Rats! An Audiobook

“What time do you call this then?”

“You didn't write, you didn't call we were so worried.”
“Well, well, well. He's here Harry, standing in the kitchen bold as brass.”

“I'm just so relieved you're back.”

Just some of things I imagine you saying as you read this, my first Blog entry in over three months. Look here's the thing, I enjoyed writing the Blog but there is a finite number of brilliant ideas and the fact is I'd done all of them. As a creative force I was spent and didn't want to sully the quality of the Tedious Clown Blog by filling it with substandard noises and shapes.

Yet here I am.

I've spent the week at my parents house in Solihull and while I was here I came across (nosed through their possessions) some of my childhood stories.

Turns out I don't need to come up with any amazing new ideas, I'd already thought of loads aged 5-12! The quality of these stories is high. From holidays with mummy and daddy to the adventures of a particularly precocious dog it's a tour de force, a high mark of the late 90's literary canon. Due to bad luck, circumstance and a corrupt agent these works were never published at the time and have been languishing in a filing cabinet draw marked “crap that can't be binned due to emotional attachment”.

These works have been liberated and I am going to do a reading of at least one to be released in audiobook form, completely free of charge. If anything I feel I should pay you to listen to them.

I am also very aware that reading out childhood stories is quite an unoriginal idea, done most notably by Richard Herring on the Collings and Herrin/AIOTM Podcasts. What separates mine is that Richard Herring didn't get steadily pissed on European Lager as he read his out.

I don't know if this experiment has worked at all. If I get any positive (or really negative) feedback I may do the second half so let me know what you think!

Link: https://soundcloud.com/tedious-clown

Train in Vain

I love taking the train. People sometimes ask why I don't learn to drive, as that way I wouldn't have to rely on public transport. But I like relying on public transport. When you arrive at the train station for a long journey you know you're going to experience the whole kaleidoscope of human emotion:
Frustration at a delayed train, joy at having a seat to yourself, anger, happiness, whimsy, jobsworths, vomit, screaming children, all day breakfast bar.

Plus there's always a real possibility that due to a crowded carriage from Clapham Junction to Reading a fit girl will have to sit next to you. That doesn't happen when you're driving a car unless you already know a fit girl. And if you're reading or writing this Blog then you probably don't know a fit girl.


On a train journey you can plan out your entire life, read a great piece of literature or simply get leathered on small bottles of wine while the beautiful British countryside and naff provincial towns whizz past at no physical exhaustion on your part. On a train journey you can witness arguments and flirtation. Business deals are made and relationships broken. It's like EastEnders but with a fucking buffet car.

On my last train journey I was sitting at a four seater table. I don't usually favour the four seater as it trebles your chance of human interaction but I had a laptop and wanted to take advantage of the space. Opposite me were a couple in their thirties. Judging from their body language and the way they looked at each they were unmarried but had been together for a long time. If their relationship wasn't at a crossroads now then a crossroads was certainly an instruction away on the Sat Nav.

Both seemed faintly nervous but he in particular seemed uneasy in his own skin. She would occasionally reach into her bag for her phone and stroke away at it's face in a smooth motion, where he would struggle for it in his back pocket, stare at it as though he was from the past, and then return it to his back pocket only for it to vibrate again a few minutes later.

When the inspector reached their seat the girl handed the tickets over and I could tell she always took care of this sort of thing. It just saved time if she handled all the practical stuff like train tickets, then there wouldn't be any confusion over who had them, would there? The inspector moved on and they smiled at each other. A smile that said “I am so fucking bored of you and your hair and your hobbies and your friends.”

The journey passed without event for about ten minutes until the inspector returned and asked to see their ticket again. This wasn't planned. In the flat lining heart monitor of their lives this was a blip. An actual blip. The woman look confused and the ticket inspector looked confused as recognition returned to him. The man had a look of hunger. A crease had appeared under his eye lids that obviously hadn't wrinkled for many years.

“This prick's thought of a joke,” I thought, switching off my film and removing my headphones, “the ticket inspector is going to realise his mistake and this bloke is going to have a joke ready.”

This was a big moment in the life of Simon and Katrina (as I named them). In years to come, together or apart, they would look back at this moment as a pivotal one. The moment their relationship was made or broken. As they sit together in their retirement villa in the south of France, sipping wine in the evening sunshine as their grandchildren frolic in the pool and their children fuss over them, they will look back to this train journey as the moment that carved S + K onto the tree of love forever.

