Pet Sounds

Spring is here.   For Gerad Manley Hopkins,

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 

For me, spring is cleaning tomcat piss out of the house.

Every spring, Tomcats come in, twriling their whiskery 'taches, only to be disappointed by our neutered cats.  In sexual frustration, they mark their territoty with a "i could've if I'd wanted to..." message written in foul-smelling musk.

Our cats don't much like Tomcats and they don't much like the food we give them.  Rather than eat the frankly rather nice-smelling tinned crap we offer, they go off to get better food elsewhere.  Much better food.  It's not unusual for them to return home only to sick up pheasant, smoked salmon and plovers eggs all over the house.  It's a sad state of affairs when the best food in the house is the cat sick.

Cats are crap - any vermin they catch are outweighed by all the songbirds they tuck into.  £600 vet bills do not work in their favour either.  The bastards.

I fail to see the purpose of pets.  They can't be eaten or milked - their only products are copious amounts of piss, shit, vomit and hair.  They have no value whatsoever.

It could be argued that pets provide comfort and warmth to lonely people.   But so does masturbation - with the added advantage that unless you're doing some very specialist masturbation, you're unlikely to end up with a garden full of shit.

We had a dog when I was a kid.  It was a Brussels Griffon that we had adopted when its owner died.  It looked like a hairy woodlouse with a punched-in face.   Like all dogs, it had a range of unpleasant habits - rolling in fox-shit, eating fox-shit and then trying to share the fox-shit with humans.  But its worst habit was in the car.   During a journey, it would pace up and down the parcel shelf.  It had associated the ticking of the indicator with stopping.  When the indicator went, it would get all excited.  But when it realised that we weren't stopping, it would snort in exasperation and blow a spray of dog snot over whoever was in the back seat - usually me.  It was a shit dog that only ever did one useful thing when it took on a rat the same size as itself and won.  The fucker - I'd backed the rat to win.


Dogs are crap too - the questionable joys of dogging are somewhat diminished by having to swing a little bag of dog shit as a come-on signal.

Another dog issue is that I won’t have anything in the house that can lick its own bollocks.  The jealousy eats me up.

Rabbits are crap - they start to think that they're human and then go psychotic and annex large areas of the house.  Ever met someone who has a house rabbit that *doesn't* have it's own room  - a room that the homeowners are scared to go into?  Seriously, invite a rabbit into your house and before you know it. it'll be doing more illegal invasions that Tony Blair.

Fish aren't even pets - they're just things that move in water.  Turds bobbing in a ditch are just as visually stimulating.

Just about the only decent pets are Hamsters. They're great - but not for the usual cute, fluffy, bollock-chopped nonsense.  Nor for the Richard Gere reasons.   No.  Hamsters are great because they invariably shit themselves to death within a month and so teach your children all about mortality.   How much easier it is to explain death when the hamster has shown the way.

Hamster fact - all hamsters are descended from one family caught in the Syrian desert in the 1920s.  That's a gene pool so small that the Forest of Dean can only gape in multi-fingered envy. This fact is, in fact, a fact.

Hamster fact -  There's so much inbreeding among hamsters that they're natural banjo players. You can get special hamster banjoes on eBay. Less of a fact, this one.

Pet Sounds

Spring is here.   For Gerad Manley Hopkins,

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 

For me, spring is cleaning tomcat piss out of the house.

Every spring, Tomcats come in, twriling their whiskery 'taches, only to be disappointed by our neutered cats.  In sexual frustration, they mark their territoty with a "i could've if I'd wanted to..." message written in foul-smelling musk.

Our cats don't much like Tomcats and they don't much like the food we give them.  Rather than eat the frankly rather nice-smelling tinned crap we offer, they go off to get better food elsewhere.  Much better food.  It's not unusual for them to return home only to sick up pheasant, smoked salmon and plovers eggs all over the house.  It's a sad state of affairs when the best food in the house is the cat sick.

Cats are crap - any vermin they catch are outweighed by all the songbirds they tuck into.  £600 vet bills do not work in their favour either.  The bastards.

I fail to see the purpose of pets.  They can't be eaten or milked - their only products are copious amounts of piss, shit, vomit and hair.  They have no value whatsoever.

It could be argued that pets provide comfort and warmth to lonely people.   But so does masturbation - with the added advantage that unless you're doing some very specialist masturbation, you're unlikely to end up with a garden full of shit.

We had a dog when I was a kid.  It was a Brussels Griffon that we had adopted when its owner died.  It looked like a hairy woodlouse with a punched-in face.   Like all dogs, it had a range of unpleasant habits - rolling in fox-shit, eating fox-shit and then trying to share the fox-shit with humans.  But its worst habit was in the car.   During a journey, it would pace up and down the parcel shelf.  It had associated the ticking of the indicator with stopping.  When the indicator went, it would get all excited.  But when it realised that we weren't stopping, it would snort in exasperation and blow a spray of dog snot over whoever was in the back seat - usually me.  It was a shit dog that only ever did one useful thing when it took on a rat the same size as itself and won.  The fucker - I'd backed the rat to win.


