David Hadley's Blog, page 82

The UK���s Leading Motoring Correspondent

Pelican Trafficbollard is probably the UK���s leading motoring correspondent, and therefore – automatically – regarded as a public enemy by people who don���t like other people having nice things.

However, Trafficbollard commits an even graver sin – in these people��� eyes – by not being contrite, or apologising for his existence. What is worse is he has opinions that sometimes contradict what these people see as the correct worldview. He also – to their utter horror – sometimes expresses those views, occasionally even in public. Often even in places where the smugly self-righteous can have their whole worldview questioned, often in a witty and pointed way, which – more often than not – pithily sums up the absurdity of their position.

However, if Trafficbollard knew his place and kept his heterodox opinions confined to the world of motor cars the self-righteous and the right-on would be able to ignore him. All thinking as they do – despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that people don���t really like cars. Therefore, they feel, the opinions of those who champion them can be dismissed as the dying roars of an evolutionary dead-end.

However, still the right-on zealots try their hardest to make car ownership and use almost impossible for the ordinary person they pretend to champion. All while foisting unworkable, unreliable and ultimately inefficient public transport on a population that doesn���t want it. Nor does the ideologically pure public transport fit the needs of that population. Mainly because it takes people from where they don���t want to start from to where they don���t want to go. Still, the smugly-righteous soldier on regardless. After all, people need to be told – seemingly again and again – what they really want. Even if they don���t want it and ignore what the self-righteous have decreed they should want and what is best for them.

After all, their perfect society works so well in theory. Consequently, all that remains is to somehow silence or remove those that prevent that ideal society being imposed on the populace in practice. A populace that will – at some undisclosed time in the future when the final wrinkles have been ironed out – show their gratitude to the wise and benevolent dictatorship that has ordered the world thus.

However, awkward sods like Trafficbollard who have the temerity to step outside their ordained ghettos are lauded and celebrated by the ordinary people he is supposedly complicit in oppressing. Even worse, he dares point out that if this new emperor is the emperor of anything, is the emperor only of a nudist colony.

This the self-proclaimed great and good of the great new society cannot understand. They can only assume that it is some great plot by the evil capitalists and a complicit media to keep the truth from the people.

The fact that the people like Trafficbollard and his outspokenness because he articulates something the people know and feel to be true is something those that would change the world just cannot bear to be true. So, of course, he must be silenced before they too start to doubt the truth of their enterprise to remake the world to fit their design.

However, despite all this, Trafficbollard is still a dick.

 

A Victorian Gentleman And The Steam Age

Surplice Dingleberry was the third and youngest son of the twelfth Lord Dingleberry, the renowned inventor of the steam-driven top hat dispenser. As was the tradition at the time, young Surplice was destined for a life in the church. However, he was ��� like his father ��� fascinated by the wonders of Victorian engineering and the possibilities inherent in steam power.

By the age of eighteen, Surplice had also begun to notice ��� even in those strict Victorian times ��� that the family���s servants were ��� quite often – female. Consequently, as his normal young male urges sought an outlet, and his interest in steam power increased, Surplice invented the Steam-Powered Maidservant Disrober.

This device, although its steam engine would fill most young gentlemen���s drawing rooms, was an instant hit. Especially so amongst the young ��� and no so young – Victorian gentlemen who wished to have a housemaid or scullery maid disrobed for them. In the upper classes of the time, all men had valets and gentlemen���s gentlemen who would assist them to get dressed and undressed. Consequently, most upper-class gentlemen had little or no idea how clothes worked. Therefore, when faced with a scullery maid, or any other female servant they wished to ravish, not many of them knew which clothes needed removing or, indeed, how to remove them.

Consequently, young Surplice Dingleberry���s invention was a great boon to such men.

From this invention, Surplice made a great deal of money. Enough indeed that he could afford to buy most of Africa for his brother, Vestments Dingleberry, who wanted to be an explorer, but had trouble finding his way out of his own bedroom unassisted. Surplice was also able to employ some of the best native guides in Africa for his sibling. This enabled his brother to explore sometimes as far as the bottom of the street, where he lived in Johannesburg, without getting lost more than once a day.

