There’s also a new pill out that helps ease the misery PMS can bring. You don’t need tablets; it’s easy to make PMS fun. I just dress up as Inspector Clouseau and shout, ‘Not now, Kato’, while she’s chasing me round the house with a bread knife. A pill to cure PMS? I’d like to say I approve but it’s messing with nature. It’s called ‘The Curse’ for a reason, girls. It was your ancestor who ate that apple, so face up to your responsibilities and deal with it.
Test-tube-baby pioneer Professor Robert Edwards has been given the Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking work in IVF. Is it just me or if you were in his position wouldn’t you just use your own each time? It’d be like The Boys from Brazil, but I’d be Hitler!
Asda have announced a plan to sell reduced-price fertility treatments from their in-store pharmacies. Aldi have their own plan, where for 20 quid a cashier will take you into the stockroom and pump you over crates of unbranded grapefruit segments.
Tesco are going to sell Viagra without prescription. Good idea. It’ll give us somewhere to hang a couple of extra bags on the walk home … alright, one. Over the counter? Well, it is if they sell you the Viagra. Tesco are predicting sales in Viagra will rocket while sales of cucumbers will dramatically drop. Lidl are going to sell their own impotence cure: a pack of rubber bands and two lollypop sticks.
A third of over-75-year-old men are still sexually active. The only problem is a lot of them get up there, then can’t remember what they went in for. I’m surprised. I assumed the only time old ladies had anyone rummaging through their drawers was when they let in two blokes with a fake ID, and one kept them distracted downstairs with some crap about a burst pipe.
Apparently, they’ve still got the patter too. Popular chat-up lines include: ‘Do I come here often?’ and ‘Here’s a ouija board. Go tell your mum you’re staying out for the night.’
77-year-old Dennis Ealam has become a dad for the third time in the last three years. He and 37-year-old wife Cora were congratulated by well-wishers and family – and their 23-year-old live-in gardener, Raoul. This woman is some kind of OAPaedophile. To increase the chance of a man that age getting you pregnant it’s claimed that you just have tiny benches installed in your fallopian tubes so their sperm can take the occasional breather.
The world’s oldest calendar girl is stripping off at the age of 94. Her tits start in October and go all the way to December. It’s tastefully done – nothing shown below the waist. Phew, no nipples then. The withered nonagenarian is ‘Miss January’. Which, if you want to avoid throwing up into your mouth, sounds like good advice.
Sir Cliff Richard had the best-selling calendar of 2011. This is kind of strange, as the people who buy Sir Cliff’s calendar are the people in society least likely to need one. I’m guessing the most popular entry will be ‘hip operation’ followed by ‘purchase soup’ and finally, around November, ‘turn heating down’.
There’s now a test that can tell you how fast you are ageing. It costs £700. If you can’t afford that, here are two simple questions that will tell you if you are ageing too fast. Do you listen to Radio 2 and think Steve Wright is funny? Are there a dozen milk bottles on your doorstep that you can’t get to as you’ve fallen and smashed your hip? Congratulations, you’re ageing very fast. And saved yourself 700 quid – which I suggest you put towards a deposit on a coffin.
Scientists claim that baldness can be cured with a pig’s bladder. At last, the mystery of what the fuck Donald Trump is wearing on his head has been solved. They also think they might have found the key to eternal youth by manipulating genes that stop internal organs from aging. Although, if you really want to stay young for ever, you should immerse yourself in a bathtub full of virile young men’s seed. When it hardens, you’ll remain trapped for eternity like a bug in amber.
Scientists have also discovered a cocktail of drugs that could help the elderly live longer. I’d love some for my nana. At least so she makes it through the current slump in property prices. Psychologists have said jigsaw puzzles help keep old people’s brains sharp. I must pass the good news onto my nan, as she pieces together yet another 1,000-piece kitten while regaling me, through a blizzard of Hob Nob crumbs, with memories of our wedding day.
