We apologise for the lack of comedy in this blog recently which is due to the author fracturing his funny bone in a recent Zeppellin-racing accident. We are delighted, however, to announce that the old, unfunny B P Perry has now been destroyed and Norwegian engineers are working round the clock to construct a new, funnier B P Perry “så snart som mulig”.
Thankyou for your patience at this mirthless juncture. Normal service will be resumed shortly … la oss hør det for Norge!
Sir/Madam
I note with incredulity that your latest advertising slogan is ‘Love Every Second’. After a recent trip to Leeds, and having used your trains in the past, I thought you might like to know the seconds I didn’t love about your service.
I didn’t love every second of the journey to Leeds where I had to stand sandwiched in a corridor with God-knows how many others. I didn’t love every second I had to breathe in the stench of excrement and urine from the toilet in the aforementioned corridor. I didn’t love every second of the 3180 seconds I had to wait on Leeds train station for one of your overcrowded trains to turn up. I also didn’t love every second I had to listen to hip-hop music from someone else’s mobile phone because your guards are too lilly-livered to tell teenagers to stop disturbing the peace. I also didn’t love every second I had to sit in a carriage that wasn’t clean.
Other seconds I’ve not loved? The seconds of fury I’ve endured after being told I’ve got to pay a full standard fare because I didn’t have the time to buy my ticket at the station – I don’t love the seconds it takes to realise I’m being punished for having the temerity to turn up with just enough time to jump aboard one of your trains, and I don’t love the seconds of work I have to do to claw back the extra money you’ve made me spend as a result of your punishment policy.
More? Well I certainly didn’t love every second of the journey I took from London to Manchester where, after I’d paid full-fare, I was forced to sit on a filthy carpet next to a door breathing in the foul odours of yet another dirty toilet on a boiling hot train with poor ventilation because you people are happy to overcrowd your trains to levels it would be illegal to transport cattle under. There was not much love for the many many seconds that arduous journey took, or for the hundreds of seconds it took to recover from the crick in my neck and the cramp in my legs.
May I humbly suggest you amend your advertising slogan? ‘Love Every Second When We’re Not Treating You Like A Dog’ perhaps?
B P Perry etc.
A growing sense of unease has crept over me since the events of Tuesday. If an arsehole with a chip on his shoulder can walk into a police station, tell them a cock-and-bull story and be believed regardless of the little matter of having no supporting evidence, what’s to stop you or I doing the same? I’ve crossed swords with a few fuckers in my time … why shouldn’t I just get them arrested? If the police are such dullards they’ll happily believe any old shit, why not get a few of the old enemies rounded up and tossed in the cells? And isn’t that simply terror?
Can you really use the law to carry out a vendetta? And if the answer’s ‘yes’ doesn’t that mean that a very important instrument of the state doesn’t work properly? If they can shoot innocent foreigners point-blank in the face, beat the crap out of women who have already been restrained, arrest anyone with a beard and brown skin on a whim, and kidnap women from their own homes without informing their families, what else can they do?
Like I say, a growing sense of unease is creeping over me … unease that is leading to seditious thoughts.
So …
Yesterday morning I went to the shop to get some orange juice. T’other half was inside the house merrily working away so I didn’t think to take my keys. I came back from the shop, rang the buzzer and there was no answer. I went round the back of the house to attract Sharon’s attention … she wasn’t there. I went back round the front, rang the buzzer again and again and again – still no answer.
“Hello?” thinks I, “What’s the game ‘ere then eh?”
To be honest, I was a bit stumped. I’d been away for about fifteen minutes and in that time my girlfriend had disappeared off the face of the Earth. So I sat outside on the wall and waited for her to come back. She didn’t come back. Three hours later (and pretty bored of sitting on a wall by now) I enlisted the help of top-floor John and together we managed to break in through the back window. Eighteen answer-phone messages awaited me – most were from Sharon’s boss and father, both increasingly worried about her sudden disappearance.
I waited another hour then reported her disappearance to the police. Shortly thereafter a curt, unfriendly-sounding bitch rang me up and informed me, with the subtlety of a bull elephant in china shop, that Sharon had been …
ARRESTED ON A WARRANT FROM LINCOLNSHIRE POLICE! HALELUJAH! HUZZAH! OF COURSE SHE HAS! WASN’T IT OBVIOUS?!
So I rang up t’other half’s father who’d also been informed of his daughter’s arrest and together we managed, with a lot of detective work, to find out where the Nazi bastards were keeping her. I’d been led up the garden path after the unfriendly-sounding baggage had informed me she’d been taken to Lincolnshire but eventually managed to squirrel out the truth that she was, in fact, still in Sheffield. Well almost in Sheffield as they’d made sure to drive her out to the most isolated police station they had – the swine.
I got through to said station’s custody suite and was told that Sharon was being interviewed and would be released shortly … and no, I couldn’t speak to her. Some time later Sharon rang me up to say she’d been released without charge. I jumped in a taxi, went and got her and took her home.
