Chris Page's Blog, page 14

Top Fucking Gear, OK

So, Jeremy Clarkson has been dropped by the BBC and the hunt is on for a new presenter for his TV show Top Gear.

Suggestions so far have included Chris Evans, Alan Partridge, Bill Oddie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Atkinson and AC/DC.

I am going to now suggest something appallingly, boringly obvious, and you know what I’m going to say, don’t you: I am going to nominate me for the new presenter of Top Gear.

It makes sense, though, doesn’t it. And I need the dosh.

I have continuity with Mr Clarkson in that I’m white, middle-aged, middle class, privately educated, and completely out of shape. But at the same time I can provide a diverting change. I’m not a racist, belligerent, bullying, right-wing fuckwit for a start, and, more importantly, I know how not to wear jeans with a jacket.

Of course, there would have to be a few changes in the format. Stands to reason: any new presenter is going to stamp their personality on the show, and there’s a lot of crap personality that needs stamping out on Top Gear.

I’d get rid of the fucking cars for a start.

Bollocks to cars. Can’t see the point in them. Cars are environment-destroying penis extensions. Have you seen those photos of car shows? I mean the ones with the women in very short skirts posing on the bonnets of the flash motors? Those women, they were paid to do that. Do you think that in real life, without being paid, they wander up and down High Street draping themselves over cars at random because that’s what they do? Well, silly you!

No, they’re paid to wear those clothes and sit on the cars and that tells you a lot about cars and the people that drive them, that does. Car owners have to pay people to wear short skirts and pretend to like their cars for them.

No, I’d skip the cars and go straight for the gear. I’ve done a lot of gear in my time, and I’d love to tell the punters about it.

I remember this Columbian Red and this Moroccan Gold I had once. Fucking top gear that was, I tell you. Not a lot better gear than that. Coincidentally — and I don’t know what will qualify anyone for hosting this show if this story doesn’t — after smoking a cocktail of the Red and Gold gear I actually drove a car. I was asked by my mother to take my grandmother home, and as much as I would have liked to have said, ‘I’d love to but I’m stoned out of my fucking tree about now,’ I didn’t because I was too fucking stoned to think of pointing it out.

That was an ordeal, I tell you, driving my gran home. The white lines were separating from the middle of the road and vaulting the Peugeot. I was driving with a hand over one eye because my stereoscopic vision was totally out of sync and the world was wobbling all over the place. Once in town, I managed to drop Gran off and then got lost. Yes, lost in the city I grew up in. I caused a crash and then zoomed off through the centre of town without stopping and hid the car in the cathedral car park. I’m not going into the details of the crash because I don’t think Britain has a statute of limitations and I don’t want to be identified. And then I had to go to a party and smoke some more. Anyway, one party later, I nearly drove the car off a bridge and into the River Severn while bending down to try to get the car’s heater to work.

A tree hugger!

Other top gear we could talk about would be Afghanistan Black. Very squidgy, very oily, always did the biz. Or that skunk I had in New York that caused the back of my skull to fall off and my brain to drop out, right in the middle of a Manhattan bar. Fucking excellent gear that was.

And then there was that brown amphetamine stuff I had that nearly gave me a heart attack and provoked my flatmate to smash a cup in his own face. And then there was the opium I had in a pipe of weed on the pavement (sidewalk) on West 25th St in Manhattan. Gear doesn’t get much more bonkers than that.

So there you go. I have lots of top gear to talk about on the TV and I definitely volunteer myself for discovering some more. I know how to deal with a crash (more gear) and I’m not afraid of speed!

Right, who’s got the skins and where do I sign?

Underpants in the headlines

World leaders take lessons in leadership and wearing underpants from King of the Undies World

Underpants have hit the headlines around the world as Canadian PM Pat Martin walks out of parliament to get his fixed.

The PM publicly blamed his cut-price underpants for his inability to sit through a vote.

This under-things excuse is daft enough to be credible but we are wondering whether this was just a ruse for Canada’s premier pants wearer to nip out and get a fix of King of the Undies World.

And that’s my own conspiracy theory and  SEO fix for the day.

Author Chris Page says King of the Undies World is definitely not a kids’ book.

King of the Undies World is not a kids’ book, said author Chris Page.

It’s not a kids’ book. Get over it.

The author’s remarks came after suggestions that King of the Undies World, Chris Page’s most recent novel might be a kids’ book.

