the stomach to finish this disaster of a film, which is ugly to the eyes and the soul.'

12. 'The boxing scenes are very amateur in execution, none of them have the shocking realism of Rocky IV... Rocky movies make you sit up and take notice. They move you. [This film] moved me, too. Right out of the cinema.
’

Answers here.

Now tell me that wasn't fun. (Don't actually tell me. Unless you're that particularly unpleasant and embittered troll who keeps bothering me. You can tell me. And I shall ignore you.)

Secondly. No more pornography. It’s really vile. What reminded me of its vileness was reading the unspeakably rank Rock Her World by Seymore Butts. Do you know that despite the vastness of that review, there were still heaps of other quotes which, for one reason or another, made me shake my head. I wanted to share them with you, but there was no space. So, as a special Christmas treat, a stocking-filler, I present them here, as The Seymore Butts Guide to Life & Love & Whatnot...

Butts on sincerity: ‘Let’s face it, in order to bed over six hundred women you’ve got to be willing to say or do anything it takes to achieve your goal – whether you really mean it or not.’

Butts on feminine hygiene: ‘If you or anyone else are dumping loads of sperm into your partner and she’s letting them ferment inside of her instead of rinsing out after each deposit, you can expect her pussy to smell like the inside of a peep show booth.’

Butts on cunnilingus: ‘Let’s be honest, some of you guys approach pussy like a starving Indian would a tandoori chicken.’

Butts on the apparent non-existence of women experienced in anal: ‘You will encounter two types of women: those who are open to the idea of anal sex but inexperienced, and women who seem to be closed to the idea.’

Butts on bars and clubs: ‘These are what I call “sexually charged social environments” – places that, when I’m in a relationship, I avoid like I would being raped by Shaquille O’Neal as he sang, “Tell me how my ass tastes!”’

Butts on rejection, horses: ‘Get back on your horse and start looking for another filly to saddle up.’

Butts on successfully bribing a bouncer and getting into a night club ahead of a queue with a woman: ‘The next sound you hear should be that distinctive squish coming from between your date’s legs as she becomes turned on by your ability to take charge and get things handled.’

Butts on the embarrassment of being a woman: ‘Most of the potentially embarrassing situations that can and do happen during sex happen to women.’

Butts on Holly: ‘We might not have made it to the restaurant but that didn’t stop her from ordering up some stuffed sphincter with a side of ass à la mode or either of us from eating plenty of brown-eye pie. For our final course, it was hot loads of sweet cream in Holly’s hot buns as she screamed with delight.’

Butts on butter: ‘We wrapped after both girls lovingly snowballed Steven’s nut butter.’

Butts on the dangers of spicing things up: ‘No joke, you can very easily kill your partner by choking her. Don’t try telling me you know what you’re doing either; that’s what hundreds of guys say every year before they accidentally kill the women they are having sex with.’

And finally, Butts on life: ‘The proof is in the pudding.’

No, Butts. No, it isn’t.

So yes. That's that. Done with porn. It’s dirty. From now on, I shall devote myself to the works of Ellen von Unwerth. Thanks to the delightful piece of adorable that is ScruffyPanther, I came across Von Unwerth's photos only last week. (No porn intended.) And they're wicked.





Woof.

Thirdly - actually no. That's it.

Now I am out of here till Twenty-Ten, which sounds so far in the future as to be just silly. Will there be hover boards? Yes. Yes, there will. In the meantime, and for most of the rest of the decade, I'm back up here in the frozen North, where even skate boards still bring forth oohs and aahs of confused awe. I should be back in time to finish my vodka on New Year's Eve.

2010.

My year.

What about you? Anything special planned for the next decade?

No deal.

About a month ago I received an interesting email, apropos of nothing, from a lady at Penguin – the publishers, not the wacky dildo people. She said she wanted to share a book with you, my discerning readers. She said she knew you’d love it. It was about sex. Everybody loves sex. So she sent it to me, hoping I’d devour it with alacrity and urge you all, with all of my heart, to rush out and buy it for Christmas. And I tried. Believe me, I spent hours trying to write a glowing review with a none-too subtle sardonic undertone, but it didn’t work. The fact is, this book is such a rancid, horrible mess that I couldn’t even pretend to like it.

