Emerald Bile

I like Third World countries, for their daily rubbish collections. The places still stink to high heaven - it isn't as if moving small piles of rubbish around makes much of a difference to the overall stench- merely that ones own unnecessaries are taken off and don't have to linger in a corner of the property looking unpleasant and attracting flies.

In England people make a terrible meal out of their rubbish - fiddling around washing dirty containers, salvaging old bits of card, rinsing out plastic bottles and storing the lot in hundreds of different municipal bags. I heard someone use the word "triage", recently, to describe the act of throwing something away - what an obscenely cuntish thing to say - just fucking appalling.

I have taken bottles to the bottle bank before, and enjoy the noise of the smashing glass as I have a deeply violent streak - but the same frisson can be achieved by chucking bottles into my own bin and further improved by the thought that they might sever a fucking lazy, bimonthly- binman's artery into the bargain. Or I might smash the bottle into the bin and then remove a piece and use it to slice the face of anyone mentioning rubbish separation to me. Years ago, when I lived in Germany - the Krauts were crazy about recycling- and they got so competitive about washing butter wrappers and scrubbing out the last smegma of quark and dithering about whether waxed paper counted as gruene punkt or not that the resulting energy wasted by a recently reunified country in "Das Trennen", could have been used to do far more useful things like rebuild Dresden faster, or teach everyone to be nicer to Turks, or to dress less like cunts.

And what about compost? What the fuck is that? Horrible pots of decomposing kitchen waste - rat buffets stinking out back yards, people bothering over potato peelings, shitting their pants if a stray sliver of runner bean makes it into the black sack. If a carrot is capable of rotting in a bucket, then why can't it fucking rot in a landfill? What is the point of having millions of small rotting points heating up the country, instead of a few, nice, big, tidy, official rotting pits? And don't give me: "Oh organic waste gives lovely compost for the garden" - what if you have no garden? and besides, commercially produced compost is not expensive, not at all, to make your own would just be taking the food out of John Innes' mouth, although I am yet to meet someone who actually used their vile teabag, peeling and eggshell sump on their plants. Where I live, a lorry comes and collects bags of rotting vegetable matter - not on the same day as the ordinary rubbish, nor in a dustcart with jaws that can take masses of bags as it chews them all up to a small size - no a strange, large lorry, with wire sides and the engine of an American cadillac car, guffing out leaded fumes, takes the bags of "organic waste", on an entirely separate journey, and drives it miles and miles to a specially designated rotting station.


It is such a Protestant thing to do, fiddling with rubbish. I bet recycling was created by an Anglican clergyman, who, at a loss with what to do with his parishoners, decided that separating rubbish into diferent piles could fill up the time when normal people are saying novenas or making a special devotion to a saint, or confessing their sins. I hate compost and people, who save their vegetable peelings, should be fed to pigs.
Noreen

Noreen is Right!

Recycling is such a load of fucking cunt.



Not content with telling me want I can and can’t put in my own fucking bin, they are telling me that some of the things I do put in it have to be washed first. They want me to wash my fucking rubbish before I throw it away. I don’t fucking think so.



At first I sort of joined in with all this nonsense. The blue bin they gave me made a nice change, so I put my paper and milk cartons and things in it. Then a stern looking man came to my door and said he had been looking through my bin (the pikey fucker) and had found a windowed envelope and a cereal box in it, which was very much against the rules apparently. He said I could put envelopes in the bin, but not windowed envelopes and I could put cardboard in it, but not cardboard cereal boxes for some fucking reason.



After that I stopped fucking bothering, fearing another speccy cunt would knock on my door and tell me off for throwing away the wrong kind of rubbish.



Then they started collecting my bins every 2 weeks, presumably to force people to recycle (remembering of course to wash their rubbish before binning it). So now my bin is full a week before collection and I have to take what is left over to the local wildlife reserve and fuck it into the lake. Now how is that helping the bloody environment? If anything it is making it fucking worse.

Ball Bag

A person who sells exotic spiders must be obese, with arms that can't lie flush against their side, as the triceps muscles are swollen pods of fat. And their eyes - the eyes of a spider seller would be flat flints, deep-set and round - just a little too small, begging the company of six more. And their hands would never be at rest, twitching, fidgeting, pulling and plucking at imaginary gossamer, and the mouth would be a lipless hole, set above a perfectly domed and very white and boneless chin. That is all.

