Flaming Fairy

And, as always, feeling rather melancholy. Dad's house is, at least, lovely and warm now he's had the central heating installed. So lovely and warm, I couldn't bear to leave it to go out on Saturday night when it was lashing down with rain. But that meant plenty of time for reflection, and sometimes that isn't a good thing. Oh, I won't inflict my current mental state on all you lot, it's way too boring, but suffice to say, I think I need to do something to break myself out of a fug of inertia.

Came home to find the boiler bust, and no repair service until this morning. With HL and I both working, the only day I can be in for the workmen is Wednesday, so hopefully, they'll be able to accommodate that. But not having hot water is miserable.

And if that wasn't enough, I have the dentist on Tuesday. I am so sorely tempted to cancel altogether, but that crown isn't going to reinstall itself and there is a sore bit on one of my gums I want him to look at. I am falling apart! If it's not my crown falling out, it's my ear blocking up (which it has done) and then there are the various aches and pains in my knee (God knows what that is, but it feels tender, like I've grazed it, but there's no actual injury), my side (feels like a pulled muscle), my back (always a problem), and the ever-present Clement Freuds (which is rhyming slang I shan't explain).

Bah, I need an overhaul, but who has the time?

Tomorrow's Not BNP

(to the tune of Tomorrow Belongs To Me)

The eye of the Griffin is glassy and cold
LJB has no LLB
Collett’s a paedo (or so I’m told)
Tomorrow’s not BNP

They can’t keep their member list off of the net
Der Fuhrer was crap on QT
They’re Billy-No-Mates in the Euro set
Tomorrow’s not BNP.

Their homophobia makes you sick:
it’s rife with hypocrisy
cos Webster’s mangina was filled by Nick.
Tomorrow’s not BNP

The master race can be exclusive no more,
they must show equality.
When Nick ushers "untermensch" through the door,
That’s it for the BNP

Not the swine flu, I don't think, just a common or garden cold, but it's knocked me for six. I'm about to tune in to Jeremy Kyle and then This Morning with Fern and Phil: proper illness telly. If only someone could come round with a bunch of grapes and a copy of Heat. Pauvre moi!

This kind of shit makes me so angry.

...The Wood End estate is one of the most deprived in the UK.

Many of its residents live below the poverty line - and when you are desperate, the idea of a cash loan to get the family through Christmas seems very attractive.

For many people, getting a knock on the door offering them £300 in cash is difficult to resist, even if they have no disposable income.

Loan provider Provident Financial actively markets its services around the Wood End estate just before Christmas - and it is not cheap.

Taking out a £300 loan over a 12-month period will attract a total of £246 in charges...

...One long-standing customer, who wanted to stay anonymous, said she had taken out loan after loan.

She said she now regretted ever getting involved with Provident Financial and was desperate to find a way out.

"I often cry myself to sleep," she said.

"It's taken a lot of my life away. I don't know whether I'm coming or going some days because I'm lending when I can't afford to pay it back."...

...Charlie Gibbons, chief executive of Coventry's CAB, said that out of the 3,500 debt cases they saw every year about 2,000 involved Provident debts

Yeah, I've unfairly snipped out all the bits where the company defend their practice, but then who cares - Provident Financial are fucking scum.

If this doesn't make you want to shake your booty, well...you must have no booty to start with, quite clearly

Just found out that a little club I used to go to way way back in the early eighties is still going strong. I say "club", it was actually someone's cellar dolled up into a disco. Alternate Fridays and Saturdays, £1 to get in, bring a bottle, drinks free all night. Nowadays, it seems to be the same arrangement only it's £7 to get in, and it doesn't stay open as late.

Oh, the laffs we had down there! One New Year's Eve, me and Gary went in drag with a plan to change into our man-clothes at midnight. All went well until I realized I'd forgotten to bring man shoes! I could have stayed in my stillies for the rest of the night, but I lacked the elan to style that particular look out, so had to borrow some shoes from someone who was staying the night in the house above. Being two sizes larger than mine, they flapped about on my feet in a ridiculous fashion but that didn't stop me shaking a tail feather until the early hours of NYD.

In another wardrobe malfunction moment, I took a young man outside to nosh him off in the bushes. Spent the remainder of the night with two large mud patches on my knees. I didn't discover this until I got home. I might as well have worn a big badge saying "boyslut".

So anyway, here's a tune we used to jiggle about to back then. Quite strenuously jiggle to, as I recall, with poppers clamped to nose. There may even have been screaming.

...I seem to be having trouble posting to this thing on a regular basis. I guess it was always going to happen, once I started my MA,as I have other fish to fry. So forgive me the irregular updates.

In the meantime, here's some music

Come H1N1, land on me.
A week away from work would be
Complete and utter luxury.
Germs - knock me flat!

I shall not take my Tamiflu.
God only knows what it might do.
Shorten my illness by a day or two?
I don't want that!

Come hacking cough, come phlegm, come snot
Come high pyrexia, burning hot.
Come friends, with mags and chocs, to blot
My fevered brow.

Lorraine, Fern, Phil and Jeremy,
Great lynchpins of daytime TV
Who numb our brains from nine till three,
I need you now.

Away with voicemails, emails, all
My daily toil's carnival.
"I'm ill with swine flu, no one call",
I shall protest.

Come H1N1, lovely bug
Give my respiratory tract a hug.
I'll have no jab, will glug no drug:
I need my rest!