A report claims over 75-year-olds who drink a little every day can cut their senility risk. I suppose even if it doesn’t, at least you’ve got an excuse for having your trousers on back to front. Tragically, my nan is a little senile. So, to help avoid the stigma attached to it, whenever I visit her care home I always leave a couple of empty Scotch bottles on her lap.
Earlier in the year, the BBC showed a documentary by Alzheimer’s sufferer Terry Pratchett, which sparked 900 complaints. Though most of them were Alzheimer’s sufferers phoning up to complain that they hadn’t shown the documentary yet. People were worried that the programme would spark a rise in suicides – I think if we got through a week of Britain’s Got Talent without killing ourselves, we’ll be alright with this. I couldn’t watch the bit where old Peter actually died, as I was coming so hard my glasses fell off. How do you schedule the showing of an assisted suicide? ‘We’ll pick Monday as it’s the only night where this will cheer people up.’
Opponents of assisted suicide say that only God has the right to take a life, and if He’d rather show his boundless love by slowly destroying someone in front of their family and friends, that’s His call. Currently, there’s nowhere for seriously ill people to go in the UK to end their lives. Not since that report on Staffordshire Hospital came out.
A Belgian man diagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time. I’ve visited Belgium. Two hours in Ghent and I was diagnosed as being in a coma. Imagine being trapped in that useless, lifeless body desperately trying to communicate with the world but failing. It must be what it’s like to be Chris Moyles. Apparently, by year 17 he put an amazing amount of mental effort into squeezing out some chest hairs so that they formed a word on his body. Unfortunately that word was ‘Agggggghhhhhhhhhhh’.
Jimi Heselden, the owner of Segway, died after test driving one of his scooters over a cliff. Who was he testing it for? Dignitas? It came just two days after the head of a mobility-scooter company tragically died while trying to jump the Grand Canyon. This horrific crash has already affected sales of Segways. Richard Hammond’s bought a dozen.
A new drug called NRG-1 has been developed and, according to a professor, will ‘kill enough British people to fill an Olympic stadium’. Now that’s the opening ceremony I want to see. And, thanks to the assassination of bin Laden, probably will.
The doctor who claimed that the MMR vaccination had a link to autism has been struck off the medical register. He says that he’s being persecuted and that sacking him will cause a dramatic rise in breast cancer.
Scientists have invented a patch to help people who faint at the sight of needles. Presumably, you stick it over their eyes. It was tested on mice. I didn’t know they were particularly needle-phobic. I should imagine a more common fear with mice would be scientists repeatedly injecting them with cancer.
Research on rats has shown the best hangover cure is aspirin and coffee. If you’re wondering how to get a lab rat drunk, it’s easy. Just leave out some cans and tell it the boffins next door are injecting his family with cancer.
Five animal-testing activists were jailed earlier this year for intimidating people supplying Huntingdon Life Sciences. It’s a victory for common sense – at last its staff can now get back to lip-sticking rabbits.
An Animal Liberation activist let a pet rabbit out of the hutch in a garden. The two owners, aged 10 and 13, were devastated that their pet rabbit Fluffy had gone. Not least because they’ll now never know what effect Head & Shoulders will have on his eyes. I’m sure Fluffy will have absolutely loved the few moments of freedom he had until he was either eaten by a fox or died of starvation because he was tame.
Hungry sheep on the Yorkshire moors have taught themselves to roll three metres across hoof-proof met
al cattle grids to raid villagers’ gardens. Dawn French has a similar trick where she rolls over the night-watchman at the Kit Kat factory. ‘Sheep are quite intelligent creatures and have more brainpower than people are willing to give them credit for,’ said a sheep.
After years of decline, bees are making a comeback as more of us take up keeping them as a hobby. I keep them myself. Not for the honey. Their pelts make ideal puffa jackets for my gang of rapping ants.
Giant jellyfish have entered British waters. Apparently, if you get stung the best thing is to urinate on the stings. I recently found that if someone else gets stung the best thing to do is ask first. And a giant 55-foot ‘sea monster’ washed up on a beach in China. The authorities said it was so badly decayed they weren’t able to identify the whale-sized, whale-shaped creature that came out of the sea, where whales live.