Noreen

Shopping

Noreen: Excuse me - do you have any pantyhose*?
Shopwoman: Yes, over there in the corner
Noreen: Thanks
Shopwoman: You're welcome
Noreen: Sorry, do you have any pantyhose* in a chocolate brown** colour
Shopwoman: Yes, I think we do. Excuse me, are you plus-sized?
Noreen: What?
Shopwoman: (slowly as if speaking to a retard) Plus-sized.
Noreen: What, like fat***?
Shopwoman: What size do you wear Ma'am?
Noreen: Well it depends entirely on the shop. normally a 6**** but in Marks and Spencers they cut large, so I can squeeze my lower half into a 4****. I've large shoulders AND big tits though so if it's a shirt - well I make a point of trying it on and I've arms like a monkey as well - so you can never be too careful. I can't go near a Top Shop shirt they are cut for ironing boards with slopey shoulders, but a Thomas Pink one has decent sized darts in that can accommodate anything up to a D cup, which is more realistic, as women with big tits are more likely to wear proper shirts, especially over a certain age. But you have to cough up for a Pink shirt - the thieving so and sos - I'm sure they make them in China and get orphans to sew them just like everyone else, but dear god do they make you pay for it! And what is it with assuming all women have stump arms - I mean some of us are more gangly and I don't want cuffs up round my elbows, I have a thing about wrists, those nasty bones that stick out give me the creeps - I dont want to look at that, a shirt should button just below the hand........ ****


At this point the woman was looking glazed so I stopped my shop chat and smiled at her - waiting for her to explain the plus sized thing or get my tights or something

Shopwoman: "This is a Plus-Sized Store ma'am". Avenue??*****
Noreen: Avenue? Ah, like a very large road.
Shopwoman: I don't think we have anything for you here - you'll find pantyhose in the drug store.


*Pantyhose is american for tights. I learnt it before I went.
** My mother would call this colour "nigger brown". I know better than to come out with that one in Yankland.
*** I did not lose my temper immediately because I have watched "The Devil Wears Prada" and the main one in that was told off for being a size 6 and called fat - For a nation of some spectacular lard arses, they are very peculiarly anorexic in New York.
**** These are American sizes, they are 10 and 8 respectively in the Queen's English.
*****People who work in clothes shops like to hear about unusual body types
****** said in that tone of voice as if I should fucking know it was a plus sized store


On the bus in DC

Noreen: Is it possible to get a one day travelcard and get on and off the bus for an unlimited number of times?
Bus driver:each ticket is valid for two hours
Noreen: That's great, but I was wondering if I could get a ticket that is valid for maybe eight hours
Bus Driver: Listen Lady,get this ticket then you can get off, and get back on before the time printed on it.
Noreen: So I can't get a ticket for all day then
Bus Driver (holding out his hand for money and offering ticket) NO
Noreen: Sorry, how much is that please
Bus Driver: rolling eyes and looking at me as if I were very, very, simple. ONE DOLLAR
Noreen: Here you go
Bus Driver: You expect me to give you change for a hundred dollar note?
Noreen: It's not my fault all your money looks exactly the same. I thought it was a one - let me see if I have it in change. Why do your coins not have the amounts on? how many of these coins make a dollar (hands over a pile of silver coins)
Bus Driver: Give me another nickel
Noreen: Which one is a nickel?
Bus Driver: A NICKEL
Noreen: I don't know what a nickel is. How many things, cents, is a nickel
Bus driver: Five
Noreen: Well there is no coin with a five on it so I do not have one
Bus Driver(reaching into my hand and triumphantly producing a coin): That is a nickel
Noreen: It doesn't say 5 or nickel on it though does it
Bus Driver (starts bus fast)




In a restaurant

Waiter: Can I get you any coffee?
Noreen: Yes two espressos please.
Waiter: So no coffees, just two espressos
Noreen: Espresso is coffee though, isn't it?*
Waiter (rather tartly and as if he was revving up to spit in whatever it was type of caffeinated beverage) I'll get your espressos for you right away

* I was starting to worry, as there are a lot of false friends in american english (the British and American Fanny are a perineum apart)- it was quite possible that it may be something entirely different to the short strong shot of coffee we know in europe.
I'm back now anyway and I did not get shot
Noreen

