Campings unhappy campers

Hello all you lucky lums?

Well, if your reading this we've survived another week in a world that has a thousand and one ways to see us off.

Its especially noteworthy as this is the week that was meant to bring the rapturous end of the world for all us sinners and unbelievers, or those that hadn't yet made a contribution to Harold Campings Viagra kitty. Now, I'm not really up to speed with the whole message he was peddling, but apparently Jesus was being born again, all the true believers, only a couple of hundred thousand it seems, would be risen to heaven and the rest of us would perish in horrible ways.

Two hundred thousand is a bit mean, I don't know how they arrived at that figure.

Logistics I expect, maybe the security team at the pearly gates imposed that figure because they were worried about queue times and unnecessary crushing, or is heaven nearly full? That would be a worry when you think that the history of the world is marked by the number of evil nasty bastards that have marched across it. Generally people are a bit more good now, and I expect qualify on those goodness grounds for an all park pass to the hereafter.

The other thing that bothered me, that's not to say only one other thing, but just another thing, was this reborn Christ. Presumably hes coming back to earth as a baby, not a fully grown, lanky haired bearded joiner, that would just be weird, and painful for his mother. So, if he is coming back, using the tried and trusted method of immaculate conception and being born in a golden, starry aura we won't know its him, and also presumably, he wont be able to speak, he wont be able to tell us anything, never mind anything profound. He could be born a baby of course , with a fully developed vocabulary and some witty anecdotes, I think that would be just as weird though he'd be a shoe in on Americas Got Talent.

The first thing he should do though is raise and shake his little baby fist at all those Middle America preaching shysters, there just competition for him, sucking up all those contributions from superstitious country folk who would have been happy dancing around a straw man not so long ago. It still seems a a lot to expect a baby to do in his first few months on earth.

What struck me most of all though was the shock and incredulity felt by Harolds heavenly bound followers when nothing of note actually happened. No ravenous earthquakes, no plagues or meteor strikes. Some of them sounded pretty disappointed that we were all not now going to die slow painful deaths and descend to Hell, where it would seem there is much more room and access is better organise. That annoyed me a bit. It reeks of desperate need to have your lifes beliefs confirmed, looking forward to the hour they can say " so long suckers" all those hours praying and thousands spent really have gotten us a seat on the lifeboat. That would suggest self doubt and a deep seated lack of faith, no wonder they weren't chosen for the country club in the clouds.

Still, they shouldn't lose hope because Harold Camping apparently didn't carry over his one or whatever and made a mistake with the dates and we are now scheduled instead to die very quick horrible deaths in October. Third time lucky Harold.

One day life on earth will come to an end, Prof Cox told me that and I'd rather believe him, and I expect right up to the end someone will be spouting this apocalyptic message and gratefully receiving pointless donations but at least somebody someday can say I told you so. I hope he's not near me in the queue.

While we're on the subject of Life on Earth, somebody published a list of new species discovered recently, yep, there still discovering things and I'm glad there discovering them but somebody has to answer for them. I mean, there is something called a Pancake Batfish that looks like joke vomit with half finished eyes, a jumping cockroach, brilliant, they'll be riding bikes soon, yet another big horrible spider,a Bark Spider, presumably because it lives on trees and not because it sounds like a St Bernard and a new kind of leech called a Tyrant Leech King, which is a pretty impressive name tag to pin on your suit if your a leech at the annual leeching conference , but guess what, it lives up peoples noses. Now, WTF, that's not doing anyone any good is it.

Terrorist groups the world over will have noted this week that the Presidents Beast of a car can't go over bumps. Dastardly plans will already probably be hatched to take advantage of this design oversight. Luring the presidential motorcade to the upper levels of a shopping centre car park, or perhaps to a car boot sale on an old semi-cleared demolition site. Sounds like the plot for my next movie screenplay provisionally titled, Bump and Grind, bear with me, I'll just do a quick google search to make sure no-one else has made a movie called Bump and Grind....

Nooooooo! OMG, how is that even humanly possible, thats like a two litre bottle of coke and those are what I imagine a dead heat in a zeppelin race would look like.

Lang may yer lum reek.

The mass Gonk extinction of 79

Good evening Lums,

Who can remember Gonks? Those lovable fairground giveaways from the 70s, a golden age when you could get your picture taken with a terrified monkey, take home a goldfish in a polythene bag and purchase toy cigarettes that glowed at the end when you sucked on them.

A Gonk, if you need reminding , and apologies for jumping straight into the biology of one, was a toilet roll, wrapped in a dubious day-glo furry material that was undoubtedly harmful to 99% of organisms and had a half life of a million or so years. They had comedy paper eyes stuck on the front, normally their only facial feature. These were usually the first to go, giving the unfortunate creature the look of a crow pecked corpse that had wronged the King of the Gonks and swung from his castle gates, Castle Gonk, probably. They had oversize cardboard feet and sometimes a little tuft of hair, which was packed with carcinogenic qualities and the No1 reason for the rise in child asthma. After the eyes, a middle aged Gonk, say one about 20 minutes old, would begin to suffer gonk pattern baldness. An unwrapping of its hairy pelt because its securing dab of glue had dried up and lost its bite.