Inevitably, Surplice became more famous and the number of female domestic staff removed from their clothing by his machine for the delectation of the Victorian gentry increased significantly. Soon, there were calls for the regulation of steam driven domestic devices, especially after the disaster that befell�� Spadgecock���s Patented Wildfowl Distractor.

Eventually, a consortium of young men purporting to have an interest in musical theatre approached Surplice Dingleberry. They expressed a wish to have a machine similar to Dingleberry���s Steam-Powered Maidservant Disrober. However, they wanted one that would work with manservants as well as manual labourers. As well as, as one put it, ���the kind of muscular young lad one meets down at the docks on a foggy night���. But what Dingleberry did not know was that this was a sting operation instigated by a group of Victorian moralists. They wanted to bring Dingleberry into disgrace, much as they���d engineered Oscar Wilde���s fall from grace a few years before.

Eventually, Dingleberry���s Steam-Powered Valet Disrober and Labourer Manhandler was ready to be demonstrated. It was shown first to an invited audience of the London Gentlemen���s Soft Furnishing Appreciation Society. However, the police raided the meeting just as a young manual labourer was having his shirt removed and folded by the device. The police arrested everyone there. They were all charged with public order offences and Consorting with the Lower Orders in an Intimate Manner.

Following the eventual trial and Scandal, Surplice Dingleberry had no choice but to flee the country. He ended his life at the young age of thirty-five in exile with his brother in South Africa.

Surplice Dingleberry���s untimely end came when his Steam -Powered Lion taming machine misfired. The resulting explosion blew parts of both Dingleberry brothers deep into the savannah where ��� it was rumoured ��� several packs of hyenas were saved from starvation by eating the remains of the two tragic brothers.

A sad end to what historians now regard as a significant Victorian life.

 

Almost The End

Sometimes the world waits, as though expecting something. There is something tense, poised about it. Geffin could feel it��� something tense about the world around him. As though something was there, crouched behind the bushes either side of the road or hidden in the woods beyond and deep inside its dark shadows under the heavy late spring foliage.

The world itself was verdant, the frequent spring rains and slightly warmer weather turning what had been short stubby winter undergrowth bursting up towards the new sunlight.

If he were still a farmer, Geffin would be pleased with the way the world was growing. Now he was a soldier all he saw in the new green spread wide and high around him on either side of the road were places for the enemy to hide, places of ambush.

The lack of birdsong worried him too.

The stillness.

He pulled his horse up, raising his hand so the gossiping and chatting men behind him fell silent.

Melore rode up beside him. ���What?���

���The quiet.���

Melore was a city boy. ���What about it? The country is always quiet.���

Geffin stood in his stirrups, his eyes scouring the hillsides beyond the trees, then the shadowed woodland and back to the bracken, bushes and brambles at each side of the road. ���No, it isn���t.��� He turned to Melore. ���Not like this.��� His hand went to his sword pommel.

Melore���s eyes searched, looking for what Geffin had seen. ���What? There���s nothi���.��� The eyes widened as his hands clawed towards the arrow sprouting from his chest.

Geffin grabbed the other man���s reins, pulling the wounded Melore���s horse around alongside his mount. ���Back! He yelled to the staring shocked faces gathered there, now in front of him blocking the road.

���Turn! Back! Ride! Ambush!��� He had little idea of the words he yelled to the soldiers pulling, turning and swearing at their panicky horses as the arrows hissed down hard into them.

Two riders fell as the rest turned and galloped down the road away from the ambush. They rode right into the enemy horsemen waiting for them, trotting forward in line where the road was narrowest.

Geffin glanced behind, knowing there were more troops there waiting. Two more of his men fell, then a third, as the arrows poured down.

Geffin looked down as his thigh exploded in pain. He saw the arrow there, quivering. Blood spread and poured down his throbbing thigh.

Then his horse fell, an arrow through the eye.

Geffen landed hard in the drying mud, knowing then it was almost the end. Arrows fell around him like the sharp spring rains that had brought the winter world back to life.

