I REALLY DO HATE YOUR SONGS DAD
Ad lib is easier with your eyes shut. Try it. Really. Now. Go on. Leave the room if necessary and practice, but open them before you walk back in as that architrave looks nasty.
Now, the method. Let all hell break loose within your vocal range and make a song up on the spot and sing it at the top of your voice, however painful your voice may be. Blackouts help concentration by augmenting your lazier senses. It also helps to be free of visual distraction such as gawping faces.
Sure, that first verse is on a par with gargling firelighters, but it will come. It will. And once you’re there, in the zone of rhyme and tone, the lyrics will dance your tongue the way of the Dervish.
Of course, you can’t legislate for the audience and their reaction. You might provoke a standup career on youtube, or you might just elicit the kind of response I got from my daughter tonight:
I really do hate your songs Dad
SHEDS OF PARLIAMENT (# 74,907)
George, here’s an idea to reduce the deficit.
Sub-let the office to someone who can afford it (banker/footballer – multiple choice).
Then move your dept into a shed on the lawn opposite (after you’ve evicted Brian Haw and co).
This gesture of austerity will rub off on your colleagues and before you can say ‘recovery’ we’ll be back in the black and you’ll be surrounded by your sisters sheds with your brothers in arms – leading The Big Society from the front.
Brilliant George, brilliant.
Take a bonus.
THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
Heisenberg deducted: the more we know of one’s position, the less we know of our velocity.
I wonder what he’d make of this moment as I sit still on a train moving at 132mph.
It brings to mind the conundrum set by your maths teacher with his stale breath when he used to say ‘Colin has 3 oranges which he juggles whilst walking…’ only to be interrupted by the lad at the back who yelled out ‘and then he got hit by a truck, sir.’
I’ll leave you with a principle I’m making up as I’m going along.
The Inertia Principle: The longer you spend deliberating over doing a particular something, the more the task is likely to seem pointless in the first place.
Write your own principle here:
MOHAMMED SMITH & JONES
If you need an alias in these troubled times to evade someone or something, there is a new name on the block that populates more of the block than any other name in Britain.
Mohammed.
More British boys answer to this name than John, or David, or Stephen, or Archie, or Oi.
Cassius would be proud.
PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING RUGS
News just in: Aladdin fails in-flight dope test, and claims the confiscated bong is merely a lamp.
9 KILLER REASONS TO LISTEN TO YOUR BODY
- It knows more than any oncologist, gynaecologist or any other qualified gist.
- It has more inbuilt miracle cures than Pfizer.
- With the right attitude, it can heal others faster than they can themselves.
- When it is tired, it is saying it wants to nothing more to do with what you are doing.
- Contrary to medical opinion, most parts of it keep on growing right up until the day we die.
- By the time we die, we’ll be able to replace every part of our body.
- It knows exactly how long it takes to live a full life so it’s the only clock that counts.
- It can prolong your life by reproducing more of you, although this does not necessarily mean that the more children you create, the longer you live as one of them might try to knock you off – you know how kids can be.
- If it’s making pungent noises, you’re in rude health.
WOY MILLIBAND & ED HODGSON
As a double red, I’ve spotted a pattern.
The instability of Liverpool Football Club precedes The Labour Party by little more than a week.
For David Milliband, read Martin O Neill.
For 5 European Cups, read 10 years of declining power.
For Hicks & Gillet, read Iraq and Afghanistan.
I could draw a thousand parallels but like you, I’m coming to terms with starting again.
GROW UP
Of all the 12,842 words that erupted from the new labour leader’s mouth today, the two that stuck were grow up.
And in all of its history, politics has never known such an infantile phase. The leaders have never been younger. Their collective age of 127 would have bought us one and a half Gladstones.
Then again, we could have still have had change from six William Pitt the Youngers.
But it isn’t all about maths.
Actually, I’m nearly completely wrong there. It is pretty much all about maths. Expenses, economy, deficit, cuts, afghan death tolls and deadlines, to name but a few.
Numeracy, that simplest of skills we grasp at primary school is forgotten as soon the decimal point swans into town.
I have an idea.
As ever, it floats around as superficially as any policy from the opposition, but an idea it is.
Take maths away. Just for a short while, as they did with television in eastern Europe as a social experiment some years ago (in case you’re wondering, the dad started off uber-keen then sank into manic psychosis with the kids fearing for their lives and the mother hiding in the larder, until, just before patricide struck, they gave them their TV back and all was love again).
Back to the point, the decimal point.
Without the impossible sums to tot up, climate change would be immeasurable and therefore steady itself without our docile intervention. Inflation would retire young enough to quietly advise Robert Mugabe to join it. Education would blossom without targets and capitalism would spend the rest of its days doing the community service it so badly craves.
And we’d all settle down to concentrate on the only one that matters – health.
We live, we laugh, we die.
Now, doesn’t that feel better Ed?
ON NIGHTS
Dear human race, anyone fancy going nocturnal? Looks way more fun to me. It might take a few weeks to adapt our vision, but the crazies we’ll meet will more than make up for it. If you’d like to second this motion, raise your retinas and repeat after me: LET US FIGHT, FOR THE RIGHT, TO THE NIGHT.
STARVING OF THE 5000
When a total you never notice suddenly reaches a round number, you take notice. Akismet has intercepted 5000 slices of shit from curdling the digestive tract of thisness. I thank them for that. They didn’t have to do it but they did. When my home-grown beets are ready, I’ll let you know – you could do with something nutritious to wash down all that spam.