Lights! Camera! Lift Off! Hold on, that's not right at all.

Coddle Pot

It's where I hang out now. Yup. Departed from the Arse, headed full blast towards a nice, safe commune with like-minded demi-gods. You should pop in and all that. There's less neon green!

No comments here, so you can reach me at the ould email address or by emailing me through Coddle Pot, should you wish to partake in feedback and that kind of carry-on. Be gentle. We've still got that new commune smell - lentils, beancurd, armpits. You know what I'm talking about, County Mayo!

The new blog...

... will be announced as something raring to go and delightfully readable shortly. Honest. No, honest. Honest as David Norris' twinkly little eyes.

The new blog has a name and an address and everything. I'm just not telling you yet. Gots to Hoover the curtains and divvy up the blogroll and all that. Oh yeah, and figure out how to post.

The moral of the story is: Stay Chooned. I haven't forgotten my sworn duties to put the fragments of oddments that roll around the back of my head into eloquent text.

Help! Help! We're being repressed!

Comments wound down, kids.

Y'know, if this new venture doesn't work, I'm going to look like a right gom. Either way, keep your nose twitchin' skywards for news. And if you need to contact me in the meantime, you know the email address. If you don't know the email address, you need to look right over there -----> for it. You gom.

Winding Down, Winding Down...

... as in, I should be. Shortly. And moving! Yes, to pastures more stylish and... more crowded. Ooh!

All going well, I should be covering up this Arse very soon and taking my alarming rants to a brand new platform and a brand new web address with some brand new buds. I was going to put up a few posts this week, but I'm saving my funnies for the launch of something bigger and better. Hopefully. I mean, fingers crossed. And all that.

So yeah, I'll be closing comments and shtuff soon. Stay tuned. And if, like Twink's beauty regime, it all goes hideously wrong, I'll just slink back in and we'll pretend none of this ever happened. Right?

I'm actually quite excited. I can tell because I've got chest pains and olfactory hallucinations.

I Still See His Little Face...

Yesterday, I shut the door in a Fine Gael candidate's face.

I didn't even give him a chance to launch the good ship Bullscutter. I balked and shook my head and said, "Oh, no. Fine Gael. Don't come near me." Dear Jesus, Kerry fucking Katona could have been more eloquent. There are so many things I could have said to express my deep mistrust for Fine Gael, and to explain why there's nothing he could have told me that would win him a vote. I don't vote right wing. I don't believe Fine Gael offer anything approximating legitimate alternative for this country. I disagree with the party standpoint on a lot of issues dear to me. All of this I could have explained, but I had coffee swiftly cooling and I hate being annoyed at home after a long, hard day breaking my arse at work fending off the slavering jaws of recession and impending doom. So instead I left him gaping, and looking not a little hurt, on the doorstep.

It goes against every white-hot fleck in my ranting mouth to be rude to people. Argumentative, yes; rude, no. I really do feel bad.

Inordinately bad. Fine Gael are people too, despite what my mammy says.

No, honest, chick-lit is easy. Show me the money.

Ally has it all; the job at Grazia magazine where she writes about shoes and all that, the sexy and powerful boyfriend with blue eyes who wears suits every day, the chic apartment with underfloor heating and black granite worktops in the kitchen she's too damn slim and full of Frappucinos to use. But when stubbly artist who wears untucked t-shirts Alejandro walks into her life, she finds herself thinking that maybe her pristine existence was missing something: adventure. Within a month she's shooting heroin while discussing death and Gasper Noe movies...

Ahem.

Sally works hard at being the perfect wife and mother. Sexy advertising exec husband Adrian is still as hot as a Stanley oven for her, and she's already had him feck three adorable and high-achieving buns in... er, said oven. But with her daughter's new teacher Marco giving her ears as well as eyes, and an impending visit by the mother-in-law from hell, can Sally keep it all together in time for the Calor Gas Housewife Of The Year? Gin helps, but with Sally slowly sinking into sticking of her own piss, spread eagled on the kitchen floor while her teenage son's best mate...

Shite.

Callie, Jilly and Polly made a vow at seventeen that whoever was the most successful at thirty, according to criteria they determined while under the influence of teenage stupidity and soggy romantic ideals no one with a functioning fucking brain can stick to, would earn the incandescent jealousy of the other two, which after all is all wimmin want. Now Callie is a successful entrepreneur with the glamorous kind of anorexia, Jilly is PA to Seb Scott the edgy director, and Polly is married with kids and has run to fat and boredom. Polly is dreading the one-upmanship at their reunion holiday at Spa Chic in NYC, but sometimes, she finds, what you want is what you had all along. Incensed by her lack-of-shit-giving about their size zero frames and superstar lifestyles, Callie and Jilly create the ultimate nightmare to put Polly back in her box, the smug bitch. Poisoned, gangraped, disoriented, can Polly pull her life back together in time for her flight home...

Wow. Maybe my mam is right. There are some things I'm just not as good as Cecilia Ahern at.

... And Even More Politicked Off

I am sick shit of politicians. They've crawled from under rocks I didn't even know I had. Fucking upwardly-straining leech-like simperfucks. They weary me.

We got a phonecall at work the other day from a Cork City political candidate. Desperate to spin himself into something approximating state-paid gobshitery, he was enquiring on behalf of a could-be constituent as to when her service call, reported back in 2008, would be taken care of.

"Every time she asked your company to sort out the snags in her local authority house," he stated, "you let her down. Months and months have gone by, appointments missed, hair torn out, phonecalls unanswered... you have repeatedly gone back on your promises to her!"

"Are you referring to the snags she reported to us two weeks ago?" asked our customer service rep.

"It is TOO MUCH to put up with in this DAY AND AGE that local authority tenants should have to be treated like SECOND CLASS CIT... what?"

"Yes, two weeks ago," said the service rep. "I have the date here. As a matter of fact, the parts needed are due in to us today, and just as I told the tenant, repeatedly, as soon as I can confirm that the parts are in stock with us we'll be out to do her snag list."

"Oh. Well, can you check whether the parts have come in?"

"Not at this moment. But when they do, we will be on to that whinging, lying tenant to arrange a service call, not on to you, as you're not our client, and we don't know you from Adam, and we don't tend to give details on everyone else's jobs to random halfwits armed with elocution lessons and self-serving concern for the Little Man. Now fuck off, you offensively accomplished buffoon."

You know what pisses me off most about this smugly benevolent call-on-behalf-of-the-less-fortunate, though? The fact that because of a happy coincidence between the timing of the politician's call to us and the due date of the moaning, lying client's required parts, that bastard will now take the credit for pushing "Evil Company Inc" into hurrying up completion of a contract we were just about to complete anyway. And so he will get a vote out of it, and a bit of wheedling arse-licking to plump him up in the eyes of the arse-licker's buddies ... but isn't that how things work in Ireland? Minor favours done at politically advantageous intervals, alliances forged on a shared proficiency in the language of wink-wink-nudge-nudge? Go fuck off and do some real work, you blinkered gimps. Just. Fuck. Off.



*Please note that the politician I refer to hasn't been named not down to any respect on my part, but because I ain't putting my job on the line for his class of cunt any more than this rapid recession already has done.