A Heartless Bastard Writes …

Well, that's put a stop to that nonsense.
I got in this morning to find four more messages on my voicemail, including one drunken, late night sob-fest that went on for bloody ages.
IT have now blocked incoming calls from K___i's and Maz's phones and I'll be working from home for the next couple of days so hopefully they'll lose interest.

It's not that I'm a heartless bastard, it's more that I'm a big old softie and I'm scared shitless that I'd give in to the wheedling and the sobbing and the big-eyed pleading (and the young and still perky body) and get sucked in to The Village Of The Damned, never to emerge again.

I mean, K___i's young, and - underneath it all - she's very pretty, and yes, I look like a ticket out of Morlok Hell for her; but to me last Friday night, looking down into her eyes was like staring into a vast, sucking whirlpool leading down, down into the hideous stygian depths of madness and despair.

So that's it.
There will be no K___i and Dive.
For a start, she's dumber than a box of rocks. The conversations would not exactly be scintillating.
I'm a pretentious twat and a snob deluxe; I'm used to coming home from work, sticking on some Stravinsky, cooking something wonderful with nice fresh organic ingredients and settling down to read Virgil or listen to the Opera Quiz on Radio 3.
I'm NOT used to coming home from work to a trashed house full of screaming, hyperactive idiot children and a woman admittedly more attractive but slightly less intelligent than a blancmange, lounging drunk in the midst of the apocalyptic mess in a fucking shell suit or a Burberry hoodie with a lapful of deep-fried lard and "recovered meat product", chain-smoking and dribbling and screaming at the kids and watching fucking crap soaps and fucking crappier game shows and - God help us - imbecile fucking shit-brained "reality" shows on a stupid, twatty fucking television.

K___i also comes packed with unappealing accessories, like the tribe of inbred in-laws with thousands of vegetable kids ready to run riot in my life.
They say that before considering a relationship with a girl you should consider the worst case scenario and look at her mother and think twenty years ahead.
That's the clincher …
Holy fucking crapola. K___i's mum is younger than me but she looks like a bull walrus that's fallen onto Boots' make-up counter and thrashed about a bit. She has the personal habits of a drunken and particularly vicious sloth and she has more children than brain cells.

I'm forty-nine, for crying out loud. I can't spend the rest of my days living with a woman who can't spell "duh" and hiding from her family.
Sorry, K___I, but that's the way it is.
And let's face it; if you weren't stuck in the Morlok Village yourself, a girl as young and pretty as you certainly wouldn't be chasing after a fat, ugly, middle-aged bloke like me.

Hopefully, this will be the last post on this particularly grisly subject.

I've Never Murdered A Child … Yet …

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lived a happy, carefree, friendly and sociable little creature called Dive.

Happy, carefree Dive went along to his friend's birthday party last Friday (the "Village Of The Damned" one in the previous post), even though he knew that it would be a traumatic and trying affair, avoiding the attentions of the Morloks. He likes his friends that much.

Happy, carefree Dive spent this morning in a happy, carefree (if somewhat tedious) meeting and then went to happy, carefree lunch, secure in the knowledge that he would be safe from the Morloks for a few more months.

Unhappy, fucking sweary Old Dive has just checked his voicemail …

Okay, Maz, I'm not blaming you until I'm certain who did it (though yes, I am glaring angrily at you), but some fucking imbecile bastard in The Village Of The Damned appears to have let slip to your older sister K___i a piece of information that I wanted kept out of Morlok hands; namely, where I work (and you're one of the only people there who knows).
On my office phone I now have three (count 'em) sappy messages from the micro-skirted, sparkly-nailed, peroxide-haired, fake-tanned, sprog-popping, stiletto-heeled, boob-tubed predatory womb on legs known to the world at large as K___i.

Now I am jumping a foot in the air whenever the phone rings and desperately scanning the incoming number for a north-east Norfolk prefix.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to her?
"Hi, K___i. I only danced with you so I'd have something funny to write in my blog?"
or,
"Yes, I'd love to see you again, but before I do, please scrape off the orange fake tan and the caked-on make-up, get your natural hair colour back, buy some decent clothes, get an education and dump your three idiot children at the local orphanage?"

I'm a coward. I'm just going to keep on ignoring her calls and hope she gets the hint.

And Maz, you are in such deep fucking shit, girl.