This is bloody marvellous - Charles Causley's "Eden Rock". It's poems like this make me realize just how crap my own are

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'

I had not thought that it would be like this.

All the tarot readings requested have been done. I underestimated seriously how much work would be involved, but I remain open to further questions and requests for readings if anyone has them. It certainly clarified for me which of the many decks I have works best for me! Hope the readings make some sort of sense to you all.

Thanks everyone for your questions, I learned a lot!

And bugger me if my crown just didn't fall out YET AGAIN! Didn't see THAT in the cards!

OK, so I've got three takers so far for my reading skillz. Please post your questions in the comments below, and I'll do a reading for you. I'll post a pic of the spread and the interpretation on this journal, but I'll filter the post so it's specifically for you!

'citing!

Those who haven't responded to my previous post, but want a reading, stick your question below as well. There may be some delay in responding if I get loads, but I doubt that'll happen.

So, I keep having these amazingly detailed apocalyptic scenario-type dreams. The night before last, London was in the grip of a virus that turned people into sort-of-zombies but without the flesh-eating, sort-of-vampires but without the bloodsucking. All very weird and seemed very real at the time, especially the old lady animated corpse thing lying down in the freezer of a little corner shop. A couple of nights before that, London was in the grip of a drugs epidemic, with everyone getting off their nuts on something called "sparkle" or "tingle" or some such thing, a drug whose long term use first of all made them immobile for hours on end but then turned them into violent fuckheads out to kill kill kill.

What is with that?

About the Fort Hood tragedy. Seems like there's growing evidence that there may have been some jihadist element to the shooting. Not that you'd know it here in BBCland where the producers of News at Ten decided that the main focus of the story should not be the victims - about which they said nothing except that they were "men and women" - but the possible effect on Muslims in the US Army. We were shown a collage of victims' photos, but not told a single name. Instead, they screened an interview with a distant relative of the killer. So, the Beeb thinks that the victims of a real, actual instance of religiously-motivated hatred are less important than the possible future subjects of some potential as-yet-unhappening instances of religious discrimination. Un-fucking-believable.

Watched Let The Right One In the other night. Wow. Just wow. Like nothing you've ever seen before - a kind of love story, kind of horror movie kind of tale of growing up that's kind of sweet and also kind of unsettling and kind of gory but not really and has a feel-good, feel-weird ending. It's totally amazing, go see it. Here's the trailer: -

But posted mainly because Phil Oakey is Teh Sex in this video. I still would now.

I am so totally into early Human League at the moment

For Boris Johnson

London mayor Boris Johnson has rescued a woman who was being attacked by an armed group of young girls, chasing them down the road on his bicycle.

Franny Armstrong called for help as she was surrounded and pushed by the girls, one of whom had an iron bar, in Camden, north London, on Monday night.

The mayor, who was cycling past, stopped and chased the girls down the street, calling them: "Oiks".

Ms Armstrong said: "He was my knight on a shining bicycle." ...

...She admitted that she did not agree with Mr Johnson's politics and had voted for rival Ken Livingstone in the 2008 mayoral election.

But Ms Armstrong added: "If you find yourself down a dark alleyway and in trouble I think Boris would be of more use than Ken."

A spokeswoman for Mr Johnson confirmed that the incident took place but said the mayor would not comment further on the matter.

For British Muslims for Secular Democracy



More of this please

Looks like mass murdering scumbag Megrahi is feeling a bit better and may be going home from the hossie soon.

Rose West has put in for a transfer to a Scottish prison and is said to be suffering a bit of a sniffle. Kenny McAskill has a statement on standby, just as soon as he can be sure of a good spot on the telly.

Alan Johnson, you were perhaps the last member of the cabinet I had any faith in. You seemed a decent enough bloke, with a good head on your shoulders. And yet, when it came down to it, you were more interested in chasing headlines in the Daily Mail than in defending the notion of rational, evidence-based policy-making. So, to support the ludicrous actions of Gordo in reclassifying cannabis, you sacked Professor Nutt and now you have a couple of follow-on resignations on your hands, gutting the Advisory Committee of its scientists.

And now look at you, trying to defend this. I don't know what I think is worse - the sacking itself or this load of old bobbins from you: -

In his letter, Mr Johnson says Prof Nutt was asked to resign "because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy".

He said the professor's widely quoted comment about horse riding being more dangerous than ecstasy was a "political rather than a scientific point".

Mr Johnson writes: "There are not many kids in my constituency in danger of falling off a horse - there are thousands at risk of being sucked into a world of hopeless despair through drug addiction."

First off - please ditch the "prolier than thou" act; it doesn't wash coming from a Labour politician when we all know your party abandoned the working class years ago. Secondly, the professor is absolutely right - roughly the same number of people die from riding accidents as die from ecstasy. And thirdly, "kids" don't get sucked into drug addiction through taking the odd E at the weekend. This is real life, Alan Johnson, not Grange Hill or Eastenders, where any drug turns into a gateway drug for *run screaming from the room* HEROIN *movie villain music*.

In some ways I think I should perhaps thank you, Mr Johnson, for allowing the final shredlet of scale to fall from my eyes. Once you started going for the scientists for giving you advice you didn't like, you blew it away in a second. You and your lame-duck government led by your lame-duck leader have no credibility any more, it really is time to go.

Night night