It was Bank holiday Monday so we went to see the family and learnt many exciting things on the journey and in the houses:

The BNP billboard slogan is ‘People like you voting’ which is not accompanied by a photograph of a big old racist so I do not understand. It certainly is not people like us*

There is a Christian Party running in the elections too. They do not like the BNP (they called their mums slags apparently) so therefore I am agreeing with the church for the first time ever in the history of me.

*Series 1 is on DVD and well worth a watch.

My mother will only drink tea if it is boiling hot but coffee has to be colder. Soya milk is better than long life milk. My dad is immune to caffeine with approximately a dozen cups of coffee drunk every day. They think I enjoyed our childhood family holidays that were mostly in a caravan in Belgium. I did not: the chemical toilet alone was reason enough to dislike and they now know.

Jamie’s mother did not know what LOL meant but she does now. She also knows that it is only used by dickheads and that becoming a fan of laughing at people falling over on Facebook is not acceptable.

Cakes are nice. Bacon is a nice treat if your vegetarian husband does not allow it at home and taking a chunk of a freshly cooked chicken home in the boot of the car will lead to chickeny smells. I will make him eat it in the garden.

Andi Peters’ choice of the top pop songs of the 1990s on 4Music was marvellously poor (C&C Music Factory, Chaka Demus and Pliers, Corona…) as was the advert every 10 minutes for Dizzee Rascal’s top 100 pop videos with sexy ladies in them, co-presented by something called a High Street Honey who was just a disinterested model sort.

We learnt that Billie Piper’s video for Because We Want To definitely inspired Russell ‘Tea’ Davies’ Doctor Who many years later:

A big old spaceship flies over a street and Billie is beamed down. Hmm…

Billie points at the bin and her magic powers make it start to melt but not like an Auton…

The bin is not an Auton but becomes a silver man who does a little dance and does not shoot her.

Billie goes to a club where the bouncer is a man with a rhino’s head. But not a Judoon…

The not Judoon lets her in even though she is underage. Nil points, space police rhino!

Next week: Vespiform in Honey To the Bee?

Ignoring the Morrissey video link, the old Southend on Sea place was allowed to be like Sunday today because it was Sunday. It tends to be like the song quite a lot though, and going there takes me back to olden times when I was a poor art student running around the sea front with a video camera. Happy days of making ‘sculptures’ in the refectory out of cups, pens and crisp packets, afternoons in the edit suite with 1980s TOTP effects on full whack, morninfs spent doing sketches of half-knocked-down buildings, evenings of drinking too much and shock horror having a proper social life for the first time ever in a meaningful way.

The Victoria Shopping Centre used to be crumbly and crappy, with pointless shops and a pub on the lower floor (The Cork & Cheese) but now it’s all swish and paved but with almost no bloody shops. And no pub. How silly. They have a comic shop but someone in power decided to be closed on Sundays. Grr…
So much has changed in the last 15 years (yes, 15 years since I befriended a girl from Southminster with bright hair and made a lifelong chum), but there were still some typical Southendy people out today. A Bible-bashing lady with a microphone near WH Smith preaching to nobody at all. The emos on the benches were more concerned with how flat their hair was or the super-skinniness of their black jeans. In my day it was all fat goths of course. The man with the owls was out too, down by The Royals, where we went to Debenhams and had a lunch that was more like dinner as it was aubergine and walnut bake with potatoes and beans. Mmm… well nobody else had bought any of the vegetarian special of the day and I felt sorry for it. After that I bought a new grown-up shirt and tie for my next work adventure which happens in a few weeks and involves me, a popular-ish philposophy author who also happens to be a doctor of something and a string of London bookshops. I am enjoying this variety instead of dealing with puny humans face to face all day long. No more “does this ‘half price’ sticker mean half the price on the book?” for me, thank you.

I am now on holiday and not as ill as yesterday which was cancelled due to being a zombie. Jamie was pampered for his birthday with lunch, dinner and ice cream plus a bubble bath. I slept a lot but not in a fun way, so I am now behind on my internet noodlings that will be finished tomorrow but should be done instead of this right now. Whatever, i have the time…

So we went to Essex this morning and drank a whole lotta tea. Got given a whole lotta Belgian food. Ate a whole lotta English food. Did a whole lotta shopping where I was disturbed by a leaflet about entering the Tesco Mother Of The Year as most of the women in that particular shop had aggressive hair and wide load rears. But they must have been entered by somebody as they mostly had unruly children with them who were misbehaving due to a diet of additives and a pattern of being screamed and sworn at by their lovely parents. I ain’t entering no Tesco lady, even if there is a cash prize! Sat in a whole lotta traffic. Got home at 7 after popping to The Husband’s office on his day off and going slow on the roads and got nudged by a white van but not in a sexy way. Not in a damage to the car way neither, which was nice, although another knock would just give it more character, to be honest. Bah. So that’s Saturday pretty much gone already.

