ROGER DALTREY: HE CAN STILL SING A MEAN PIN BALL !

My run-down Guinness soaked body is only just recovering from a few days down in the capital. As regular readers, there must be one or three out there...It's nothing to be ashamed of.....Well maybe a little ,just keep it to yourself and carry on reading your laptop under the blankets......Well as i was going to say , i was down in London and you'll not be too stunned shocked and amazed if i say it was to go and watch ROGER DALTREY perform TOMMY at the ROYAL ALBERT HALL. There! i bet your shocked , stunned and amazed.

We hit the big city and hit a few boozers quite soon afterwards. Later in the afternoon we met up with two caricaturists of my ,but hopefully not your aqaintance, a certain SIMON ELLINAS and a certain PAUL BAKER who forced us to drink even more beer .We gave Simon a spare ticket for the show ,i tthink it was on the roof of the R.A.H. We agreed to meet later ,shockingly ,stunningly and amazingly ...In a pub!. Just around the corner from the hallowed hall. The problem was we couldnt find the pub, so while Simon tried to find a decent 'spec' we retired to the bar. Whilst i gagged on the tin of Guinness ,because of the price ,my friend ,also called Simon, incidentally. Obviously a common ,nasty name , not like TIM. Well Simon (2) gagged on some Taiwanese lager ,for a number of reasons ,two being :It tasted of donkey piss with bubbles and it cost a bomb. But these arent big enough reasons to put a galavanting pair of northern lads off their 'pop', so we carried on guzzling away 'till a certain Mr ROGER DALTREY hit the stage. It has to be said him n' his band did a blistering performance ,his voice sounded years younger and was more than up to booming over the band ,who were a rocking bunch of chaps. After, they did a pile of real WHO oldies ,even LIVE AT LEEDS stuff, and pulled it off superbly. The biggest cheers of the night tho' were for a certain Mr PETE TOWNSHEND, who couldnt resist it and came on for two tracks. Both Simons agreed it was a great night.

The following morning Simon (2) awoke ,mentioned in his Geordie accent "worra grayte show tha' was!", let a loud fart out and rolled over to go back to sleep. Simon left London that day and i met up with a couple of caricature deadbeats and wasters in the form of GUY CARTER and later on PAUL BAKER They took an innocent northern lad to evil nasty pubs and dens of iniquity in the back streets of Londons fair city. Guy and Paul arent the most handsome of faces, in fact i'd go ,at a push as far as to say they are ugly as sin, but it was good to see their grotty visages again, and ,of course Simon from the day before. But the sun shone the Guinness tasted well ,i laughed more than i have for a long time, as KEN DODD would say in his analysis of "What is a laugh?"...It starts in the 'CLACK' and moves on up to the 'CHUCKLE MUSCLES'...Well ,my chuckle muscles were strained and pulled that day.

YET ANOTHER REASON WHY COMPUTERS DRIVE ME NUTS...

Will somebody please explain to me what the bloody hell those little boxes of upper and lower case letters and numbers ,for security ,or something are all about ,cos i havent a bloody clue.They're all distorted and jumbled up together ,sometimes with coloured patterns behind them and you have to dechipher the 'items or write a strange word. I was having to write 6 letters n' numbers from a box to send a mail, but for the life of me i could only find 5. What and why are they there for. You have to write the letters from a stupid word which is often quite easy, but then theres coloured ones and then it becomes an optical illusion which can make you dizzy and feel like your 've been smoking some weird substances, which actually would be better as that would make me mellow rather than drive me into that pit of driving rage and frustration as the red mist decends as i keep getting knocked back by the bloody computer for some distorted grammatical mistake in trying to dechipher the distorted grammatical and numerical mish mash in the first place. The stuff on the computer may be safe ,but i become very unsafe ,infact downright dangerous.

PASSIVE SMOKING IS ONE THING,BUT THERES NOTHING PASSIVE ABOUT 'DOG SHIT N' BUS TICKET' ROLLEE'S!!!!!

As our beloved leaders show themselves totally inept and incapable of doing anything of use for the occupants of these fair isles, very craftily they have shifted the crosshairs away from the important target problems to other, according to them vitally important 'stuff'. Basically saving all our lives. This will make us fit n well so we needn't have to go to doctors or hospitals, then the NHS can come crashing down around our ears and we wont even notice. Very important scientific scientists have done vital work on the effects of drink ,drugs ,greasy chips n burgers on the cholesterol bunged up vessels of the average healthy obese Brit, who even tho' he drinks ,smokes ,stuffs his face, knows its not the healthiest way to spend his rapidly reducing benefits. As the country goes to hell in a nicked Asda trolleycart; The arab world goes up in smoke ;japan hit by horrendous natural and manmade disasters, but all this is partially eclipsed by thegoverment announcing their latest attempt at saving our lives and the importance of covering the advertising labels on packs of fags! Apparently if you cant see the coloured pattern on your usual pack of 20, you'll not want to smoke anymore. And those who dont smoke ,mainly youngsters are attracted by the bright colours and before you can 'strike a light' they're on 70 a day. So the top shelf will be covered magazines, i'm a good catholic lad so i've no idea why that would be .Maybe they're car magazines and as a way of reducing the number of cars being bought ,because of pictures on the cover of glossy car mags, we reduce the carbon footprint, yeah that must be why. Then below them little white boxes with nothing written on them ,just that whatever is in them gives you cancer.

