THE RANTING BRUMMIE'S SHADY HOLIDAY GUIDE

Greetings, as you may or may not be aware, (probably not because nobody ever actually reads this bloody thing) I recently did something I hadn't done for almost ten years.

I went on holiday.

Granted I had no say in the matter, I had to miss LFCC as a result, and my Nan having a mini-stroke the day we were due to fly out notwithstanding, but like most things it got me thinking. Firstly, whenever I told people I was going on holiday, or had had been on holiday, everyone kept saying the same thing: 'Ooh, I've always wanted to go there.' Well, it's not exactly that bloody difficult. if you want to spend a week basking in sulphur and riding around on a camel with hair like Toyah Wilcox, and you've always wanted to know what Hake tastes like, you just go to an airport and get on a plane.

The fact is though, you go on holiday because you want to come back with a suntan. Because if you don't all your friends will think you haven't gone away anywhere at all. This might lead them to either suspect a) you're a vampire, or b) poor, which, if I'd gone to LFCC instead, I would have been. So instead, you went to Birmingham International, where you were herded onto some godforsaken tin cigar that whisked you away to the Canary Islands, where you spent a week bathing in chlorine, avoiding projectiles from the immature idiots in the pool and occasionally venturing out to a restaurant with plastic chairs.

But it didn't matter because you came home with what you think is a tan but instead turned out to be a series of pink and white stripes. You aimed to be a bronzed Adonis like Christiano Ronaldo, but ended up looking like something the butcher hangs up in his shop window with a label reading 'offer of the week' jammed up it's arse. And less than two weeks later, it's all gone, and now you're peeling and shedding skin to such an extent you could be forgiven to think you've turned into a snake. You have therefore spent a month's wages for something that lasted about as long as an X-Factor winner's career.

The history of the suntan is in itself an interesting one. In the olden days, any one with bronzed skin worked out in the fields, whilst those that lived in towns and cities saw about as much sunlight as Nosferatu due to all the inner city smog. Even the upper classes, who were responsible for inventing the seaside holiday in the first place, would often venture out onto the beach wearing what would pass for a pretty decent pair of pyjamas. Then, one day in 1923, Coco Chanel stepped off a yacht in the south of France, sporting the full David Dickinson leatherman look, and a new craze was born. The Americans took note and began to appear on the world stage, after developing burgers and cars with fins, and everyone else copied them because they thought it looked cool. So, when the package holiday was invented, every fine upstanding Englishman had the opportunity to look like the bastard offspring of George Hamilton and Micheal Winner.

Not me though. I am well aware I have the complexion of forced rhubarb and I am simply not equipped to spend more than five minutes with the glare of the sun on my ugly, piggy, pasty, overweight frame and spend all summer long dashing from tree to tree. if anything, because a bottle of sunscreen theses days costs more than a bottle of cheap Spanish wine and for me that is simply unacceptable. If you go for cream rather than lotion, it often comes thicker than wallpaper paste and I really don't have time to waste on weather or not I should go for factor 30 or 50, because either way I panic I've forgotten some random exposed area that gets burned anyway and will keep me up all night wriggling until my bedsheets cocoon me into a linen maggot. I learned early on in my foreign excursions that's it's much better and safer to bathe in it, then sit in the shade reading my book and listening to music all day. Mind you, if you have children, you obviously have to spend an unreasonable amount of time smothering them in the stuff as well. I told my sister just to get my nephew a frogman suit and let him get on with it.

Not my mother, though, oh no. She will spend the best part of half an hour applying what looks like Castrol GTX to her skin and then, using the kind of careful alignment that would make Jordrell Bank wince, arranges a sun lounger so that she need not move all day. She just lies there like a roast potato, basting. The effect though, I must say, is astonishing, she goes from a middle aged woman to a little brown Yoda, and then two weeks later, she turns back again.

As for me, I kept surrounding myself with as many parasols a possible and arranging my sun lounger so that thanks to my new prescription sunglasses, I could keep my eye on a stunning pale-skinned girl in an orange bikini who I developed something of an obsession with. She had the face, hair and body of Karen Gillian, only with the added bonus of quite possibly the most incredible pair of breasts I think I have ever seen on a human woman in my life. They were not silicone monsters, they were totally natural, perfectly shaped and to my eye, cute. They were in proportion to her body with a cleavage that was contained and well defined, not spreading and stretched.