Geffin knew then it was almost the end for him and that he would never see the summer.

 

Not To Mention The Marmosets

Of course, the mandolin was not involved. After a certain age, some erotic practices no longer reach the peaks of satisfaction and satiation they once did. Anyway, by not bothering with the mandolin or the wellies, means that we save over a fiver a week on butter alone.

Not to mention the marmosets.

So we won���t.

Not mentioning the marmosets that is, not the butter and the other savings from the dairy aisle such frugality assures. Nowadays, she no longer needs quite so much mango and peach yogurt in the wellies either.

Of course, it saves quite a sum on the laundry bill too, not having to wash the yogurt stains out of the sheets or the straightjacket for that matter.

Obviously, the straightjacket is only for those occasions when she needs her ���special sexy music��� to get her in the mood. After several year of sexual experimentation, we have discovered that the aforementioned form of restraint fulfils our erotic needs. The straightjacket is the only form of restraint that enables me to stay in the same room as Barry Manilow until she achieves the necessary level of satiation.

Obviously, not the real Barry Manilow.

There comes a point when even a besotted fan ��� like the good lady herself ��� realize that the object of her desires does not reciprocate her passions. Nor is he going to respond to her invitations to join in one of our ���special games���. Anyway, his security staff have been on full alert since her last bungled kidnap attempt. Therefore, she has now resigned herself to just using her favorite album tracks, in lieu of the man himself.

No doubt, this is much to his relief��� and that of the marmosets, of course. The marmoset does have few natural predators this far from its natural habitat, of course. But having a marmoset driven out of its tiny mind while trying to escape the ���music��� has its problems. It has almost caused several road accidents as the poor creatures flee for their lives, or ��� at least ��� try to get out of earshot.

But, as I said, it is probably better not to mention the marmosets.

Especially since what happened to that last investigator from the animal welfare charity when he came to investigate the sounds of what he called ���severe marmoset distress���. No doubt caused by the volume of the alleged music. Unfortunately, he was not aware that the good lady herself doesn���t like being interrupted in the midst of her passion.

Of course, I would have helped her bury his body, but of course, the whole point of the straightjacket is that it makes the use of the arms impossible.

Furthermore, wearing a straightjacket does also have a rather deleterious effect on the balance. When she returned to the bedroom to continue our tryst, she immediately began the album from the first track again. This caused me to flee across the room in order to escape the music whilst I was still straightjacketed and thus unbalanced. We have since discovered that yogurt stains on the straightjacket are not as difficult to remove as are the traces of squashed marmoset.

Which is, of course, why it is probably best not to mention the marmoset.

May it rest in peace.

 

The Great Terror Threat

She didn’t have the egg whisk, at least as not as far as we could see. But that didn’t mean that it was safe to approach. After all, standard anti-terrorist training teaches caution at all times, especially if the potential terrorist is in the kitchen. For we all know what a militant cookist is capable of when they gain access to a kitchen.

Most of the existing terrorist organisations faded away during the early 21st century as terrorism became too much like the kind of ordinary job radicals thought themselves too good for. Consequently, most people thought that terrorism had reached its natural end.

However, few people realised just how radicalised the younger generations in the Western world had become. Mainly through the almost constant diet of TV cookery programmes they were exposed to during their formative years. There was nothing more frustrating and alienating to these putative young radicals than to be bought up on a constant diet of cookery programmes. All while living in a society where most food consumed was takeaways and cheap processed supermarket ready meals.

Many of these young radicals complained about having a rolling pin or a chopping board, but not having anything to use them on. These youngsters started hanging out on secret radical cookery websites. There they would learn about cooking from the basic raw ingredients, as well as basic cookery techniques and theory. A radical approach that threatened to undermine the very basis of the Western ready meal based economic model. As well as a prospect that could bring about the possible downfall of so much of modern society from advertising right through to waste disposal. This radicalism could throw many thousands of people involved in the whole business of meal supply out of work. This radical cookeryism could then help create the kind of cookery-based society, which these young radicals are very keen to bring about.

