Arse Camera Revisited

It's that time of year again, the time when a member of the medical profession is paid to shove a camera up my bum. I was on a five-year schedule until the aforementioned medical person found a polyp which he described as almost cancer. He took it out, and apparently in the nick of time, then proposed I switch to a yearly colonoscopy schedule, so here we are.

I've been dreading it - not the insertion of a Kodak Instamatic on a spring, nor even what horrors it might reveal because they're not yet sufficiently real as to induce concern. I'm dreading the preparatory day of fasting and shitting myself, and I'm dreading it because Suprep®, the medication by which I am to cleanse my bowels in readiness, is the worst thing I've ever had in my mouth. The prescription comprises two six fluid ounce bottles of the stuff and costs eighty fucking five fucking dollars even with medical insurance chipping in. You dilute the contents of each bottle with a further ten fluid ounces of water to make a pint of the stuff, then down it in one, or at least as quickly as possible. It's something involving magnesium but the manufacturers have attempted to render it more palatable by flavouring it to resemble Dr. Pepper, a drink which tastes like cheap perfume and reflects nothing found in the natural world, hence its being named after a scientist. I've never liked Dr. Pepper and now, thanks to Suprep®, the smell alone makes me gag; and having paid eighty fucking five fucking dollars for this vile shit, then spent an entire day squirting rusty water into the lavatory bowl, I'm expected to complete this course of treatment by making up a second pint of the stuff with the other bottle.

This time, once I was through to the doctor's office and had made an appointment, I begged for some alternative to Suprep®, and begged at such length that the technician who answered the phone actually seemed to find it a bit weird.

'Okay,' he said. 'You have a couple of other options. There's a similar drink with a different flavour, or a course of tablets. I'll put you down for both, then we'll see which one gets sent to your pharmacy. It all depends on what the medical insurance will pay for.'

Next day, I dropped in at my pharmacy.

'Here you go,' said the young man handing me a paper bag. 'That'll be eighty-five dollars.'

'Eighty fucking five fucking dollars!' I screeched like a figure in an H.M. Bateman cartoon, unable to contain my horror whilst knowing it was hardly the fault of the guy behind the counter. I called my wife to make sure I had the funds, then popped my debit card into the slot. 'You know,' I told the pharmacist, 'I wouldn't mind but I'm sure I could get pretty much the same result eating an out of date curry for about a tenth of the price.'

He seemed sympathetic, amused even.

I got the bag home and discovered it to be something called Clenpiq® which seemed suspiciously similar to Suprep®, thematically speaking, and the promise of it being cranberry flavour wasn't massively reassuring.

'Next time, we'll get you the tablets,' my wife said from the other room. 'I don't care what it costs.'

Clenpiq® wasn't great, but the not-quite six fluid ounce bottles could be downed in one without my being required to turn each into a pint, and the taste wasn't quite so appalling, and was significantly easier to wash away with black coffee and ginger ale.

Monday comes and I remember that the technician to whom I spoke asked that I call back once I've picked up my prescription to let the surgery know which I've been sent. This is so I can sign consent forms or something of the sort, which sounds ominously like it may lead to a patient portal, one of those ingenious online solutions to having an actual human being do the job, and for which I will be expected to create my forty-millionth new password this year.

I call and it's a recorded message.

All of our representatives are busy right now…

I am on hold and in a queue. Weirdly, the queue comprises zero calls awaiting the attention of one of their many representative - according to the automated voice. I'm not sure if this means that I'm first in line, or that there are literally no calls awaiting the attention of a representative because I don't exist. Minutes of low resolution corporate jazz pass before the message repeats. Now there are three people in the queue, then a few more minutes and we're back to zero. It's difficult to work out what's going on, and I give up after thirty minutes.

Next morning I call at 9AM determined to beat the rush.

The voice tells me, 'our office hours are 9AM to—'

'It's nine right now,' I protest.

'No it isn't. It's 8.57AM.'

'Are you seriously telling me to call back in three minutes time?'

'There's no-one here,' she says. 'Not even me,' she could have added without significantly elevating the surrealism of the scenario.

Three minutes later, I call back. The phone is answered by a person with an impenetrable accent, which feels sort of deliberate. I try to tell him that I am simply attempting to pass on a message, a message of just one single brand name comprising seven letters; but he insists I call back later for reasons which aren't entirely clear.

