Waiting for the Sun to Set

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest television progamme ever made*, and when it came to a close in 2003, I was rather lost, although I felt it had not only Jumped the Shark, but rode the back of, spat at and defecated in the eye of the same sea beastie.

The show ended not because the producers realised they were developing a walking corpse that wouldn’t play dead, but because Sarah Michelle Gellar decided she wanted to move onto bigger and better things.  By which she meant become a film star and make a shitload of cash.  

I discovered last week that Gellar is a Republican, and it left a bitter nastiness in my metaphorical mouth.  I love Buffy because, behind the mask of inanity, there was a programme which was quite progressive for a mainstream American show.  I considered it be an Ideas Smuggler – surreptitiously provoking Americans into thinking while they thought they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires.  Obviously, they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires, but it was oh-so-much more.

To discover that the hero of this modern masterpiece is playing, politically speaking, for the other side meant that my sturdy walls of perception came tumbling down, as if a fog had been lifted from my eyes, like a cubic zirconia bullet right through my forehead.  It was up there with the time I realised that God didn’t exist, and the realisation at the age of ten that, despite my claims to the contrary, Manchester City were not better than Manchester United, and weren’t the greatest team in the world***.

Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is a Buffy comic which takes up the story from the end of the final season and it’s actually quite good.  More importantly, because it’s a comic, SMG isn’t actually required, and doesn’t profit, and I am not forced to deal with the dichotomy of reality vs.fiction.

The moral of this tale is that sometimes it can be a good thing to dig up the rotting corpses of popular media and re-animate the cadaver, slap on a bit of lippy and give it a new haircut, and send it back into the world.

However, some corpses should remain buried. Buried forever.

This forthcoming Sunday the Crown Prince of Corporeal Evil, Rupert Murdoch, will attempt to insult an entire nation with the relaunch of his cesspit of a rag, The News of the World, under the guise of The Sun of Sunday.  After his performance at the select committee hearing in which he claimed to be living the humblest day of his life in a manner which was, tellingly, very fucking far from humble, I hoped that he would least have the sense to accept that the hacking of a murdered child’s phone was so far below any kind of accepted civilisation as to  understand that he might as well dance up and down on Milly Downer’s grave as try to bring back a Sunday paper.  I underestimated him.

To my mind, this is a little like Hitler claiming he’d seen the error of his ways in trying to wipe an entire group of people of the face of the earth, and he felt humble because he’d had an epiphany, rather than because he’d been busted. And while he was at it, would anyone be interested in reading the new edition of his book, which would no longer be known as Mein Kampf, but would now bear the moniker How to Kill Friends and Liquidate people. A little like this.

The comparisons might be a bit extreme, I admit, but the principle’s the same.  

I am hopeful, however, that the target demograph for The Sun, the kind of people who attacked a paediatrician believing she was a paedophile****, aren’t quite so forgiving or forgetful as Rupert the Human Cancer would believe.  In fact, given The Sun’s history of moral outrage, I fully expected the weekday Sun to run a campaign against The Sun on Sunday. I’ll even give them their headline for free.

Humble hacker in Pseudo Sorry Sunday Sun shocker.

Or, preferably, Murdoch Falls in Mincer: Nation Rejoices.

Please don’t buy this piece of shit.  You can make a difference.

*I’m serious**

**No, really, I am.  Closely followed by Battlestar Galactica (The new one, obviously), and Duckula.  

***Both these problems have now been addressed

****I shit you not

Sicknote

As icy days close in, and the previously absent winter has a go at reminding us it still exists, out come the unused Christmas hats and gloves, breakfast porridge makes its annual appearance, and up pops the duvet safety of sick days.  

It’s at this stage of the season that petty sickness creeps apace, winding its way round the workplace like a sulphuric fart in a small lift, leaving no corner unfouled. People drop off the work radar for a couple of days, followed out, on their return, by another shivering sniffler, like a hibernal game of contagiously diseased dominoes. I had my turn last week.

The problem with sick days, for me, is that finding myself with a whole day I’d otherwise be sacrificing to the gods of work, I don’t want to waste my opportunity to get stuff done, go places I’d normally never see and do stuff I’d normally never do.  There’s a plethora of art galleries and museums I heartily neglect, a world of books I intend to read which perch on my To Be Read shelf.  (In truth, this is more like my To Be Read shelves, and is on the brink of becoming my To Be Read bookcase.  I estimate it will be a To Be Read library by the time I retire. I really ought to buy shares in Waterstone’s).

Unfortunately the nature of sickdays, is that I’m, not to put too fine a point on it, sick. Well, usually.  Or sometimes, at least.

 I may want to fill my time with worth, but the sad truth is I’m more likely to sleep until midday, wake for a Lemsip and then spend the day dozing in and out of consciousness whilst listening to some play on Radio 4 about a bunch of middle class people uncovering the secrets of their grandparents’ abuse of servants in India during the Raj, or some other offering from the Radio 4 write-by-numbers drama factory. By the time I feel anywhere near rested enough to do something, it’s pretty much the time I’d be getting home anyway.

Johnny Rotten, before he became the face of whatever dairy product it is he advertises, once asked ‘ Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ . Yes, Mr Rotten, I have. Every time I waste a sick day on actually being sick. 

What is more annoying than this is when the sickness pounces and it is not a work day.  There is no greater injustice in this world* than arriving home on a Friday to discover that your body has developed a malfunction which results in being bed bound and incapable of doing anything beyond groaning and making Mr Kleenex rich**.

The real shit-smeared nail in the coffin of life here is that, no matter how extraordinarily unwell you are, you will always have recovered by Monday, and have no legitimate excuse to take a sick day. This, along with the existence of the parasitic wasp and Alex Ferguson, is the keystone on which I base my unshakeable belief that there is no God.

And, on that theological bombshell, I’m withdrawing back under the covers because I’m feeling slighty queasy. And, unbelievably, I’m on holiday. Today I planned to do those things I neglect – play guitar, read a book, leave the house.  Curse you, lack of God.   So, instead, I’m off to have that same fitful dream in which a thousand gloomy towers of unread books loom over me, berating me in thunderous tones for depriving them of their destiny while a billion tiny pixies adorned in Waterstone’s T-shirts dance gleefully on piles of burning money.  It’s a recurring highly vivid dream.

If only I knew what it meant.

*This is obviously a lie.

**From blasting snot out of your nose, you filthy minded guttersnipe.