In actual fact, if I’m completely honest, I think Rock Her World by Seymore Butts is probably the worst book I’ve ever read - and remember, I’ve read both Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown. So, with apologies to Jenny Chun of Penguin, who I’m sure was just doing her job and is actually unutterably lovely, I forbid you, my discerning readers, I forbid you to buy this odious mound of literary effluent.

Really. The man makes Chris Moyles look like Vladimir Nabokov. (Don’t buy Chris Moyles either. VERBOTEN!)

Now, it’s safe to say that certain groups of people have a poor reputation for intellectual prowess. Models, for example. Football players, for another. Toilet attendants, boxers, BNP voters, people who work in Argos. And, of course, porn stars. Now I don’t know if Seymore Butts is considered a cerebral giant in the world of porn, but let me tell you, when he isn’t ball-deep in stretched rectum, or else pointing a camera at someone who is, Seymore Butts is a moron. And I neither use this term lightly, nor mean it as an insult. What I mean is that, having studied Butts and the language he uses to convey his ideas, I have concluded that he has the mental age of someone aged between 8 and 12 years old, and therefore, according to the original medical classification, he is, unequivocally, a moron. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. At least he’s not an imbecile. But should Penguin really be paying him good money to write horrible, rancid books? I’m not so sure.

‘This isn’t your ordinary book,’ says Butts at the offset. Of course, he’s flattering himself. This is barely a book at all. It’s more like a soiled bib around the neck of a retarded sex pest.



It could be, of course, that I am very wrong, and it’s actually more to do with the fact that I’m just not Butts’ target audience. I do use pornography, don’t get me wrong. I use it a lot these days. But also, I read, and Butts’ readers don’t read. Just as Butts himself does not write. In the opening chapter, in a touchingly honest exchange, non-writer addresses non-reader and lays it on the line:


‘I realize you may not be used to reading anything without a centrefold and may look at the number of word-filled pages ahead and say, “Who the fuck has the time to read all that?”’


This is a nice touch. It immediately puts the reader at his ease. Essentially, Butts is saying: ‘Fear not, my oafish friend. I too, am a moron. We’re all friends here. Stupid horny men friends. At ease.’

He goes on to allay his readers’ logophobia by promising lots of saucy cartoons (think Sun Fun circa 1975) and the following:



What do you think is on the following page? Can you guess? No, it’s not a bunch of poorly-drawn women promising sex with anyone who reads Butts’ book.

Oh, yes, sorry. It is.



I could stop there really, and I think you would agree that my loathing of this book is justified. But I'm not going to. Sadly, this is only just the beginning.

In the introduction to his book, Seymore Butts - real name Adam Glasser - lays himself bare in a brief biography of his sexual exploits and career highlights: porn star-cum-porn director-cum-reality TV (porn) star, all the while with the accent (maybe a bumlaut) on 'assplay'. He then embarks upon his first attempt to crystallise and clarify recent shifts in perceived gender roles which he maintains are responsible for the current socio-sexual environment, the very environment which he blames for necessitating the creation of this book.


‘Women are now becoming empowered through their sexuality and it is up to you as a man to keep yourself in the game. Refining your sexual skills is certainly a step in the right direction, and I will go into great depth to help you achieve this. However, to me, the quickest way to become a “legitimate player” whom women are drawn to, whom women can give their respect and admiration to - something they naturally crave giving their man - is through the acquisition of knowledge. In my opinion, this is the only way for men to combat the change in sexual behaviour patterns (which is most certainly a psychological reaction by women to centuries of male dominance in and outside the bedroom, combined with the rise of the gay community and the recent emergence of the metrosexual.)’


Hmm. You see what I mean about words? Butts knows some, for sure, and probably even knows what some of them mean, but he has great difficulty amassing and amalgamating them into a coherent argument. Instead he just hammers away haphazardly, embarrassingly, achieving nothing, like a half-blind dog humping a dead man’s leg.

And so he continues, with pre-pubescent clarity, attempting to explain how his book had to be written, how the very survival of modern man - ‘in this new millennium filled with hypocrisy and contradiction and bound by a set of ambiguous new rules’ - depends upon it. He doesn’t really go into too much detail about the exact nature of the perceived hypocrisy, contradiction and ambiguity, but he knows it’s something to do with the media, and women. And probably the gays.