Later, I spend another thirty minutes listening to low resolution corporate jazz whilst pondering over whether or not I really exist before I get through to a human being who is able to take my call.

Next day I fill in the online consent forms.

The day after, I receive umpteen text messages and two phone calls reminding me of my appointment. One of them is a courtesy call regarding insurance details which are wasted on me because I don't understand any of it, and the other is a technician asking whether I received Clenpiq® or whether they sent me the tablet form. I tell him the former, and that I've already spent an hour on hold trying to relay this information to his office, apparently without success. I don't suppose they received the multiple text messages I sent suggesting that they employ someone to answer the fucking phone either.

Diarrhoea day arrives and is relatively painless, just boring because I can't eat anything; then the day of my colonoscopy - early morning which makes a nice change from last time.

I take a book with me. It's actually one of my own books which I'm in the middle of proofreading prior to vain attempts to fool strangers into buying the thing. This time last year I spent a couple of hours hooked up to an IV drip waiting for the doctor, so I figured I should make use of the time. The technicians are amused that I'm reading my own book. One of them asks what a book is in jocular fashion. They seem like a decent bunch of people.

'Is this morphine?' I ask as the general anaesthetic is added to my drip. Morphine is the one I've heard of, even though I'm not actually sure it can be used as an anaesthetic. It turns out to be Propofol, which I've never heard of. I feel suddenly warm and dark, as though I'm within a cave looking out.

'I think it's working,' I say.

I wake. It's been over for ten minutes. About half an hour has passed and my slumber has been deep and powerful. They removed one tiny polyp, nothing to worry about and I'm probably good to leave it for another five years, by which time I'll be in my sixties. I could have lived without a full hour of low resolution corporate jazz, but otherwise I came through and it feels great.

Our Friend, the Couch Panther

 

I don't know if it's ever either fair or meaningful to say you have a favourite cat in cases such as our own, where my wife and myself have lost track but suspect the feline head count is somewhere north of fourteen; but Bean was my favourite cat, at least for a while. He was one of four kittens we rescued from a local crazy person back around June, 2019. Mark, who is generally a lovely guy despite his brain occasionally sending him down some very strange avenues, feeds the feral cats which turn up in his garden and doesn't get them fixed; so kittens come into being in large quantities and we rescue them on the grounds that, as Mark will himself admit during his more lucid moments, his cat husbandry is cranky and intermittent. We had noticed a fresh bunch of kittens springing around his yard a couple of times, mumbled the usual concerns to each other, and then Bess came home with all four of them cradled under one arm like hastily gathered fruit.

Junior gave them names almost immediately, but nothing too headachey for a change, nothing from a console game or Disney. Sylvester was the little black and white tuxedo cat whom we initially thought was a boy; Muffin was the traditional female tabby; Bear, so named because the kid thought she looked like a tiny bear, was all black and female; and Bean was the runt of the litter, an all black male about half the size of the other three - named for his being of leguminous volume in comparison to the rest. Bess was worried he wouldn't make it due to being so improbably small, but I'd seen him in action at dinner time and had a feeling he would be fine. At first I plopped a single tin of cat food in a foil tray and let them all go at it. Bean's technique was to dive right in, roll around in the food pushing the others away, then combine the subsequent clean up with dinner, eating until he became spherical, resembling a small black tennis ball with legs.

They grew and we found homes for Sylvester and Bear, but kept Muffin and Bean because we couldn't stand the thought of parting with them, and two more wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. Both of them bonded to me to an unusual degree, possibly due to my being the human who was usually around as Bess didn't switch to working from home until 2020.

Bean climbed onto me each evening as I slouched back in the couch, digesting my dinner. He'd make himself home on my chest, purring away and occasionally licking my nose. He followed me everywhere and was my little buddy. Strangest of all, or so it seemed at the time, was his smell. Bess has told me about the smell of a new baby, how it's positively intoxicating and pushes all the motherhood buttons, or was in her case when she had Junior; and finally I felt I understood because Bean smelled amazing - a scent to his soft, silky black fur which remains difficult to describe but is maybe something in the vicinity of fresh cut hay.

I began to notice something which hadn't quite occurred to me before, or at least to piece together parts of a pattern I was only just beginning to recognise as such: there really is something special about black cats. Of course, they historically have a reputation associated with the occult and are typecast as the familiars of witches and wizards, and I began to wonder if there might be a reason for this, at least beyond the hysteria and general misogyny.