Author Chris Page was quoted as saying ‘It’s not a book for kids, King of the Undies World.’

The confusion arose when a number of adults and parents asked him ‘Is King of the Undies World a children’s book?’

Both Chris Page and the parents and adults are thought to be referring to King of the Undies World, the comedy novel published by Psipook Press in January of 2015.

‘No, it isn’t in any way a book for children,’ Chris Page, the author, clarified.

The parents and adults are quoted as saying, ‘We were only asking because of the King of the Undies World’s apparent underpants theme, and the bright and jolly cover of a fat man in his underpants with an extra pair of underpants on his head. And our children were asking.’

‘No, absolutely not. King of the Undies World is not a book for children. I would know, because I am the author and also the designer of the cover,’ said Chris Page [Have we made the Chris Page-author collocation enough times to satisfy SEO criteria yet?].

‘But what about the cover and the underpants,’ the parents and adults wanted to know.

‘First,’ responded Chris Page through legally clenched teeth, ‘there are no kids in it. Second, some of the underwear is quite sexy, though I say so myself. I would be worried about the heads of children exploding if they read the sexy underwear bits. Bit. Second, some of the underwear is quite violent. We have military grade undies here that are not to be messed with.’

When pressed further on whether King of the Undies World was a book for children, the author and designer Chris Page stated: ‘Look, my official position on this is that King of the Undies World is not a book for kids. Quite apart from the scenes of sexy underwear and the pants-related violence, there’s drugs, terrorists Disney Land, a man who licks toilet seats, and quite a lot of sticky buns. I don’t think the averagely responsible parent would want their children to be exposed to so many depictions of sticky buns at such a young age. The kids might end up heroin junkies.’

In a further statement, Chris Page, author of King of the Undies World, said, ‘Do you remember the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? He was the scariest creation in fiction ever, so if this had been a book for kids I would definitely have put him in it to terrify the little buggers. But I didn’t. Ergo it’s not a fucking kids book, OK?’

Other people this book is not for include North Korea despots, persons of a literary disposition, and people who are afraid of underpants.

You have been warned

Pay to protest: free speech for sale

It was reported last week that a coalition of climate change protesters has been told to pay for a planned protest, or permission to hold it will not be granted.

When The Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) approached the London Metropolitan Police (MPS) to arrange the event, the police force declined to help, telling the group to hire their own private marshals to close the roads on the march route.

This would be enormously expensive but without the marshals and a traffic plan, Westminster council (Conservative) were not going to grant permission.

The cost and the bureaucracy raise doubts about whether the march will go ahead.

What is behind this decision by the police? The MPS claims budget cuts — £600m in the last four years and another £800m to come — have forced a review and contraction of their ‘services’ (their word, not mine) and this is a convincing explanation. Refusing to go along with a peaceful, uncontroversial and potentially popular march such as this climate protest will highlight the extent and effect of cuts on their own budget and perhaps muster a bit of public support for the poor, hard-done-by force.

It is a conspicuously passive-aggressive tactic, effectively hijacking someone else’s protest to make their own, but it will get a message out.

However, the police do not operate in a vacuum (and no cruel jokes about the vacuum being under the bobby’s helmet, please) and the decision has more than a little of the neoliberal stench about it.

Successive UK governments, from Thatcher, through Blair to the current ConDems, have dismantled the public infrastructure of the country, transferring assets owned by everyone into the hands of the few: water, electricity, the trains, the phone system, the post office, data management; prisons, the NHS, education, welfare services and on and on.

This government and its forebears are turning health and wellbeing, security and our future into commodities to sell back to us.  This decision to charge marchers is a logical step in this process. And if you can’t afford to protest, well, tough. Like big homes, foreign holidays,  and nice cars, protest will belong only to those who can afford it.

Just as with all the other public services, the shortfall in police functions will be offered to the market, forcing yet more money from our pockets and into private coffers.

Whether a simple result of belt tightening by the MPS or a more insidious and deliberate policy of privatising law and order, charging people to protest is not only a restriction on rights, it is the commodification of free speech.

There’s no need for @stephenfry to apologise: his critics have not answered his questions

Cartoon by Chris Page

A week ago Stephen Fry in that now-famous interview on RTE’s The Meaning of Life said that if he ever met God, he would ask ‘‘bone cancer in children? What’s that about?’ and went on to ask, ‘Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’

Fire nor brimstone nor lightning bolt were visited upon Mr Fry’s head for his comments but he did find himself at the centre of a storm of Biblical proportions in both conventional and social media, with people of faith lining up to throw figurative stones or pointed words of forgiveness at him.

