Hurt

Twitter and Facebook have a lot to answer for. They’ve ruined the art of the put down.

My calling for more insults may sound strange in a week when journalist Alison Pearson reported an unknown comedian named Doug Stanhope for abusing her on Twitter, Radio presenter Richard Bacon told police of an internet troll who insulted him, and former footballer Stan Collymore watched Joshua Cryer get sentenced to 240 hours of community work for comments posted.

But I’m talking about the proper insult, one which leaves the recipient admiring his assailant for inventiveness, ingenuity and cleverness. Pearson’s abuser posted that he hoped her kids would get tetraplegia, Bacon’s stalker insulted his wife and infant son while fantasising about Bacon’s death, and Collymore’s opponent simply posted a vomitarium of racial slurs. Hardly clever, ingenious or inventive, and certainly not designed to leave anyone in admiration.

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that people who insult others on digital media tend to have nine fingers more than their total number of brain cells and therefore type nine words for every time they actually engage their thinking gear, or whether they just spend too much time on their own congratulating themselves on their sense of humour.

If digital trolls had any social contact whatsoever, people would instantly tell them that drawing beards on photos of ladies and boobs on pictures of men doesn’t really make you a comedian, no matter what Stanhope’s agent tells him. Guessing what other trolls have had to eat over the past few weeks, by looking at their stained clothes and matted beards, may pass for entertainment at the open source computer code writers’ weekly forum in the church hall but the rest of the world just doesn’t get it. You’re not funny, OK?

None of the people mentioned above will find themselves quoted in years to come as being the source of great new invective. None will be held up as a new Oscar Wilde.

One of my favourite insults was written many years ago when someone who talked a load of rubbish was described as being “an alimentary canal with a sphincter at both ends.” What a fantastic way to say “you talk sh*t”. It’s inventive, snappy and funny. When was the last time you found that level of insult on Facebook? We seem to have lost the art of the funny put down.

When I was younger, much, much younger, I once tried chatting up a girl at Glasgow University’s student disco. I must have been completely hopeless and persistent because I’ve always remembered her reply when I asked if I could drive her home. “No thanks, I’d be scared if you put your head out the window we’d be arrested for mooning.” Now, admit it, that’s clever. It may have been the only put down she had, she may have stolen it and she may have used it hundreds of times, but I smiled at her originality - if not her taste in men.

Churchill was brilliant at inventive put downs. My favourite of his is “He’s a modest little person with much to be modest about.”

Many special put downs have become clichés and old hat but were original once upon a time. “He’s a self made man and worships his creator” may sound dated now but when John Bright first coined it I hope people cheered. Groucho Marx again deserved applause for “I’ve had a great evening, but this wasn’t it.”

But perhaps the best insults come when two original thinkers come together. When George Bernard Shaw insulted Winston Churchill he wrote “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my play. Bring a friend....if you have one”. Churchill wrote back “Can’t attend first night, will attend second....if there is one.”

So, set beside these legends in the art of the insult, today’s internet offence geeks are neither big nor clever. They’re small, very small, and missing something in their make up. Many people are now deserting Twitter and Facebook because of these nasty, weak, emotionally cadaverous zombies who are wordsmiths only in their own imagination.

I think that social media arrived just about a hundred years too late. Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and the rest would have had a ball.

Dirty Cash

While billionaire Philip Green flies dozens of millionaire celebrities First Class to the Caribbean to celebrate his 60th birthday in style, here in the UK we are just days away from the country’s new financial budget being announced.

I realise this is a blog start guaranteed to turn you off quicker than a hormonal teenage male watching TV’s Embarrassing Bodies only to find it’s a special devoted to the cast of Loose Women. But, as always, it could be worse. A special on Anne Widdecombe anyone?

Perhaps I should have started this blog with an attention grabbing sentence like “This week I thought I’d discuss Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics” or maybe “Here’s Sean Penn with thoughts on his struggle to learn the alphabet”. But I have no confidence in my knowledge of philosophers or indeed Sean Penn’s ability to write .

So, the Budget it is. Money’s important.

For those reading this from outside the UK I should explain that “the Budget” is the Brits’ annual chance to complain together while our Government tells us the new ways it will rip us off over the next few years. Or, as they put it, “help us plan for our future”.

How important is it? Well there’s no need to worry about it costing you money unless you happen to be male or female, alive, and aged between embryo and one hundred and seventy nine. So relax. We’re all in this together, unless you work for Barclays bank or can afford a clever accountant who’s not already in jail.

I cannot object to the tax on cigarettes going up each year as anyone addicted to nicotine deserves all they get. Likewise it’s a bit difficult to object when tax on alcohol or petrol increases as we should be cutting back anyway. But as the search for new government income goes on, the year they introduce a tax on chocolate I’m leaving the country.

Trouble is we’re all so broke we’re looking for cleverer ways of avoiding taxes like never before but, like a one legged farmer, we’re falling in the shit. Our local retired cab driver - let’s keep him anonymous and call him Timmy even though his name is Tony - has been living the life of Reilly after his mum left him the house they lived in along with a substantial trust fund. The problem for Timmy is that his lawyer’s fees have now all but wiped out the fund and he can’t sell the house to move somewhere smaller as his mum’s will states that the proceeds have to go to his kids. He’s stuck in a house he doesn’t want, with no income. Great tax dodge, eh?

