Miaow Am Legend

Pussycats are brilliant. And I can prove it. You see, one day they will rule the world.

Last night I had the pleasure of watching a documentary on the extinction of mankind. After watching the latest episode of The Apprentice, I must say it came as something of a blessed relief.

The gravel-voiced narrator postulated that one day humans will disappear into the ether, like a spaceman's fart into the troposphere. Could be 3 billion years, could be a week next Thursday if the pigs keep sneezing.

Once we're gone, the planet will be empty. Quiet. Clean. An Eden without even an Adam and / or Eve to fuck it all up. The world will shake off mankind like a dose of pubic lice and in the immediate hangover period begin to heal itself.

Buildings will crumble. Holy shit, will they crumble. A good 78% of the documentary was dedicated to computer simulations of national landmarks flaking and disintegrating like a chalky dog turd on a hot pavement.

And not just the recognised landmarks that are destroyed in Hollywood action films on a yearly basis, oh no. Everything. Within 1000 years there would be little evidence that mankind ever infested the planet. From your house to my house to Noel Edmonds's garden gazebo. Every last remnant dissolved.

It's around this time that all other life on the planet would breathe a sigh of relief so deep that Mars will be able to smell what each one of them had for lunch.

Life in the oceans will return to its once plentiful levels, hunted species will once again flourish and household pets will...well, that's where it gets interesting. Their fates will be decided based on a readily quantifiable variable - i.e. how awesome they are.

Pets lacking in awesome...I'm thinking goldfish and budgies for a start....will be fucked. Give them a week at most. Fish in particular are so stupid that they can't even figure out how to breathe air. A fortnight of swimming around in their own shit without a kindly sentient being to sprinkle nutritional flakes into their immediate line of sight and they'll go belly-up.

Budgies are possibly resourceful enough to at least think about escaping, but they are notoriously disorganised and the whole affair would most likely fall apart in the planning stages.



Dogs...well, dogs are a mixed bag. I love them to bits but they are fucking cretins. To my mind, keeping a dog as a pet is like having a friend with severe learning difficulties. One minute they're good as gold, the next they're wiping their arse on the curtains, making indescribable noises and dribbling in your crotch. Leave them in a locked room and they'll be stumped. They'll pace up and down, slowly lose any semblance of sentience that they might have once had, lay down and die. Trust me. I've tried it.

On top of this, a high proportion of dogs are genetic freaks. Bred to buggery over the centuries, they've been engineered to have very silly short legs...or squished up noses which make them look oh-so-cute but are about as much use in hunting as a blunderbuss made out of Mechanically Reclaimed Meat.

In a darkly enjoyable case of Survival of the Least Stupid-Looking, most of the dogs you'd see wowing the Crufts crowds or shivering in one of Paris Hilton's handbags would be dead as shit.

The mongrels would last a bit longer, but it'd be an ugly life. Scavenging the dead, drinking from sewers, they would be little better than the Argos Saturday staff.



Pussycats on the other hand would treat these cataclysmic global changes with utter indifference. If the documentary is to be believed (and how could you not believe a documentary on the distant future that has been produced by the History Channel?) they would hang around for a few hours to see if we were coming back, before packing their bags and nonchalantly pissing off to pastures new.

Skyscrapers now overgrown with flora and infested with mice would become their playgrounds-cum-larders in the sky. Like Tom and Jerry infused with the spirit of Mad Max, it would be quite a sight to behold. Legions of cats romping, hunting, possibly even skipping through hectares of office space reclaimed by jungle. They wouldn't even think about us. Not for a second would they get all misty-eyed at memories of those weird bald monkeys who knew how to use tin openers.

And that's why they're brilliant...because they're our friends, our companions...yet deep in those eyes, deep deep down in those glassy animal eyes burns a healthy indifference to our destruction. Which means that they can only ever land on their feet.

The Pleasure of Annoyance

I am perplexed.

I am perplexed as to why I have spent the last 2 hours playing an old NES game - Mega Man 2. The whole time has been spent on the same couple of screens, being killed by the same handful of bastard enemies.

I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed a single moment of it. Yes, there’s the occasional surge of adrenaline as I think that this time….THIS….TIME…I CAN DO IT….ARGH, SHIT IT! Dead again.

The joypad creaks under my frustrated trembling sweaty attempts to break it in half.

Right…I’ll have another go at it. Start again.

Yep…killed that fella. No problem. Memorised his attack pattern. It’s ridiculous that enemies even have attack patterns that need to be memorised this early on in the game.

But never mind. Soldier on. Yep, three little flying blob things. Can’t get caught in their line of fire. Kill them before they get a chance to shoot that green electric shit. DONE. Brilliant. I can feel the adrenaline flowing into my fingers…heightening my responses. I’m a fucking stealth leopard. I’m on fire. Heart is racing. I can do this. I can do it.

Next screen…it’s the tough one. The dude made out of barrels. Have to shoot the top one first. Jump…shoot….my rectum puckers…mouth dries…yep, all good…..shoot again….he breaks apart…w….WHAT? YOU SHITTING COCK!!! I can be damaged by your lifeless disintegrating corpse?