It was possible to glimpse them even from behind her when she way lying down and I made this the main focus of my day until the battery in my iPod ran out. She walked without shame or false modesty, her dark ginger hair wrapped up neatly above her head, knowing she was beautiful to the eye, sleek with a slender frame. Combined with that graceful walk and a bottom that danced like two Volkswagen Beetles trying to parallel park, there were a couple of occasions where she walked right past me in the poolside bar, her breasts almost acting as weather balloons, and I damn well nearly dropped my drink.

Naturally like the complete and total coward that I am, I never approached her or talked to her and instead thought about pulling a pneumatic 21-year old blonde in the other bar with the strappy sports top and jogging bottoms with the word 'juicy' written across her bum. That never happened either.

Anyway, if you want to get a tan, get a job mending the roads.

Next year I'm going back to LFCC.

NO-DEAL BREXIT ?! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR (DANDELION) MIND ?!

Last week I had the privilege of seeing Bill Baliey performing his current show, "Larks in Transit" at the NIA / Arena Birmingham. The man is one of my absolute favourite comedians, and his ability to draw laughs from music in particular is one of his absolute highlights. From using birdsong in rap music, a downbeat southern bluesey version of "Old McDonald", leading the audience in a rendition of the German version of "You Are My Sunshine", to a Brexit-based version of Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday".

I mention this bit of the show in particular because the gig had taken place on the day of the 2019 EU "Elections" (something of an oxymoron in itself, as it's not actually possible to vote for any of / against / vote out any of the people that are actually in charge of the EU) and given that comedians are often the guardians of topical satire in this country, Mr Bailey clearly had to start the show with some rather obvious Brexit jokes.

They were side-splittingly funny, especially the one about Jeremy Corbyn, but it got me thinking.

One of the best things about Brexit has been its shattering of anti-establishment pretensions. All the people who for yonks had been getting away with posing as rebels and disruptors and irritants to the status quo have been exposed as utterly allergic to actual radical political change; as 'small-c' conservatives became freaked out by revolt; as the nervous, nodding footsoldiers of political power.

From the trustafarians of Momentum, those laptop Leninists who fantasised that they were revolutionaries, to columnists like Caitlin Moran, the Times’ token rebel who once said she lives ‘like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash’ (cringe much?), virtually every self-styled couterculturalist has gawped in unfiltered horror as a swarm of people, the 17.4m, has done something genuinely revolting. As they said for real, rather than just in a tweet or on a placard that will be binned before dinner, ‘We reject the political order’.

My favourite Brexit-delivered demolition of anti-establishment posing concerns professional nonce Owen Jones. Poor Owen. A few years ago he wrote a book called "The Establishment", (how on earth Hale and Pace didn't sue I don't know) railing against the rotters and bankers and tabloids he thinks are running Britain. Now he finds himself chortling along as bona-fide-establishment-figure-Nick-Clegg-takes-the-mick-out-of-stupid-northerners-who-voted-for-Brexit mouthpiece.

Owen, like so many Fischer-Price revolutionaries, weeps millennial tears over the democratic sucker-punch delivered to the EU, that most establishment of institutions, by the oiks.

But going back to Bill Bailey, and this was something he addressed himself during his performance, right-on funnymen and women, who for decades have been cracking gags about nasty, grasping politicians, have also had a meltdown over Brexit. They’re raging AGAINST the revolting masses and actually pining FOR the EU. They’ve been exposed as court jesters - Juncker’s jesters (until of course he bans them all along with internet memes of his ugly, vulture-like, wine-addled face) - telling jokes designed to flatter power and defame revolt. They are, perversely, satirists for the status quo.

Marcus Brigstocke told Radio 4 this week that his own anti-Brexit schtick is causing him trouble in the north of England: "People have been angry. People have walked out of my shows and people have booed". He reckons Brexit is ‘not just the hideous social and political turn we have taken as a country’ (yawn - change the record Marcus !!) but is also ‘comedic poison’.