A Slow Dance With The Morlok

Brace yourselves; it's time to don protective clothing and go for another paddle in the gene puddle.

Yes, it's Sharon's fiftieth birthday party in The Village Of The Damned.
Actually, this time we are just up the coast from that evolutionary dead-end and are sequestered in a rather nice hotel on the verge of the real world, where people walk upright and punctuate their primitive grunts with the occasional intelligible word; all of which comes as a relief until I realise that there is no available kitchen for Rod and me to hide in; I am stuck in a large room with the Morloks.
My only hope is that they won't recognise me as new genetic material for their terrible breeding programme. That hope is dashed as soon as I walk in the door and realise Shazza forgot to tell me it was fancy dress. Dressed as Dive I stick out like a sore thumb … or more accurately like fresh DNA in Morlok territory.

For those that don't know about this inaccessible and inbred little community, just click the "Gene Puddle" link at the bottom of the post and read the lower posts to appreciate my sense of creeping dread as I enter that room.
I home in on Sharon, looking radiant in a gorgeous ball gown and easy to spot as one of the only two recognisably human life forms in the room other than myself.
We do the kissy, huggy, squealy thing and then Rod comes over, for some reason dressed in immaculate navy whites like he never cottoned on to the screaming gayness of Top Gun. Suitably protected by one on either arm I head to the bar to lube up and to anæsthetise my brain against the inevitable.

The musical entertainment for the evening is being provided - inexplicably - by a Meatloaf tribute band, the lead singer of which is fat, hairy, sweaty and actually astonishingly good.

As I turn to face the room things start to get scary.
Over the years I have come to know quite a few of the inbred denizens of The Village and they flock to me now.
You remember I first described these occasions as "Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on"? I cannot possibly improve on that description as they slowly shuffle and lurch toward me with arms outstretched.
First up is lovely little Kimberley. She is dressed as a heavily pregnant nun and it is only when we are greeting one another that I discover the heavily pregnant bit is not part of the costume.
Kim is eighteen and this is her second sprog, which is very, VERY slow going for The Village.
Next to slobber over me is my beloved little friend Claire, who grew up overnight and is already on her second husband and tonight is a heavily pregnant Little Red Riding Hood, a very disturbing image for somebody I've known and loved since she was a little girl.
It doesn't take much glancing around to confirm that the theme for the evening (much as with any evening in this little anthropological nightmare) is the race to have as many babies as you can before you hit twenty and turn into your mother.

Allow me to recap: The girls in The Village are uniformly gorgeous (Kimberley was a successful underwear model at fourteen) and from the ages of twelve to twenty they squirt out as many sprogs as is physically possible in some awful race to breed a bigger tribe than their next door neighbours.
At twenty - like butterflies in reverse - they emerge from their beautiful cocoons as saggy, haggard, embittered caterpillar women. A lot of them suddenly inflate like Americans yet they continue breeding at a prodigious rate; there are very few mothers here with less than six or seven kids haring round the dancefloor and shrieking.

Thousands of years of total isolation (the sea on one side and impenetrable marshes all around) has unfortunately resulted in a genetic apocalypse in The Village, and sat around the edges of the room are the sad results: the wheelchairs of the "vegetable kids".
The worst of these is S___'s youngest. This poor little boy has been in and out of hospital for all of his short life and has had every major organ replaced at least once; every one, that is, except the severely damaged brain that is his genetic inheritance. S___ie himself is the typical Village male; slow and heavy, yet remarkably cheerful for someone with seven kids, two of whom are little more than decorative plants. He used to roadie for me way back when and is a pretty good mechanic. Though his methods are his own … when the engine management computer went blooey on my car one night he simply nodded (slowly) and drove off to Grockle Hell (the tourist resorts down the coast), returning with a nice new part stolen from some poor sap's car. He's done the same with a wheel, when I got a puncture, and most of the band's bus was rebuilt with parts stolen from coach parks.

The tragedy of The Village is that the inbred denizens seem Hell-bent on producing as many children as they can. The room is full of them, screaming and fighting and bashing into tables and the parents sit around like blancmanges, idiot grins plastered across their faces. A frighteningly high proportion of the kids have genetic disorders, which is why the women are always so glad to see me with my fresh DNA.

