The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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New £500 note to be a yard wide, printed on vellum made from bat’s scrotums.

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So the new quid coin is going to look exactly like an old thrupp’ny bit. Stunning. How innovative.

We should throw it open to the Massive to propose some new currency designs. Any PhotoShoppers here who can suggest a new coin of the realm, or a new note to capture our imagination? A twenty with a picture of Kanye West up to his chin in mud on the back and Kim face down in gloop on the front? How about a new note altogether, worth minus 5 pounds, with Osborne’s grinning mug on both sides?

So they have installed a double. But he’s just a Putin lookalike! The sneer is wrong.

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Play Nikolay Baskov & Sofi’s current Mockba chart hit “Ty Moe Schast’ye” backwards at half-speed underwater and you can clearly hear the chanting; “Vladimir is dead, Vladimir is dead.” And now we’re expected to believe that this is really him, back in circulation, when we know the KGB always had at least 2 clones ready and waiting to step in for any operative who fell in the course of duty. I ask you, do they take us for fools?

What’s your favourite conspiracy theory this month?

A trifle for a logical Friday:

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What’s the oldest item of clothing you’re wearing RIGHT NOW?

I’ll start, and I bet it’s the oldest clobber on the block; I’m wearing the leather belt I bought in Parikia on Paros in the Cyclades in 1978. I’ve worn it almost every day for the last 37 years. No wonder Greece is in financial trouble, they have no concept of built-in obsolescence.

Can you beat that for age, and are you wearing something that could tell few tales too?

Here’s another one of the tunes that Noel ripped off.

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Put the old See For Miles records 10th anniversary sampler on to play this morning, mostly because I hankered after hearing Marsh Hunt’s fabulous cover of “Walk On Gilded Splinters”, which is the second track. I let it carry on playing, and my attention drifted as I got on with few boring weekend tasks… until my ears pricked up again because the Kink’s “Waterloo Sunset” came on, and then the next track started and at the chorus I wondered, from the other room, why the office stereo had decided to play an Oasis song….

Anyone fancy a huge block of Moroccan kif? Souvenir leather pouf? Fresh spices?

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I’m planning a quick trip to Marrakesh to bring back a huge block of decent hashish. I figure if I fly via Gatwick it should be no problem at all; Special Branch and all the other officials there are obviously having a breather this week, and have switched off to the extent that three teenage girls can swan past them on their way to Turkey for a jihadi hen night. It beggars belief.

A mere 13 years before our “democracy” sinks without trace. Let’s party!

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Stepping out of my Time Machine this morning, having popped into the latter half of the century to get some REALLY fresh milk for breakfast from the village GrubOmatic, I chanced upon a copy of the day’s newskindle. Scanning the main story, I was reminded that the UK as a political entity will cease to exist in just a few years time, to languish under military rule for many years:

Back in good old 2015, tucking into buttered crumpets and real coffee over a printed copy of the Grauniad, I pondered that we could take all sorts of liberties with our politics in the coming election, reasoning that it won’t really matter anyway, given the approaching coup.

Then I thought that perhaps it’s this very sense of hopelessness to come that has somehow already seeped back from the future, colliding with today’s own political torpor and disgust to create a brew that will likely deliver an ineffective cobble of a government, unable to prevent any slide towards totalitarianism.

As my preferred tactic of rounding up the current Westminster establishment, dumping them all in the desert somewhere in the north of Syria with one shared » Continue Reading.