Loose Cannon

God's honest truth I will write off anything I put my hands on, especially if it has a steering wheel, an engine and a gear box! Any motor vehicle! Give it to me and I will write it off.

Give me a Russian tank - I will squash it like a gnat!
Give me a German U-Boat - I will deposit it on the muggy bottom of the deepest puddle of Wiltshire!
Give me an armed vehicle with a bullet-proof exhaust and steel reinforced bumpers - it will melt in my hands like a dollop of butter on a frying pan!

No! I don't control cars! I can't control cars! I’ve no time for such trivia!
I don't know what the gear stick is for other then to rest my left hand on, or the rearview mirror other than to check my makeup in (and also to see if the leather-clad hank behind me on that lovely shiny motorbike is smiling at me).
I ride the clutch like I would a wild mustang on The Last Mohican movie set.
I rev-up so badly that my engines howls in terror.
I break so suddenly that the entire content of my handbag flies over to the front seat of the car in front of me.
I refuse to mind the pedestrians. They’re a nuisance entering zebra crossings at their leisure, smirking at the poor motorist who has to give them way, procrastinating, asking to be run over. They should be banned on the road, consigned to pavements, shopping malls and cycle paths.
From under a YIELD sign in a tiny country lane I enter a dual carriage artery bravely straight into the path of a heaving truck, a bulldozer even, and it is entirely up to him to avoid a collision by swiftly swerving into a ditch. You may ask why he should go to such lengths…
…Because I AM WORTH IT!

I am a BAD DRIVER…
So shoot me!
Crucify me!
Whip me!
Put a funny black hood on my head and electrocute me!
Send me to Guantanamo!
… just please don’t ask me to take a bus there. Lend me your car whilst mine is... um... indisposed at this very unfortunate moment. I will meet you there at the front gate of Guantanamo under the banner that says “ARBEIT MACHT FREI”
I will be there, I promise, to serve my sentence for reckless driving, pedestrian harassment, public disorder… you name it. I confess I am a serial car killer. But please, please don’t torture me with public transport! I will be good.
I don't know how to use a bus, for God's sake!

France, our dearest, beautiful, graceful and coquettish France! The mother of Asterix le Gaulois, of butter croissant, of underarm hairois, Arsene Lupin, the guillotine, and short men wearing white leggings and oversized hats with rosettes! She is all but a ghost now.

Joan de Arc of Europe, she used to have visions of grandeur once, she used to lead masses into battle on a white horse, with her hair loose and one of her breasts popping our of her bra (or was it Marseille?). She used to dance cancan, flashing her knickers (or their absence), wriggling her bottom under layers of twirling frills and singing L’Amour in a seductive, husky voice drenched in red wine.

Today, she is a ghost, floating in the attic, watching wide-eyed those who live in her erstwhile home. She is shocked to see them eat with their hands, plunging their fingers in a cow’s skull to get to the delicacy of its brain. She flinches – and her image goes into a transitory flicker – as she observes women not only don’t flash their knickers, but they don’t even flash their faces, only the whites of their eyes.

She drifts away into the never-land of her past, further and further away with every day, she becomes only a memory, and one day even that memory bursts like a rainbow-coloured bubble.

This was the last in the long line of French Revolutions…

I was planning to maintain dignified silence during the farce of American elections since it is absolutely of no consequence which hand-puppet the Neo-nazi Masters of America choose to cast as their starring arsehole for the next four years. However, something bugs me in the McCain’s profile so much that I just have to rise from my peaceful slumber and swat the damn bug so it stops buzzing at last.

His credentials seem to lie mainly in his so called service to the country by way of his “heroic” participation in the Vietnam War – “Later that year while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese.” (Wikipedia).

It appears that based on his war effort, he can be trusted with the highly morally demanding post of the future President of America. The Americans must regard him as one of them, the so called boy-next-door. They all must have great empathy with their hero: he fought, he was shot down and kept prisoner by the wicked Vietnamese terrorists. Ooo-ha!

