Kestrel Swilling House of Mystery

A neighbour opposite me moved out some years ago. he has since let his property out to several tenants who have come and gone over the last twenty four months. At the risk of sounding all Daily Mail and elitist (thereby exposing my latent snobbery) the people that have moved in over the years have become incrementally chavvy with every new lease. Before the current tenants moved in there was a very young couple who churned out babies at a rate that directly contravened the minimum human gestation period.

And three months ago the mystery man or woman moved in.

I'm not sure who the mystery man or woman is but I know for a fact they they're a heavy smoker, enjoys strong cheap lager and is probably unemployed. The reason for this is that every morning when I leave for work and every afternoon when I arrive home there is a man or woman sitting on the front doorstep smoking and swilling from a can of lager while staring vacantly into teh middle distance and thinking no doubt anti-social thoughts.

Now, here's the thing!

It's always a different man or woman sitting on the step. Always!

Nonetheless, the cigarettes and alcohol and setereotypically chav like appearance are consistenty present.

Can anyone help me out here? Has some sort of shapeshifter taken up residence on my street or has a very small community centre opened in the house opposite? Is my mysterious new neighbour some sort of crack dealer or escort and all I see is their carcinogen imbibing clients. I certainly hope not as I often see a number of them pushing prams as they smoke drink and exchange ringtones.

Can anybody help me out here? I genuinely haven't got a fucking clue!

P.S. please don't bother to point out the irony that for all my socialist rantings the above post might as well have been written by Richard Fucking Littlejohn.

Re : Kindle

For quite some time now, I've been getting spam e mails encouraging me to pre-order a Kindle.

I have to say it's nice to know that the people responsible for distributing spam mails are aware of my interest in literature as well as my enthusiasm for attaining 'l0ng3r lasting 3recti0ns' and having 'expl1cit dates with H0T local s1ngles'.

Having had a look at the product it strikes me as the most inherently pointless and redundant appliance a human being could ever spend two hundred smackers on!

Kindle, (if you didn't know already) is an e-book reader and it's selling point is that it has the weight and dimensions of a paperback book. Wow! So I can read an e-book just like an actual book for a mere forty times the price!!

Of course it defends itself by boasting to hold up to 1,500 books within its sexxxy digital memory and through some sort of miraculous wireless networking allows you to download e-books from almost anywhere in the world. Effectively this offers you a vast portable library where ,theoretically, a vast catalogue of titles are never more than a click away.

While this sounds impressive, has anyone ever attempted to lug over a thousand books around with them on holiday? Does anyone even need to?!? It often takes me at least 2 or 3 days to get through a decent sized book and the chances of me being able to get through more than five or six for however long a jaunt that I'd propose to take a Kindle on. And I certainly wouldn't want to read more than one at a time, now, would I?

The way they're trying to market it, Kindle is trying to be to books what the i-pod was to music. When you think about it, though, that's all a complete load of rancid penile discharge!
The average pop song is 2-3 minutes in length, necessitating a good few tracks to be on demand if it's being taken out for any longer than ten minutes. Why, oh why would anyone need hundreds upon hundreds of books on demand?

It's not like the downloadable e-books are cheap either! Bestsellers and new releases average at about $9.99 when most of the exact same books are available as hardbacks for around $6.99 USD on Amazon! To convert my existing, shelf warping library into sexxy ephereal e-books would bankrupt me. Not to mention the inevitable piracy shitstorm that arises from the wealth of torrent websites from which e-books can be downloaded for free.

In short, I surmise that Kindle is the most pointless and redundant invention since the penis flavoured condom and I shall certainly find better things to spend nearly two hundred quid on this Christmas!

Tempestuous Times

Well violate my puckered sphincter if it hasn't been an inordinately long time since my last blog post. You will forgive me for this, but my diminished online presence has been the result of being occupied with many varied occupations too dull to go into here. Highlights include marking year 10 coursework and redecorating my in-laws' bedroom.

The Monday before last, however, was the day my hard working and wonderful (though smelly and spotty) cast of adolescents performed The Tempest at the Shakespeare Schools Festival which was hosted by the Preston Charter Theatre.

Both myself and my fellow director (the lovely and talented Lizzy Anthony) entered our kids (our students, not our illegitimate love children) into the festival thinking it would be a great way to get young people to engage with Shakespeare in an exciting and dynamic way.

On observing our competitors' entries into the festival it seemed that we were totally wrong in our belief!

It turns out that the actual aim of the festival was to offend the ancient, decomposed corpse of the bard to the point where he actually rises from the grave and destroys his collected works in shame!

To say that the other schools' entries were shit would be like referring to the bombing of Hiroshima as a minor impediment to the city's public transportation network.

Having said that, I harbour no blame against the students who did their best despite their oh-so-evident apathy and the fact that they'd probably much rather be sniffing glue and cranking out bastard babies. No, my venom is directed entirely at the teachers who conducted themselves with so little sense of occasion, enthusiasm or team spirit you'd think they were there to sort and colour co-ordinate Nick Griffin's cum-stained underwear.

They'd clearly applied this attitude to their rehearsals as well since in the dress rehearsal students frequently fluffed their lines, called for prompts, chatted amongst themselves, fidgeted and committed all manner of sins that Lizzy and myself would have cheerfully disemboweled our students for doing.

First came A Midsummer Night's Dream, or more aptly A Midsummer Night's Doze. Dead eyed students went languidly through the motions with only the animated and charismatic young boy playing Bottom giving the play anything like its much needed comic appeal.

Then came a rendition of Hamlet that was about as respectful to the memory as Shakespeare as exhuming his corpse and pissing into his empty, wasted eye socket. First of all, Hamlet is not a play suited to strong scouse accents! After the third or fourth rendition of "What 'o 'amleh!" I became sure that my brain would implode with rage. But that was before the completely out of place and unneccessary street dance interlude.

You heard me!

A fucking street dance interlude!

In cunting Hamlet!

Our students, however performed with professionalism and aplomb and even drew comments and compliments from the theatre's tech and management staff. Lizzy and I were filled with quasi-parental pride as were the great many other teachers who'd turned out to the theatre to support our students.

For all the pissing and moaning I do about my job it really is a priviledge to be working with such hard working, dedicated and talented kids. I'm immensely proud of them and really grateful that they showed me so aptly what it is I love about my job!


P.S.

Apologies for the stock image but a) I didn't take any photos of the performance proper and b) since the internet is used almost exclusively by paedophiles I didn't want to put myself in an awkward position of putting photos of minors on t'interweb!