Scientists are to create a barcode for every species of animal on earth. Well, they say every; I’m guessing they won’t have to bother with the zebras.
Japanese scientists believe they will soon be able to bring the woolly mammoth back to life using samples of their DNA. It seems odd when there are plenty of animals the Japanese could save from extinction just by not eating them.
Four astronauts have agreed to be locked away in steel containers for 18 months to simulate a NASA mission to Mars. In order to make things as realistic as possible, the scientists behind the mission will eventually pump out all the air in the capsules so they can die inside a freezing vacuum.
NASA banned astronauts on a recent shuttle mission from any intimate activity. NASA’s come pretty close in the past, though. The Challenger space shuttle fucked the entire crew. They’re right to ban relationships in interplanetary travel. How would you dump someone? You’re hardly going to get away with, ‘I just need more space.’ Maybe better to go with, ‘Whenever we get down to it I know the others are just behind that foil curtain sucking cottage pie out of a toothpaste tube.’
It’s the end of the space-shuttle era. I always think it’s sad they only started spacewalks in the 1980s. Long after they’d stopped sending dogs up. We’ve a lot to thank the shuttle programme for. Let’s not forget, without its role in satellite launch, right now bemused villagers in remote parts of Nepal wouldn’t be sitting in front of the village TV scratching their heads at a 1979 episode of Knots Landing and I wouldn’t have been directed into a field last night screaming, ‘This isn’t a fucking petrol station … stop telling me this is a fucking petrol station!’
A photograph of a topless model that was smuggled aboard an Apollo mission is to be sold at auction. The astronaut who discovered it was shocked to find the picture after his capsule landed on the moon, but not as shocked as he was five minutes later when he discovered a cup of tea his mum had left for him on the side of the control panel.
A NASA probe has become the first man-made object to orbit an asteroid. The research could help develop techniques to divert space rocks away from a collision with earth. As long as they can give us a bit of warning, just so I can build a giant horseshoe out of papier mâché, write ‘Asteroid Magnet’ on it and point it at the sky while screaming, ‘I, ’tis I killed the world!’
The first wedding officiated by a robot took place in Japan in 2010. It was all running smoothly until the robot asked the groom if he would now exterminate the bride. I think it’s a great idea as they’re highly efficient, follow orders and never question their instructions, but I don’t know why Japanese people also see the need for robots.
A scientist who implanted a computer chip in his arm says that within the next ten years we’ll have robots with human brains to help around the house. I’m not sure a machine that’s capable of feeling jealousy and rage, and is able to snap your spinal cord like a cocktail stick and then wear your skin because it’s taken a fancy to your wife, is really going to be worth all that hassle just to save on doing a bit of hoovering.
I’m not actually that convinced that our modern scientific outlook is a rational one. Isn’t rationalism about using your own reason, engaging your own inductive and deductive mind? Most of the popular embrace of scientific culture seems to be about accepting other people’s reasoning. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-science, I just think a lot of people imagine our culture to be defined by rationality and scepticism, when actually that strand of our thought is overwhelmed by our decadence, dogmatism and ego.
* The hotel I stay in when I’m in London will only bring you The Times. Caitlin Moran’s showbiz column always has exactly two jokes, the rest of it just being sentences. Some of the sentences are printed in a larger font, because she can’t even think of enough non-jokes to pad it out. I read her book by being strapped into a chair with my eyelids held open, like in A Clockwork Orange. Apparently, her parents schooled her at home and I can’t help thinking that her personality is exactly the sort of thing that bullying is for. Sadly, her whole ‘What larks!’ sense of humour has survived to adulthood, so if you see her you would actually be doing her a favour if you gave her a Chinese burn. Or, better yet, a hearty kick in the pie.
‘The tube door opens and we hang our faces into the deathly slipstream, hearing the strange whisper of our onward transit through the meaty, sepulchral corridor’
I spend a day in the stateroom moving the wee voodoo men about the wax scheme and working up this short story from ages ago. Maybe a smaller magazine might put me on the cover, not the whole cover but on it somewhere. I look at the door again and I have got to do something.