I have no picture (yet) to illustrate Day 58 of the McCanns On The Express Front Page Bonanza but they woz there, I tell ya. Today it was something like ‘Madeleine taken by people traffickers’ but without the quotation marks so it read as fact. So that’s 58 days in a row of using random ideas that a person thought or random words that a person said and making that one of the most important things in the world. There may have been a Diana on there too but there were definitely ‘free dance lessons for every reader’ which is nice if you are disabled or have guilty feet that ain’t got no rhythm *cough*McCanns*cough*… It’s gonna take a nuclear war to move the young blonde and the old blonde off the front page… not that I am suggesting we have one just to test the theory.

Is it Starlight Express for chavs who are in fact rather posh? No. It’s some Mouthwash, innit?

How about that Moonlight ? Hmmm, I thought… It’s a new show about a good vampire who lives in Los Angeles and is a private detective. Sounds completely new and original to me! I should give it a go, shouldn’t I? So I did and found the cast somewhat familiar…

… and I’ll save that for tomorrow or I’ll have no blog then.

So I woke up with a sinus headache and had to go to Essex. Stuck in traffic listening to Transvision Vamp and Rick James might be smi-fun but it’s tiresome when your neck aches from falling asleep on the sofa the night before while watching another episode of The Hand Of Fear (I fell asleep during episode 1 too, damnit!) and you just want to have a rest. My evil side came out when my uncle was at the parents’ house and my inner monologue (don’t we all have these?) found me in a smug place. Uncle has always been a slightly superior type and when I was a kid his family (who are all lovely by the way) were, in his mind, a bit better than ours, for reasons unknown. Nicer house, nicer things, all the really important stuff like superficial luxury items and wealth. So all the stuff I didn’t really care about. Well it is Essex, innit? And he loves them Gays (and them Blacks, Asians, Jews, Chinese..) too. I think I learnt more homophobic terms off him than anyone else, such a nice kind-hearted fellow. Maybe me being the token gay vegetarian Guardian reader while he was the owner of a butcher’s shop who read The Sun and was more intolerant than my Belligerent Dad didn’t really endear me to him. Needless to say he completely ignored Husband Jamie and didn’t seem to want to talk to me either. His dog, however, was very friendly and just goes to disprove that animals/owners cliche. Anyway, my point (and I do have one)? Is it evil of me to feel a bit of ‘haha!’ when I hear that My Perfect Cousin (no not the song) is currently living in a council flat on his lonesome and is slightly estranged from his children (and more than estranged from one of them so there are at least two different mothers from what I could gather) while I, the immoral Evil Gay One, is living happily married in a three bedroom house that we own? Not that I think this makes me superior to anybody else. It’s just nice to see the judgemental people be in a position that they would find highly judge-able if it were happening to somebody else. I blame the parents!

While at the parentals we learnt that The Daily Mail is outraged that some police officers have been posting funny pictures of themselves in uniform on Facebook when they should have been out and about catching criminals. I don’t know who these police think they are, having a bit of fun in a quiet moment during what must be a rather stressful time at work. I say ban all computers! They are statistically proven to give you cancer and make unmarried women 3 times more likely to get up the duff, leaving them taking our taxi-paying monies to bring up their ASBO babies as we all know. Stop these evil Facebooks at once!

The pilot of the ‘reimagined’ Bionic Woman has been watched. It was not bad actually, and was exactly how I thought it would be. Bartender Lady Zoe From Eastenders As An American lives with her stroppy deaf sister Anne From Arrested Development and is frakking her college lecturer, as all American telly students do. Then whoops a big truck hits their car and he has a few scratches but she wakes up in the Big Secret Location That Is Not A Real Hospital and does the “why can’t I feel my legs?” thing. Oh dear, College Lecturer Who She Is Frakking is involved in Shady Secret Organisation With Morally Grey Areas and has replaced her legs and one arm (plus an eye and other bits) with funky bionic parts like in that 1970s teevee show. So she gets a bit upset, buggers off in a bionic running scene and meets Starbuck From BSG Who Is Evil who just so happens to have been driving that truck that smooshed her up and just so happens to be The Previous Bionic Woman Who They Thought Was Dead. Evil Bionic Starbuck and Bionic Zoe From Eastenders have this weird kind of lesbiany flirty thing in the bar where she still works and then end up having the Obligatory Chick Fight (In The Rain) for a bit, as you do in these kind of things. Secret Grey Morallled Organisation tries the softly softly approach to get Bionic Zoe From Eastenders to become their new agent but she tells them to frakk off. Meanwhile, a shady man with a foreign accent threatens Chief Tyrol From BSG who works in a top secret prison and lo and behold a Very Evil Man is mysteriously released and they plot a Secret Very Bad Thing… then it goes all ‘to be continued.’

