Head Rambles

Grandad August 17th, 2009

I have to go back to Skobieville [our local town] on Saturday.

I had to get new lenses fitted to the old spectacles.  It was a second attempt as the first lot of lenses were guntered and fair play to the girl in the shop – she refused to fit them, and sent them back to the lens makers.  Either that, or she fancied me [no surprise there] as she asked for my phone number the first time I was there and has been phoning me at intervals on the pretext of giving progress reports.

Skobieville is a town that has become dedicated to Skobies.  You won’t find much there if you want to do a normal days shopping.  I have noticed that over the years, the decent shops have all closed and now all you will find are pubs, betting shops and takeaways.  There are about fifteen Chinese Takeaways per head of the population, and betting shops alternate with pubs all the way down the main street.

On Saturday, I noticed a new phenomenon – the tattoo parlour.

Our wonderful government are constantly harping on about the Mary Harney Pig Flu Pandemic but I think they have missed the real threat.  There is a pandemic of tattoo parlours in Skobieville.  I don’t know where they all came from but they are everywhere.  Just out of interest, I did a Google for tattoo parlours in Skobieville and came up with over 100,000 results, which shows it’s not just in my mind.

I could never understand tattoos.  I can understand how someone might dye their hair or even shave it off to appear fashionable but hair dye grows out, and shaved heads just grow so the damage is temporary.  Tattoos on the other hand are for life.  I mean to say, wouldn’t I look a right Wally now if I had some tattoo etched across my back extolling the virtues of some long forgotten 60s rock group? 

I have to be careful now as my daughter went and got herself tattooed.  I suppose in years to come when she is hitting her sixties she can always get them removed?

This is the thing about tattoos though – they are permanent.  It may only take a good drunken night and short while in a parlour to get one, but to remove it requires laser surgery.  That is not only very expensive, but [I hope] a lot more painful than the original tattoo.  Even then you are likely to be scarred for life.  And if I had had “Big John” tattooed on my todger and then wanted it removed, I don’t think I’d want a laser gun being aimed Down There, if you get my drift?

Of course, Skobies get tattooed for no apparent reason at all, and that probably explains the pandemic.  A tattoo is as mandatory to a Skobie as a mobile phone a can of lager and five illegitimate kids, to go with the ultra tight skirt and the plunging neckline. Other people however get tattoos because they are fashionable, because their friends have them of [God help us] because some pea brained “celebrity” has them.  However, fashions change,  friends change and with a bit of luck “celebrities” end up on the compost heap or a drug clinic, so what happens to the tattoo then?

Someone help me out here.  Someone please explain why people permanently mutilate themselves?

Is it because they want to remember how to spell?

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Grandad August 5th, 2009

I went into town yesterday.

I hate going into town because of the lack of parking and the stench of Skobies, and I was dreading going in as I had a lot to do and this entailed trying to park in different parts of town.

Something very strange happened.

At my first port of call, there was a parking space directly outside.  I put this down to an anomaly in the Space Time Continuum and went about my business.

Having finished there, I reluctantly left my neat parking space, and drove to the other end of town for my next port of call.  I really began to question the reality of the situation when I found a grand space there, exactly where I wanted it.

I had a few places to visit, so set off.  The first port of call was an office supplies shop to get some ink for my printer.  For the last couple of weeks, I have been forced to print all my documents in red or blue or some strange combination, as my black ink cartridge was empty.  For some reason, people give you strange looks if you present them with an official document that is printed in pink.  I have this strange knack of buying printers that are the only ones whose cartridges are impossible to buy.  The usual response is that they have every known cartridge known to man in stock except for the one I’m looking for.  When I told the bloke in the shop what model printer I had, there was the usual sharp intake of breath that I know so well.

“I’m sorry, but you’re out of luck on that one.  We don’t have colour cartridges for that model, and only one black ink cartridge left.”

Once again, my luck was holding out so I bought it.