After a while, these cookery fanatics formed several radical cookery terrorists groups, from the Nigella Brigade to the Deliah Revolutionary Front and the Jamie Army and the Young Ramseyists. All dedicated to the overthrow of the ready meal industry.

Soon it was not safe to risk a trip down the frozen ready meal aisle of a supermarket without the risk of confrontation by a cabbage or half a pound of raw mince put there by these terrorists. Then when the shoppers fled in panic from the raw ingredients, the terrorists phoned the media demanding that the media broadcast their recipe ideas and serving suggestions to the nation.

Soon companies had to transport snack foods in convoys, unless they wanted their cargoes hijacked and replaced by tasty homemade equivalents. Even a solo walk to the fish and chip shop ran the risk of kidnap. Once taken hostage, the terrorists tried to teach their hostages how to cook for themselves, often against the hostage’s will.

For once, in the recent history of humankind though, it seems this latest iteration of terrorism will not be so easily defeated. For, even now, despite the best efforts of the authorities and prepared food packagers, the internet is home to an increasing number of recipe sites. All multiplying faster than the authorities can take them down.

 

Celebrity Nude Selfie Dancing Bake-off On Ice

In the end, it became inevitable. First was increasing domination of the TV schedules by celebrity versions of popular talent shows masquerading as cooking programmes. All coupled with the desire to watch celebrities making arses of themselves on the dance floor and on ice. This combined with the growing interest in those same celebrities in a state of undress found in their allegedly private selfies, led to a spark igniting in some Programme Concept Engineer’s momentary lapse from self-aggrandisement.

Quickly, tucking himself away and storing the naked celebrity photos for later, the Programme Concept Engineer called a meeting to discuss setting up a meeting to discuss planning a meeting about a new programme concept.

At first, those charged with discussing the viability of his request to set up a meeting about the meeting were a bit confused. After all, no one had had a new idea in television since the early seventies. Consequently, they were not used to having to deal with such an alien notion and were unsure of the best way of setting up a meeting to find out what a ’new idea’ entailed.

However, the Programme Design Concept Visualizer (who had since his original thought had his job title changed) explained that it was not really such a new idea after all. This came as a great relief to the channel executives, who feared an outbreak of originality in the TV business and what such a revolution could do to their salaries and pension packages.

The Innovation Visualizer (Programmes) Concept  Manager (another job title change) then set out his idea for  the programme later known to the general public as Celebrity Nude Selfie Dancing Bake-off On Ice. Almost immediately, the executives gathered together in the meeting to discuss setting up a meeting saw that this plan would work. Consequently, they cleared all their diaries, suspended any on-going job title changes  and immediately started planning the meetings to set up the lunches that would become necessary should the concept go beyond the initial meeting stage.

Of course, problems arose when the celebrities were confronted with the idea of their full-frontal nudity on live prime time TV. However, the producer of the show explained that they could replace the bodies on display with body doubles. Not only that, the programme itself would be on a ten-minute delay. This would enable a team of CGI experts equipped with the very latest in Photoshop technology to make sure the bodies on display were ‘the best they could be’.

Then, once the contracts were signed and the merchandising deals on the celebrities and their nude selfie products were put into production. These ranged from Bake Off Nudie Aprons to Bake Off Nude Selfie coffee mugs and egg cups and much more. Only then could the development of the vital programme trailers begin.

After that was all sorted, they cast around for the cheapest production company they could find to actually make the programmes, at some time yet to be specified.

 

The New Energy Revolution

Back then, obviously, it was different… apart from the anchovies, of course. But such was the nature of pizza-based technology at the time.

Of course, back in the early days of the 21st Century there were still some – despite the evidence – who thought that wind power was the answer to the UK’s energy problems. At least, they did until the government stopped subsidising them and the wind farms fell into disuse faster than a celebrity talent show winner.

Of course, the blades soon fell off the disused wind turbines as more and more – and heavier and heavier – birds used them as rusting roosting spots. Then, as the wind saw it was safe to come out again, the blades soon broke and fell to the ground. Then whole tribes of scrap men emerged from the undergrowth to recycle them into something useful, at last.