Bean had certainly cast a spell on me by some definition - not least by the release of oxytocin as I stroked his improbably silky fur to induce purring, and those eyes looking out from the solid black seemed to know something. He seemed hypnotic somehow.

Bean wasn't even the first.

Our first and currently oldest black cat is Nibbler, whom the boy found as a kitten hiding under a car back in 2012. Since then there has been Jack - who was black and fluffy and therefore amazing - Enoch, Tony, and Jessie - all ferals from our yard who eventually - presumably and hopefully - found other homes, or just moved on; and also Ava, another alumni from Mark's garden who still hangs around but rarely comes inside the house.

Nibbler was the first cat I've seen play like a dog, fetching something thrown for him, bringing it back and dropping it in your lap for another throw. Nibbler also made himself the feline equivalent of a teddy by pulling the stuffing out of the sofa and forming it into a lump which he then slept with in his paws.

Ollie, our latest black cat also fetches things and has that amazing scent to his fur, and has now learned how to open the kitchen door so he can go out into the garden. This is a door held shut by a heavy spring when unlocked, so heavy that one has to physically shoulder it open when carrying a laundry basket. Ollie - who is presently about three or four months old and is still small, has learned to not only push the door open, but he's worked out how to get back in again. We still haven't witnessed him doing it, and presume he must hook a paw under the door and pull, which seems like it really should be impossible given his size and the strength of the spring, but it happens nevertheless.

This isn't to suggest that any of our other cats are necessarily idiots, but it really seems that whatever gene is associated with black fur brings other features to the party - which I state as a general observation rather than an actual scientific thesis. Perhaps we are witness to the birth of a genuine feline master race.

We lost Bean around July 2020, the same time as two other cats - Squeak and Holly went missing. We still don't know what happened. We have at least one shitty cat-hating neighbour, but he really doesn't seem like he would have the balls to do anything horrible. Holly definitely had a second home somewhere and was in the habit of staying away for days at a time; and another kitten had just turned up, which always puts everyone's noses out of joint, so it could be an unfortunate coincidence, strange though it may seem, and in the absence of any actual information whatsoever, that's how we've thought of it because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Needless to say, eighteen months later I still miss Bean and I think about him every day, but there's probably not much point in beating myself up over what may or may not have become of him.

We still have Muffin and the others, and Ollie is doing very well at carrying the traditions of his people forward.

Three Birthdays

 

Debbie is our neighbour, or at least she's the ex-wife of our neighbour. Our neighbour is a lovely guy, tall and dark with the haunted expression of an amiable ghost. He talks and moves real slow, as we say in Texas, but he never says anything when there's nothing to be said so my wife and I like him a lot. We're not entirely sure how Debbie managed to move back into his house, but assume he never intended it to be any sort of permanent arrangement given that their relationship seems to be only vaguely platonic, bonded by nothing more than previous association.

Debbie is small with raven dark hair suggesting some distant familial relation to Johnny Cash, which I state with authority as my wife's stepmother was the daughter of Johnny's cousin. Many of her family members have that same raven hair and hawk-like appearance, and Debbie is originally from Tennessee, so who knows?

I tend to think of Debbie as rootin' tootin', which shouldn't be taken as an insult so much as an indication of her being a certain type - white, working class and not averse to country music, although she recently revealed a love of techno, which was confusing. She's chatty and chirpy with a disconcerting habit of delivering terrible news with a big smile.

'You two going out somewhere nice?' she chirps. 'You're such a cute couple. It makes me happy just to see the two of you. The doctor told my pappy he has cancer and now he has to have his arms and legs amputated. Y'all have a blessed day now, you hear.'

At other times we'll hear all about her plans. She has a job interview. She's going to have money and she'll be able to afford an apartment and everything's going to be just fine once she's moved out, away from that man; and always the interview falls through, or they take against her for no reason, or she realises she ain't gonna be able to get there if she takes the job, but the good news is she just bought her some boots at that fancy place. They were seventy dollars. Those boots usually cost more than a hun'erd.

The job interviews come along, often two or three a week, and there's always a reason why she can't take the job. We get the impression that she's just telling herself she wants to get some money and move out, but it's not really our business.

