I DON'T KNOW ABOUT 'THE KIDS',BUT THE THE 'ORRIBLE 'OO! ARE MORE THAN ALRIGHT !

T'was the Sunday before christmas,or two! and all was still, especially on the motorway network, or what laughingly passes for it on the way from the 'grotty norf' to the' sunny sarf', and our beloved capital of London,what with all this travelling and possibly...No,without doubt the worst couple of cups of coffee i've ever tasted in my whole adventurous life. I used to be a connoussieur of fine n' awful coffee's n' teas in paper n' plastic cups from service stations, greasy spoons and station platforms from my days of travelling when i was on the caricaturing circuit(ahh those were the days, i can tell you!). But the stuff i was slurping at ,not for refreshment, but just to postpone going back out to the car again for a few more hours of the dark frosty journey, was without doubt on a level of disgustednous that cannot be imagined. In my time away and off 'the road',the whole driving experience, the roads, the driving ,the whole sheebang ,now including the coffee has turned to complete and utter shite!..I always used to stop for a jam dougnut at Keele services, i can only hope that the jam doughnuts haven't been swept down in this general shitedness that has swept the land. But it's a long time since i've travelled those highways n'byeways, so, maybe i'll never know, maybe it'll be a good thing living in jam doughnut ignorance. Keeping my jam doughnut dreams alive...

You may well be wondering as to why we went on this voyage of discovery and bad coffee.....And don't get me staeted on the Watford Gap Kentucky fried chicken!......Somebodies lost Colonel Saunders secret recipe, believe me!....But the reason we put ourselves through all this was because we were on a pilgramage. THE WHO! ..were back in town! My two favourite pensioners in the whole world were back home. Namely, a certain Mr Roger Daltrey and a Mr Peter Townshend, of the parish. I remember years ago working at what was laughingly Tony Blair's ,(whatever happened to him?) crowning achievment ,tthat bloody tent that made us the laughing stock of the world, The Millenium dome. Famous because JAMES BOND(Pierce Brosnan,really!) dropped out of a balloon onto it in the 'World is not enough.' And of course the bridge that was fine as long as people didn't walk on it together in step,they had to stop marching as pedestrians in the city do all the time.They had to break step or the bridge'd start swinging. Doctor Who should think on that next time the Cybermen are chasing him through the big city. But what was the dome is now something called the indigO2 arena, or something. Do you remember the days when places were given names and not named after advertising logo's?...Proper names like ,Empire,Lycium,Palace ,etc,etc....Liverpool , for instance has the Echo Arena, i wonder where they got that name from!

But the IndigO2 is to be fair quite impressive and on the night i didn't realise until the end that next door to us a little band called COLDPLAY had been banging out a few tunes to a few fans. Theres not much chance of coldplay being heard over theWHO, but i'd like to think that the Cold play crowd were banging on the walls trying to get their noisey neighbours in THE WHO to hold it down a bit. The 'ORRIBLE 'OO' were wonderful, Townshend was wild and even at his advanced state of immortality full of adrenaline,power,aggression and just immpossible not to watch. Daltrey was still able to keep up and the screams ,etc, were all there and his power is still there. They enjoyed themselves and the banter from the stage was genuinley funny. The only problem was, we were up on a balconey quite a way back and some fuckin' prick, apparently from Leeds as he started singing about it, as if he was at the match.This, in between shouting witty Yorkshire reposts to a distant Townshend on the stage. I lost it and went for him, the 'Leatherbarrow finger' was pointing at him as i made my feelings known. I mean to say we'd travelled all bloody day ,spent a packet on tickets, suffered the motorway coffee n' Kentucky's just to listen to this knob'ead yelling down my 'lug'oles'?...No, i think not!

Afterwards my adrenaline was up and i was hyper n' tinglig all over looking for a quite corner where i could go and practise my Pete Townshend air guitar moves. The following day coming down from the high of the previous night into the morass of mundanities of an everyday Monday, i did a 'Pete' leap and windmill to 5.15, off QUADRAPHENIA (a little technical info, for the fans!), and pulled my bloody shoulder, the damn things still not right. And the pain wasn't helped by haven't to freeze my knackers off at a carol concert in the little 'un's school playground that night. Ah, the rock n' roll lifestyle, eh ?

A MERRY THINGEY N' A HAPPY NEW WOTSIT,YOU GET OVER THE BLOODY FLU N' YOU'VE GOT TO SUFFER BLOODY CHRISTMAS!!!