 On their wedding day the vows they had written themselves would make reference to Simon's witticism on that fateful train journey that had rekindled their passion for each other's company. As he carried her over the threshold of their marital home he would allow himself a wry chuckle at the joke that had brought them back from the brink. On Simon's deathbed, as he prepared to check out for the last time after a long and happy life of wine and roses and more love than he thought his heart could take, Katrina would hold onto his frail hand with her own and ask him, one last time, to repeat that oh so simple, oh so run of the mill, but oh so special little observation. Just one last time. A final moment of levity in tribute to the love they had shared, and the life they had built together from such humble beginnings into this. This Arcadia of love, this great city of trust and happiness.

“Sorry, I've checked you already haven't I?” The inspector said, embarrassed.

“That's alright mate, the ticket collector always rings twice!”


There was an awkward silence as the words sank in.

“Oh no, it's the postman isn't it. The postman always rings twice. Shit?”


Another silence fell, the ticket inspector forced a weak smile and Katrina looked on with a bitter cocktail of pity and boredom. The pause stretched on for what felt like forever, until it was broken by a machine gun fire of laughter from me.

The tension was immediately broken, the ticket collector smiled and Katrina gave Simon a playful nudge and leaned against his shoulder. The train pulled into Birmingham New Street and I left the train, confident that Simon and Katrina would remain together, for the rest of their lives.







 So that's why I fucking like trains. Because of the greatest love story ever told. So you can take your Jeremy Clarkson column, your boring conversations about Formula One and your £20 per driving lesson and drive off.

The Dating Game

Hello. The last time I did a blog it was about running. This time I'm going to write about a date I went on recently. This is because I now work in marketing and it's become abundantly clear that Tedious Clown is in dire need of a re-brand. All Market Research suggests making up a load of shit about alien list shows and being from the 90s is right out. Writing lifestyle blogs about being physically fit and kissing girls is very much in.

“The New Black” is how one prominent marketer (Piers Wad o' Cash) phrased it, over and over again until his boss had to tell him to stop because it was starting to sound racist.

So say goodbye to satirical whimsy and welcome to the relaunch of Tedious Clown as a cool fashionable lifestyle magazine about real things like dating and keeping fit and recipes.

 

*

I arranged to go out with someone on a dating website for cool and sexy people because I'd finished the Deadwood box set and what else is there to do? 

It became apparent as I rocked up at the Bar & Grill where we'd agreed to meet however that she was dramatically out of my league. To continue the sports analogy it was like she was Spurs and I was a team of overweight asthmatic children with severe confidence issues and only a basic understanding of the rules of football.

 

This was a problem. In real football the FA simply would not sanction a match like that, even if it was just a pre season friendly.

The logistics of arranging such an event alone would be a nightmare. For example the team of fat, wheezing children would have to get permission slips signed by their parents to travel to North London. Alternatively the Tottenham Hotspur squad would have to be signed in one by one at reception by Mrs Jarman and I just can't see Emmanuel Adebayor being arsed with all that.

The Football Association would probably also question the validity of Burton Junior School's credentials as a team. Clubs will often be fined for fielding an illegible player so an entire first 11 and substitutes bench consisting of young children not old enough to pay full bus fare, let alone sign professional contracts would be problematic.

I think the validity of the contest would also be called into question. If Spurs decided to go easy on the team of children they would be susceptible to accusations of match fixing, so would have to really go for it, and even given the free flowing nature of Andre Villas Boas managerial style, the physical contest would be one sided at best.



Jermain Defoe not relishing the task at hand

Although quite popular and often on billboards advertising sportswear, I think public opinion may turn against Gareth Bale when footage came out of him brutally but fairly charging down young Ian Stevens from class 5b, who has confidence issues as it is, whose home life isn't ideal and who doesn't need a 23 year old Welshman shoulder barging him into the corner flag.

I dare say Sky Sports would have their say too, having already signed the contracts giving them exclusive rights to Tottenham Hotspur's pre season friendlies, they'd have no choice but to broadcast the farcical spectacle of high earning professionals battering the fuck out of schoolchildren in an event that would probably be described by one pundit as “less of a football match, more of a deleted scene from Saving Private Ryan.”

James Dale, holding midfielder. Inferior to highly paid professionals

There’s a chance that the Spurs players, overcome with guilt and a feeling of self consciousness, would decline to participate, therefore refusing to play a game and bringing the entire sport into disrepute, as if it wasn't already in danger of that due to the farcical exhibition match taking place.