She wasn’t, in all honesty, in the best of moods.
So what, I know you’re dying to know, was the reason for my missus’s Stasi-style kidnapping and incarceration? A little back-story is necessary at this juncture I fancy …
Two years ago Sharon was offered the manager’s position in a city-centre pub. The job came with free accommodation and was better paid than her previous position working for British Telecom, so she jumped at the chance. I went along with it because, even though I was none too friendly with the landlord, I’ll eat my own feet if it means a free roof over my head, mercenary son-of-a-gun that I am.
Well it was a nightmare. The landlord turned out to be a wife-beating, psychopathic drunk who specialised in bullying women. In the space of a month he managed to drink his way through every penny of profit the pub made as well as whacking his missus about and refusing to let t’other half take breaks or at any time leave the pub (she worked from eight in the morning until midnight most days … y’know, that old ‘concentration camp work ethic’). When it came to an audit it was discovered over three grand was unaccounted for and, being the sort to see blame in everyone other than himself, this louse decided to blame Sharon for the financial discrepancy. Two days later he sacked her and we were unceremoniously turfed out of the pub.
The pub itself sputtered on for another four months in which time the bastard landlord ploughed through thirteen thousand quid before doing a runner leaving his battered partner with a business dying on its arse. She, being of limited mental capacities, was unable to run a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a piss-up in a pub with no beer, no money, and no customers. The pub shut down. It was later completely refurbished and turned into yet another Walkabout clone. The landlord, as far as I know, is now a tramp.
The sting in the tail was that the landlord, before disappearing into the gutter where he belongs, had gone to the police and made an accusation that Sharon had stolen the pub’s money – he’d also thrown in that she’d stolen vast quantities of booze … in for a penny, in for a pound and all that jazz. Unaware that the police, despite having no evidence other than the word of a convicted felon (two years inside for beating the shit out of his wife), had issued a warrant for her arrest, Sharon got on with her life and went on to get a better job with people who don’t drink and slap females about professionally.
Two years later she’s arrested in her own home and dragged off to the cells. She’s made to sit in an empty concrete room for six hours doing nothing whilst two officers from Lincolnshire Police drive up to interrogate her. They arrive, it is soon decided the entire thing is a load of shit. She’s released – case closed. Oh, and at no point had the police bothered to inform anyone where she was … even though they’d lied to her and said they’d been in touch with me – which they hadn’t done.
After her release she was dumped in the middle of nowhere. She had no money on her. Even though she hadn’t done anything no apology was offered, and neither was a lift. She was left stranded at the police station and I had to go and get her, spending fourteen quid on taxis and trams in the process.
So …
In this country you can be arrested for no fucking reason, dragged to the middle of nowhere, kept locked up in a room for hours with nothing to do except piss in a metal bucket, be interrogated about shit that never happened, and then be released without so much as a ’sorry’ and left to fend for yourself in the back of beyond.
Am I the only person to think there is something, well, 1984 about all this? Welcome to the Brave New World.
Sheffield train station has gone no smoking for my ’safety and comfort’. Not being able to have a fag on the platform before a two hour train journey will increase my comfort apparently. Not being able to smoke increases my safety as I’m no longer able to set fire to the concrete and burn myself and my fellow passengers to death, etc. etc. etc.
May I suggest my safety and comfort might be massively increased by not delaying my fucking train by fifty minutes making me freeze my arse off, by not charging me full price to stand in a corridor next to a stinking toilet because there’s no seats, or by not squeezing me onto a train that’s so fucking full it’d be illegal to transport us if we were cows?
It’s just a thought, but there are a million and one things the rancid, thieving cartels who run our piece-of-shit railways could do to increase my ’safety and comfort’. Stopping me smoking in the open fucking air they do not own isn’t top of the list.
The bastards.
Here’s m’latest illustration for Tits ‘n’ Cars International. I can’t remember what the story’s about that it illustrates … something to do with Christmas if memory serves.
Aaaaaah! There’s nothing quite like looking out of your front-room window to see a fifteen year-old blind dog crapping all over the daffodils – we’re up to our knees in it ‘ere. The man upstairs has taken time off from his job as a roving vagabond (which has at least shut that fucking cat up … for now) leavin’ his hound plenty of time to flood the front of the house, the side of the house, and the pavements around the house with gallons and gallons of shit. Everyone who walks up our road stands in it and trails it into their houses, but has the beast upstairs even noticed? Why no! He’s too busy experimenting with ever more lethal strains of marijuana to concern himself with day-to-day ephemera such as kids going blind or old folk slipping over and breaking their necks. The straggle-haired, dope-smoking hippy bastard.
“But Ben?” you ask, “Have you done anything about it other than moan to a bunch of disinterested people who stumble upon your site because you keep writing the word ‘fuck’ every five minutes? You blackguard!!”