Most of my family smoked and to be honest it never particually bothered me. And later in pubs n boozers, i wasnt too bothered, passive smoking ,they called it, not saying i liked it, but it was cheaper. The problems started when my dear ol' dad went through a rough patch and for a variety of reasons spent a little time in a certain resthome called STRANGEWAYS in the fair city of MANCHESTER. It must've been wonderful for him, as it was the time when there was fighting and riots and rooftop demonstrations. The main effect was when he came out he ,like a good ex-con would smoked'SNOUT', or rolled up tobacco as you n me might call it ,or the famous ROLLEEY!......He would roll one of these things into a battered hair thin paper tube that when lit burnt more like a fuse on a stick of dynamite ,as opposed to the gentle smoulder of a normal ciggie. As the rollee fizzled away he would be rapidly rolling yet another just in time as the 2 inch column of ash from his mouth tumbled down onto the growing ash mound on his lap. He'd have a cough and promptly dissappear into this cloud of ash. But aside from all that was the smell of the bloody things, the old dog shit n bus ticket adage came to mind never mind nostrils. The worst thing about the rolleeys was that they never stopped rolling and puffin the damn things from morning 'till night. At least with the ciggies they did stop and breath air on occassions. It does strike me as funny that our glorious leaders havent mentioned loose 'baccy, maybe they're keeping that as a secret weapon for the next batch of measures in the noble proud task of the nannification of our NANNY STATE.

YOU CANT BEAT A GOOD DISASTER, BUT ITS GOT TO BE A REAL BLOODY GOOD ONE !

Tim Leatherbarrow

As i dragged myself out of bed this morning and set about consuming the first of my 5 litres of tea over the following half hour , i turned on the telly to see what the world had in store for me on this fine wet windy ,freeze the bollocks of ya Warrington morn. I was stunned and amazed to see all this footage of the JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE and the resultant TSUNAMI. All of it absolutly amazing ,'gob dropping stuff'. As the day drew on i was transfixed watching the events unfold. The last time i spent the day just watching the news was the day of the TRADE TOWERS. This was amazing stuff, it had the lot; The country getting hammered by a major world record earthquake, and hundreds of nearly as bad aftershocks; A resultant Tsunami which slammed a mere 10metres high wall of water moving at nearly 90 miles an hour in to the nearby populated coastline, blasting ,everything out of the way , boats, ships ,lorries, cars ,buildings ,just everything; Petro-chemical plants exploding into raging infernos hundreds of feet into the blackened smoke filled sky; Nuclear reactors shutting down ,and one whose coolant pumps malfunctioned and nearly caused a nuclear catastrophe; A Tsunami that, as time passed swept across the PACIFIC OCEAN to swamp everywhere around the biggest ocean in the world. This was incredible stuff and it wasnt done with CGI with BRUCE WILLIS and SLY STALLONE to pull our little oriental friends out of the SUSHI. This was all tragically real.

On a personal level i noticed something slightly disturbing about myself. This doesnt come as any grea suprise as theres a lot about me that disturbs me and people who know me. As all the disaster footage was being shown i was sitting there comparing bits of footage with other bits of footage . I sat there watching a country getting destroyed and comparing bits with other bits and preffering some scenes of disaster with other bits of disaster as if it was special effects on a film. As the TSUNAMI swept across the PACIFIC, i got quite excited as they counted down the time until the wave would hit HAWAII. As the time drew near , a reporter said that small waves had come up the beach and i 'tutted 'with disgust. He followed that with a comment about how ominous it was that the tide had withdrawn rapidly, this is a sign of an approaching 'big wave'. This rekindled my waning excitment. When eventually a 1 metre wave hit and basically 'splashed the beach' i was dissapointed. Theres a side that doesnt want any harm to fall on anyone ,but theres a dark side that just wants to be amazed and stunned by the forces of OL' MA NATURE when she gets her knickers in a twist. I was in Malaysia when 'THE BIG 'UN' went off in 2004, KUALA LUMPUR was spared the Tsunami but we felt the shocks, i was like a little boy ,totally amazed. I looked down MOUNT ETNA, and i could see the steam ,feel the heat and hear the silt moving, again i was 'gobsmacked. I told THE LOVELY LYNNE(actually it was our honeymoon,aaahh!)....I told her i was going to travel the world looking at volcanoes.

Its still a disaster even if it was amazing telly , so all the best to JAPAN and to the JAPANESE, i've never been to the country ,but met plenty of people through the years and they've been brilliant and dont deserve any of this.