Mark Millar, the comic-book writer, is someone I know from years ago, from a threesome at this really weird New Year’s Eve party in Dennistoun. Nobody really spoke during it. In fact, the only thing he said that night was when the woman first stood up and started undressing. He turned round, his face emotionless, looked me in the eye and said ‘Victory’ in a monotone so numb I actually really laughed.
Changing CDs while he was fucking her seemed really odd – after that I tried to straighten up enough to leave. Sometimes I think he’s not the guy from the party. I got to know him properly about a year ago and when I mention it he always affects not to know what I’m talking about.
I email him and ask if he can put me in his magazine CLiNT, and he says that actually there is a hole in the next issue, so I sit looking at the sheets of A4, lying on my back in the stateroom, wondering if the story is any good. I remember that I couldn’t get started on it at first, then I thought of writing it as if I were Paul Marsh, and it just appeared. I wonder briefly if Marshy is a fictional embodiment of my personality, like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Then I wonder if everybody is. Then I wonder how many comics are having that thought at this precise moment, and settle on 80 per cent.
My agent phones me from hospital, where she is in the early stages of labour. She’s quite chatty about the Caesarean she’s going to have. I laugh when she finishes talking and try to think of something to add. ‘Fuck,’ I say. I tell her that I placed a story but I don’t know if it’s any good.
‘It must be good if Mark’s printing it,’ she assures me.
‘But he hasn’t read it,’ I remind her, and she just gives that two-beat silence she does when I say something stupid.
Peeking Under the Hood
Things came to a head around the time I was having dreams about Laurence Fishburne. I remember him staring at me from the other end of an empty tube carriage. It was a place that looked like the London Underground but felt more like purgatory.
After losing my job at the Bromley Courier I realised I’d gotten fairly disillusioned with journalism. Well, I like writing but I don’t have the temperament for that kind of work, the requisite aura of bullshit. My flatmate Martin had met some guys with crystal meth, a lot of it. We knew plenty of people who would be interested in buying. And we were pretty desperate for cash. At the back of my mind I thought it might also give me some ideas for the crime novel I was trying to write.
And that was when the dreams started, with Fishburne. Maybe
it was the over-active imagination of a film obsessive but after the second time I did start to think there was something really strange happening. I’ve read about shamanism, people having encounters with their guardian spirit. Or maybe it was just something weird in that last batch of meth.
He never said anything, just seemed to be weighing me up with that strange, distant look. There was all this other stuff going on at the time, what with breaking up with Karen. And we’d come to the attention of some people. Well, the guy who came to the flat that night. I’d read about the Peckham Boys and gangs in the area, how ruthless they could be. I never thought I’d meet one of them, never mind having a gun waved in my face.
I suppose I’d been trying to rebuild the myth of myself, fuelled by regret about the past. Driving through New Cross with the windows down, the steady martial synth line of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 theme playing through the speakers, my nerves felt fine-tuned to the pulse of the city. I guess my head was quite far up my arse by this point.
We had a couple of big paydays in the beginning, and we partied. But after a while it seemed like a dark grey cloud had settled round the flat. Martin’s ‘craziness’ was starting to grate. A bunch of student girls were in the flat one night and he starts waving around this replica Glock, doing his mad Latin American gangster voice, or whatever the hell it was.
I was becoming more like a ghost, obsessive about time keeping and household chores. Sometimes I felt like I really didn’t belong in Martin’s social scene, in which I probably cut a fairly spectral figure. ‘Who was this pasty-faced indie-kid wearing Ecko Unltd T-shirts and listening to NWA?’ I could sense people wondering.
I’d been going through an existential crisis of sorts. I remember thinking it would be good to try lucid dreaming, where you become aware of what’s happening while you’re in a dream. I could ask Fishburne what was up. Some paternal street wisdom is what I expected from him, I suppose, like Tre’s dad in Boyz n the Hood. Or he might tell me to wake up, that I was in The Matrix.
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