I don't know where they originated from, they didn't have a TV show like the Wombles or Banana Splits, they had just always been there, visiting once a year with the fairground gypsies. Then they disappeared, like the Mayans, no trace, no mass Gonk graves or Gonk memorabilia turning up on Antiques roadshow. Their place eventually was taken behind the cocunut shys by inflatable hammers and big annoying balloons on an elastic band.

Even finding a picture was difficult, the specimens displayed above are with the Gonkkenheim museum, I had to get special permission just to think about this rubbish, not from the museum, from my mental health therapist.

Sometimes , in Spain or somewhere I would see what I thought was an evolutionary offshoot of the gonk, a bendy, mouldable blob, with those familiar friendly eyes. These creatures were usually full of flour, I know that because my daughter tried to bring one back into the UK but it burst, actually , exploded is more accurate, all over a number of humourless passengers on the plane. At least, I think it was flour, that's what the Colombian fella that sold us it at the airport said.

The Furby I think is some kind of a relation, part machine, a bionic gonk I guess, but unable to jump over buildings and run at 60 miles an hour, it could flap its little stubs about and wobble energetically on its feet. It was meant to have the gift of speech and be able to learn language as we spoke to them over time, like a sinister mechanical parrot, learning all our secrets, hearing all, knowing all. In reality I've since discovered they left the gonk mechanical anthropomorphous engineering facility with only about 100 words programmed into their little gonk brains. So, you could chat away to it like a lonely widow, read it everything from Boswell to Billy Connollys Gullibles Travels and after 25 years it would still only be able to squack" Furby wuv" " Furby Worried" and "Please Stop".

Those frightening little troll dolls from the 90s are sometimes referred to as Gonks, which is plainly ridiculous, they are a much closer relation to Smurfs.

Lang may yer Lum Reek

King Zog and Begbie in one sitting

Reports of No1 lums death are greatly exaggerated, there are embers yet.

Yes, the lack of a decent Internet service had forced me temporarily into exile from the connected world, to North Korea probably, or maybe Hoxhas Albania. Albania had a King you know, King Zog which sounds like he belongs in Flash Gordon and probably everyday when he opened his palace window, wished he did.

Speaking of our mighty God anointed superiors, our own privileged little caste had a chance to dust themselves down and step into the blinding, unforgiven light of the 21st Century for Bill and Kates wedding. A posh do, I hope the father of the bride wasn't paying for it. I expect he offered to make a contribution, "you've done so much already your majesty, at least let me organise the cars". That would be great, an old white Merc ex taxi for the bridesmaids and his pals new Mondeo with ribbons on it for the bride and groom, just because its new and has a valid MOT. The press were of course in a frenzy, the headline writers so busy they probably talked in headlines when they got home. POTATOES SLIGHTLY UNDERCOOKED, SHOCK!

I read one, i think the evening before the wedding that said " Kate waves for fans". Not to fans, or at fans but for fans, like the monumental effort of her raising her noodle arm and shaking it about for 2 seconds was something all the congregated saddos will forever be eternally grateful for, probably giving them the greatest 2 seconds of their life and making spending all their months pension money getting to London and the nights sleeping in a subway in London with the junkies and meth head prossies worth while.

The press were at it again a little later with the news of Osama Bin Ladens, from now on known as OBL, just because I don't have enough acronyms in my life, overdue demise. The general reporting media must have been slobbering like Pavlovs Dogs with a feast such as this on the table, but they were impatient for facts, they wanted to be the paper detailing how the op went down. So, they would just make it up and hope some of it was close enough. One report I read had OBL spraying his twin AK47s from the hip like Rambo, shouting "death to infidels" and laughing insanely as the bullet casings fell in slow motion and special forces abseiled in the window like ninjas, barrel rolling across the floor and dispatching the fiend with 50 bullets, one for each state in the federal republic.

In reality he was probably cowering behind something, his arms out stretched and fingers splayed as if trying to hide behind them, I expect totally shitting himself. Maybe he was half under his bed, not trying to hide, but to get rid of his porn collection before the Americans got it, how embarrassing is that. I wonder what Taliban porn looks like anyway, I guess all the women will be wearing veils and scarfs, I bet the readers wives section looks a bit samey.