Britain’s comics are almost universally anti-Brexit. The conformism is staggering. Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, nailed it this week when he said ‘the comedy world’s reaction [to Brexit] has been exclusively negative’. Too many comics, virtually all of them, ‘rely on lazily branding 52 percent of voters as racist’, he said. There isn’t much comic mileage, he reckons, in ‘lashing out at stupid people making the wrong decision’. Indeed. No wonder the likes of Brigstocke face fury in Brexit country. People don’t like being told they’re disgusting, hateful idiots.

Who knew that a hulking swathe of the populace rejects the EU but hardly a single comic does shows how utterly disconnected the comedic class really is. It confirms the colonisation of British comedy by a breathtakingly narrow strata of society. Tragically, the same is now happening in the pop and acting worlds: they’re being overrun by well-fed toffs or well-connected middle classes who tend to share the same worldview. Hence the cultural elite now thinks one thing, and ordinary people think another.

Considering that Elvis, the Beatles and Cliff Richard were originally considered for being banned lest they might have swayed the minds of impressionable teenagers of the 50's to rebel against their elders and end up vote for revolutionary parties such as Free Love, Old (new, old as it was then) Labour and the Communist Party of Great Britain, this caps an astonishing cultural u-turn that would leave even Jeremy Corbyn gasping for breath.

Having utterly jettisoned self-awareness, many of these fantasy rebels convince themselves they’re still in the business of rebellion. How? By bashing Boris and Farage and Gove and everyone’s favourite 1950s throwback, Jacob Rees-Mogg. They pretend (they must know it’s a pretence?) that these four Brexiteers, being posh and quite wealthy and influential in the government and media, are The Establishment, and that anyone who makes jokes about them or tweets photos of them gurning on Question Time is a radical.

Please. It’s such a farce. A minute or two of serious reflection will confirm it’s the pro-EU side that is establishment, and the anti-EU plebs who are anti-establishment. In the run-up to the referendum, the EU side was backed by most MPs, by big business, by virtually every global institution, by the White House, by almost all of academia. If you’re making jokes or writing columns or taking to the streets on that side, then you’re not anti-establishment. You just aren’t! And that’s okay. You’re nervous and conservative. Fine. Own it.

All of this points to the spectacular failure of the left with regards to Brexit. I’m not sure the left will ever recover from its failure to see in Brexit a good and honest mass yearning for greater democratic accountability and meaningful popular sovereignty. The right’s failures on Brexit are technical - it looks like they’ll make just as much of a dog’s dinner of the negotiations as the left - but the left’s failures are existential.

A movement founded to express the will of the people against the established political order now does the utter opposite. The right might have been exposed as inefficient by the Brexit revolt, but the left has been exposed as kaput, over, reduced from a dreamer of rebellion to the obedient propaganda wing of a clapped-out oligarchy that millions hate. It's like living inside the hokey-cokey, remixed by Fatboy Slim.

Now that’s funny, so some on, comics: this material is rich, mine it.

That is it Thatcher hadn't sacked all the miners … boom, boom, hint, hint, satire, politics, etc …

AN OPEN LETTER TO THERESA MAY

Dear Prime Minister,

I live in Longbridge, Birmingham, in the Northfield constituency, an extremely Labour supporting area, and come from a very long maternal and paternal line of Labour supporters. My paternal grandmother was a proud active supporter of the Labour party. My maternal grandfather was a Labour voter because his father was and his father’s father was before him.

My mother isn’t particularly interested in politics. She still says that they were all as bad as each other and would make her mind up at the ballot box. My sister and most of my friends is Labour supporters and, until recently, so was I until they elected a scruffy, bearded, terrorist supporting Marxist who has openly declared that as a red-meat-eating, heterosexual, Caucasian male, I am not longer demographically interesting enough for them to pursue their vote. I, like my own father, am now Conservative-voting for the first time in my life. You could say talk around the dinner table and down the pub has been interesting recently.

Ever since I have been old enough to have the capacity to formulate political opinions (thanks in no small part the genius-level comedy and biting satire of Spitting Image) I have had no love whatsoever for the EU. I have loathed and despised them ever since my adolescence.