Once he’s established that his book is going to rescue the male species from... something or other, Butts gets stuck in, tackling the topics that other so-called sexperts just don’t have the cerebral retardation to address. Topics such as Is Assplay Gay? Just in case you were wondering, it isn’t: ‘I know I’m suggesting a rectal exam,’ says Butts, ‘but I can absolutely guarantee you won’t turn into a pickle smoocher.’

Ah, yes. ‘A pickle smoocher’. You might imagine that as a consequence of having slept with more than 600 women, Butts would at some stage have stopped guffawing about sex like a 10-year-old boy. Sadly, this is not the case, and moronic euphemisms are splashed across every page of this book like bukkake. Now I’m no psychologist, but let’s face it, you don’t have to be Emma Freud to wonder if perhaps Butts’ verbal moronia actually belies a deep-rooted shame over his feelings about the sexual act; shame which forces him to hide the physical reality of good honest genital contact behind a wall of infantile imagery, a veritable tsunami of bliss berries, love tunnels, clams, peaches, tushies, dipsticks, flagpoles, beanstalks and one-eyed monsters. Butts would probably argue that having a sense of humour about sex is a good thing. I would agree. Sense of humour is essential. However, referring to your genitals as your ‘twig and berries’ has nothing to do with humour. That’s just being a cock. And quite probably having something to hide.

Whether Butts is actually a giant prude in porn star’s clothing or a profoundly closeted, double-bluffing homosexual is a moot point, and not enormously relevant, but as he guides us through the labyrinthine anusphere of sexual relations like some brilliantine Venereal Virgil, his playground argot quickly becomes extremely tiresome.

The range of subjects covered by Butts, however, is impressive. In just 336 pages he covers everything from premature ejaculation to where to find virgins; from erectile dysfunction to what to do when your woman’s vagina stinks; from chat-up lines to controlling her gag reflex when you’re training her to deep-throat; from ‘how to properly fist a lady’ (presumably without splitting her infinitive) to how to spot if she’s trying to steal your sperm and trap you into marriage.

Seriously.

This by the way, is the same book that Lisa Scott was all over like genital warts just last week in the Metro. She couldn’t possibly have read it. Please, God.

At this point, it needs to be said that unfortunately, there is a broad seam of gender-related ugliness running through this book and you don’t have to be Andrea Dworkin to find yourself wincing in discomfort at certain points. The section entitled Conception Deception, for example, in the chapter Bun In The Oven, is particularly repugnant.

‘Some of the stories I’ve heard about women using deceptive methods to get pregnant,’ Butts begins, ‘simply astound me!’ I have no doubt that this happens, of course, but is Mr Butts really suggesting that this practice is common enough to warrant five pages on how to identify and thwart these nefarious, psychotic women? Ah, yes. Evidently he is.

Read this and despair.



Wow. What kind of world is this fucked-up man living in? A world where women have to be escorted to the bathroom after a blowjob and men have to keep a bottle of Tabasco by the bedroom bin. Just in case.

Then there’s the chapter entitled Something’s Fishy. Can you guess what that’s about? Yes. I’m afraid so.



It begins thusly, with all the tact and common courtesy of a gang rape (please excuse my outraged daubs):



Gorgeous. Overwhelming sensitivity.

Then there’s Cherry Picking, the chapter on the best places to find virgins. ‘Personally, I don’t get it,’ he writes. Still he devotes five pages to advising men who do get it where to find them and what to do once they’ve found them. Thankfully, Butts does not apply the same logic to paedophilia, presumably because there's a law against it.

However, having said all that, there is more to Butts' book than brutish ignorance and deep-rooted misogyny. There is also excruciating embarrassment.

At regular intervals throughout this book I found myself looking away from the text, my face contorted in a rictus of physical embarrassment. Sometimes it was because he was trying to be funny when he clearly doesn’t have it in him. Sometimes it was when he put puerility to one side and weighed in with some heavyweight medical fact or other, such as this: ‘Our testicles, the oval masses that sit within a sack called the scrotum, actually produce our sperm.’ And sometimes it was when he was offering suggestions for what to say to a woman. And you just know, before you even get into it, that Butt’s lack of word-wisdom is going to let him down.

‘Send her a naughty text message during the day,’ he says, ‘telling her some of the things you are going to do to her later that night. The anticipation of it all will have her literally marinating in her own juices all day as she watches the clock and thinks about what awaits her when she gets home!’

