Ta Ta Me Old Fruit...

This is my last night in my ends. I'm moving to a cottage in the middle of fucknows-where-Kent as apparently they have hospitals that babies get born in without catching MRSA or get sold to a Latvian couple who paid "good price". It wasn't my idea, but the tickets have been bought and my beloved 500 Arsenal programmes are in a box halfway out the door - so I'm going.

It's going to be a shock to the system. I'm from Leytonstone. I'm used to chicken shops - not farm shops. I'm used to looking at someone like you're going to cut them if they touch your trolley in Tescos and being able to buy 12 beers in a black plastic bag off a Turk at 3am. In this leafy parish, Dot knows Graham, who's Colin the baker's son, who went to school with Phyllis - the lady who won Best Courgette 2004 at the village fete. Nobody fucking knows anyone in my manor - unless you've got beef or they actually live with you. Neighbourhood Watch consists of waiting until next door has gone out before popping their kitchen window and nicking their Xbox. Where I'm going they smile at you like perverts just for being in the same mile radius. When we went to view the cottage some yocal walked past and said to my missus: "Hello, how are you?" whilst smiling like a Cheshire cat. I said "Who the fuck was that? What did they want? Have you still got your purse?". In the motherland the only people who smile at you like that are traffic wardens and drooling crackheads about to plunge a screwdriver into your face for 48p.

I will cherish some very sweet memories of living round here. Like the time some Americans staying with local family asked me which way to the station and I sent them to "Fatched Ouse". Thatched House is the biggest irony since time began. It's in between Leytonstone and Stratford, has four Caribbean takeaways, 11 chicken shops, a Percy Ingle, a minicab office and a dirty cluster of estates. It's head, shoulders, knees and ghettos - there certainly ain't no mock Tudor culture down there! Anyway, the Yanks got robbed. I know this is fact as later on I met one of the estates' yoofs wearing the very same Denver Broncos watch Mr Yank was wearing an hour earlier. Classic.

Another fond memory is how none, absolutely none, of the pizza places in the area would dare go into my mates block to deliver a pizza. Not a chance, and certainly not the 14th floor. They had a five minute waiting time from when they parked their budget ped outside, as they knew, in six minutes, the vultures would come out and they'd be getting jacked. New drivers got ruined and learnt quickly. How many times we'd see hoodrats riding a Pizza Go-Go branded ped across the local park until the Old Bill wised up that the 13 year old "driver" wasn't legitimately employed and the bike was nicked. Comedy.

So now I'm heading off to a village with the population of about 100, probably about 97 by the time I get there - although not reduced from gun crime, just old age. People are going to be nice, which may take some getting used to. I might, however, have a trip back to East occasionally to stop myself feeling homesick- just to see the crackheads blow their noses on bus timetables and to grab myself a one piece snack box from Chicken Palace.

Gonna miss you East London - I'll be back!

One more thing...

Children of the 90's will have remembered this immediately. If not, check this out

THIS IS EPIC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxi6QDwQyLU

The Apprentice: You Mugs.

I've just watched The Apprentice for the first time in a long time. I know why I left it for such a long time. Do they actually pick people by how smack-me-upside-the-fucking-head-stupid they actually are?? One team, lead by the carnivorous and piranha faced Susan Ma, head into town to buy a Cloche. They don't know what it is. GOOGLE it. Jesus wept. How many primates are walking around with high powered smart phones clever enough to use Google, Bing, Bang or Ask Jeeves. Jeeves would laugh in your face and call you a mug. He's a butler and there to serve - but he's not a mong. That's right, go and buy a greenhouse you brigade of champion muppets.



The Grand Wizard Sir Rabbi Lord Aspartame OBE MBE QVC BBC ITV SKY1 LWT BHS C&A LandOfLeather Hons should have at least picked someone better than Super Hans in that rag tag bunch of High Street pirates. I turned over and literally thought I was watching Channel 4. Had PeepShow's Super Hans cleaned up his act, finally kicked the rocks, applied for The Apprentice and made good his buzzing existence? My survey said: Not fucking quite. No, it was some chump called Vincent. He could have been buzzing given the fact that he was leading his harem of pin-striped wearing business brasses around with about as much coordination as the Right Honourable Charlie Sheen MP, on a Bolivian day trip with an after party in Professor Burp's Bubble Works. Baffled. Useless.

I miss Margaret - and have a fairly educated idea as to what's happened to her:

Late at night, in his opulent offices in Canary Wharf (actually a shanty commercial park in Brentwood, Essex) Lord Aspartame asks loyal, hard working Maggie into his office.

"Send her in Tracy" (or whatever the bint on the fake front desk is called).

Margaret arrives.

"Margaret, I need your help".

Margaret, shuddering at the memory of Lord Aspartame's last request of help with an office enema and the Nescafe Brown Blend farts he stalked her with for a week, replies sheepishly:

"Yes, Your Holiness, how can I help?"

Stepping down from his eleven shoebox tall high chair, Aspartame gestures Margaret nearer.

"Margaret, take a quick look at these figures, in this spreadsheet, this one here, right on my desk."

As Margaret approached, shaking like a shitting spaniel, Lord Aspartame snapped closed his eagle like claws, dragging Margaret's alarmed face to his crotch.