It's Debbie's birthday and she says she wants to take us out to dinner to celebrate. Bess pays because she knows Debbie is on welfare and can't really afford it so it would feel awkward. We go to Las Palapas, which is actually pretty great, much better than I remember. Debbie picks at her food because she doesn't eat much, drinks margaritas, and tells us about her life and her family. She's interesting and a lot of fun, and as with her ex-husband, the impression is formed that it would be difficult to dislike her.

Weeks pass and it's our birthday. Bess and I were born on the same day of different years. Debbie again proposes to take us out for dinner, to return the favour; but Bess insists on paying because it doesn't seem fair otherwise, that elusive first paycheck still having failed to appear for some reason. We go to Charlie Brown's because it's a bar which serves good food and we expect Debbie will like it and feel at home, which she does. We feel we owe it to her. Every other week she's at the door with brisket or cookies or carne asada or the best jalapeno poppers I've ever eaten, because she made too much and figured we might like some, that being the neighbourly thing and all. We sort of wish she wouldn't. It's not that the food isn't appreciated, but we're both on diets - nothing absurdly stringent except that neither of us eat during the day, usually fasting until the early evening; and the one surefire way of knowing when a person is on any kind of diet is to take a look at the line of friends and relatives stretching all along the block and around the corner, all waiting their turn to offload an extra cake they made or a tray of deviled eggs for which there was no room in their own fridges.

We drive to Charlie Brown's and Debbie pipes up about illegal immigrants and how sleepy Joe Biden just ain't doing nothing, which isn't a good start. I don't mind people having political beliefs which differ from my own providing they're not simply downloaded verbatim from Fox News. I have friends who voted for the orange billionaire, and for the most part they've had reasons I've understood even if I don't agree with them, so it makes me uncomfortable when someone threatens to unveil contentious opinions or biases.

We eat and we drink, and somehow the evening lasts much longer than either Bess or myself intended. Debbie nurses a margarita for the best part of an hour, both of us watching the glass like it's a steel mill clock on Friday afternoon. She orders another and the evening extends.

'This is fun,' she chirps. 'I'm having a real blast here. We need to do this more often. Are y'alls having fun?'

'Yes,' we tell her each time she asks the question.

'I got you a cake,' she tells us as we drive home.

'You shouldn't have,' we say, both smiling the smile that hurts.

It takes ten minutes to get the candles to stand up straight, then lit, and the cake is huge and sweet, so sweet it makes our teeth itch. We keep smiling.

Once she finally goes home, the rest of the cake is shared with the raccoons in our yard.

We're not doing that ever again, we tell ourselves, and the sense of guilt feels nevertheless kind of good, even liberating.

Lost Masterpieces

The title is ironic, obviously. As tireless archivist of my own work, I've retained a reasonably thorough recall of all my creative dead ends - undertakings which never really came to anything, or which at least stumbled before achieving whatever fruition I had intended for them. Sometimes I simply ran out of steam, but more often than not I recognised the enterprise as bollocks before I'd fully got into the swing of it; or sometimes it was just something I had to get out of my system before moving on. Here, mostly from memory are projects - for want of a less twatty word - which deflated in the manner of a premature souffle before I could get them out of the oven. These are works on which I spent sufficient time and energy as to forge a memory of my labours, as distinct from anything less intensive such as doodles on the back of a phone book whilst enjoying the Post Office dial-a-disc service. The best that can be said of any of them is that they made sense at the time, so there are no lost masterpieces here. If Kevin J. Anderson is reading and feels inclined to finish off any of this shit after I'm dead, he's welcome to give it his best shot.

The Burps (1975, possibly earlier)
This was my first attempt at drawing a strip cartoon series, and I seem to remember churning out hundreds of these, each one a single A4 landscape format page rendered in whatever biro I happened to have to hand. The Burps were spherical aliens with antennae resembling a stove pipe topped with a conical rain cap growing from the tops of their heads, which were also their bodies, much like the Mister Men. Each strip ended with one of them doing a massive burp, possibly emphasised with green felt tip. I don't think there was ever much of a story and I remember my granddad leafing through the stack then commenting, 'there seems to be rather a lot of burping in these.' I think he approved of my productivity but was a bit disappointed by the repetition of the same punchline. To my way of thinking, the repetition was what made it hilarious.

Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler (1976 or thereabouts)
I'm not even sure what I was aiming for here, but it was my own one off magazine, or would have been, created mostly using material snipped from either the Sunday Times colour supplement or back issues of the Topper and inspired most likely by either The Goodies File or Spike Milligan. Of what little I can remember, the oddest detail was my apparently having decided to make my own artisan paper by coating A3 pages cut from a scrapbook with glossy brown parcel tape onto which I glued my vandalised images and text. I wrote the text on regular writing paper, and then cut out each individual line and typeset it with Uhu, so with hindsight it was all a bit Jamie Reid. I'm not sure how many pages I managed, but the only one I remember was Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler, which was Tiny the World's Biggest Dog from the Topper rendered more sinister by the addition of a toothbrush moustache, swastikas, and cruelly slanting eyebrows to make him look angry. I don't know if I ever gave the enterprise a formal title, and I was very much a fan of Tiny the World's Biggest Dog so maybe I couldn't take the guilt.

Robot funnies (late seventies)
I drew eight or nine of these and although I don't recall a specific overall title for the series, I had some vague idea about submitting  them for publication and perhaps even syndication. They were mostly two or three panels drawn on landscape format A4 with plenty crosshatching inspired by Paul Sample, usually some laboured gag involving robots - two robots regarding a petrol pump with concern, one saying I think he's trying to commit suicide in reference to the gun-like nozzle seated against what our boys have apparently mistaken for the pump's forehead. This particular joke, such as it is, was shamelessly recycled from the funnies pages of Doctor Who and Star Trek annuals, as were most of the others. I had some vague idea of producing definitive versions of the gags in question. A couple of them made it onto the walls of the school art room, which was thankfully about as far as it went.

Poo Corner (1983)
I'd been reading Sounds music paper for a couple of years, and particularly enjoying Savage Pencil's Rock 'n' Roll Zoo strip. Alan Moore's The Stars My Degradation - which was also a significant influence - had come to an end so I figured there was an opening. I drew about ten episodes of Poo Corner, each some self-contained tableau taking a wry sideways glance at the lighter side of either the music industry or being a teenager - only one of which I had any experience, resulting in what was more or less a recycling of Rock 'n' Roll Zoo combined with stuff other kids had said at school which seemed hilarious. I sent them in to Sounds explaining that I was ready to start work immediately but the reply must have been lost in the post or something.

 

Twenty Pages (1985)
Once I realised that I would probably never be able to afford to have anything printed, I resigned myself to the photocopy as the principal medium for my visual material; and because the double-sided photocopy was likewise beyond my means, I concluded that single-sided copies loose in a plastic wallet - actually the protective PVC covers which could be bought for 7" singles from WHSmith - seemed reasonably artistic in comparison to single sided sheets stapled down one edge like some shitty school magazine. Because my visual material was, at the time, mostly news items about local murders cut from newspapers and therefore underwhelming, I enlisted contributions from fanzine, tape and weirdy music people of my postal acquaintance - just a page the same size as a 7" single, artwork, text, whatever you like, I told them. Andy of the Apostles wrote out an imaginary interview with a generic punk rocker, which was quite entertaining, and a couple of the collages were quite good, but by the time I had twelve of the proposed Twenty Pages I realised that the thing was a bit of a waste of time on the grounds that I probably wouldn't have bought it had someone else been trying to flog it to me for the price of a stamped addressed envelope.

 

Newspaper strips
There were several attempts, mostly the same format as Peanuts, George & Lynne, Fred Basset and the rest. Having obtained my fine art degree in 1987, I soon came to the realisation that I was more or less unemployable and that strip cartoons seemed to be about the only working string to my bow in terms of making money off anything - a realisation informed by the fact that most newspaper strips were bollocks while everything I drew was hilarious. The first was a series of unrelated comically surreal vignettes abandoned before I could come up with a title (1986); then Mr. Temper (1987), a sharply-dressed curmudgeon who went about beheading anyone he didn't like the look of while politely explaining the essence of their supposed transgressions; and The Rock (1988) which was me thinking, well, if Alan Moore can get paid for Maxwell the Magic Cat then I'm quids in, and which may as well have been the Mister Men but with more sarcasm - a formula which apparently failed to make much of an impression with the editor of the Chatham Standard.

