Tag Archives: real life

The camera hole

Ten huge oafs lumbering about a squeaky school gym, bouncing and hurling a reinforced beachball at each other. They have to put the ball in a net, and that’s made nice and easy by the huge board they can deflect it off, like that motorbike racing where they lean right over, but with stablilisers. To win, you need to be less shit than the other team just once in 48 minutes, which is why every game seems to finish about 190-188.

No, basketball is not for me, but I accept it’s for some people. And two legends of the game were recently linked across time by monumental sporting moments. Michael Jordan won the 1998 NBA Finals with the last shot of the game, as the astonishment of a Salt Lake City Crowd was immortalised in the background of a famous photograph. 

And last year, LeBron James broke the all-time NBA scoring record, and the background again shows a wide-eyed crowd basking in the joy of history in the making. Not that they saw any of it. The second of these two now-classic pictures shows almost every fan beside the court holding a smartphone in front of their face so that they can one day hear a young child say “But Grandad, why didn’t you just watch the fucking game?”

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Stocked and stacked

So, today l decided to organise my record collection.

If l can just maintain any slippery grip I may have on even a wee sliver of your no doubt already shriveling interest, l’ll give you a bit of the back story. l’ve been buying records since l was a Tween, l suppose, back in the dying years of the 1970s. With hindsight, them weren’t the best of years to be a Tween, were they? I was clearing out my loft recently, and as well as uncovering a few old jokes from some lesser remembered comedians, l was surprised when l came across what appeared to be a copy of The Sex Offenders Registry. On closer inspection it was just a copy of the Radio Times from 1974.

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A lamp’s tale

Light is important.

There’s too much darkness around here. I mean, nearly all the universe is made up of something called dark matter, or so we’re told by people who’ve never seen any of it. I regularly tell my bookmaker my account is made up of hundreds of pounds of theoretical winnings I should be allowed to withdraw, and publicans that they forgot to pour the top half of the pint, but it’s not that easy to get away with making the pretend real when you’re not a ‘scientist’.

For years we’ve had this tall lamp in the bedroom. In recent times it’s had the skeletal remains of a small blue table lamp sitting on top of it to lessen the brightness, and provide a meaningful threat of being brained by a small blue table lamp any time you moved an inch at night or the bloody cat comes in on the menace. I don’t know where the lamp came from and that’s not important; what’s important is it gave out light. Then one day it didn’t, as the trusty ping of a knackered bulb proclaimed.

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The Grange Hill sausage

The band are on fire.

Not in a Bataclan sense, but they’re tearing through their set like a chainsaw through trifle. The crowd are going batshit and no-one will leave without tinnitus. And you’re in the middle of it all, mainlining life.

From nowhere, a boot is thrust into your eyeline like the Grange Hill sausage. It thrashes about and whips at your eyebrow, ayabastard. By rights you should be furious; there’s no reason for a boot to be up there by your head, nor the ankle poking out of it. You grab it, pull it and drag it over yourself. Sweet Jesus there’s a whole body coming with it, a fat fuck of a man punching the air. He’s shovelled forwards, crushing the pink mohican of the lunatic in front.

It’s brilliant and you’re having the time of your life. But enjoy it while it lasts, because they’re coming for it.

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Mooing in defiance

Trump got elected. It’s not hugely surprising. Poor people responded to their unhappy situation by voting in a man who plans to cut taxes for the rich. Uneducated people voted for a guy who will make it far, far harder for the average child to get decent schooling without parents who rob banks. It turns out people are stupid. Shocker.

A couple of years ago I probably would have been spitting feathers about it all. But there’s no rage for politics left in me. All that’s left now is to laugh.

This truly is the crowning glory of human achievement – the setting up of a system so confusing to the layman that they willingly truss their own hooves and leap onto the cart to the abattoir, mooing in defiance at the man with the bolt gun. If you can’t laugh at that you must be a Mrs Brown’s Boys fan.

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