Yup! Here we go again, now we've gotten over having the missus blown up and the deccies're up and the tree's thistles are all over the bloody floor and its not even bloody christmas yet and the bloody trees fallin' apart. I haven't seen the Lovely Lynne in days as shes behind a heap of presents wrapping, wrapping ,endlessly wrapping...I can't see her, but i can hear her through the rustling of forest loads of wrapping paper, the snotty sneezing and full flemmed coughing and spluttering of my beloved and her 'real snorter 'of a cold. The little 'un Elara, thankfully is at my ma 'in law's ,she's got the full dose of a real dose of flu. So ,hopefully Father Christmas'll bring heaps of antibiotics, oh and some presents......(That bloody WII, that everyone is going on about....It looks like people pretending to box,play tennis or ski on a set of bathroom scales when i see the ads on the telly.)

We had a slight embarressment today. Being the wonderful neighbour i am ,i delivered a card to the nice lady next door.(Kath, if your reading this, yer lovely!)...The dog was sniffing around behind her leg as she was speaking to me, then to my horror and then gut busting laughter the bloody stupid creature, cocked his leg and pee'd down the back of her jeans. I thought i'd better make my excuses and so in the spirit of good neighbouriliness(?) i 'legged it.' I told the Lovely Lynne over the phone, so the outcome a box of After Eights originally meant for a cousin was given to Kath next door as a peace offering.

Anyhow you lot have a 'good un and if you survive the festive excess's i'll be back to bore the arse off you in the new year. I've decided that i'll be back to being a productive cartoonist/blogger next year, i can resist Sky +, I can ,i tell you!......That was another 'balls up', with the bloody Sky broadband thats why we've been off line and my wonderous ramblings have been denied you for so long. Blame them shitheads at Sky broadband ,we had some real fights with the ,laughingly called customer support people......Anyhow i'm off. A heap of reindeer shit just landed in the back garden, its nearly time for all good boys n' girls to go to bed, the rest of you ,just hit the bottle.......(hic...Buuuuurrrrpppp!!!)

AMAZINGLY,WHEN I CONNECTED THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS TO THE MAINS THEY LIT UP...SO DID THE LOVELY LYNNE!

It's that time of the year when i sit here scratching myself a lot more than normal!....Yes ,as that bloody ASDA advert Bing Crosby song tells us every thirty seconds.."It's beginning to feel a bit like christmas(groan)". As for my increased levels of itching. This is due to my forced entry into the attic to rummage round for the bloody christmas decorations. When i get covered in the loft insulation, which keeps me warm for a few days as i don't sit still long enough to cool down ,i'm a constant blur of scratching and scraping at fibres of loft insulation. But i hauled the boxloads of baubles, decorations,mangers and,of course miles of lights. Now ,i faced the lights with more than a little trepidation. When i neatly wrapped them up last year they were working perfectly well. But, as you all will know, that means nothing. cos' as you plug them in again, the bastard things wont work. It is an unwritten law of the universe....Christmas lights will not work when you first plug them in! I wandered scratching n' scraping; Putting off the inevitable, just for a few more minutes to put the kettle on and have a cuppa. (Like the song 'Right!' said Fred.... An we woz gettin' nowhere. An' so we 'ad a cuppa tea...") All tasks can be subdivided into mugs of tea, it's what made Britain great. But, a monumentous discovery was made whilst i was about my kettley duties. Instead of leaving the travesty of the great christmas lighting (attempted)turn on to me, the Lovely Lynne went about it herself. Then it was conclusively shown miracles do happen...THE BLOODY LIGHTS LIT UP!....The mains alternating current went through the lights and they lit up. Unfortunatly the same mains alternating current went through the Lovely Lynne and she lit up, as well. I knew nothing about this until i saw her still smoking shoes on the floor beneath the charred hole in the living room ceiling, and she reentered the room with a strange 1970's disco style frizzy haircut with large sparkling if slightly crossed eyes. I leapt into action and shoved her out of the way ,i had to make sure the christmas lights were still working. The highly charged Lovely Lynne, or 'Sparky'as i affectionatly call her is fine, with no after effects from her 'shock' except she doesn't need the telly remote control to change channel, just clicks her fingers, same to set the car alarm. She's always only had to click her fingers to fire up my systems and get the Leatherbarrow sparks flying, but the battery's still flat, maybe next year when she lights the lights again, or maybe when i stop scratching...Bloody loft insulation.