The spectator facilities at Burton Junior School fall well short of Premier League standards and the 2,000 travelling away supporters would also have to be signed in one by one and that frankly just isn't fair on Mrs Jarman. The game couldn't be played at the Spurs ground as Burton Junior's goalie wouldn't even be able to reach the cross bar of a full sized goal.

Plus the refereeing standards of Ms Owen the games teacher are negligible and 5 year olds start crying when a fully grown professional referee books them for time wasting

Plus Timmy Francis is off games because of an infected verruca and without him the whole diamond formation in the midfield set up falls apart.

Plus Defoe is still nursing an ankle injury and probably doesn't want to exacerbate it by playing in a poorly organised, ill thought out match of inter generational soccer, on a school field that is well maintained by the standards of comprehensive schools but a sham by the standards of White Hart Lane and thinks the whole thing is an appalling joke and should never have been arranged as an analogy for the mismatch in appearance of two 20 somethings on a date organised on a single's website that doesn't even charge subscription.

Anyway the date went badly.

Recipes next week.

David Gilbert, 2007-2013.

Face kicked off by Aaron Lennon.*



 

*Since this match took place in my imagination I feel I should point out this real child is probably alive and well and there is no evidence that the model professional Aaron Lennon would ever kick a child's face off, even if his team were losing 2-1.

 
 

Running Towards Your Problems

I recently took up running after googling how many chins the average adult male is supposed to have and realising that, even including neck amputees, I was well over my quota. So I decided to take up running as it is free. All you need is some floor and there’s loads of that. Just look at America. Can't move for floor.

I decided I wasn't a serious enough athlete to justify buying all the official running paraphernalia like latex shoes, breathable leg sheaths, jock strap, running scarf and those special trainers with flashing lights on the side so everyone knows you are a serious runner. I just decided to go with a pair of swimming shorts with the netting cut out, some running trainers I'd found in a ditch on a boy and an XXL football t shirt that was in a sale at 75% off because the team in question had just been relegated and they couldn't give them away. Well they could give them away they just couldn't sell them at full price. Hence why they were in a sale, but I don't need to explain retail to you do I dear reader.

So I've taken to running around the place all sweaty and heart palpatitiony and it mostly goes okay. People move out of the way and cars sometimes don't speed up when I cross at pedestrian crossings.

But, like every time I try and do something to improve my health and fitness, I end up seeming like a sex offender.

It isn't anyone's fault.

It definitely isn't my fault.

What keeps happening is, as I get about a third of the way around my sixty four mile route (or about three tracks into my running play list, you do the maths) a quite pretty girl emerges from another street a few feet ahead of me. My heart sinks like a pounding, cholesterol coated stone as I realise she is running at almost exactly the same pace. I am no longer Corporal Joggy McSexington of the Fitness Regiment. No I am now a disgusting Benny Hill throw back in a too big football top.

Just spending a lovely summer evening chasing women about the town.

Just having a little chase, what's wrong with that eh?

They can't do you for that mate!

The can't touch you for chasing 'em eh! Lads? Eh!

What?! Come off it love it's my street too! If I want to follow this bird about calling her a frigid lesbian if she doesn't slow down then I will and there's nothing you or Emmeline Pankhurst are going to do about it!

But it's not like that! I'm just a nice boy having a lovely jog!

And sometimes the pretty girl looks round and catches my eye and I just feel terrible that, even inadvertently, I may have made another human being uncomfortable. Whenever this happens I am presented with a choice:

OPTION 1)
Stick to my guns and carry on at my normal pace on my normal route and risk, at best social awkwardness and at worst a lengthy prison sentence.

OPTION 2)
Slow down, and remain overweight forever.

OPTION 3)
Speed up and overtake, which comes with it's own set of problems. Most notably when the pretty girl turns round and sees I have apparently found the reserves of energy necessary to launch into my wooing/attack.

OPTION 4)
Do what I usually do when I find myself in an awkward situation with a pretty girl. Turn and run in the opposite direction.


It's dilemmas like this that have caused an obesity epidemic in this country. SORT IT OUT BLAIR.