Now, either Butts is unfamiliar with the definition of the word ‘marinate’ or he’s unfamiliar with the definition of the word ‘literally’. But I’m being pedantic; his meaning is quite clear. So, to the point: if you’re unsure quite what to text to your woman in order to persuade her to spend the day soaking her ‘hot box’ in a combination of oil, vinegar, spices and herbs, fear not, for Cyrano de Butts is on hand to give a few examples of the type of texts he sends to his long-term partner, Mirna. Spices at the ready, girls:


‘I’ll pick you up at eight / and take you out to dine / then back to my place / for some hot 69!’

‘Lips so soft / body so tight / can’t wait to see you / gonna fuck you all night!’


Or what about this for a slightly more subtle role-play-themed text:


‘This is a courtesy reminder that you have an appointment with Dr Feelgood at ten P.M. tonight.’


Oh, Seymore. Dr Feelsick more like.

Speaking of feeling sick, it's probably worth dwelling for one moment on the stories Seymore tells throughout the book. Whether he’s being thrown out of a brothel for asking for anal sex, or being sprayed head-to-foot with some woman’s shit after having anal sex in a public toilet, or coming face-to-face with Crystal, or as he sweetly dubs her, ‘Elephant Anus’, the porn star with the monstrous haemorrhoids, every last one of Butts’ stories is as sweet and subtle as a sledgehammer made of excrement. They also have an air of the utterly contrived. Which is not to say that Butts is making stories up, but rather that, because he has no idea how to tell a story, everything he says sounds artificial, unconvincing and banal to boot. Although, having implied that I’m not accusing him of making stuff up, he does clearly get carried away at times.

For example, there’s the anecdote which begins with a young Butts and a bunch of his ‘practical joker’ friends - who may or may not be named Mr Muffhound, Mr Porker, Mr Diggler and Young Master Glans - eating together at a local restaurant when one of their group excuses himself to go to the bathroom. Oh, here, I’ll let Mr Butts tell it. In his own inimitable style.



Hmmm. Enchanting.

However, as much as I despise Butts for the childishness, the ugliness, the crass bravado and wilful idiocy of his writing, I think - perhaps - the worst section of his book sees him recounting his brush with genital warts.

He tells of how he discovered a series of bumps a short while before a planned trip to Palm Springs, ‘the whole purpose of which was to get laid, and I thought the cauliflower growing on my dick might not go over too well with the ladies!’ (He loves his exclamation marks.)

He told his friend Kurt. Turns out Kurt had them too. They wondered where they might have contracted whatever it was. Then it came back to them: ‘Tanya, the girl we gangbanged with eight of our other friends!’ So the first thing they do is to inform all eight of their friends, then a couple of them go to the doctor. There is no mention of anyone informing Tanya.

Then, and this is the really mind-bogglingly dumb bit, Butts tells of how, rather than follow the doctor’s instructions and return to the clinic for intermittent treatment, he steals the ointment and, along with his friends, applies it over a period of four to six days instead of the recommended period of four to six weeks. Just so they can make the spring break. And get laid. Cool.

What’s slightly worrying, however, is what if – and I know it’s a long shot – but what if some of the people reading this are real easily-led, suggestible types who think that if they read it in a proper sex guide with a hardback cover, then it must be perfectly acceptable to ignore medical directions and recommended dosages and generally play fast and loose with potentially fatal sexually transmitted diseases, as long as you can get another fuck out of it. Eh? Eh, lads?

The irresponsibility is breathtaking. As is the very next page of the book, in which Butts writes: ‘I’m hoping that reading this book will help you avoid many of the mistakes I’ve made.’ Christ. The really depressing thing about this blithering fuckwit is that he's not even aware of most of the mistakes he’s making.

So, to sum up, I would have to say that as well as being very, very, very bad, this is also a morally reprehensible and socially irresponsible book. It taught me nothing I feel better or richer or happier for having learned and it made me frequently despair at the parlous, unevolved state of the human brain. And not in a good way.

The really bad news, however, is that no matter what I say, Butts' abhorrent book will definitely sell thousands and thousands and thousands more copies than my absolutely beautiful and infinitely sexier book, which would make a wonderful Christmas present for just about anyone and which, if you haven't already done so, you must buy immediately. And that means you too, Jenny Chun!

Incidentally, if you have a product would like me to review, please drop me a line at the usual address. It would be my pleasure.