I went to New York, or The Big Cunt, as I like to call it. What a fucking awful place it is. I blame the town planners and their shitty grid system, building the narrow, yet endless straight roads that form a windtunnel from one end of the water to the other, each street a dark valley, flanked by tall, gloomy, uniform buildings, and home to an icy breeze. Every walk in the city is a freezing cold, interminable bore, with tediously regular stops at pedestrian crossings, which, contrary to American television do not light up the words "Walk" and "Don't Walk", but rather have a big red hand and a green man, much the same as anywhere else. And you get stuck with the same group of dull people, all walking in the same direction for miles and miles, and people stare so, which I find immensely rude, and they have really loud conversations, and dart their heads around, hoping desperately that people are listening in, as they talk about stupid things like their therapist, and their dysfunctional lives and vapid relationships and how much everything costs and how they would, like, DIE if they had to move out of the East village and live in the nineties, perish the thought. I hated it.

I was not irritated by the way New Yorkers give directions, first and fourth, and all that shite, which, I thought, was incredibly big of me, but I really fucking objected when taxi drivers asked me for directions, when I asked them to take me to places, like hotels and museums. "Where is that?" they all asked, blind to the fucking enormous Sat-Nav thing in front of them. They only ever have to drive around three square miles in a grid, so it can't be that fucking difficult to know a few landmarks. New York taxi drivers are lazy gobshites, who drive like arses - zooming up other cars' backsides, sighing, slapping the wheel, saying "Would you look at that?" when they rarely, ever, look at the road themselves, as they are so busy holding forth about some shit or other, whilst gawping at other drivers, in the air, in the glove compartment,at their passenger, at the boring television thing in the cab, with a woman wittering about the weather (which, by the way, is always going to be cold, because of the stupid long straight streets being so near the sea). One taxi driver - a Latvian- harped on and on about how Churchill had given Latvia to the commies or something - and I just thought to myself "Churchill was right", which doesn't happen very often. And everyone I spoke to, without exception, had the absolute neck to exclaim "wow - you have an accent", when their own mangled vowels and brash, shouty, inflected sentences made my ears want to shrivel up and climb inside my head.

Most of all I hated the myth. I saw a bunch of try-hards living a collective lie - pretending to be edgy and achieving being abrasive and argumentative; shoving each other, making passive agressive remarks "would you look at that, God! And people complain about ..", posturing and showing off. New York is as egdy as its mainstream inhabitants in their market-stall-mixed-with-designer clothes, about as edgy as a boring digestive biscuit with wacky green icing. Each smart bar serving cactus snacks, with great trestle tables of edgy people, thrilled to be drinking vodka made in France, is rather unedgily plastered with posters explaining what to do if someone chokes, lists of dos and don'ts, waffle about drinking and pregnancy, and there are always a bunch of people on hand to quell any spontaneous dancing in bars that haven't been officially designated as dancing places, whilst the teams of miserable staff hover and glower and expect to be tipped for doing absolutely fuck all. I found it a very limiting place, full of people who thought they were being wild and free, but were actually fairly unimaginative squares, and that got on my fucking nerves. If you work at the UN and are busy trying to save the world and New York happens to be your head quarters -then fine, you may stay. Or if you are a hugely high earning banker who is funding all of those smart shops and the titty bars - then you may stay as well, (for now, until you lose your job in the next couple of months, at which point I suggest you shoot yourself or take an overdose). But if you are just some dull cunt from the sticks, who thinks that by moving to shitty New York, and doing some grunt job, you are suddenly going to inhale a spirited energy that will make you more interesting - please get back on your greyhound bus and fuck off home. That is all.
Noreen

Opinion is varied on the most irritating noise on earth. I get bored when people yip about fingernails on a chalk board - if the noise doesn't set your teeth on edge, and not all people are sensitive to it, then it is actually quite a quiet and unobtrusive sound. A road drill in operation, is irritating to all except the absolutely stone deaf. It is also popular to bleat about the music weeping out of the headphones of someone elses iPod - which, again is a mild annoyance compared to the racket of a fox screaming.

I went to the cinema on Sunday, which was nice. I watched "Juno" - this film about a teenage mother, probably because I was a teenage mother once- except, rather than give my child to an uptight yuppie with an immature husband, I raised it myself. Anyway - the differences between my and Juno's choices in outcomes for our respective teenage pregnancies made the film more thrilling as I could experience her choice without actually having to give birth again - winner. Less successful for me was the music of the film. It was that chatty, folksy, modern, minstrel shit, where the lyrics are a running commentary of a vacuous activity, sung in a major key, cheered along by the gasping respiration of my least favourite musical instrument, the harmonica.