So now you know. It’s kind of Alias meets Coyote Ugly meets Spider-Man.

I was wondering how Bionic Woman is going to cope with having her non-bionic arm repeatedly broken in those big bionic fight scenes every week. Hmmm…

Another new Sia song has leaked. Messy!

News alert! While having dinner and watching BBC News 24 a very fat woman talked about how the floods affected her house until a ‘breaking news’ graphic appeared onscreen: Mike Reid has only gone and died! So here’s our mini tribute to the great cockernee man, a few YouTube clips that we lurve:



Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!

I also made a quiz about me on Facebook. If you like that sort of thing you know where it is.

My brain has been zapped going to Groundhog Day Land, sorry, Essex. It’s always the same and it gives me allergies for some reason. Bloody countryside! Highlights included the baby bird that lives in the airing cupboard being fed, a look at the rebuilt well (yes those things full of water)in the garden and a lot of very lovely cakes. Throw in some of the usual moments like my sister being in bed past lunchtime, my dad not managing to last an hour without saying something offensive , my cat allergies making me all funny, almost falling asleep on the sofa, some M25 Very Bad Drivers and a lot of cups of tea and you have the Essex Famerlee Day Out. The only real surprise was seeing a brief appearance of David Cross on the telly as Men In Black was on.

Talking of comedy and that kind of thing from an American perspective, I like this thing that Ben Baker guided me towards yesterday:

It’s funny because it’s true. As I know only too well.

We lost an hour in bed and went to Essex for a belated Mothers’ Day today. That’s mothers in the plural sense as we have one each. Like most other people. So double Essex meant a lot of time in the car, admiring the marvellous Essex graffiti such as our favourite which is ‘Cock Bum Willy’ on a building near my parents’ house. Such class and inspiration there. We picked up my mum, nearly running over a stupid pheasant on the way, and found that my sister was in bed as usual, brother 1 (the one who is not horrible) was at work and brother 2 was, how shall I put it, eating more than his fair share of warm oaty cereal. My dad hates going shopping or going anywhere really so it was a mothery trip… We picked up Husband Jamie’s mum and brother and went off to Southend On Sea, home of Dan: The Art School Year(s).
Southend is a bit of a shithole really but I have loads of happy memories of it. I’m amazed that I can remember much of it at all as The Art School Year(s) was also the year of chemical darkroom work which tended to rot my braincells. That and the booze of course. Bloody students. I spent a year roaming the streets with a video camera, filming random seaside town life and overlapping the images with weird noises. Like you do. I also dressed one of my art colleagues up as a tramp and made a rather crummy bit about the homeless for a project. I was such a fraud and a lazy git too, but it was studenty times after all. Don’t even ask me about the shit movie with 70s funk music starring a character inspired by one of the settings on the outdated camera, involving a flipflop on a stick, a balaclava and a strategically placed pingpong ball as I am trying to forget that one.
The goth/chav division is strong in Southend. The goths have developed some odd sub-groups including the very local incarnation that consistsof hairdye (black), eyeliner(black) and Nirvana t-shirts (black) paired with a scowl and Very Long Leather Coat. Like some kind of grumpy superhero. Without fighting any crime as it’s too much hassle and pressure from sicuety to conform and that. It just looks silly but at least they aren’t running up and down the high street off their faces on cheap lager beer shouting at pigeons and seagulls. God I miss that place.
We had the authentic lunch of fish and chips except I had a dry cheese and onion pastie as I am one of them vegetablearyan freaks. The baked beans gave me much needed moisture. Made in a cafe and served up by an old lady who used a papery notepad to take our order. With ketchup from a squeezy thing. You don’t get that in Fancy London! We then had 99s and made a mess. Mmmm…
Almost ran over a grouse on the way to dropping my mum home. This makes it sound like they live in a game park or something. She had forgotten to take her housekeys, as you do, so another detour was needed… and eventually we got home and were rather tired.

My rubbish photoshop tribute to our day out. Marvellous!