"Now suck me like a bloody overzealous Dyson or you're FIRED! FIRED I SAY! FIRED!"

The rest is tragic history. Needless to say, the vivid, haunting, vision of fellating Aspartame's salty acorn was enough to drive poor Margaret away, forever. Forever in shame and denial. Lord Aspartame has now employed a seasoned cocksucker in the form of Karen Brady (used to noshing two old men at her day job with West Ham) and this task is part of every episode's team debriefing. He's never been happier and the series continues...

(For the record: The Vince/Super Hans comparison is fucking mine, not Dara O'Briain's: reference titter/FB at least 30 mins before the aftershow)

SNUSRAGE and Slow Walkers...

I have very little snus. Almost none. The impending doom and sorrow is not having a pleasant result on my patience.

Yesterday, on the way back from shopping in town, a group of French tourist teenagers were crawling through Oxford Street station, SLOWLY. Very. Very. SLOWLY. Londoners move fast on the Underground - and so do I. In a knuckle whitening example of how blind they were to people wanting to get by, they occupied an entire corridor to look at a map, posters and just take in oxygen. I couldn't get by. This made me want to scythe these shellsuit wearing rats down with the rustiest, sharpest instrument I could find- although I would have been happy with a wooden spoon. When we collectively arrived at the escalator, my heart filled with joy and celebration that, in 10 seconds, I would be able to barge this group of Gallic pricks down the steel steps and watch their garlic stained skeletons crumple into a pile of satisfying dust. By the grace of God and the frogs' guardian angels, a pair of coppers walked through the mob just as I was preparing my "Iron Shoulder Technique".

Lucky fucking bastards. Along with those who want to dice with death by walking those lightweight, skinny, pixie suitcases that have longer legs than Peter "Freak" Crouch - yet are only travelling from London to Zurich or some other cunty highbrow wanker arena around Europe. It's amazing to consider the physics of how the two bars of their cases' extendible handles could gracefully wrap around their heads. That experiment was close to happening last night.

I am weaning / pining / catting / snarling my way off my beloved snus. Actually, I want to bite you on the FACE. I have been doing snus for 5 years and it packs a dirty punch versus cigarettes. You don't have the odd 5 minute snus. No. You have a snus for an hour. Or at my stage of addiction - almost all day. Now, I have to deal with the fact I have JUST 7 left in the universe. Some bastard in the European Parliament (I'd would cut him in half, fill him with salt & vinegar, then sow him back together with flaming needles) has decided that snus can no longer be sold to ANYONE in the EU.

W H A T. T H E. F U C K.

This person should be drowned in furious hornets. Or thrown into a bag of livid scorpions. You fucking bastard. Snus does profoundly less damage than smoking, it's cheaper and can be enjoyed anywhere. WHY take it away from people?? Brussels. The ultimate meeting place for the biggest wankers in Europe. You've done FUCK ALL for me here - now you take away my only vice (other than occasional binge-drinking ultra rapscallion adventures, you can't stop them, but they need snus too). I categorically guarantee that if an MEP crosses my path before I get my next batch of snus - there will be a kidnapping, torture and a very satisfying variety of katana blade manoeuvres.

Save a life. Bring me snus. I now have 6.

CoggBlog's Vagabonds #2+3

NAMES: Vlad & Leatherface

PAST LIVES: Oligarch & Mining Empire Heiress.

REASON FOR VAGABONDERY: Vlad's unending appetite for buggering and murdering Kazakh rent boys was seen as highly undesirable by the Kremlin and his once lucrative oil drilling contracts met a swift decline. His once beautiful wife, Leatherface, maintained a consistent addiction to the good life, provided by her father's successful mining business, her main vice being expensive fashions- Siberian Snow Leopard fur jackets. After she had rendered the last of the species extinct, accumulating 101 furs to form the ultimate body warmer, her wildlife loving father disowned her. She, along with Vlad, were left with nothing and started drinking petrol and Castrol GTX to cope.

HOBBIES: Loitering around the Jet garage in Dalston, trying to lap up occasional fuel spillages. Mourning the loss of their bastard son, Igor, who tragically died when his trapeze broke auditioning for Russia's Got Circus Talent series 5.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: As Leatherface no longer holds any moisture in her body, at all, she is completely impervious to damage by extreme heats. She has been known to snort the flames coming off oil rigs for shits and giggles. A feat previously expected by BP to be impossible. Vlad holds the audacious title of being the only man alive who can stare a bison to death. Experts speculate his dark rapist heart disturbs the bison's soul and the extreme fear of nonconsensual sodomy scares the bison to his doom. (Poor bison. Chilling.)

I encountered this begging "dream team" on the streets of Islington at 11.30am on a Sunday morning. Leatherface stopped me in my tracks to crinkle her face tighter than a last place betting slip and pretended to display some agony or distress in the hope I would reward her with revenue for her super-unleaded fuelled performance. Ushering my smoking companions away, in fear that she and they would combust into a raging inferno of perpetually burning flames, I told her quite bluntly that I had no change. Cue Vlad, with his menacing stare, to ask me himself. No Vlad. I'm no bison and you won't get a penny from me. Admitting defeat, the couple took their ethanol aroma elsewhere.

PLEASE NOTE: No bison, buffalo or ox were harmed in the writing of this blog post.