Of course I bloody-well haven’t! I’m British! I’ll sit moaning and mumbling about this until that stinking, half-dead hound kicks the bucket … but I won’t actually say anything – it’s simply not done to make a scene etc etc. I’ll just carry on my daily life, floating in a mountain of shit … BY GOD I SHOULD BE SHOT!!
KISS have just released KISS 4K – a comic book the size of a skyscraper that costs more than the GDP of Germany to own. Telling the story of KISS’s quest to consume all the money in the world, the comic sees the four members of the band transform into be-muscled uber-bankers with their leader Gene Simmons as a big, fat, greedy Chief Cashier with an awful wife and a lust for financial adventure. The first issue sees Gene (or Corpulento as he’s referred to in the comic) rename the continent of Africa ‘AfriKISS’ and then charge its unfortunate inhabitants an arm and a leg for living there. Those who refuse to pay the new tax (or KISSgeld) are forced to listen to the four KISS solo albums until shit comes out of their ears and they pay up, weeping like infants. Meanwhile Paul Stanley (The Profiteer) secures the copyright to William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, renames it KISS MaKbeth 3000 and sends out backdated invoices to anyone who has ever performed it causing theatrical companies across the world to go bankrupt. Sadly, this doesn’t help them much as KISS own the rights to bankruptcy – or KISSruptcy. Elsewhere Ace Frehley goes mad and Peter Criss does something else.
Speaking at the launch of KISS 4D at the recently redeveloped Mount KISSmore, overweight shagsack Simmons told the press,
“This comic is the best comic in the world – its price reflects that fact. If fans of the band cannot afford the price of this comic they can buy a KISScounted version priced at $1000 per page which is exactly the same as the expensive version, minus the ending,” he said, “Now pay up and get off my fucking mountain.”
I don’t know if you happened to catch Animal Farm on the television, but if you didn’t you missed a treat. Not only were there glow-in-the-dark rabbits, featherless chickens, and salmon genetically altered to grow into sharks, but also cows made from nothing but muscle with five hundred buttocks. The programme’s purpose was to educate you about the potential benefits and hazards of genetic engineering and was a glimpse into a marvellous future where anything is possible as long as you don’t give a fuck about messing around with nature (and after watching this, believe me, I don’t).
From what I understand (and what I understand about science can be written on the back of a miniature postage stamp attached to the right-hand corner of an actual postage stamp – so I could be wrong ‘ere), boffins in science labs can cross just about anything with anything else. The aforementioned rabbits were crossed with jellyfish and produced super-funky glowin’ rabbits that I assume will be employed in the disco/drug-abuse industries to produce ‘freak-outs’. The cows were crossed with steam-hammers and will no doubt live out their muscle-bound lives standing outside nightclubs denying entry to those dangerous individuals who try to enter such places wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Unless I’m barking up the wrong tree, the possibilities are endless! Frankenstein lives! And it’s about fucking time!
Imagine the boundless possibilities! Elephants crossed with maggots to produce giant, legless Elemaggots that hatch into hideous giant flies with trunks, big flapping ears and peanut-based dietary requirements! Wasps crossed with spiders crossed with rats crossed with sharks to make the most frightening, bad-tempered critter ever to walk (or swim!) the Earth! Dogs crossed with grasshoppers that make green hopping dogs of a revolting appearance but lovely temperament! TARANTULANTEATERS! BUTTERDILLOS! DVDEEP!
I want this future NOW! I’m not satisfied with the paltry shower of second-rate animals nature has provided us with! I want beasts of an awe-inspiring nature that put the fear of fucking God into you and make you run for your lives! Science, if we allow it, will deliver a future where anything goes and where population will be controlled not by war, or famine, or disease but by crazed Gorrilorpians with giraffe necks and eight legs! This can only be a good thing! All hail our future animal overlords!
So Justin Hawkins failed in his quest to represent the UK at Crappenfest 2007. His song, I Went Up Brokeback Mountain And Came Back Down With The Clap, wasn’t awful enough to take the prize – that honour went to a shower of shit collectively titled Scooch whose song, Barbie Girl Hamburger Beefburger Buttfuggin’ Baby Beefburger Bitch, managed to top last year’s Kiddie-Diddlin’ Yeah Yeah Yeahin breaking new ground in the field of gob-smacking awfulness.
Hawkins stormed off in disgust, though in all honesty he shouldn’t have been surprised. The Great British Public, lest we forget, are the very same maladjusted lunatics who helped propel the likes of Joe Dolce, Jonathan King, Mr. Blobby, Aqua and Steps to the top of the charts … why he thought his attempt at an actualpop song would win their hearts when they had the monumentally deranged Scooch to choose from is anyone’s guess. Storming off because your pile of crap isn’t quite as crappy as someone else’s pile of crap makes you look like an arse … and to be fair, Justin Hawkins doesn’t need to make himself look more of an arse than he’s already achieved in the past.
Mind you, at least he didn’t look like he was about to hang himself, like wot Brian Harvey did.