The next thing I had to do was get some things for the car for driving in France.  I wandered into the motor factors and got my beam benders and a couple of other things.  While I was there, I decided to try my luck which seemed to be holding out remarkably well.  For a couple of weeks now, I have been looking for a fine, single core insulated wire, to complete my electric fence to stop Sandy wandering.  I need about fifty meters of it.  I had called into a couple of places in the past and they always tried to flog me three core mains cable or telephone extension cable or even television co-axial cable.  Do they think I’m daft?

“I know this is a long shot” I said to the doddery bloke behind the counter, “but do you sell wire?  I need fine single core insulated wire and a lot of it.”

“I don’t think we have anything like that, but I’ll have a look.”

He wandered over to a stand and started muttering to himself.  Eventually he announced that they didn’t, but while he had been doing his mutterings, I had been poking around in a bin and what did I find?  I found a reel of fine, single core insulated wire that is apparently used for earthing car speakers or something.  It was on a reel, and stamped on the side of the reel were those three glorious letters – 50m!

I had a coffee and a smoke then to celebrate my successes, and mused upon my day.  I contemplated buying a lottery ticket, but decided that I didn’t need that much money.  Then to my amazement I realised that I had only seen one Skobie the entire trip.  She had come into the motor factors to borrow a funnel as her car had run out of petrol and she needed to fill it from a jerry can.

She just stank of petrol.

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Grandad July 14th, 2009

There are many things I abhor and detest in this world.

Crowds.

Shops.

Any place that is all concrete and glass, and not a blade of grass to be seen.

Combine the above three into one, and you get a shopping centre.

Again, there are shopping centres and there are shopping centres.  Some are almost tolerable.  Some are just mindless edifices dedicated to consumerism.

The king and queen of the latter has to be the Dundrum Shopping Centre, or as they prefer to call it, Dundrum Town Centre.

When I was a lot younger, I used to work in Dundrum.  It was a pleasant enough little village with a couple of pubs and a television factory [where I worked].

They demolished that factory and a couple of hundred acres of surrounding land and built what I can only describe as a cathedral devoted to the god of hedonism.  It is not a Town centre, as the centre of Dundrum is further down the road.  It isn’t even a town.  But they have to glorify it to con the ignorant masses.

I was there once.  I had to call in to collect something and the experience was a nightmare.  It is vast.  It is anonymous.  It is packed to the gills with the kind of shop that the world could well do without.  There are 166 shops in the one building.  One hundred and sixty fucking six shops.  And they are all the worst kind of shop.  Most are clothing shops selling fancy brand named crap to people who are as idiotic as the prices.

I have to go there today.  I am dreading it, but I have no choice.  To me, visiting that centre is only one step away from being dumped in New York.  It is hell on earth.

I thought that while I was there, I might as well get a couple of yokes that I need for the car.

You would think that out of one hundred and sixty fucking six shops, one of them would be a motor factors.  But no.  There are forty one shops selling ladies fashions, but not one miserable shop where you could buy a headlight bulb.  Fuck that.

Frankly, I can only think of one use for that place.

I’m going to use it to test fire one of my new batch of nuclear missiles as soon as they arrive.

I hope it’s full of brain-dead shoppers buying their NEXT and their Gap and their Tommy Hilfiger.

The world will be a better place.

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Grandad April 7th, 2009

I went for a few pints on Saturday.

Normally I wouldn’t mention such a mundane thing, but this was different.

The difference was that I wasn’t drinking down in the pub.  I was in a different place, that I wouldn’t class as a pub at all.  It was a hell hole of a drinking emporium that almost had me screaming to sign The Pledge just to get out of it.

The pub in the village is a nice quiet spot.  It is a place of quiet chat and conviviality where the locals go for a few pints, a smoke and maybe a game of cards.  The only sounds to be heard there are the murmur of conversation, the clink of the glasses and occasionally the soft thump of Spanner passing out off his stool.  It is an oasis of calm in a hectic life where we set the world to rights and have a laugh.