Dogs are crap too - the questionable joys of dogging are somewhat diminished by having to swing a little bag of dog shit as a come-on signal.

Another dog issue is that I won’t have anything in the house that can lick its own bollocks.  The jealousy eats me up.

Rabbits are crap - they start to think that they're human and then go psychotic and annex large areas of the house.  Ever met someone who has a house rabbit that *doesn't* have it's own room  - a room that the homeowners are scared to go into?  Seriously, invite a rabbit into your house and before you know it. it'll be doing more illegal invasions that Tony Blair.

Fish aren't even pets - they're just things that move in water.  Turds bobbing in a ditch are just as visually stimulating.

Just about the only decent pets are Hamsters. They're great - but not for the usual cute, fluffy, bollock-chopped nonsense.  Nor for the Richard Gere reasons.   No.  Hamsters are great because they invariably shit themselves to death within a month and so teach your children all about mortality.   How much easier it is to explain death when the hamster has shown the way.

Hamster fact - all hamsters are descended from one family caught in the Syrian desert in the 1920s.  That's a gene pool so small that the Forest of Dean can only gape in multi-fingered envy. This fact is, in fact, a fact.

Hamster fact -  There's so much inbreeding among hamsters that they're natural banjo players. You can get special hamster banjoes on eBay. Less of a fact, this one.

Put Your Hands Up

We middle-aged men love to self-test.   Any excuse to haul up the ball-bag - arm over arm as it's getting dangly these days - and check the plums for lumps and bumps.   However, it wasn't until a recent pub conversation with a friend that I realised that it was possible to self-test the prostate.
In front of people he'd only just met, my respectable, professional friend regaled us with his experiences of jamming his hand up his own jacksie - the range of positions available ('The Missionary's Glove Puppet'; 'The Suckling Piglet', 'The James Herriott' and 'The Custom Officers Fist of Fun' are just a few) and the expected findings - grapes, donuts, hoops - he made it sound like it was a bit of a buffet down there.   If I could only give one piece of advice, it would be to never Google 'Anal Buffet' with safe search off.

There's more that just soft fruits and patisserie down there though.  A few years back, there was a reality TV series where a bunch of minor celebs were taken to an island and were given coffee enemas.   This was a great premise for a TV show - imprison some annoying publicity-hungry no-marks on an island and see how much hot beverage can be stuffed up their bums before they burst.  "It's time for Tradesman's Entrance! The Gaping Gameshow! With your host - Richard 'They-don't-call-him-Hamster-because-of-his-surname' Hammond".   Like Channel 5 does Last Tango in Paris meets Papillon.  Or pretty much any German porn film.
Unfortunately, this show was simply about the benefits of enemas.  It was still worth watching for the stuff that was flushed out - half-digested pills, childhood toys, fire extinguishers and one of Jimmy Saville's bracelets. 

What if you were caught self examining. How would you explain it away?
"I was washing my bottom and my hand slipped!"?
"Bloody hamster gets everywhere."?
"Now then! Now then!"?

Probably the only thing worse is to be caught indulging in some auto-erotic asphyxiation. 

Auto-erotic asphyxiation has been surprisingly popular - Tory MP Stephen Milligan; Michael Hutchence and David Carradine all succumbed to that last fatal wank.

Why did they do it?  To prove that men can multitask - that's why.

There's an enormous amount of rubbish talked about men and their inability to multitask.   It's nonsense.  For example, we can stand up, urinate and breath at the same time.  OK.  I accept that aiming is a step too far but even so...

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is the ultimate in multi-tasking.    You have to do FIVE things at the same time.
1.  Stand on tiptoe - not easy in a low friction gimp suit & mask
2.  Suck on an orange.   Like a healthy ball-gag but not easy to keep in place.  The gimp mask doesn't help - the orange gets easily caught in the mouth zipper.
3.  Tie a workable noose and keep it round your neck while the other end is anchored somewhere that'll take your weight.  Ever tried making a noose?  Not easy at all.  See www.macrameformurderers.org for instructions.
4.  Keep the porn in focus - not easy when you've got a gimp mask and a face full of citrus fruit. It would be a terrible way to go if you accidentally dropped the porn and bent over to pick it up and...  Oh dear...
5.  Far and away the most difficult - keeping a hard-on in the face of death.  This is difficult enough at the best of times let alone when dicing with death.  Realistically, you can only do this in the one place where an erection is unavoidable however hard you think about Anne Widdecombe.

On a bus.

It does seem a bit far fetched to go on a double-decker bus and find the stairway blocked by a wanking gimp (they need to be on the stairs for the noose to be effective) but friends who travel on London night buses assure me that this is a regular occurrence.

Oh yeah.  Prostrate cancer.  Get your hand up.  Get your doctor's hand up.  At the same time if you like.