 

Avanti! (1987)
This would have been the third and final weirdy music cassette compilation from my mail order tape label, Do Easy. While the first two had failed to set the world on fire, they had featured some genuinely great music from the likes of We Be Echo, Irsol, the Unkommuniti and others, and had sold fairly well by my standards - somewhere in the region of thirty or forty copies each, often to people I didn't actually know. I'd already been sent new material by We Be Echo, Virrullex, ESP Kinetic, and Man's Hate, and it could have been great but I simply ran out of steam, enthusiasm, and disposable income; which is probably for the best given my edgily deciding to name the thing after the newspaper which first got Mussolini up and running.

 

The Dovers comic book (1987)
This was probably my first attempt at drawing a vaguely coherent comic strip, or at least one which was only 75% crap jokes strung along an improbable narrative. Inspired by an unlikely combination of X-Men comics, Viz, and the work of Robert Crumb, it was a massively fictionalised account of the adventures of my band, the Dovers, featuring Carl Glover and myself, wherein Chris, the  drummer of our previous line up, is possessed by forces from beyond the dawn of time, our manager is former US President Richard Nixon - now living in Lewisham - and I find myself recruited by Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. I drew three and a bit issues of the thing - amounting to 72 pages - assuming that I would find an affordable means of getting it all printed and that it would be worth the effort. I eventually realised that I wouldn't and it probably wasn't, but it kept me busy for about six months.

 

Berserker (1987)
I had begun to tire of my own crap jokes, as exemplified by the proposed Dovers comic books, and recognised them as a deflection from the fear that any more serious undertaking to which I might apply myself would probably be drivel; so I decided to grasp the thistle and produce a really, really, really grown up real world superhero but not actually a superhero comic strip like all that Alan Moore stuff. The main character is some dude who gets diddled in a flying saucer and subsequently develops amazing psychic powers, influenced by X-Men comics, cranky UFO literature, and the work of Gary Numan. After fourteen or so pages of heavy cross-hatching, wonky figures with stern expressions, and ludicrously portentous dialogue, I realised there was still some room for improvement, possibly not even a room so much as an aircraft hanger.

 

Small World (1988)
Unwilling to piss away all the frowning and clenching I'd squeezed into Berserker, I revised the thing and came up with this when Charlie Adlard asked me if I'd written anything he could draw so that the two of us might make our first attempts at breaking into the comic book industry. Small World was the same thing but marginally better written - albeit not by much - and certainly better drawn, but it still wasn't enough. The slight improvement in quality only served to expose the fact that I didn't actually have a story, and oblique references to Richard S. Shaver weren't much of a substitute. We took the thing to Martin Skidmore of Trident Comics who correctly pointed out that I didn't actually have a story, although he was very polite about it. Charlie Adlard subsequently went on to international megastardom as artist of Image's Walking Dead comic, the rewards of which mean he now lives in his own hollowed out volcano with ICBMs and a fleet of flying Rolls Royces. When asked about the early days of his career, Small World never seems to warrant a mention - which is frankly understandable.

 

Three Empty Chairs (1991)
I'm still a little vexed that this one never came to anything. My friend John Jasper kept an exercise book of short stage plays which he wrote entirely for his own amusement, despite which they were fucking brilliant, slightly harrowing and genuinely hilarious - a combination of Alan Bennett, Samuel Beckett and Derek & Clive pushed to an uncomfortable extreme. One of the greatest was set entirely in the hallway of a council flat and involved two characters having an argument over a packet of custard creams with one side of the argument shouted entirely through the letterbox because the other guy refuses to open the door. I was still to blossom into the world's greatest comic artist in 1991, but had developed a sufficiently capable sense of realism for the adaption of John's Three Empty Chairs into strip format, partially on the grounds that he clearly wasn't going to do anything with his book of plays. I still believe I did a reasonable job, and showed him the first thirteen pages hoping he would be pleased, or at least somehow flattered. This is amazing, he told me to my face, then later told my friend Carl that he was massively pissed off by my having decided to illustrate his work. I had photocopied the entire book of his plays, and later lent the stack to a friend with stage connections who began to murmur about actually getting one of the things performed in front of an audience, but that also made John angry, so bollocks then.