I was out and about in central London yesterday and crikey. You forget. London at Christmas is insane. All that jostling and tension. All those angry shoppers and boozed-up Santas.



It reminded me of something I heard recently when I was listening – kind of by accident – to the audiobook of Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. It apparently formed part of the Christmas advertising of a New York department store, back in the day. You may find it trite, tedious and a little bit sick-making. If so, you may bugger off. I find it rather special, and of course - really - it has nothing to do with Christmas.


The Value of A Smile At Christmas

It costs nothing but creates much.



It enriches those who receive without impoverishing those who give.

It happens in a flash, and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.



None are so rich they can get along without it, and none so poor but are richer for its benefits.

It creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in a business, and is the countersign of friends.

It is rest to the weary, daylight to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and nature's best antidote for trouble.



Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is no earthly good to anybody until it is given away.

And if in the last minute rush of Christmas buying, some of our sales people should be too tired to give you a smile, may we ask you to leave one of yours? For nobody needs a smile so much as those who have none left to give.




Eh? Eh? You see?

So - it's my birthday tomorrow. And the two-year anniversary of the blog on Tuesday. I was planning to do something pretty spectacular, but you know how it is, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. Added to which, there is family stuff afoot. My grandmother is going into hospital on Wednesday to have her arthritic foot sliced and scraped. My mum was going to be there to look after her, but for reasons which shall remain her own, she cannot. So I'm going up there. Not sure how yet. Thinking of something quite radical at the moment. Probably won't come to fruition though. You know how it is. Aft agley.

Anyway, if I don't see you for a while, be good.

32! How novel.

Out of sight, out of mind. That's what they say. And I hate to admit it, but except in the cases of romantic obsession, I fear they are right. In my case at least. But then maybe I'm just monumentally self-centred. What do you think? Oh, I don't care. Button it.

Anyway, the reason for this self-berating is that my very best friend since not long after I was born, also not known as Keith, posted something on his blog almost two weeks ago and I have only just now got round to looking at it. What a shit. To be honest, if this something hadn't been quite so spectacular, I might just have moved onto something else, forgotten all about my so-called best friend for another month and not even bothered berating myself. But it was. Spectacular, that is.

Look:



Isn't it? Wow. It really is a pleasure to have such talented friends. That I never see. Or let's face it, barely ever think about.

God, I'm cold.

Anyway, then he went on to do this:



Go to his site at once and reward him with your praise. Oh, and if you're in the market for an unusual and unique gift for the Christ day, then he's also selling his stuff. Think about it. I've got one of his pictures on my wall, next to a Kandinsky print, and I'm the coolest person in London.

Henry Chinaski - Charles Bukowski’s alter ego in Barfly - says, ‘I don’t hate the police… but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.’ That’s pretty much how I feel. Although sometimes, it has to be said, I hate them.

I don’t know whether it will surprise you or not to know this, but over the years, and without meaning to over-egg it, I’ve had my fair share of police encounters. A small handful, let’s say. A Beadle handful. As both crime victim and alleged perpetrator. And when they’ve been on my side, they’ve generally been mostly very sympathetic and humane. But when they’ve not been on my side, they’ve generally been disrespectful, abusive and just awful. Until that is, last Thursday evening. Let me tell you what happened.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I'd met someone who had some excellent green stuff. Well, I met him again early on Thursday evening and he supplied me with some of said self-same stuff. He probably deserves a name at this stage. I might call him Danny, as if he were my very own offspring. Errant Danny. My wayward son. It is written. So I left Errant Danny in west London and made my way to Oxford Circus where I met up with my old friend, Shambling Luther. Luther bought me a drink and we went outside to sample Errant Danny’s wares. We crossed the street with our plastic glasses and found a little window ledge in an adjoining back street.

I set about rolling a one-skinner. As I did so, I noticed a couple of chaps up the street, maybe ten feet away, loitering on the corner. I saw one of them looking straight at me and I assumed that a) he knew what I was doing, and b) he was probably a little envious. I know that whenever I see people smoking joints in the street, that’s how I feel. I even briefly imagined him coming over and asking if he could have a little, as occasionally happens. Anyhow, I carried on chatting to Shambling Luther. As it happens, we were chatting about the inherent risk involved in carrying smelly green stuff around London, what with all the sniffer dogs about the place, and police everywhere.