National Rhino Association “Frankly Sick” of Comparisons

Ryan Peters is not what I am expecting. I arrange to meet the beleaguered president of the NRA in his Los Angeles home. As I walk into the lounge I notice he is not dressed in the generic hillbilly garb we have come to expect from Rhinoceros owners. The 38 year old is wearing a crisp, light grey suit and looks a bit like Tommy Carcetti from The Wire. He is however sitting in a throne built from empty beers cans and the skulls of his enemies and various stray cats and dogs from the neighbourhood. He is also drinking coffee from a mug engraved with his family's insignia- an eagle and a rattlesnake having full sex. He is sitting under a framed photograph of a naked Ayn Rand mud wrestling Margaret Thatcher in a pit made of gold as City Traders from Wall Street masturbate over the spectacle.

I assume it has been Photoshopped.

 Despite my efforts not to stare I find my eyes drawn to the huge Rhinoceros tethered to a stick outside the back window.

“Don't worry,” He says in an easy Southern accent before throwing his head back and laughing, “she won't hurt you...unless I tell her to!”

It's this kind of brilliant wit and charisma that has made Peters such a darling of the Tea Party, along with his belief in a small state and a massive fucking Rhinoceros.

“It's patronising really, when you hear the liberal left go on about Rhino control. So they don't think honest American people can be 'trusted'? It's insulting to say that we as citizens shouldn't have unregulated access to any dangerous wild animal we damn well please. Is it really any of the government's damned business if we choose to keep odd-toed ungulate in our homes and our cars to protect ourselves and our families?”

I ask Ryan if he really keeps a Rhinoceros in his car.

“Sure! A baby one,” he concedes “I mean the effect isn't quite the same as an adult, but if a gang banger tries to jack me when I'm driving around in, let's say Harlem, and he knows I've got a fucking Rhino in the trunk, well he's going to think twice.”

Peter's wife, a meek and moronic woman in her early thirties enters the room at this point to bring Ryan and I a beer. I ask Ryan how his wife feels about Rhino ownership.

“Oh she's on board 100%,” he assures me, “she comes from a humble, stupid family down in the South. Rural people understand more than anyone the importance of self defence in these times. And what better defence can there be against the underclass and the Washington Fat Cats than a massive fucking Rhino?”

I ask Ryan how his wife feels about the recent string of controversial promotional marketing techniques by the NRA, including a calender featuring a series of scantily clad young women draping themselves over confused looking Rhinos. As well as the now infamous discarded slogan, “A Rhino's horn is actually formed of matted hair. Who's scared of some matted hair? Only a homosexual gay. Don't be a gay: Support the NRA”

“Look that was unfortunate,” Peters says, for the first time during our conversation seeming a little flustered, “but listen, at the end of the day, a Rhino's horn is made of matted hair. Nothing in that campaign was untrue. The fact is we're a civil rights organisation. Like Martin Luther King or that other black guy on the bus.”

Ryan seems annoyed by the question, so I change tact, asking him how he feels about minors and Rhino ownership.

“I think it's great! You see all the kids these days, fans of the hip hop and gangster rap and they're all singing, if you can call it singing, about bling, Rhinos and bitches. I think it's kinda cool, kid's wearing very, very, very baggy pants so they can try and conceal their Rhino down there. I mean they inevitably fail but I appreciate the effort. These kids are just exercising their liberties.”

How does Peters feel about the latest in a string of tragic school goring’s that occurred after a pupil took his Uncle's Rhino into school?

“Now you listen to me you filthy Brit socialist, that kid was a psychopath, the fact remains he would have still caused that tragedy whether he had access to a Rhino or not. You can cause just as much bloodshed with a knife or a bit of stick that you find on the ground as you can with a wild rhinoceros that you've starved for several days, given a taste for human blood and then released into a busy playground.”

I sense that the interview is in danger of getting out of hand, I notice Ryan's eyes glancing with increasing regularity to the large Rhinoceros in his garden. I also spot he is rubbing his hands together restlessly and muttering something about Obamacare.

I feel as though our conversation has run it's course. I thank Ryan Peters for his time and at the door offer a handshake that he grudgingly accepts.

“Listen, I know I haven’t convinced you, but what you have to understand is that in the USA we have this little thing called the constitution. In the UK you have the queen and she's sort of like your collective mum and tells you what's cool. I get that. But here we have that beautiful little document and in it there's the second amendment. Which, as I understand it, includes the right to do whatever the fuck you like as long as Jesus is in your heart and there's a massive fucking rhino to back shit up.”

I thank Peters once more and go to my car, giving the chained up Rhino, the ultimate symbol of American freedom, a wide berth as I depart.