Yesterday, Mr Fry apologised for any offence caused.

In calling God a ‘bastard’ Mr Fry could not have intended any offence whatsoever, this is clearly an objective statement of fact, drawn from the reality of disease, pain, suffering and so forth that is entirely beyond our control.

People of faith clearly were stirred to strong feelings, yet no apology from Mr Fry was necessary for this simple reason: in all the froth and outrage not one of Mr Fry’s critics has been able to answer his questions. Not one.

What, indeed, about bone cancer in children? God’s not like that, the faithful say, as if no child has ever suffered. God moves in mysterious ways, others told us sagely without seeing that mysterious ways are entirely unhelpful to those afflicted by them.

On the Guardian site, Giles Fraser wrote a borderline incoherent post in which he claimed God is love and warm and fuzzy and suffers with us, without seeming to comprehend the question ‘why have suffering?’ Mr Fraser left us with the surreal feeling that God indeed made the universe, but not the bits we don’t like.

Citation needed, I think, Mr Fraser.

Genesis says that God made the world and everything in it. Genesis is very clear about that. Genesis doesn’t attach an asterisk to ‘everything’ and a footnote: ‘except for disease, natural disasters, dangerous insects and anything else you feel you would like not to be the work of the creator’.

If you accept that God created the universe you have to accept that God created arbitrary misfortune and the misery it brings (and then, as Mr Fry pointed out, demands to be thanked for it). This would indeed imply a vile and capricious deity.

On Twitter @Belief4Truth was very confused and invoked free will: ‘can God stop Man Stephen ?’ [sic; being just as confused about capitalisation] as if victims of cancer will the condition on themselves.

And on and on and on, in ever-diminishing spirals of absurdity and non sequiturs.

So, no, Mr Fry, you are way too nice and you don’t need to apologise. The faithful have yet to provide any meaningful answer to your questions — and they won’t, because they don’t have one.

England: not a multi-party system, actually

A good friend from the US, talking of politics, commented to me on Facebook “Must be nice to have more than two political parties, eh?”

“Eh?”

Oh, yes, it’s that common misapprehension that England has a multi-party political system, that there is a plurality of choices. A lot of English people have the same mistaken belief.

I would like to put all my non-English friends (and my confused English friends) straight on this: England is in fact a two-party system. At the moment, it is very, very rigidly two party.

The biggest party by far is the Conservative-Labour-LibDem-UKIP bloc.

I suspect it is the fact that the biggest party looks like four parties that confuses people. But please don’t be baffled.

These various names add up to just one party.

Of this we can be sure because this party, all four of it, is completely and utterly in thrall to capital. It is terrified of doing anything to offend the corporations or its agents or get in its way. These four bits of the main party are falling over themselves to grease capital’s wheels and keep and facilitate its mission to own everything and everyone. The UKIP portion of this party even has the image of the pound sterling as its logo — bit of a giveaway that.

Another dead giveaway is the principle players, the leaders. They are all the same person. He is wealthy, he is male, and has never done a day’s real work in his life: straight from Oxbridge and into the party as an apparatchik. Never having done an ordinary job or faced ordinary problems, he now insists on telling ordinary, hardworking people how to run their lives and runs down every bit of infrastructure that might give them security.

The party is xenophobic. All of it. For sure, some bits of the party are slightly less rabidly xenophobic than other bits, but the party as a whole spends all day, every day chanting ‘Immigrants! Immigrants! Immigrants!’ like Daleks. The subtext of the Dalek repetition of ‘Immigrants! Immigrants! Immigrants!’ being ‘Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!’

The whole party is intent on breaking up England’s social heritage — the NHS, universal education, welfare — and selling it to their affluent mates for scrap.

So it’s clear that despite the bewildering array of aliases, the Conservatives, Labour, the LibDems and UKIP are actually just one party.

The second party in England is the Greens. Unfortunately, they are much smaller than the big party. But they are very different: they put people and the quality of life and giving everyone an equal chance and natural world on which we depend before the interests of capital.

The Greens stand for pretty much the opposite of the Con-Lab-LibDem-UKIP party.