The stream of Dive-greeters continues for some time and every one has either a new pregnancy or a new sprog to show me. It is truly heartbreaking as I have grown to like a lot of these people rather a lot over the years.
Scariest of all is little Maz. She is so happy to see me and kissy and cuddly and wriggly as any sixteen-year-old should be, yet she is pregnant with her third baby, by three different men in the Village. It is so awful I can barely stand it.

And then the Morloks move in for the kill; those allegedly female abominations belched forth from the gaping, sulphurous stinking maw of Gehenna and greedy to extract my genes from my jeans.

One of them from Maz's tribe, who goes by the name of K___i and who I know is in her twenties but who looks my age, drags me out onto the floor for a slow dance.
Brr … I'm shuddering even now as I recall the horror.
Let me describe her:
K___i is still pretty and was obviously once beautiful, yet the Morlok uniform does dreadful things to a girl.
She is dressed in the height of Morlok style and sophistication; the denim microskirt and strappy high heels worn with hideously long false nails with stupid sparkly scribbles on them (her fancy dress consists for some unfathomable reason of a fluffy boob-tube and matching rabbit ears). Her hair is platinum blonde, straight from the bottle, with an inch of mousy roots on display; she has caked enough make-up onto her fake-tanned orange face to delight a transvestite army, and she has been dipped in a fœtid, reeking "parfum", the stench of which burns my throat and makes my eyes water.
You know my views on the denim microskirt; the most disgusting and loathsome passion-killer in Satan's Spring Collection. Well K___i's is pressed hard against me in such an unerotic, grunting-animal fashion that I feel it would send even Bill Clinton running for the scissors to cut his cock off.

Oh, K___i … Where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

Like most of the Morlok women, K___i is an unmarried multiple-mother and now she's after more. All I can say is thank God for the Meatloaf tribute band. They know very few slow-dance numbers (and actually surprisingly few Meatloaf numbers) and I am rescued by their launching into a monstrously incompetent version of Motörhead's "Ace Of Spades".
K___i immediately starts to perform a bizarre bouncing "dance" that has her spilling out of her boob-tube in every direction at once. I make the universal sign of the drink and run for the bar where I can hide behind Rod and Sharon.

This goes on for some time. Morloks are pretty tenacious beasts and K___i makes several attempts to climb up me during the evening, the reeking result of which saw all of my clothes get flung straight into the washing bin as soon as I got home.

As soon as was socially acceptable (always look for the first family to take their kids home to bed and leave with them) I do the huggy, kissy with Rod and Sharon and head for the door, where one last horror awaits me.

As I cross the lobby I see Maz standing outside in the cold, sucking hard on a cigarette in the hope that the nicotine might damage the inbred cells of her unborn child and cause it to be born normal.
However, the doorway is barred by a gorgeous girl apparently in her late teens, dressed in what - had it been a foot longer - should have been a 1920's flapper dress but was in fact a teeshirt with frills on.
"Hiya Dive! You don't get out without a kiss."
I would gladly comply but for the fact that I recognise her.
"You're one of S___ie's girls, aren't you?"
"Yeah. So?"
"How old are you now? It doesn't seem ten minutes ago that you were toddling round the dancefloor."
"I'm twelve!" She thrusts her hip out defiantly as if twelve is above the age of consent. Which unfortunately in The Village Of The Damned it all too often is.
"Does your dad know you're out here?"
"Yeah."
Oh, well. She's not going to let me past so I lean down to give her a friendly peck on the cheek.
At which point she grabs my head and forces her slobbery tongue into my mouth.
I break free and back off quickly.
"God! You bloody kids grow up way too fast these days." I protest as she giggles and shrieks with mischievous glee.
At which point Maz reaches round from behind me and gives my balls a - mercifully - gentle squeeze, before laughing at me and pouting "You're no fun any more."
Fucking Hell!
This whole village is just one big rut.
I reach the safe cocoon of my car and look back to see the girls still giggling and waving and "flapper girl" lifts up her dress and flashes her knickers at me in farewell.
I just know that the next time I see her she will have joined her sisters in the race to make vegetable babies.

On the news as I drive away is yet another report on the evacuation of hundreds of women and children from a polygamous sect's compound in America, where pædophile allegations have been made against some filthy old perverts.
Come to rural Norfolk and live the dream.