I fucking hate the harmonica, it's a real cunt's piece of kit. Tuneless, horrible, sucky and blowy racket. The only good thing about it is that when the type of person who plays the harmonica, is actually playing the harmonica, they can't talk. The downside is, that the nasty music they produce is only marginally better than their conversation. Imagine John Lennon - enough said. And why do harmonica players feel the need to waggle their fingers in that gay way, masturbating an invisible cock glued to the side of the machine? No, please, don't tell me "It's for a vibrato effect", it is not - it is to give a full blown sensory assault - wanky actions to wanker's music.

In English shopping centres, as well as people in Lonsdale clothes shouting loudly at each other, sometimes there are one-man-bands, I think they are Morris Men who have been excommunicated from their local dance troupe. Anyway - one-man-bands usually have a bass drum strapped on the back like a snail and moving a leg bangs the drum. Chicken flapping arms quite often operate cymbals, stowed under the armpits, and the hands might play a piano accordion at the same time. The mouth has a choice between raucous singing or harmonica playing, where the harmonica is strapped on a stand on the top of the piano accordion, and the musician just needs to bob his head forward, like a chicken again, in order to ring the changes. When I see a one-man band, part of me dies.
Noreen

When our whining, mediocre generation finally melds with the earth, as it misses the boat for cryogenic preservation by a decade and is forced to decompose, old-school stylee, we will pass our world into the asthmatic, allergic hands of our children. Many generation x ers, like a lot of parents generally, want to live vicariously through their offspring- a result of never quite having got out of life, the spice that should make them feel alive and worthwhile. For us lot, who were born in the seventies, have missed pretty much everything good that was going. As our mothers and fathers mutter about rationing, if they can remember it, and make a fuss about depressions and strikes and economic crises and unemployment, race riots, free love and Vietnam, we kids are left with the insipid doings of Mr Bush and his predecessors, "the rave scene" -which lasted five minutes, Robbie Williams, reality TV and the internet. You can see why some whimpering idiots want to hang on for ever in case it gets more exciting. I can tell you it won't.

There are terrible people of my age out there, who try and recreate our childhoods for the next generation - churning out those tedious "dangerous books" for boys and girls - encouraging children to hang around in railway cuttings, whittling sticks and giving the glad eye to perverts. Or those awful designers who try and foist old fashioned curtains and wallpaper onto kids who just want lasers instead of beds. Nostalgia is fucked-up nonsense. If the past actually had been that good - we'd still be doing everything we were back then. We are programmed to want more than we have - that is how progress happens - no child will want to regress to hanging about in the cold when all the excitement in the world is accessible through their keyboard. If I could have played grand theft auto instead of baiting the local flasher, I would have been there like a shot. Nowadays the flasher is internet savvy too and knows how to adopt a persona to groom a kid and maybe even get it to wank him off - a sure step up from being jeered at in the bushes. Advances in technology mean kids no longer have to contact their peer group crushes in person, through a communal phone sitting menacingly in the hall, in full earshot of all the family - nor are they required to pass a note through the hands of a third party in order to avoid talking to their loved one face to face - text and email has saved the blushes of many an adolescent - three cheers for that.

But progress costs, and here is where kids start paying - in stress. Higher tech means tougher streets and cleverer baddies who can use spyware and cheap shitty surveillance equipment to perve on kids and watch their movements. It makes fussy parents, who monitor and push and force extra kumon maths and drag their kids to shrinks as soon as they squeak. The internet has created a new way for kids to be bullied and although I have to make myself give a shit quite hard, when I hear of brats going doolally because of a spot on name calling online - compared to the ritualistic torture I saw going on in my boarding school, I can only conclude that as their world is more screen based, so are their feelings more screen sensitive, and one cannot judge another person's pain on one's own scale of tolerance. The weedy, vealy, palefaced, square eyed, little shites.

Noreen

When I was a small child I knew three words of Spanish. This was thanks to American children's daytime programme Sesame Street. Now I am a grown-up I can say, quite truthfully, that everything I know about American Presidential Elections, I learnt from the TV show 24. I think I am not alone in this.

I am not grateful to 24 for teaching me about it - I have never wanted to know anything about American politics and Americans used not to be bothered whether anyone else knew either, twenty years ago they were quite self-contained about their internal affairs - rather like the Chinese - concentrating more on their own sovereignty and less on interferring in other peoples business and washing their dirty linen in public. Now it's a different story of course - a really long and tedious one, and their political motives leak into everything they fucking do - including making entertainment.

