Intelligent and capable Gordon Brown in disliking-vulgar-woman shock!

I imagine you're all up to speed on what's been going down today regarding Gordon Brown and the abruptly-famous Gillian Duffy. In case you're not, I'll summarise. In brief, GB was approached by the aforementioned pensioner in (Christ preserve us) Rochdale, and after deflecting her rather forthright views on immigration he fled to his car. Unfortunately, he failed to realise that there was a Sky News mic still attached to his lapel, and once in the back seat he let fly a couple of fairly juicy lines about "that bigoted woman".

What're you waiting for? That's it. That's the whole story.

GB has now spent the rest of his day frantically apologising for this tiny gaffe, whilst Duffy has shamelessly milked her fifteen minutes and, by refusing to accept his immediate press-conference apology, actually necessitated a home visit by GB - let us be clear, one of the G8 world leaders had to go and grovel to this silly old woman because she wouldn't let him off the hook for being rude.

More to the point, why on earth ought he to be apologising? I can count on one hand the number of people who I have met but never subsequently been catty about - it's simply to my advantage that the chaps at Sky News very rarely have me wired for sound. And why shouldn't GB mention to an aide, in private, that he found someone's company unpleasant and their views unsavoury? I wouldn't want to have a conversation with Gillian Duffy.

The villain of this piece is whichever unconscionable little shit at Sky or News Corp decided it was in everyone's best interests to release the soundbite - presumably big papa Rupe is so desperate to regain control of the election that he decided to arbitrarily twist the knife in GB's bruised and broken back. I'm also hugely irritated by the outpouring of emotion regarding Gillian - she's being touted as a salt-of-the-earth Northern grandmother archetype, the sort of slightly grubby but possessèd-of-a-heart-of-gold pensioner who holds the country together. Everyone's carefully ignoring her unpleasantly fruity views on immigrants, not to mention the dizzying ineptitude of her question "And all these Eastern Europeans, where are they flocking from?". Last I heard, they were from the West Indies. Sneaky fuckers.

Ooh, there's more! Twitter tells me that apparently Niall Paterson 'broke the story' (read: snitched to the old lady, like a dirty tell-tale) and is now scolding Emma Kennedy for having the temerity to call him a twat. Which he is. Mr Paterson, you're a twat.

Mr Brown, if you want to call someone a bigot, a yobbo or a snivelling pig-faced twazzock, nobody has more right. Sock it to 'em.

Ha!

Well done, SMBC.

Blag Hag

Hello, you lot.

Just a quick heads-up, since I should really be essaying. You may be up to speed with the excellent Jen McCreight aka Blag Hag, who has achieved some notoriety in recent days for suggesting that the ladies of the Western world test the fascinating seismological theories of Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi. In case you aren't up to speed, this inventive cleric claimed last week that women who dress immodestly are directly responsible for adultery, which raises the risk of earthquakes. In response, McCreight has launched a campaign encouraging women around the free world to leave the house on Monday in their most cleavage-enhancing shirts or borderline-obscene hotpants, so that we can definitively establish whether earthquake frequency or severity is affected. Read more about Boobquake (!) here.

While I'm blathering about Blag Hag, this is also well worth a look if you know any of the feckless gonks who claim that homosexualiy is wrong "because the animals don't do it". Do have a read.

Right, back to the essay! Also, if anyone is, by any chance, reading this on account of Emma Kennedy having favourited my blog yesterday, please leave a comment - I'd be interested to see whether it's had any effect on traffic.

Eat your greens x

Pubs, breasts and pipes.

But of a confused post this morning, I fear - even if it goes as planned it's going to end up as a rather muddled review of a) The Drapers Arms N1, b) standing up to cancer and c) pipe-smoking.* Don't worry, all will become relatively clear.

Right, pub review. I'd never been to the Drapers before last night, it not being in my tight circle of approved Notting Hill pubs where I'm allowed to do the crossword in the complimentary papers. I was directed there by a chance tweet from the superlatively talented Emma Kennedy (who hasn't appeared for the one and only time in this post, oh dear me no), who was promoting a pub quiz being held there. The Drapers is pretty much exactly what you expect from a certain sort of Islington pub - its interior is absolutely beautiful, with brass rails and bevelled glass (love a good bevel, me) much in evidence, and it sports a very well-stocked and -served bar to complement its tempting but buttock-clenchingly expensive menu, complete with the obligatory dish or two which turns out to be something inventively mental. My companions and I had never heard of Scotch Woodcock before, and the overwhelming mindfuck induced by ordering something which is assumed to be an inventive woodcock / scotch egg crossover and receiving fishy scrambled eggs is reason enough always to check what you're ordering. Still, everyone was very pleasant and it'd be churlish to buck at the prices - one does not, after all, head to an upscale Islington gastropub for £1 lager and wide-screen football. Actually, where does one head for that sort of action? Possibly Portsmouth.

But I digress. The reason for the Drapers' night of festivities was to raise money for a team of lady writers, actors and so on (spearheaded by EK, above, and featuring luminaries such as the irrepressible Caitlin Moran - do check them out here) who are rather bravely attempting the terrifying Playtex Moonwalk in May. I think I may have mentioned this (in brief, it's a walked marathon, at night, for breast cancer charities) in an earlier blog, but you're forgiven for not noticing it. Since only one in every 1.2 billion people worldwide are currently following me, I don't think this is the time to be springing pop quizzes. Anyway, the point of the evening was to edge the Booby Dazzlers a wee bit closer to their breast-cancer-mullering target of £20k, and since I'd consistently failed to have £10 to call my own for long enough to donate it I thought I'd get have a crack. Happily, the quiz was not only unashamedly highbrow and fun, it also raised £250 which the lovely folk at the Drapers have agreed to match. Cracking fun and lots of money raised, in essence.