Give me a couple of weeks and I'll be able to laugh and joke about The Village Of The Damned again. But right now I am shaken and somewhat disgusted and no amount of showering and hairwashing seems to be able shift the lingering reek of K___i.

Morloks In Frocks Again

Oh, crap.
Sharon's fifty.
That's crappy for two reasons:
one: it means I'll be fifty later this year; and
two: it means that I've just been invited to her party in …

… The Village Of The Damned.

Those of you who've not been hanging around here for years better read this to help understand my horror.
An evening out in The Village Of The Damned is like Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on … Morloks in frocks.

Centuries of inbreeding and living in a swamp are not qualities I find particularly appealing in a woman, and this place has been cut off from civilisation (or indeed anywhere where fire has been discovered and the wheel developed) since the end of the last ice age.

Okay, so things are gradually progressing … some of them can walk upright and one or two have been seen using rudimentary tools, but this village owns the smallest gene puddle known to anthropology and evolution is as strange a concept to them as it is in America's Bible Belt; though for different reasons.

So … Friday night, I will be driving off the edge of the map into uncharted territory.
This place is not in any atlas and Google Earth just shows it as a fog bank. Unless you know exactly how to get in, you - together with the rest of reality - will simply slip on past it and emerge feeling slightly clammy and eager to be driving away at speed.
I will descend that long coastal slope toward the distant cluster of primitive buildings and enter what I can only describe as a Heironymus Bosch nightmare set in a seventies disco.

Rod and I will do what we always do. We will fight our way to the kitchen with whatever weapons we find to hand and barricade ourselves in there for the duration, shirts ripped like Doug Mc.Clure fighting off hordes of cavewomen in fur bikinis … The main difference being that ours wear cheap polyester party frocks, the entire Boots make-up counter, yellow-stained teeth; plastic knee-boots and a perfume made from local goats.
They cackle as they reach their horrible, grasping, fag-stained fingers toward us; false nails hanging askew in their desperate attempts to drag us down to the floor and to mate with new genetic material.

Will we escape unscathed yet again?
Will we manage to retain our honour?
Or will we be debauched by primitive harridans?

Do you really give a fuck?

Who knows? Tune in next weekend to hear the results.

Lovely Personality

Poor Sassy had to endure the bane of the single adult, a family wedding at the weekend.
That brought so many horrors to mind, not least the fact that I have a wedding to attend in the Village of the Damned later this summer. Brrrr.

These days, at family gatherings I find it too much of a hassle to constantly go through the:
"Yes I do have a girlfriend, thank you."
"Well where is she?"
"Actually she's not from the Norfolk end of my commute and things are more than a tad complicated at the moment, so …"
"Huh! Aren't we good enough for her?"
So - like Sassy - I get the "whispers". Mad little Aunts' heads get conspiratorially close together when they see me across the room and the fact that I'm "not seeing anybody" gets tutted over.
Then I either get labelled as gay or paired off with a Morlok.

I don't mind the "gay" thing so much. After all, I'm a middle aged man living alone and anyone walking into my house is confronted with some of the gayest rooms imaginable, full of lovely books and paintings and Tiffany lamps and colours and textures and furnishings arranged with such exquisite taste that macho men run screaming out the door.
The sad fact is that I just don't fancy the bum sex. I like kissing girls. Hey ho.

It's the "Morlok" thing that pisses me off about family.
Ever since the end of my sixteen year purgatorial sentence living with Ming The Menstrual, family and friends have been charitably pairing me off with X's daughter or Y's sister.
These women are invariably described as having a "lovely personality".

Hokay, having met some of these - let's generously call them "females" - I find that some of them do indeed have a lovely personality. And they certainly need it.
As Mum said when trying to set me up with one of them, "She's a little bit chubby but she does have a lovely personality".
Mum, she's fat! And I mean fat like an American!
I'm not the world's biggest fan of fat … or facial hair or acne or personal hygeine problems, especially not in combination and definitely not on a date. Some people may find these things erotic but that pleasure has sadly passed me by.
And when it comes down to it, these women do NOT have a lovely personality; they are bitter and vindictive and are single for very good reasons.
So please stop trying to force me to breed with fucking Morloks!

