Lurking in the shadows

Frankly, I despair of the British public.

Have you seen what they’ve done now?

When the BBC unwisely invited them to name the Worst Briton of the Last 1,000 Years, who do you think they opted for?

Would you believe, Jack the bleedin’ Ripper?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Jack the Ripper was a cross between Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. He’d have attracted too much attention, looking like that.

But how on earth can any reasonable, intelligent adult think Jack the Ripper was anywhere near as vile as Andrew Pickering?

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What do you mean, ‘Who’s Andrew Pickering?’?

The Andrew Pickering!

The Andrew Pickering who sat next to me at primary school and was always flicking bogies and chopped-up caterpillars at me when Miss Robocop wasn’t looking; who stuck pins in me and pelted me with school tapioca pudding in the bike shed; who filled my satchel with paraffin and left me roped to a poisonous shrub after stealing my collection of Reginald Maudling non-moveable inaction figures…

The Andrew Pickering who gave me the nickname ‘Trough Of Sludge’ that I’ve never been able to shake off (the Princess Royal was using it only yesterday)…

The Andrew Pickering who went with me to Futon Vale Remedial Academy and taught the other kids to clash two dustbin lids together with my head between them; who forced me to shove giant hogweed up the headteacher’s pantaloons and then ran away; who sabotaged my science project by telling the CIA it was a secret Soviet germ warfare bunker…

Ring any bells yet?

The Andrew Pickering who used to walk up and down outside my hostel all night, just to unnerve me…

The Andrew Pickering who got me sacked from every job I’ve ever had by convincing them I was fat and idle and never came to work and was always sticking my tongue out at them behind their backs, and how would he have known any of that, and why on earth did they listen to him anyway?

The Andrew Pickering who keeps ringing me up and then putting the receiver down when I answer; who makes horrible rustling noises behind the skirting boards, night after night; who tells my neighbours to empty their wheelie bins through my letterbox; who gives me food poisoning and eczema and delirium tremens; who puts banana skins and abandoned skateboards on the pavement exactly where he knows I’m going to tread…

Do you know that every night of the week he follows me home, taking great care to remain out of sight at all times?

No, sorry to be blunt, but the British public are simply WRONG. This sort of thing is far more evil than just disembowelling the odd prostitute, which anyone might find himself doing, had he happened to mistake her for Robert Kilroy-Silk.

So come on, Brits. Get a grip, eh?

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LEGAL NOTE
I have been asked to make it clear that the foregoing remarks are not in any way connected with this Andrew Pickering.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

We live among gods

Lurching upright from my tomb, may I warmly congratulate not one but two inmates of the Toasty’s Futon sidebar, Caroline of Trivial Pursuit and Peter of Naked Blog, who’ve been shortlisted in the 2006 Bloggies, the annual awards for weblogs?

Caroline is one of five cyber-scribblers brawling for the title of Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog, while Peter, who was blogging away merrily when most of us were merely twinkles in the plumber’s eye, should be a shoo-in for the Lifetime Achievement Award.

There’s still (just) time to add your voice to the swelling consensus that Caroline and Peter should be made Perpetual Joint Presidents Of Everything. Get yer ass down to this page here, scroll down and vote like it wuz goin’ out of fashion, and afterwards you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror and know you’re a Good Person and who cares about the Rotherhithe murders anyway, it was a long time ago.

Orange juice and soggy biscuits are now on sale in the créche, and don’t forget to look at our Floral Bazooka.

Self last

Well, thank God that’s over for another year!

New readers may not know that in 1998 I was convicted of improperly consorting with a pistachio nut. A ridiculous charge that should never have come to court – I was only doing what the nut wanted, and don’t tell me I couldn’t possibly know about the desires of a nut, as this particular nut was communicating with me via special nut telepathy audible only to me, but they don’t understand that in the Crown Prosecution Service.

Any road up, I was spared jail, after a petition signed by all current inmates of British jails, pleading not to have to put up with me on top of everything else, was read to the court. Instead I got the so-called easy option: thirty weeks’ Community Service.

Easy, my pancreas. Do you realise that as a result of this ghastly business I haven’t had a proper Christmas or New Year since 1997?

You see, what I was sentenced to was thirty weeks to be served in annual three-week chunks commencing on December 25th.

The first seven days are spent in a secret lead-lined bunker beneath a gasometer in Hounslow. They give me a crate of orange juice, a sack of untoasted crumpets, a book called How To Spell, and a computer that can’t receive incoming mail.

And I then have to write all the post-Christmas journalism, thus releasing our wonderful sociopathic, space-filling, pig-ignorant hacks to spend quality time with the families who hate them.

All those belly-aching columns and ‘lighter vein’ opinion pieces about how it’s impossible to keep your festive goodwill going when your mother-in-law inadvertently spits her false teeth into the cranberry sauce while your maiden aunt’s flea-ridden mongrel shags your favourite whoopee cushion…

And isn’t it sad that the simple joys of Christmas are being howled down by an orgy of materialism and spend-spend-spend, and oh for those poor-but-happy Yuletides of yore when everyone munched on crunchy robins and all you really wanted from Santa was a period of remission in your frostbite…

And money’s tight after Xmas, isn’t it, so be first in the queue for the post-Christmas sales, except there’s nothing worth shoplifting as all the good stuff was sold in the pre-Christmas sales, and here’s how to turn turkey lungs and bowels into an Emergency Soup that lasts for ten days (because no one wants to drink it) and now’s the time to book your holiday, except the only place you can afford to go is next door’s car-port…

Haven’t you ever thought that all this stuff is utterly identical, year after year?

Now you know why.

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My second week of misery is spent hobbling around Salisbury Plain and Sherwood Forest on all fours in a black jumpsuit, trying to breathe another year’s life into those ‘mysterious big cat’ stories.

But it’s the third week that really does my head in.

Under a cloak of secrecy I’m hovercrafted into Dublin, kitted out in ancient rags and dragged down to the catacombs beneath the Basilica of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh of the Polypins.

As you probably know, in these catacombs the miraculously uncorrupt (but still pretty knackered-looking) body of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh is preserved on top of his tomb, and goggle-eyed pilgrims gape by candlelight at the withered, waxy, scarcely human features of the old twit – except between the 8th and the 15th of January every year when it isn’t Saint Shellailleaggghhhh at all, it’s me – the supposed ‘lookalike’.

What, you ask, is Saint Shellailleaggghhhh up to all this while? Kitted out in skin-tight lycra, with his new blond highlights gleaming in the sun, he’s riding the surf in some tropical hideaway, or hurling himself into a frenzy of body-popping in the nighthawks’ fleshpots of NYC. Nauseating, really, a man of his age. But, as he rightly croaks, it’s only once a year.

Once too often for me, mate. You’ve no idea what those rats can do to a body that still has some juice in it. And as for pilgrims, you can catch things off them.

Anything’s gotta be better than that.

Even writing Toasty’s Futon again…

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(REAL) DEATHS IN DECEMBER 2005

19 December: Dr Julio Iglesias Puga, who fathered a child at the age of 87 and suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 90, days after the announcement that his wife was pregnant by him again. 27 December: Captain Peter Moore, ‘military adviser’ to Salvador Dali (Dali thought that every banana republic had a military adviser and, being much more important than a banana republic, he should have one too).