What else have I missed while stranded on the Island of los connectos. That's right, didn't Scotland take a Salmond leap forward to independence, yes, I believe it did. I'll admit, it causes some anxiety, like the kind you get when leaving a job you've done for a long time, not really sure how it will go, but it could just be the best thing you ever do and you'd spend the remainder of a lifetime regretting it if you didn't. I mean, what if we had been independent when the banks went tits up, given that they were Scottish banks primarily, I don't think that would have been a good thing. We would have been like Iceland, reputation in tatters and selling our arse in Europe like a Chinese hooker just out of a container in Hamburg. It will go to the people in a couple of years, if the SNP keep governing responsibly, win the confidence and faith of the older folk, they already have the younger ones I think, then who knows. Its a rare chance, you don't know when or how the next opportunity will arise, maybe its time.

I've been on a few trains lately, and I have a new least favourite people type that shoots straight to the top of the list for immediate dealing with when I become King of the World. They are the strangers that sit opposite you then proceed to talk and blether like the best of friends about alternative travel routes and likely times they will get home, what made it worse was they were so ill matched, a cob webby old spinster lady I imagined to be a retired teacher and a younger guy with a comedy beard and annoying affected accent that was trying to be Bearsden but sounded more Bathgate. He even came back from the saloon car with a bottle of wine and two plastic cups, I mean wheres mine, you've known me for as long as her, but she gets the wine, bastard. I would have quite happily fire hosed them with Blackberry Jam then shoved them into a big bucket of bees

I had to travel from Glasgow to Newcastle on Virgin trains, the train I got was the Glasgow to Penzance. It was due to leave Central Station at 10.30 am, do you know what time it was scheduled to arrive in Cornwall? 11.5 hours later, that's a long journey, you could fly to Bangkok in that time, I made a note to self not to fall asleep and miss my stop.

Earlier in the month I went to watch a little of the London marathon. I arrived at the 23 mile mark just as the first of the speedy little stick thin Africans sped by, he didn't even look like he had a sweat on, I think he went on to break the world record, and I witnessed about 4 seconds of it. Then eventually the sweaty multitudes came rolling by, like the flotsam on that tsunami wave in Japan. I noticed a few guys with blood down there tops, obviously from bleeding chaffing nipples, then horror of horrors, I saw a guy with blood soaked shorts which evidently was coming from his red raw nob, chaffing in his shorts, so that was that, just as I was feeling inspired, the will to do anything like it was sucked violently out of me again, hopefully forever.

Am I the only one that cant understand a single word Dizee Rascal sings about, I've tried, really concentrated, watched his lips and everything. There is no Smash Hits any longer so cant go and buy that and read the lyrics. Everyone else seems to get him, or are they just pretending?

There is nothing more entertaining than arriving at a cold, wet and windy Glasgow airport for your commuter flight to London and encountering the returning holidaymakers just landed from Tenerife or wherever. The first thing they do of course is rush outside for a fag, where they brace themselves against the wind, their shoulders so hunched up, the head looking like its trying to retract to the warmer climes of the central core, it must be a shock after two weeks in Calete de Fuste. Of course, you can see that scene outside any office or city centre pub of a miserable spring evening, what sets this off as visual poetry is the clothes. The coral white trousers, the azure blue vest tops, sandals and sunglasses perched on the bronzed dome. Each item carefully chosen before the holiday had begun to show off their expected Arabic hue on their return. The Scots in general, still like to get dressed up for a flight. Tell you what though, if the plane did nosedive at 60 degrees into Endrick Muir they would have a right job identifying the body parts, all those tracksuits, the crash investigators would think it was the Fuertaventura athletics team.

As I write this on the flight south, Robert Carlyle is sitting in the seat in front of me, I’ve always liked him, but he’s a film star, and as such, he gets the full celebrity treatment from me, which is to totally ignore him,. I’m fearful of feeding his ego and making him think he’s something special, I’m sure he appreciates it, so, no looking, no double takes, certainly no nods, or heaven forbid , words, just a well practised adoption of a policy of polite nonacknowledgement, if he speaks to me, I will of course be civil. I expect we may have a bit of a coming together when we go for our bags in the overhead, I shall say, “on ye go pal" or something. But no starry eyes.

Lang may yer lum reek.

I can offer a conclusion to the Robert Carlyle episode. We did indeed have to converse, as I let him out his seat. I went for " There you go mate" and he said "Thanks", kind of in a whispery, didn't want to be over heard way. Some crass fellow passenger started talking, probably completely inanely to him as we walked through the terminal at City airport before I lost sight of him, he's only little. Then he popped out at the smoking area for a quick fag before getting his cab. There was no eye contact as I stuck firmly to policy, I'm sure if he had looked my way he would have recognised me from an almost identical situation about 3 years ago and he would have said " don't I know you?". Anyway, off we went on our separate ways, me pleased that I hadn't inflated the egos of any actors between Glasgow and London and I proudly shared my non-experience with my flatmate when I got in. I got a bit of a row and felt just a tad guilty as she pointed to the complete box set of Hamish MacBeth she had just not two weeks ago bought and went on to proclaim herself Hamish MacBeths biggest fan. I should maybe amend policy to exclude Robert Carlyle in future, I'm due to share a plane with him in 2014, I'll make sure I have a pen.