Which brings me back to the Village of the Damned.
Every time I go to a party there (and I go quite often, to remind myself why people should never breed) it's as if I'm wearing a large neon hat that reads: "New Genetic Material".
The village of ---- is at first glance full of stunningly beautiful young girls and yet I know from watching them over the years (like Jane Goodall only with less intelligent subjects) that by the time they hit twenty they will have ballooned to sumo size, married within the family and developed the personal habits of a particularly vicious sloth.
These hideously inbred creatures loom out of the murk of the dancefloor with horrid graspy hands and reeking, toxic fag-breath laced with enough booze to fell a moose. A nightmare vision of yellow fingers and yellow teeth, plastic boots and mousy roots. Ick! If you follow the link you'll discover why I describe these evenings as "Dawn of the Dead with party dresses on".

Weddings are even worse.

At least I have a lovely personality to help me to cope with all this crap.

Gene Puddle

Rod phones to remind me that he's off to Hawai'i with Sharon next week.
Rod is the band's sound engineer, Sharon is one third of the best three girl backing-vocal group on this or any other planet. They are off to Hawai'i to get married on a beach in Honolulu at sunset, sometime early next month.

Bastards! What's wrong with Britain in November? What's wrong with horizontal sleet? What's wrong with sub-zero howling gales? Eh?
I'm just grumpy because they invited me and I stupidly decided to stay home (I'm on a saving frenzy, ready to extend the house next year and form a proper library before my thousands of stupid books reach critical mass and collapse into a black hole, sucking in all life on the planet).

So, copious and effusive congratulations overflow in Rod and Sharon's general direction.

We'll be having one hell of a party when they return. A little virgin sacrifice, some dancing with goats, hog wrestling, dwarf tossing … you know the kind of thing … Live and very loud music, quaffage on a Niagara scale, some serious cake abuse and maybe even some balloons.
Norfolk will be laid waste to an extent not seen since the Vikings got a bit frisky twelve hundred years ago.

Cue one of those swirly effect things as I invite you, dear reader, to pop back in time with me to the very first of Rod's parties …

Rod and Sharon are not Norfolk natives. They have the usual complement of fingers and un-webbed toes. Yet for some reason - probably a shared interest in evolutionary anthropology and a twisted sense of humour - they live in the remote countryside, just outside the village of –––––.
––––– is one of those tiny coastal villages cut off from the land by marshes for thousands of years. You remember the village in Hitchcock's "The Birds"? I get that same sense of creeping dread, of some nameless abomination stalking me as I crest the low ridge and stare nervously down at the wide, bleak sweep of coastline with the tiny and very isolated little community clinging to the dunes. The kind of place where they'd never marry a first cousin if a sister was available.
"Deliverance" is a walk in the park compared to rural Norfolk.

This is waaay back in the mists of time; the last flaring embers of a dying millennium …
Claire (another third of Sharon's vocal group) is turning eighteen and Rod decides to organise a surprise party in ––––– village hall. It's quite a feat of map-reading to even find the place, so I'm relieved to see Rod's car parked outside a long, low building.
Entering the hall alone and unsuspecting, I walk in to a scene which has provided more than a few sleepless nights in the intervening years. Before I get a chance to scream, something that might, in pre-Cambrian times, have been classed as female lurches toward me with a look that shouts "NEW GENETIC MATERIAL"!
It's "Dawn Of The Dead" with party dresses on!
In a desperate bid to keep our honour intact, Rod and I barricade ourselves in the kitchen and stay there for the rest of the night (this is one hundred percent true)!
The gene pool in ––––– is not Olympic sized … not even paddling pool sized … maybe not even a gene puddle … more of a genetic damp patch.
As for evolution: when you've struggled out of the sea and up into the dunes, why bother going any further?
These people never even made it up into the trees in the first place …

Rod and Sharon have since settled in there surprisingly well. They seem to be looked on as some kind of alien exotica by the Morloks (remember "The Time Machine")? I've even been back there myself on occasion. Whenever I get the slightest tingling of a nascent desire to produce offspring, a trip to the pub in ––––– is all it takes to kill it stone dead.
I have kept the name of ––––– a secret as I don't want to end up being burned inside a giant wicker man the next time I'm down that way …

But back to the present (cue: swirly thing) …
I have in front of me a glass of stupidly expensive, cask strength Islay malt whisky. Here's to Rod and Sharon. May they live ludicrously happily ever after.