For me, the best bits of 24 were watching people die from biological warfare, close-up footage of a nuclear bomb exploding, torture scenes, showdowns between CTU agents and terrorists, all the many, many moles in the American intelligence services and the really impressive facial recognition software and satellite imagery used in counter terrorism. The worst bits of 24 were the Presidential Primaries and all the White House chat, tedious in fighting between administrative staff, worthy monologues about what is good for America and fatuous glimpses into the work-life balance of a Yank leader.I suppose there is some good in it, in that 24, showed the American people a black man as a good president, and this, perhaps, has gone some way to smooth the passage of Obama to his current witterings and ravings from podia around the country. In the same way that smoking in films encourages children to take up the habit, so the subconscious message of a man of colour doing a good job in the oval office may filter through to the dumbass, narrow, passport-free minds of a lot of the American voting public. However, if I were Mr Obama, I would sleep with a gun under my pillow because in series five, President Palmer gets shot through a hotel window. That is all

Noreen

I am all for legalising things. I think prostitution should be legalised and tarts should be on a register and pay tax and have enforced disease screenings, and I think drugs should be legalised and dealers should pay import tax on their shit and junkies should be dished out what they need on the NHS, and screened and helped and I think grafitti should be legalised because it is pretty harmless just scrawling on walls that no one looks at anyway, and there is a lot more harm done with it being illegal.

The harm I am talking about is the "street" cool reputation grafitti has. It makes me want to shit. Don't get me wrong now, I admire the hand eye co-ordination one must need to make a picture out of colourful deodorant - I could not do grafitti art as I have the fine motor skills of a snail. And some of it really looks quite nice. When I am on a train, which I frequently am these days, the underside of a bridge is only enhanced by tags and squirly shapes, and as for the train carriage having some decoration inside or out - well why not? It can only be an improvement on the miserable colours and vulgar antimacassars and lame posters about art sported by provincial trains in this country. And the other day I saw a train that just said "Legoland" all fucking over it. I hate lego - it makes your feet hurt when you stand on it and the little figurines have square heads with a great bulbous wart on their scalps - fucking Scandinavian horrible shite it is. No - go on now, you grafitti artists and spray your phrases and shapes and pictures all over the trains - crack on with it, you have my blessing.

But would you all give it a rest with making a fuss about the monkeys who do the spraying! There is a constant stream of broadsheet newspaper writers, wide -eyed and wanking, spouting their brave, edgy thoughts on the artistic merits of one shadowy can-toter or another. Just fuck off to the Slade if you are a good grafitti artist, or Monmartre if you are shit and do art and sell it and stuff if you want to be famous,or just squirt paint on dirty walls if you have no talent but enjoy defacing things - I don;t care either way as long as you shut the fuck up about it. Quit trying to get "recognised", it is fucking tedious. I won't even broach the subject of those spod writers who promote underground culture,pretending to be coming up from the streets - one day the warm fuzzy street-cool feeling these cunt writers seek, will be provided by their own blood, as they drown in it, after being shot by a gangsta, irritated by nosey social tourism. There's no need for me to get involved- I'll save my ire.

When I lived in Beijing, the Chinese were busy pulling down all their shacks (the hutongs) and there was a song and a dance from all the tedious expats "Oh the heritage!" they moaned from their warm condominiums "Oh it's a part of history gone!" as the inhabitants of the hutongs were hoiked out of their damp freezing sheds and rehoused in tower blocks with indoor lavatories. "oh the quaintness the city is losing!", as Beijing prepared to build itself gaga, in preparation for the Olympics and the vast amounts of cash and employment opportunities a massive international event would bring to the city.

And one bloke who was against the hutong- pulling- down thing, used to go about and draw a picture of a face and an AK47 on the walls of the next area destined for the bulldozer. He became this underground hero - and all the shitty little expat magazines would carry stories about him, making a "point" with his pictures. I was quite fascinated by the stories and set out to find one of his artworks - and do you know what it was? It was a fucking chad - that is what it was, one of those simple looking faces, a chad with a vague outline of a gun. Not only was this secret hero a total fame whore, but he was no good at grafitti at all - utterly shite at it. And don't give me any "post modern" or "Irony" excuses please, the only non phoney thing that man was, was a genuine class A cunt. Self-promoting grafitti artists and other attention-seeking urban warriors - fuck off.
Noreen