Nuclear fusion was, of course, the then preferred option with most people hoping that the problem of containing the high-temperature plasmas was resolved.

However, a physicist working late at the fusion experimental laboratory discovered the extremely high temperatures that the cheese on a pizza can achieve. Up to then, the physics had mainly experimented with takeaway pizzas and the occasional frozen supermarket pizza.

This physicist, however, made his own pizza in the laboratory. There, he discovered that cheese when cooked achieves a temperature normally only otherwise seen in the hottest parts of the sun.

Once he had cooled his mouth down, by sticking his head in a can of liquid nitrogen, he was able to repeat the experiment. Only this time he experimented with not putting the superheated pizza in his mouth, but inside the fusion torus.

It was at that moment that the UK’s first sustainable nuclear fusion pizza came on line. The superheated cheese on the pizza – combined with the essential anchovies and chorizo topping – produced enough power to heat a town the size of Luton. Even now, twenty-five years later that original pizza has cheese still hot enough to sustain the fusion reaction for the next 200 years. Or so scientists predict, providing no-one sneaks into the facility when they are feeling a bit peckish.

For, as scientists have discovered, despite being safe, efficient, producing no waste except for a few crumbs and a handful of uneaten olives, the pizza fusion reactor is without any drawbacks. Providing – of course – that no-one eats the pizza. This means that a high level of security surrounds every pizza fusion facilities, especially if the pizza fusion facility is near any centres of population. In particular, those where people get hungry and just fancy a pizza. Hence, the government’s recent promise to those concerned at the high cost of security that no future facility will be built near student accommodation or within staggering distance of any pub.

 

If He Could Be Arsed

Andrew was not much of a traveller. He regarded going to the supermarket as a great excursion and had only been abroad a few times. Not from any fear of the foreign or uncertainty about what it would be like abroad, more a matter of his not being arsed.

Andrew just didn’t care.

Once, when he was bored one Tuesday afternoon, he’d tried to list all the things in the world that he didn’t care about and had stopped at number 752. Not because he’d run out of things he didn’t care about, but because item number 751 was Numbered Lists Of Things. He’d thought of that before several TV channels hit on the idea of making entire two or three-hour long programmes based around numbered lists of whatever archive footage they could shovel together around some vague theme.

One of his ex-girlfriends had once said, ‘Andy, you are so laid back, I have to check for a pulse to make sure you’re still alive.’

Andrew had thought she just liked holding hands in that way. He’d thought, once or twice, about telling her he didn’t like been called Andy, but – in the end – he decided against it. After all, she made nice toast and so it wasn’t worth the hassle of upsetting her.

Her name was Sharon. It was only after he’d tried to kiss her in the pub that she told him, with something akin to shock on her face, that she’d left him five weeks before.

Later, thinking back, Andrew realised he’d been puzzled by the lack of her underwear on the bedroom floor. Also, a pack of her favourite chocolate biscuits had lain unopened in the kitchen for more than a few days. Then, even later that night, on returning home he eventually did remember to have a look around, just to confirm that she wasn’t still living there.

Well, he thought, slumping down in what would be his favourite chair, if he could be arsed to have one, that will save a few bob on teabags… and chocolate biscuits. But it would mean he’d have to start going out again, and making a bit of effort, to get another girlfriend… if he could be arsed.

 

Something for the Weekend – Free Kindle Humour: The Sexiest Elbows I’d Ever Seen

The Sexiest Elbows I’d Ever Seen

Available FREE for the next five days

 here (UK) or here (US)

 

Extract:

[….]

Twelve hours later, just as the TV station covering the event live went to an advertising break, there was an unearthly scream from the AntenDec beast. It jumped up and stood on the tapioca-ignoring table. It stripped off its clothing and dived heads-first into the, now stone-cold, tapioca dish on its left before smearing the contents of its other tapioca dish over its genitalia. Then it strode towards the female celebrity judge, licking its lips and demanding perverse sexual favours, there and then, live on the auditorium stage.

Fortunately, the AntenDec’s keepers were able to throw one of their restraining nets over the rampaging creature before it got too close to the judge. They sedated the beast and took it away in a wheelbarrow back to its cage ready for the long journey back to the Geordie wilderness where it made its home.