 

Tract 002 (1995)
I'd started a religious cult based around the worship of Ringo Starr. We had about twenty members, all carrying nicely laminated membership cards. Tract 001, the first official communication of thee Church ov RINGO looked decent and seemed to have gone down well with everyone who read it, particularly existing members of the Church of the SubGenius - and I'd had about three-hundred printed. The second issue was coming together with contributions from people besides just myself and the other guy, when the other guy went into the sort of creative overdrive that results from quality control going out the window. The whole idea had been something which made us laugh because it appeared to take itself far too seriously in its obsession with the Beatles' former drummer, and one of Ringo's songs was playing in an episode of Pobol Y Cwm last month and here are seven VHS tapes of all the episodes broadcast since July tee hee hee seemed to be missing at least some of the point, and this was the general spirit of the barrage of Ringo crap the other guy took to sending me on a nearly weekly basis - jiffy bags bulging with ephemera found in charity shops and page after page of stuff printed off the internet. The final straw was the print out of a full length Robert E. Howard novel wherein our man had used his find and replace function to substitute every mention of Conan the Barbarian with Ringo. It really sucked all of the fun out of the enterprise, which had started off as something fairly light and silly. So I gave up and turned my back on the thing because I could no longer stand to think about it. Annoyingly, one of the other contributions for the second issue that never happened had been a highly entertaining article by Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions about depictions of Ringo found in the early neolithic carvings of Britain - complete with illustrations - so I felt quite bad about that. There always has to be one who spoils it for everyone else.

 

 

Grudge Bunny (1996)
Partially as a result of the genius who magically transformed a Robert E. Howard novel about Conan the Barbarian into one about the guy who played drums on all those Beatles albums, 1996 was probably the most embittered year of my life. The aforementioned genius who bombarded me with jiffy bags bulging with ephemera was simultaneously in correspondence with a million other fanzine or otherwise countercultural types and therefore ended up with a ton of DIY tapes and photocopied missives which he didn't want, or couldn't be bothered to keep, and he seemingly sent most of them my way just in case there was anything of interest. Occasionally there was something good, but most of it was pure shite which left me profoundly depressed about the state of the DIY counterculture; and whilst I nevertheless appreciated the freebies, it sometimes became a real chore just wading through it all. One of the good things, however, was Outlaw Trainspotter, an A5 zine about trainspotting. Regardless of the subject, it remains one of the funniest, and most gleefully acerbic fanzines I've ever read. I couldn't even tell whether it was taking the piss or not, although I heard a rumour that it was actually the work of the late Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, so probably the former. Anyway, Outlaw Trainspotter combined with the weapons grade sarcasm of David Stubbs' wonderful Mr. Agreeable column in Melody Maker brought me to the realisation that it might be fun to do a fanzine dedicated to how much I hated almost everything else that was happening in 1996. I slapped Grudge Bunny together as quickly as possible so as to preserve the negative energy with paper, scissors, glue, typewriter, scrawled ink, and swearing, taking delight in ripping apart substandard fanzines, indie comics, tapes, and bands who needn't have bothered, and then ran out of steam after eight pages. It can be a lot of fun spitting righteous truths about creative endeavours which actually aren't much good, but becomes quickly exhausting, then even a bit depressing after a while.

 

Uuuuugh! (2002)
I had been obssessed with Doctor Who when I was a kid, then drifted away by the time I discovered fags, booze, and sexual intercourse. I rediscovered it in the nineties when my friend Andrew gave me a VHS copy of Terror of the Autons for my birthday. Being well disposed towards culty things, I discovered that the series had continued in novel form by the agency of Virgin publishing and thus was my enthusiasm reignited. I was surprised to learn that the show still had a substantial following of like-minded shut-ins despite having been off the air for nearly a decade, and so I came into contact with fandom. Because the worst aspect of anything is usually its stupid fucking fans, I began to feel like someone really needed to take the piss out of the whole thing and so Uuuuugh! was born, named after the noise made by a slow moving monster as portrayed by a guy in a rubber suit. Uuuuugh! was put together on a fancy computer, the very same one by which Ed Pinsent produced the early issues of Sound Projector. He'd upgraded and sold me his old one, so Uuuuugh! also served as a means of putting the machine through its paces. I churned out twenty-four pages of sarcastic material amounting to a conflation of Charlie Brooker and Viz comic, then realised that the only people who would get the jokes would most likely be the same people who actually wouldn't find them even remotely funny; so that was thankfully the end of that.