UNFORTUNATE FACE CREAMS
Skin of a Younger Woman (with free sachet of organic fixative)
The Mater-Grater
Pore-Stabbing Irritant Wash For Blokes
Slush2
Deep-Fried Fat - the Moisturiser |
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We are Britons. While the world flutters to the coming century in a spiral of misconception and lost purpose, we stand fast and resolute in our unshakeable identity. We have Britain.
We have sugar-loaded, copyrighted fast food in plastic restaurants by the sides of dog-claimed roads, the tables crowded with podgy, ill-dressed teenage friends ignoring one another to speak on mobile phones. We have car-strangled out-of-town shopping experiences ragged-tempered with families buying yet more overpriced sporting shoes in a conga line across the shiny, perkily themed floor, behind the screaming, exploratory toddler and its buggy-confined, dull-eyed, sticky-faced sibling continuously pushing handful after handful of cheese-flavoured corn snack into its slapping mouth.
We have litter. Casual violence. Joy-riders. Endless, endlessly bleeding endless quality meetings and mission statements and project groups around which flailing businesses revolve like awed tribes aknee before the empty alien case of a transistor radio, bartered in the novelty moment for all and with the slice of loss yet ungrasped.
We have public service broadcasting. We have ordinary people and damaged animals and cooks and detectives and sponsorship and the word classic. We have presenters who can read the producer's words from an autocue without offending. We have our guilt stilled by the brace of irony.
We have accents and quaintness and unsatisfying pornography. Smashed bus shelters and the pungency of telephone boxes. The cloying, silvered despairs of a million discarded lottery scratch cards. Store security guards with folded arms and uniforms rejected by the Italian army rocking heel to toe to the beat of their baffling croaking walkie-talkies. Garden centres. Souvenir tea-towels. L-plate pizza delivery. Shopping trolley immobilisation devices. Accident blackspots. A Gift From Wales. Sky Sports. Mr Bean greeting cards. Open areas. Rab C Nesbitt Series 9. Semi-pro car boot sales. Bargain bins. Fondant-enrobed ginger biscuits. Unattended bags but no dustbins for safety. Old, skewed men in wigs bestowing culpability.
We have fun pubs. Car alarms. Green streaks depending like club ties from the necks of ageless dripping taps in the baths of musty rented accommodation. Uneven pavements with a sub-culture of packets and spillage. Replacement windows with a rose motif. Corporate livery. Stone-effect vinyl flooring. Royalty. A cultural pretence that we matter.
Whatever our faults, we still have all this.
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PROCESS OF CREATION
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs... Gah! I've spilled the ink. Gah! It's gone everywhere! Ugh! Ink on my trousers! Ink on my writing-desk! Gyeearghh! Oh my God! The window - my only chance. Aieee!
Roses are red, violets are blue, and now I have correctly separated them by identification
Marley was dead. Well, I hope so, as they'd buried him. Hahahahaha! No, but seriously
It was a dark and stormy marriage |
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