All I find slightly disconcerting in his saga of heroism is this:
1. He was flying a bomber, about to go and drop napalm on some hapless Vietnamese village whose inhabitants begged to disagree with his views on world order; and
2. He fought in a war that had been condemned worldwide as unjust, cruel and serving no purpose other than establishing (with pitiful effect) American hegemony in a distant part of the world where America had no inherent interests to protect.

So here we have a callous executioner, murderer of civilians from an episode of American history of which even the Americans are (or should be) ashamed, and against all odds, it is on the strength of that criminal record that Mr. McCain rises to Office. His spin-doctors use that very shaming part of his CV to appeal to the American nation to win their support and trust. What does that say about the prevalent moral standards in that nation I dare not contemplate.

I think Britain should learn something from her prodigal daughter - If you want a strong leader who ain't afraid of no blood even if it is on his own hands, release one of hardened lifers from your well-overcrowded prisons and send him to 10 Downing Street. The polls will skyrocket when he starts telling the nation how he butchered his victims and how badly he was then treated in jail. It will be so much more interesting than talking about being cautiously optimistic about an economy that is dying one-hell of a boring, natural death.

Back to our Horrific Horror Movie characters. They are all waiting to get out of the closet. England has been scratching the door from the inside, complaining of stale air and dampness. No wonder – England is a Mummy.

England used to be a gentleman-explorer wearing a top hat and a pleasant smile when, full of hope and expectations, he was leaving the friendly (but wet and miserable) shores of British Isles to sail and take over the world. Which he did.

He followed all the right paths of justifiable conquest and diplomatic channels to scramble to power and achieve his lofty purpose nicknamed “Rule Britannia”. In order to rule however, and rule efficiently, he had to civilise the savages so that they could understand the principles of the Rule of Law and social order. Alas, the savages misinterpreted his teachings (obstinate wild things that they were) and promptly elevated him to the status of revered God, whereafter they decided to empirically explore the idea of his immortality. Unfortunately the experiment went wrong and the bastards, against their best scientific intentions, managed to smother our Englishman to death.

Never mind, they said, God is dead, let’s pretend he isn’t or there will be riots and unrest. So they took out his guts and other internal offal (which they reverently consumed), bathed him in scented vinegar and wrapped him tightly in bandages made of only natural fibre. All through the entire process, our Englishman didn’t bat an eyelid and kept a stiff upper lip (which shouldn’t surprise, considering he was dead) and from then on the English became world-famous for their stiff upper lip.

After the mummification, our misunderstood God was carried into a nice comfortable chamber in the heart of a pyramid. Some obscenities have been written in hieroglyphics all over the walls of his chamber by the most talented local graffiti artists. As the obscenities were pretty explicit, the linguists of latter day pretended they could not decipher them – they were too embarrassed – until of course, that Frenchman came and sacrileged the illusion out of pure French spite towards the English.

Centuries later the Mummy was excavated and brought back home to be displayed in the British Museum. A whole retinue of chieftains, scribes, astrologers, street beggars, peddlers and all sorts accompanied their old God to the Mother Country, and since he was long dead and buried, decided to settle down nearby the British Museum to keep him company, where they remain to this day.

The Englishman enjoys his peaceful rest (though since he is back, rheumatism has kicked in and he misses the sunshine and dry air of the desert. Secretly he wishes his remains could be borrowed by the Spanish Museum of Human History in Madrid. The weather there is immeasurably more mummy-friendly, but he naturally no longer has any say in how the British Museum or indeed the world is run so he keeps up his stiff upper lip).

Sometimes, American tourists come to take a few pictures of him, which irritates him beyond endurance but he is too much of a gentleman to say anything. He only resents the fact that for all his kind heart he is being represented in schools to little children (whom he adores)as the epitome of evil and in America they use his nicely clipped accent for all evil characters in Disney movies. Again, he won’t bat an eyelid, even though it hurts somewhere deep down where his guts used to be.

A few times he awoke to appear in two Hollywood movies, “Mummy” and “Mummy Returns”, but on each occasion he was exterminated by one Dalek called Brendan Fraser (good looking but alas an American).

With all eternity ahead of him, our mummified Englishman has only one worry – with all the shortages they may one day recycle his bandages to make environmentally friendly Sainsbury bags, and then they will discover the God-King is… naked.