WHAT?

Bloody Japanese bastard programmers from the 80s. Who made this shit? *checks box* CAPCOM. You fucking miserable arseholes. I hope you all died of something horrible. I hope you had pustules and apthous ulcers. I hope they all burst at once and your last few moments were spent agonisingly writhing around and choking on your own fetid discharge.

And the question pops into my head again….WHY am I doing this?

What in the name of all things holy am I doing to myself?

This behaviour goes against the most base survival instincts. I’m like a guinea pig repeatedly licking the terminals of a car battery for no discernible reason. Even though its fur is starting to crackle and its eyes are beginning to melt….it keeps going back for more.

Then comes the “continue” screen and I’m compelled to hit START and plunge balls-deep back into the whole futile, painful endeavour. It’s like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of the bell, even though his last fifty dinners have been plates of nothing but sand, broken test-tubes and cocktail umbrellas.

It makes no sense.

Similar principal seems to apply to television watching habits. Why do I feel compelled to watch The Apprentice? Do I enjoy it? No. Not a moment of it. It’s an ordeal. I only get through it by playing little games in my head – like deciding which candidate I hate the most, and who deserves the most horrific physical punishment…and even better – what that punishment might be.

The best I’ve come up with so far is force-feeding snow globes to the Estate Agent. Imagine it. Him having to chew through the glass, the stagnant water spilling down his bleeding gullet…and him shitting polystyrene snowflakes and tiny plastic reindeer for weeks after. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.


I suppose I’m just a sucker for self-punishment. Maybe we all are. Maybe we all secretly loath ourselves and deep-down think that we deserve it. Even our unconscious mind annoys us. We’ve all experienced getting a song stuck in our heads. Usually the most irritatingly shite song imaginable that we would never listen to out of choice. But it’s not out of choice. Our unconscious mind has coiled around it without our waking consent, like a snake around a snoozing fat man’s leg. And it then it starts to cut off our circulation.

The most recent ditty to turn my brain blue and numb was the theme-tune from early 60s Gerry Anderson puppet show “Fireball XL5”.

A deep-core drilling platform wouldn’t have been able to bore that one out of my skull. Why? No idea. Ask my unconscious. I’m too scared to go anywhere near it.

Maybe it’s the same reason why some people are into S&M. Different strokes for different folks. No whips and clamps for me, though. My little grey square of concentrated pain is jammed in the gob of my NES.

This time I’m going to do it. This time I CAN! I WILL! I…


AAARGH! FUCK!!!!

....That’s SO good.

Blog Off

Well, shit my arse and call me a cunt.

I've decided to write me a blog. Why? In the words of the immortal B. Piper "Because We (I) Want To." No greater reason than that.

Also, the interweb is a barren and faceless place. Heck you're more likely to see an extreme closeup of someone's uterus than you are of having a good face-to-face with them and finding out what makes them tick.

This is my little bit of the web. Welcome. It has a face. Not a particularly inspiring one, but a face nonetheless. Perhaps you'd like to give it a little kiss. Or a lick. Just around the nostrils. But first take your shoes off. And wash your hands. I don't know what or who you've been fiddling with.

So here I am, a reasonably unremarkable individual babbling into the void. Still listening? Fair enough.

I am writing this epistle from the bowels of the Royal Free Hospital. This is where I spend 8 hours a day. For those who may not know, the Royal Free Hospital is an ugly squat concrete bastard located in North London. It sucks in death and shits out birth. Saline fluid and piss run through its veins. It's a hospital.

The corridors are labyrinthine and dark. And some people have been down here for upwards of twenty years. Their eyesight has dimmed and I fear that will soon begin to bio-luminesce. Happily I have only been stuck here for a little under 3 years, so my genome structure remains unaltered.

You may think that a hospital would be a fascinating place to work. You may think that it would represent a microcosm of society at large, all differences cast aside, all imbued with a wartime spirit - united under the common enemy of disease. A place where altruism is a way of life. This may well be the case in most of the hospital. But I work in the admin department.

My suture is the stapler, my scalpel a pair of blunt-ended safety scissors. I spend my days not on the cutting edge of medicine but in the cluttered backwaters of bureaucracy, supping droplets of data from spreadsheets and chewing on the occasional e-mail. Stuck to my desk like a battery chicken in an iron lung.

But, hey....it's a living. Could be worse. I could be scraping dried skin from the corners of a tramp's mouth, collecting it into tobacco tins and selling it to Nazis. Or I could be in marketing.

I do have pleasures in life, though. I enjoy biscuits. Biscuits with creamy fillings. But not custard cream or bourbons. They can get to fuck. Boring.

So this isn't necessarily a place for me to shower an anonymous audience with spleen and spittle. I'm not going to bark futile bile like a hairy mental shouting at a bus queue. This is no place for that sort of shite. This is not Loose Women.

I shall merely endeavour to shower you all with golden observations on day-to-day shit that interests me. Telly. Films. Games. Animals. Politics. Hopefully there'll be some laughs, there'll be some tears. Maybe even, if there's time, some good hard sex.

JOIN me.