Tangents From Listening To Too Many Records
The view was familiar yet not so, the valley and its village, grey upon green or no colour at all. In summer the three of us would hard-pedal up the old drovers’ track, the incline sharpening, at least one eye on the first to give in and dismount. Cheap jokes and playful insults, spinning lies … Continue reading By Gallop’s Graves, A Hollow – A Ghost Story for Christmas
Earlier this week, the prime minster visited a large, former train station in Manchester, where he announced the cancellation of a high-speed rail line to Manchester to an audience missing many because on the day in question there were no trains from, or to, Manchester. Hold on… that’s the type of sentence that, were you … Continue reading Everything is Broken. I Blame the Woman Who Put That Cat in the Bin.
In the bleak midwinter. The shared complicity of our shitty Christmas. Shitmass. Merry Shitmass. And a great pestilence had fallen on the land; who’d have thought that the end times would be so mundane? It’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead, and this place reminds me of Santa’s workshop, except it … Continue reading From Contagion to Self-Isolation: A Christmas Covid Carol.
It’s been quite the year for Rudy Giuliani. First his haunting, eerily convincing portrayal of sex pest Rudy Giuliani in that hard-hitting Borat drama, followed by his lead role in screwball comedy Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in which he plays idiot lawyer Rudy Giuliani, manically barking out baseless election-rigging conspiracy theories during a press conference … Continue reading The End is the Beginning is the End. Or Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Now that we’ve defeated Covid-19 by – *checks notes* – pretending that we’ve defeated Covid19, we’re off to our next existential crisis, in which we mobilise platoons of Billy Brownshirts to protect our statues from rampaging hordes of imaginary Antifas armed with grappling hooks and bits of string. And don’t worry too much if … Continue reading Gladrags and Body Bags. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The ‘Rona.
So; how we all doing? Teaching yourself to play the clavichord in all that unforeseen free time we have? Cowering in a cupboard at the prospect of visiting the supermarket? Preparing for another game of Russian roulette in the care home you work in? Or maybe you’re lying in a mass grave on Hackney Marshes, … Continue reading Postcard from a Pandemic
2019. It’s been a hoot. Or if not that – for hoots suggest fun, and/or owls – then at least fascinating to rubberneck, the political story arc driving itself off its hubris cliff in an idiot carriage fashioned from Battenburg cake and duck vomit, time after time after time. Curled up on the sofa with … Continue reading Dos Dedos Mis Amigos: Autopsy of an Election
Last weekend I watched as some local Dickensian urchins senselessly vandalised the front garden of a harmless, little old man. They were stomping on pot plants, urinating in the ornamental pond, ripping up the herbaceous border, and I chased them away but only with the implicit threat of a minority Labour administration propped up by … Continue reading Written in the Prophecies. Or on Scratchcards: Thoughts on an Election #6
How many children does the prime minister have? No-one seems to know. Not even the prime minister. All the womens, they want a go on BoJo’s upstanding member. Little Lord FauntleFuck, his tickle stick primed and ready. Does he tour the country in a Luton van, a stained mattress in the back? He pulls to … Continue reading Boris Johnson’s Offspring Numberwang: Thoughts on an Election #5
Midway through pretty much every election campaign, once the ratings have slumped and the writing team responsible for the whole sorry mess start to struggle under the weight of all those narcotics they’ve ingested, there’s usually a point where a special guest star is introduced, forcing the story in a new and kinky direction. The … Continue reading Spirit, Can You Hear Us? Thoughts on an Election #4
This is the third week that I’ve been writing about Brexit, and the election we have to have because we can’t have Brexit, and the gaping void at the heart of everything but especially the election, and Brexit, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, ‘Come … Continue reading Calling All Exorcists: Thoughts on an Election #3
On election day in 2010, Nigel Farage had his plane crash. It was funny and also rubbish – two things that a plane crash shouldn’t be. In the February of 2019, Ross Thompson, the former Conservative member for Aberdeen South, got drunk in a House of Commons bar and started grabbing men’s genitals. Which ran … Continue reading Nothing Can Divide Us (apart from the Heptagonal Shrapnel in our Bloody Foreheads): Thoughts on an Election #2
The other day, on the pedestrianised bit of the High Street, an elderly, constipated gentleman whom I did not know dropped his trousers, and there, amidst the shoppers and the vape stores and the hordes of canvassing Evangelical Christians, he began to squat. With a grimace on his face and perspiration on his brow the … Continue reading All the Pretty Things are Going to Hell: Thoughts on Brexit, and the Election.
It’s all to do with allegory. Ghost stories aren’t about the ghost. Rather, they serve as mirrors, reflecting and refracting who we are and what we are, where we’ve been, where we’re headed. Low have always been a band for late autumn or winter – which is when ghost stories work best. Something to do … Continue reading LGM’s Album of the Year: Double Negative by Low
It’s Sunday evening. You’ve got work in the morning, and therefore you have the fear. A giant, all-encompassing fear. The FEAR. Here it comes. AARRGGHH. “Hello, Sailor,” it purrs. Right before it drops its trousers… Yup; you need something comforting. A sedative. Something to cloak the fact that you have but a short time on … Continue reading I got bored, so reviewed every episode of Countryfile
Lazer Guided Melody - Tangents From Listening To Too Many Records 