The main reason for me voting leave in the 2016 referendum was to take back control of my own country. I have seen the damage it has done to our region’s automotive, farming and traditional industries. The UK would be a much richer and finer country without the constraints forced upon us by the EU. What may be good for, say, Spain or Greece (not that it has turned out to be any good for either of those countires) isn’t necessarily good for the UK (and so it has proved as we now can't even unpeel a banana without being lectured about it's ecological impact - and havng to find one that's not bent enough in the first place). I am NOT a racist and find it extremely insulting to be called one simply because I voted leave.

The EU has never been a trade club; nor was it ever intended to be. Flag, anthem, embryo army, militarised state police, unaccountable politburo, Napoleonic Legal system, European Arrest Warrant, Supreme Court etc etc, do not signify a trade club. They signify the latest incarnation of European totalitarianism, strutting along in a haze of smoke and mirrors that no-one of sound mind could possibly mistake for a trade club, or anything remotely resembling one. Trade is not its raison d'etre; it is the EU's weapon for enforcing political control.

The EU has no interest in small or beautiful, or efficiency or democracy or even people, other than as economic slaves and cannon-fodder. Its sole interest is the promulgation of itself as the next great, global, dictatorial superpower.

I am sorry, Prime Minister, but you have been shown to be exceedingly weak to allow yourself to be bullied by the EU, the remain members of your own party and by parliament. You are now acting against your Cabinet, party, manifesto, prior policies, repeated promises, electors and the law.

The result of the referendum was for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to completely and totally leave the European Union. I will admit when I found out the result (I was in the pub, naturally) I was overjoyed. Had the result been to remain, naturally I would have been disappointed, but would have accepted it and moved on.

Probably to to country with some common sense and doesn't have any nosey old Belgians making up their own rules and forcing them on us having drunk their way to their jobs in such a way it would make George Best, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris look like they were attending a Sunday school.

But anyway, I most certainly would not have demanded a second referendum simply because the result did not go the way I wanted.

It is astonishing that members of parliament on all sides are acting like petulant children. The UK voted to leave the EU, so do as the country has asked, and leave without any strings, conditions or clauses attached. I find it incomprehensible that all members of parliament have treated us, the British public, like a bunch of Milwall supporters.

They have brains of a cheese sandwich, and the attitude of ‘these moronic peasants have voted to leave but are too stupid to understand what leave actually means. So we will do everything in our power to remain or to broker a soft Brexit deal which is really remain by another name‘. Imagine what would have happened if the result of the vote was to remain. Do you think as much air time would have been given to leavers demanding a second referendum, and that MPs would try to force the country to leave when the country voted to remain ??

The vote for a further Article 50 extension was carried by one vote, and that vote was by a Labour MP who is a convicted criminal no less. It says a lot about the wretched state of our parliament. The British people deserve better than this treacherous rabble. I don't know where this is going to end in terms of British society but I am starting to get a bad feeling that things will get a lot worse unless we have a purge of this house of clowns.

I have never been so disgusted, both as a (recent) Conservative voter and as a British citizen (NOT, as I have NEVER considered or identified myself to be, an EU one !!), that my country should be reduced to this laughing stock of a nation. Members of Parliament should never be complacent as to who put them there in the first place. They are there because their constituents or party members voted for them. We are already beginning to see the consequences of this ridiculous fiasco. Local parties are de-selecting or proposing votes of no confidence in their MPs. It is us, the British public, who hold your P45 and we won’t think twice about handing it to you. It is time you and they are reminded of that.

This land is my beloved ancestral home, and it can never be morally illegitimate in any way to reject handing it over to foreign rule. That presence is not legitimised by our consent, therefore it is NOT legitimate, and you have absolutely nothing to lose from stating the fact; for we are already losing our life and land courtesy of the same political class which is contemptuous of our rejection of their other great project of assimilation.

If a General Election were to be called now I can confidently say that I will NOT be voting Conservative. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party will be getting my vote. How can I vote Conservative when all my faith and trust have been eradicated ?? It will take a new strong leader/PM to unite the party, and more importantly, the country.

Yours truly,

The Ranting Brummie.