The place I was in on Saturday was different.

It was one of those modern places, and the first thing that struck me when I walked in was the noise.  There was fucking music blaring out of speakers that seemed to be everywhere.  Where there wasn’t a loudspeaker, there was a television.  This place was like the television section of Power City as there were fucking screens everywhere, and they were all showing football.  Of course everyone was shouting at each other over the background noise and the overall experience was one of sensory overload.

I sat down in the quietest corner I could find, under one of the television screens.  For some reason, all the televisions were on without sound, so it was a little quieter there.

I hadn’t been there long when this bloke came in with his girlfriend and sat down near me.  She was pleasant enough on the eye, so that was something for me to ogle.  All he was interested in though was the football on the screen.  He started shouting at the muted figures and got really worked up over the match.  At one stage, someone obviously nearly scored a goal and Wanker nearly had a heart attack.  He roared at the screen and waved his fists in the air while his poor girlfriend tried to concentrate on the crossword she was doing.  At this stage, I hoped someone would score a goal, as it would be interesting to watch someone having a coronary.

Unfortunately, the blokes I was waiting on arrived so I had to leave Wanker and his girlfriend to it.  We went out the back to the beer garden, where it was cold, but at least it was quiet and there was no nauseating stench of stale perfume and farts.

A while later, as we left, I had a look to see if Wanker was still there but he wasn’t. 

Apparently someone had scored a goal.

The ambulance was just leaving as we stepped outside into the night air.

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Grandad March 2nd, 2009

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t posted earlier today.

The fact is, I was Out.  [Why do people start sentences with ‘The fact is’?  I hate that.]

I had to go to one of those great warehouses they call DIY stores.  I had a load of stuff to buy, such as paint, wire netting, floorboards and a cattle prod.

I wandered around for half an hour.  The musak was bloody awful so I tended to head for the quiet corner, which wasn’t very helpful as the only thing they had there was toilet seats.

Not wanting a toilet seat, just at the moment, I had to brave the musak and head out amongst the endless shelves of paint tins, claw hammers and things to hang on your wall.  I found the paint easily enough as they had great stacks of the fucking stuff at the end of each aisle.  Paint brushes were easy to find as they were strategically placed behind the lighting section.  You couldn’t miss the floorboards as the pile was so big it looked like it was waiting to be loaded on a ship.

I couldn’t find the wire netting though.

I searched everywhere.  I found wattle fencing and bamboo fencing.  I found razor wire and I found three-core wire, but no wire netting.

I found a bloke who looked like he worked in the place.

‘Excuse me!’ says I.  ‘Can you point me in the direction of the wire netting?’

He pondered this for a moment.

‘I know it’s around somewhere’ he said while looking at the ceiling for divine inspiration.

He wandered off, and I followed him.

He peered around a couple of corners and walked down a few aisles and eventually, he accidentally tripped over a roll of wire netting that someone had left lying out on the floor.  He picked himself up, beamed at me with delight and then vanished as only a sales assistant can.

I now knew where everything was, and I did my calculations as to how much of what I wanted that I wanted.  I then went up to the main information desk to find out where to get a bloke to help me carry the floorboards out as they were fucking heavy.  She paged Paddy, and Paddy duly turned up.  It was my friend of the wire netting fame.

He beamed at me again, and I explained to him that I needed someone to carry half a ton of floorboards.  I told him I would do it, but that I had a bad back.  He immediately claimed that he had a bad back too, so we looked each other up and down, and decided we were well matched liars. He grabbed one of those low loader things they have and headed off to the furniture section.  I called him back and told him the floor boards were in the other direction.  He looked a bit confused but followed me anyway.

We reached the flooring section, to his surprise and delight and loaded the trolley.  I also loaded all the rest of my stuff.

‘Hold on’ says I, ‘I nearly forgot the wire netting.’

‘I don’t think we do wire netting’ he said apologetically.

And I thought I was bad.

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