In blind taste tests, it seems that voters prefer the Green party but aren’t always aware of the fact.

(That’s England. Scotland, by contrast, has a bit more going for it. Scotland has the SNP which to this non-Scot looks like a humane party, England’s main party is barely a factor, and they have their Greens.)

There you have it: England has two parties, a big one and a small one, one for capital and one for people. I hope I have clarified things a bit.

You’re welcome.

The disease isn’t just Islam, you know

It is at times like this after the murder of Japanese hostage Kenji Goto by ISIS, in the wake of the killing of his friend Haruna Yukawa and the Paris attacks, that even the most liberal of us are inclined to see Islam as a specially violent and brutal religion.

This would be a mistake. To single out Islam would be to divert us from a more basic and urgent truth: all religion is poisonous. No distinction should be drawn between Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, animism, Wicca, whatever.

We habitually make a distinction between mild, innocuous religion — the church-going lady in a hat — and the extremist, the masked RPG-wielding nutter or the Koran-burning pastor in Hicksville, USA.

This distinction is false.

The mild and personal religion and the violent oppressive version exist on the same continuum and they are bound together by faith.

Faith is the willing suspension of reason. The faithful cleave to their creed despite all the evidence that it is made up; a fiction, a historical relic; a code of living plucked out of the arses of self-declared seers in ignorant  times; a rationalisation of a world the ancients could not understand or interpret; a story to make things all right in the long, dark scary night before the enlightenment; and ultimately a tool of power, an otherworldly authority to earthly control.

It is this suspension of reason that makes religion the insidious thing that it is because without reason, the brain is crippled. We are unable to tell the difference between right and wrong, we don’t know up from down, our arse from our elbow. Faith allows you to see beheading, shooting, or bombing innocent people as a reasonable thing. Thought without reason leads you to believe that stoning people to death for being raped or murdering doctors because they perform abortions is necessary.

It is no coincidence that the justification ‘God told me to do it’ belongs not only to the criminally insane but to the religiously devout.

The fact that we are witnessing an upsurge of atrocities committed specifically in the name of Islam is neither here nor there. Central Asia and the Middle East are very unstable and volatile areas of the world and an ideal environment for the disease of religion to breed. Had these areas been dominated by a different creed we would be seeing the same religious violence — the articles of devotion would be different and the heads would be rolling in a different name, but the irrationality of faith would be the same.

Page’s underpants on Amazon and Kindle

My new novel King of the Undies World is now available in paperback on Amazon and as a Kindle ebook.

The tale is a comedy, a farce and the blurb on the back of the book goes like this:

“Victoria Gousset, rich, beautiful, daft, and heir to an improbably massive fortune, has been kidnapped.

Her father, mercurial underwear magnate Sir Hades Gousset, sees a way to make capital from the kidnap of his daughter and sets his own cunning plan in motion.

Persephone Gousset, volcanic wife of Hades, discovers her husband’s ruse to exploit his daughter’s predicament and hatches her own plot to teach her scheming husband a lesson.

The farcical collision of these events propels Victoria on a misadventure that takes her across continents and beyond, while catapulting the Goussets, their friends and enemies into a series of catastrophes that eventually threaten the destruction of the planet.

And all because of some pants.

King of the Undies World is the first volume of the Underpants of Fire trilogy in which Sir Hades, Victoria and Persephone continue their adventures in underwear.”

Regular readers of this space (Hi!) will be aware that King of the Undies World is my second novel, the first being Weed. The sequel to King of the Undies World, titled The Underpants Tree will be published later this year.

A question for Rupert Murdoch, who said that all Muslims should bear responsibility for the Paris outrages:

Happy N-ewe Year!

I wish I had thought of making this image at New Year’s when the time was right. Oh well, never mind.

But really, what is this about the year of the sheep? The year of bland conformity? The year when the corporations win their fight to turn us all into obedient brainless automata that will obey, believe, work, and go shopping?

We should be afraid. Very afraid.

I checked online to see whether this really was the year of the sheep — or the ram or the goat, but even the people who think up these things didn’t seem to know. The exact species of animal kept changing with every site I visited.

It seems to be the year of the non-specific bovid.

Or perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps there is some association with sheep, rams, goats that I’m missing.

Got it!  It’s the year of the kebab. That sounds a lot better. I’ll go with that. Chilli sauce with my 2015, please.

Belated Happy Year of the Doner to everybody!