Season 2 Coming Soon...

(Thanks to Michael Siddall for the depiction of my face.)

( I mean Tedious Clown's face. Did I ever establish whether I was pretending this Blog wasn't me?)

(Either way cheers Sid. Season 2 of Tedious Clown coming soon. Probably "This Spring.")

(If this Spring ever bloody turns up eh!) 

(Season 2 will feature better quips than that.)

(Remember the Ladbible one, that was good wasn't it?) 

(Bye)

You know you're a 90's kid when...

Are you sick of all these Justin Bieber listening, Rastamouse watching douche bags?

"Those aren't my cultural reference points!" I hear you whine like a prick.

They missed out on the golden age of growing up didn't they? The 90's! That's where it's located! Oh snap, Take a Chill Pill, All That AND Chips, Don't Go There Girlfriend because You Are Da Bomb.

But how do you know if you're a 90's kid? You can't just take the year you were born and figure out if your childhood and the 90's coincided as “science” would have you believe. 

No, you have to LIKE and SHARE this list with all your 90's friends otherwise you WEREN'T a 90's kid! 

Come on, you may only be in your 20's now, but lets try and manufacture some artificial nostalgia for a decade that only ended 13 years ago and LIKE and SHARE this list or your nan will die and WON'T bring Gavin and Stacey back! She'll be dead, how would she? She simply wouldn't be able to.

25 Signs you're a 90's Kid!

1) You can't resist finishing this- “Iiin West Philadelphia born and raised!” It's actually a really serious illness. If you don't sing the next line your immune system begins to shut down, if treatment (singing the next line) is not forthcoming symptoms develop into something similar to African Trypanosomiasis or "Sleeping Sickness."

2) You had a massive crush on Robson or Jerome and would argue with your friends about which one was the dreamiest.

3) Before you watched a video you remember the short recording of King VHS wishing you well in his kingdom of film and hoping you enjoy the feature.

4) When I was your age I wasn't pushing a pram I was eating a MAOAM!

5) You remember the day it turned out Tamagotchis were actually a sentient organism.

6) You remember the day it turned out a Tamagotchi was actually a type of very small horse.

7) You remember the day it turned out Tamagotchis were self aware and capable of human emotions.

8) You remember the day Tamagotchis enslaved all of mankind and forced us to feed them nondescript cubes of food and clean up giant mountains of their shit and then play with them/train them depending on the model.

9) You remember the day we all remembered that if we stopped feeding and petting the Tamagotchis they just died within a few days.

10) You remember 8 million attending the “never again” Tamogotchi peace march. You remember the relief, the joy, the pain, the songs, the floral tributes and the burying of the dead.

11) You remember that time period after Mike Tyson was convicted of rape but before we all decided that that's fine now and cast him in a hilarious and charming buddy movie.

12) You remember the great trading card crash when the value of Pokeman cards plummeted and people were pushing around wheelbarrows full of football stickers just to buy a pint of milk.

13) You remember watching Jumanji and asking your dad to buy you the board game but he told you it didn't exist and all the grown ups around the table laughed ha fucking ha.

14) Slap Bracelets were all the rage. Slap Scarves, Hats and Shorts didn't catch on. Slap Hijabs were a public relations disaster

15) The only books you liked were Goosebumps. Now as an adult you have a deep seated hatred of reading and like Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and Frank Turner instead.

16) You remember Round The Twist, a searing and unsettling portrait of mental illness set in a lighthouse for some kooky reason

17) You remember when it was actually worth getting up early on a Saturday because you were a child and life seemed full of excitement and possibility, not a dirge of tedium and pain.

18) Because technology wasn't as good then no-one was even slightly materialistic and everyone was happy with all their toys. If you look at kids today they're always looting ipads in Tottenham, in OUR day we were happy with whatever we had!

19) If you didn't have a Nokia 32.10 you were NO-ONE and you could fuck off mate.

20) George Martin IS the sixth Backstreet Boy.

21) You remember a time before Blogs! The equivalent of a Blog was a Dairylea Lunchable! Podcasts were two cups on a string.

22) Your favourite Disney Princess was Princess Diana.

23) Freddos cost less than they do now! Everything cost less. It was the past.

24) You know the Spice Girls were a girl group. If you said "Spice Girls" to kids today they'd probably think of a Hareem of ethnic porn stars or some kind of set of cumin figurines probably!

25) You read through endless lists about the 90's and say "oh yeah I do remember that."