The disqualification of the AntenDec meant that Plenitude and I were through to the final.

That night we celebrated alone together in my hotel room. Plenitude dipped those sexy elbows of hers in the champagne they’d presented to us for winning the semi-final. She offered those elbows for me to lick the dripping champagne from them, as she did that special thing she did with the castanets and the Shrewsbury & Telford A-Z Street Atlas.

[….]

Product Description

When we first met she was Emeritus Professor of Post-Colonial Marmalade at the University of Ffestiniog, and she had the sexiest elbows I had ever seen. We met at the Annual Ffestiniog Tapioca-Ignoring Convention, back in the late summer of ’83. At the time neither of us had a Tapioca-Ignoring partner, so naturally – once we found our handicaps were compatible – we teamed up for that autumn’s preliminary Tapioca-Ignoring Cup rounds. Of course, with both of us being amateurs we never expected to get to the finals.

Her name was Plenitude Cleavage and she came from the Welsh valleys, in fact she had quite a Welsh valley herself, never in my experience had I ever seen such a splendid example of nominative determinism in a woman’s body before.

[….]

This collection also contains several other stories of equal import, such as: 

‘Shropshire Smith and the Temple of Vegetables’. A tale of adventure and excitement within a forgotten temple of one of the world’s oldest forgotten civilisations.

‘The Famed Vegetable Killer of Grimsby’. Murder most foul.

‘The Dancing Sex Nuns of the Tenth Quadrant’. A story of one of the great mysteries of the far future.

‘The man with the Golden Cheese Baguette’. The tale of Britain’s greatest spy and his attempt to thwart an evil genius with plans for world domination.

‘The Thing Falling Out of the Sky Incident’. Some claim there are aliens out there, waiting to invade Earth. Some say this has already happened.

Plus other stories, such as: ‘Feeling Betrayed’, ‘The Aftermath’, ‘The Perfect Woman’ and others the like of which you will never have read before.

 The Sexiest Elbows I’d Ever Seen

Available FREE for the next five days

 here (UK) or here (US)

A Revolution In Competitive Cycling

Velodrome Creamcheese is probably the UK’s leading long-distance cyclist. Many sports commentators and travel journalists put this down to her innovative use of the Cheap Day-Return Rail ticket in her races. Many sports experts also say that it is the use of such tactics, up to and including the short haul domestic flights she used,  that enabled her to win the Trans-USA cycle race last year. All of which has enabled Creamcheese to stay at the top of competitive cycling, while at the same time eschewing the use of illegal drugs.

Of course, the tactic has been used to great effect before. After all, it was the use of the Aston Martin DB4 by Disraeli Sturmey-Archer, which enabled him to win the last seven Tour De France in a row. Although, there have been calls for stricter drug-monitoring of contestants in that race when traces of digestive biscuit crumbs were found in the footwell of the Aston Martin, after the tricky hill-climb stage.

However, some cycling commentators and traditionalists claim that this adoption of modern technology into cycling races has somehow diluted the sport. However, the modernisers point to the fact that cycle races are… well, a bit boring. After all, when you have seen one herd of multi-coloured lycra-clad madmen peddling furiously past a beauty spot, then you have seen them all.

As Creamcheese herself said, in one post-race interview, ‘Why should I bother with all that pointless bloody pedalling? After all, this is the 21st Century for god’s sake.’ She went on to point out that the motorcycle outriders and camera crews in cars are able to easily keep up with any cycling race. Even on the most gruelling stages, the motorbike riders and car drivers expended so little effort. It was this insight that led to Creamcheese changing her tactics.

A change which has bought her all her recent successes. ‘I thought, on the last bit of a steep hill climb just outside Walsall; bugger this for a game of soldiers. I was just thinking about retiring, going into commenting or grooming product advertising, when I saw the local railway station. It was like a message from god. So I just parked my bike and brought a ticket to the station closest to the finish line. I was there 3 hours before the rest of the mugs busting a gut to pedal faster than one another. Now I think about it, it is so bloody obvious.’