Then there’s another friend called Annie, (though her real name is......oh, never mind) whose accountant talked her in to a complicated scheme where she didn’t have to declare income on a property she owns and rents out. Now she wants to sell it, she can’t as, officially, it doesn’t exist. Another pal got a Portuguese holiday home in her divorce, registered to an overseas company to avoid stamp duty. It costs her a fortune in accountants and she can’t sell as she’ll have to pay prohibitive corporation tax.

As soon as someone offers to save us money we seem to jump in, head first and without hesitation, and hand over our life savings. Yet when someone asks us for a small donation to charity we make ourselves self important and ask what it’s for, what percentage is taken off for administration, etc, before handing over our ten pence. It seems the only charity we really want to believe in isn’t UNICEF or the RSPCA, but SCAMB - Saving Cash And My Behind.

This week several celebrities were exposed as having greedily invested with a conman who “guaranteed them” riches. No other person in the world could give them the return that he promised so, instead of asking questions, they simply threw thousands of pounds at him. He gave them back some money every month as “interest” to encourage them to invest more and then disappeared with their millions. This week he started a prison term. Serves him, and the investors, right.

Greed isn’t good so, I guess I’m asking the Chancellor to be wise in his budget this week and make us believe we don’t need to be sneakier than a career conman to pay what’s fair. Make it worthwhile for us to work. Get the charlatans at Barclays, Goldman Sachs and other banks to donate several million of their own ill gotten gains to worthwhile projects. Stop making us pay tax on savings. We’ve already been taxed on the money as we earned it. And stop taxing older people on their pensions.

Let me bring it back to earth. If all else fails as you prepare you budget this year Mr Osborne, just keep it simple. No tax on chocolate, and give generous tax breaks to anyone with the initials PC.

I could live with that.

Who's Foolin' Who?

Just a few weeks to go before April Fool’s Day, that time of year when I kind of get away with my visceral stupidity by claiming “I was only joking”. It’s the only day of the year when I don’t look a complete idiot, just a work in progress.

So, have you planned ahead? Got some innovative ideas that will have them falling about with laughter and hiding with embarrassment, or are you going to fall back on the old faithfulls like cling film over the toilet bowl and washing up liquid in the cistern?

Toilets do seem a ripe area for April Fools. While my academic record at University may make my genius less like Michaelangelo and more like Michael Angelis, the voice of Thomas The Tank Engine, I will always be proud of the day I visited an old school pal’s student flat for the first time. I left a twelve inch length of dental floss floating inside his toilet bowl and showed him that he had left a huge tapeworm behind. My cries of April Fool didn’t help in any way, perhaps, on reflection, because it was, and I imagine he’s probably still in therapy. Once you plant an image like that, it stays for life.

I think I’m already ahead of the game this year. I have ordered a box containing a new capsule that has just been launched, and I may end up buying crate loads. It’s called Puck - probably because the reaction you will get may sound a lot like that – and the idea is that you go to someone’s house and ask to use the loo. Once there, slip a capsule in to the cistern and then say nothing. For about a week afterwards, no matter how often they flush, the water will remain the shade of yellow that artists may call ‘lemorange chiffon’ but you and I will know better as ‘three day old wee’.

The best practical jokes take a bit of setting up. Chocolate covered apples with sticks in make lovely treats. Chocolate covered onions, however, look exactly the same and are the present that keeps on giving – every time the recipient gets wind for hours afterwards.

Some April Fool jokes can be cruel. One couple I know were expecting their first baby and had already decorated the nursery and installed a cot. They hired a babysitter and went out for the night, telling her not to disturb their nonexistent child as she had just fallen asleep. After an hour in their favourite restaurant they rang home and asked the sitter to check how the baby was doing. I’m told the hysterical report back that the baby was missing had them in stitches. Me? I thought it was mean.

I also didn’t much appreciate the thinking behind last year’s call to our local large grocery superstore on April 1st when some idiot had obviously ‘phoned in and asked for a call to be put out for his friend. Over the PA system a woman steadily announced “Would Al Kyder please go to customer information. That’s Al Kyder to the front desk please.” You don’t have to be a terrorism specialist to find that a bit stupid. Clever, but stupid just the same.

These April Fool tricks are usually great when done to someone else but, for some reason, I don’t find them hilarious when aimed at me. I still harbour a grudge against the school pal who put those sticky plant seeds in my gym kit many years ago, making me itch for days. I’m not happy either with another pal at my gym who swapped my deodorant for Ralgex heat spray, nor my old school pal Robin who stayed with me just before I got married and hard boiled all the fresh eggs in my fridge one day when I was out, before putting them back in their box.

So, let’s get our thinking caps on this year and come up with something new and different. If you have any ideas please let me know. A lot rests on this, remember. It’s my day to shine and make people forget I’m just a sad idiot every other day of the year.