I finished making the joint and put it in my mouth. This would be the first tobacco I’d smoked in almost two weeks. I inhaled, but the light hadn’t taken. I was about to light it again when I saw that the two chaps on the corner were no longer on the corner, but were coming over. Naïve fool that I am, I still imagined they were going to ask if they could maybe purchase a little green stuff for themselves. In fact, I thought that right up until the moment one of them took out his badge and said something about the Metropolitan Police.

‘You have to be joking,’ I said, meaning it. Like there was no way this could really be happening. Like I was determined to cling to the paradise of the past, the good old days before everything had become tarnished, before the universe had become the heinous, unholy, nonsensical place it now was. They simply had to be joking.

They weren’t joking.

The first officer – let’s call him Bryan – reached out and took the tiny unsmoked joint from my hand. I think he said something about ‘a controlled substance’ as he placed the offending item in a jiffy bag and asked me if I had any more about my person.

‘You know I have,’ I said, sadly, the realisation of what was happening sinking onto me like a poison.

‘Yes,’ he confessed. ‘I do.’

With a heart as heavy as a barrel of bricks, I reached into my pocket and handed over £50 worth of the finest green stuff I hadn’t smoked in a long time. It really hurt. It didn’t seem fair.

Meanwhile the other officer was performing a perfunctory search of Shambling Luther’s person. ‘He hasn’t got anything,’ I said. ‘It’s all here.’

I asked if I could see the first officer’s badge again, just on the off chance it was all an elaborate scam by London-Omar types, small-time rip-and-run merchants on the make. When he showed me the badge a second time, I asked if I could take a photo. I told him I wanted to write about it, fully expecting him to say no. Instead he placed his badge on the window-ledge, right there on Errant Danny’s wacky stash-purse.



I've blurred his number so that he doesn't get in trouble with his colleagues for showing humanity.

Then he wrote up the incident, which he also let me photograph - but not the face, which, for an undercover copper, is probably fair enough.



He began by explaining the recent changes in the law, including the latest reclassification and explained that I would be receiving a warning.

I probably asked Bryan three times during the interview if he might not bring himself to just, you know, give me the stuff back, or at least some of it, maybe just one of the two little bags. Or even just the mini-joint. It would be a gesture. ‘I wish I could,’ he said.

‘But you can,’ I coaxed. ‘Just say yes.’

‘No,’ he said.

He asked me how much I’d paid.

‘Fifty quid!’ I cried, scandalised.

He asked me my name.

I wanted to refuse. ‘I’m anonymous!’ I wanted to yell. 'I disclose my identity to no man!' I told him my name instead. He asked me where I’d purchased the drugs. I wanted to tell him. ‘I got it from Errant Danny, who resides at 420, London High Street.’ But instead I said, ‘You don’t really expect me to tell you, do you?’

He said, ‘No. Shall I just put “street”?’

I said yes and thanked him for his sensitivity.

It really was remarkably civilised. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that, essentially, I was being robbed, I would have counted it as one of the most heart-warming first impressions I’ve enjoyed for some time.

At one point – in a moment of desperation – I tried something outlandish. I held the gaze of the second officer - let's call him Ross - and I told him, earnestly, ‘These are not the drugs you’re looking for.’

He rewarded me with a slightly indulgent laugh, for which I was grateful, but it was not my greatest Jedi mind moment, it has to be said. I was like a poor man’s Derren Brown tribute act. I was like Dan Brown. Dan Beige even.

‘What about a bribe?’ I ventured. ‘What if I was to offer you the single ten-pound note in my pocket?’

To which Ross replied, ‘A couple of pints of Kronenberg would probably do the job.’

My eyes lit up. ‘Really?’

He shook his head. ‘No. not really,’ he said.

At the beginning of the exchange, Bryan had asked me if I had any photo ID, but then amidst all the bonhomie, he seemed to have forgotten about it. I reminded him and asked if he still needed to see any. I could be anyone, after all. He said it wasn’t necessary, as I was clearly being cooperative and civil. He said if I had been uncooperative, he would have had me against the wall and searched me properly. I imagined plastic, powdery gloves and enemas. I was touched that it wasn't happening.

‘You two are going to get so wrecked later,’ I said. ‘That’s really good stuff.’

‘Nah,’ said Bryan. ‘I don’t smoke.’

‘You used to though,’ I said, ‘before you were a policeman. I bet. Eh?’

He looked at me, smiled and paused long enough to clearly indicate that the answer was a resounding 'hell, yeah!'