Right, I've done the heart-warming story of virtuous folk toiling in face of adversity and amassing significant but ultimately drop-in-the-oceanesque amount of money, In an ideal world, this is whe the 'Donate NOW' number would scroll across the bottom of your screens, but even the most be-moneybagged of rich text editors is not, alas, quite that loaded. Do consider donating if you feel like a charitable ego boost and have it spare, though - Christ knows that cancer's going to foul all our lives up at one point or another, so it's definitely worth getting involved with the fiscal equivalent of ganging up with loads of other people and happy-slapping it. Whatever happened to happy-slapping, incidentally? Whe I was a kid, bullying crazes had a lot more longevity. So donate, and if you pass cancer in the street then kick it in the knees. Twat.

On reflection, I feel that reviewing pipe-smoking in any but the sternest tones would now be a tad hypocritical, so I will content myself with instructing you not to do it, however marvellous it may look. Because it does. It also tastes lovely, goes well with a monocle and requires that you visit marvellous specialist pipe tobacco shops, which are always a joy. On the other hand, it's more dangerous than cigarette smoking in almost every respect, so it's essentially a vintage style/numerous diseases swings and roundabouts situation. Make up your own mind.

That turned out to be even less structured than I was expecting. If you made it this far, well done. If you didn't, I shall have to communicate with you via telepathy. I shan't be pleasant.

John

*Please try not to dwell on the apparent contradiction between the latter items, because I don't plan to and if you don't either then hopefully my mouth won't catch on.

Henry does Charlie

This is the best thing I have ever, ever seen.

Multiculturalism? Pass the cruet.

I saw this on the BBC website yesterday and thought you'd like it. It's mindbending. In case you're too busy to read the whole article, it tells the compelling story of an Australian cookery book which inadvertently listed 'salt and freshly ground black people' as an ingredient in the recipe for, ironically, spelt tagliatelle. As is to be expected, almost the entire print run is being recalled, at a cost of around £12k (for which you could finance two schools in the Third World, natch).

Is there any need? It's not as if there's anything remotely offensive or loaded about the concept of grinding, for heavens' sake. On the scale of oppressive culinary punning, this rates somewhere below that giant in the BFG saying that people from Wellington taste like rubber boots and Swedes have a sweden sour flavour.

I, for one, would love to have a book with a comedic misprint in it. I can't believe that anyone was genuinely worried about some nameless copy editor harbouring secret desires to grind the blacks (why didn't Eugene Terre'blanche ever use that as a slogan?) or that any readers, even in Australia, might take the instructions at face value and start grating Aborigines. Well, maybe in Queensland, but the odds are against anyone sitting in a tin shack in the Atherton Tableland deciding that they need a break from kangaroo steaks and whipping the spelt pasta out.

Crackers.

Mark Watson's Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge (and me)

Hello, chaps and chapesse (based on current followers).

I've been a little lazy with this in recent days, since I've been alternately jetting around the country and trying to write the twenty thousand words of philosophy I need to get together by May if I'm to receive a degree. However, I'm just popping on to tell you about something that comedian, writer and all-round good egg Mark Watson is up to and which I think it's well worth getting involved with.

Earlier in the year, Mark did some quite grown-up things in a shortish space of time - turned thirty, acquired a baby, all that good stuff. One of the things he did was decide to try and keep a blog every day for a decade, which is a fairly lofty ambition. Some of his other plans for the decade were lumped into a pile which he decided to regard as a Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge or TYSIC, and he rather endearingly decided to throw the option of TYSICing one's life open to any- and everyone who follows him on Twitter or so on. The only requirement was that you should register what you're trying to do, and then get on with it.

Needless to say, I put in my two penn'orth in the form of a commitment to be making my living writing facile shit like this in a decade's time, having just been published by the London Student and feeling generally pretty positive about the whole zeitgeist-straddling thing I aspire to have going on. Since then, I have made approximately fuck-all progress with this ambition - my main attempt so far has been a hugely effort-intensive application to work for the Dave channel, which crashed and burnt in an unpleasantly undignified fashion.

BUT. I thought that if I wittered briefly on here about the TYSIC, I'd have more of an incentive to keep writing and actually give the whole thing some welly. So with that in mind, I'm basically putting my future career in your hands - please douse me with criticism and praise in quantities you find appropriate and at intervals which do not greatly impede your social lives, and if you think there's something I could be doing which I'm not then for heavens' sake tell me. Max, Becky, Jonny, Will and the one chap I don't actually know in real life (hi!), the ball's in your court. Which collectively means in Kensington, Notting Hill, Oxford, Islington and somewhere else, so that could take some co-ordination.

More blogs soon. Promise.

J x

Lynx vs. Specsavers

Christ alive, not another tedious Lynx advert... ooh!

Specsavers have done an absolutely cracking job with this, I think. As soon as it began playing (shortly ahead of Come Dine With Me, which always puts me in a critical mood) I started badmouthing the boring, predictable Lynx adverts with their bottom-feeder target demographic, and Specsavers kept up the pretence of being frightfully common deodorant vendors (right down to having a topless twat with twin spraycans held akimbo, which is apparently the latest Lynx gimmick) until the last three shots.

I can't imagine it'll get them a single new customer, but the tens of thousands of pounds that must have gone on location, aerial shots and two hundred girls with their vitals swinging in the breeze were entirely well-spent if all they achieved were some pissed off ad men at Lynx HQ. Some tiny, petty, stupid victories are worth any price.