‘No,’ he said. How we laughed.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous!’ I said, politely exasperated. ‘Isn’t it?’

He agreed. ‘It’s the system,’ he said.

‘The system’s an arse,’ I said.

‘Yep,’ he said.

I asked him how come they happened to have been hanging around. ‘We’re everywhere,’ he said. He said they were particularly concentrated around Oxford Street because it’s a bit of a crime black-spot. A veritable street theft jamboree. I pointed out the irony. ‘You’re here to stop street crime!’ I hooted. ‘And here you are mugging me!’

He laughed generously. I’ve been mugged a few times, but this was by far the most humane. And as police experiences go, nothing could be further than my last experience. They asked me what had happened. I told them, mentioning that the arresting officer in particular had been a bad egg of the highest order. ‘With all due respect,’ I said, ‘he was an enormous cunt.’ I wondered as I said it whether I might have crossed a line.

Ross replied without pause. ‘About 90% of them are,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘And we have to work with them.’

It was very refreshing, and almost worth a pair of lost ponies for the insight into a different side of policing.

But not quite.

‘You do know I’m just going to have to go straight back and get some more, don’t you?’ I said at some stage.

‘That’s what everyone says,’ replied Bryan. ‘“I’m not gonna stop doing it.”’

I shrugged.

We are a nation of children.

The next morning Errant Danny became Healing Danny and helped me out with some of his own supply, which was very kind and much appreciated. He understands, you see. Restless souls have needs.

I left Danny’s around 1pm on Friday and wrote the following in lovely big note book:


The sun is out. You can smell it. It is a striking day. I’m gliding along the broad bright platform of an unfamiliar train station luxuriating in a five-minute break, chewing over recent events as I wait for my connection. Loud dramatic pop is emoting for all it’s worth in my ears, transporting me to a slightly more cinematic universe. The train appears on cue and transforms itself gradually, gracefully, from a glinting pin-prick of light on the horizon to a perfectly ordinary full-sized train. That’s physics.

Through the glass of scratched train-windows, I smell the sun through my eyes. It reminds me of holidays, and I feel right with the world and right with myself for the rest of the afternoon. And I get a hell of a lot done.

It’s a highly beneficent treatment, this green stuff, and personally I consider it a symptom of a rather terrible administration, and a rather backward nation, that the use of it is a criminal offence. I’m insulted. And occasionally indignant.

Anyhow, now I’m off to the countryside to eat lots of hand-picked, purely organic, naturally occurring and wholly illegal mushrooms.

Good old nature. Silly old system.


All in all then, an expensive, but interesting and somehow slightly gratifying learning experience. Don't smoke dope in the streets, kids.

Let that be a warning to you...

I wonder, how much of your identity is tied up in your name? What do you think? I would say, in my case at least, none. This is partly because I’ve never felt close to my real name and indeed I’ve taken steps throughout my life to distance myself from it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, however, and I think I might be growing into it, or about to grow into it. In fact, 2010 will be the year I grow into my name. Fingers crossed.

I was thinking the other day about a little boy called Rory. Rory is a mate’s kid, and he has a fine name, I’m sure you’ll agree. But what if Rory turns out to have a speech impediment? What if he has to introduce himself for the whole of his life as Wowy? That would be awful. Potentially a genuine tragedy which could only be exacerbated if he plumped for a career at Defra and had to spend his working life talking about environmental and rural affairs.

I mentioned this to Ben. Ben said this is exactly why people should be allowed to choose their own names. I asked him what name he would have chosen for himself if he’d been allowed to do so as a child. He said, 'Princess Leia.' I find it increasingly difficult to believe that he was ever married.

He asked me what name I would have chosen. ‘Fonzie,’ I replied. Thinking about it more seriously, however, and for reasons into which I am unable to go, I would have chosen the name Danny.



I’d still quite like to be a Danny. I wonder though, would my life have been any different if I’d been a Danny?

Maybe this is one of the reasons people have children, so they can give them the names they wish they’d had themselves. But maybe not. I’d like to think that babies’ faces suggest names, like cats. Parents must think, ‘Oh, she looks just like an Emily’ or ‘He has the nose of a Cyril’. But then people make mistakes. What about you? Did your parents make a mistake? Did they name you correctly - or are you a big Jesse trapped in a Jake? Hmm?