Oh, for God's sake.

My repeated warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Granting you operational leeway has produced nothing but dung in my lap. And my abusive e-mails have clearly gone unheeded (or otherwise docked undeclared in your spam folder, adding a cherry gob of spit to the caking dung).

CONSIDER THIS YOUR FIRST OFFICIAL WARNING.

I shan't clarify how many steps constitute this disciplinary procedure. Could be two. Could be five. You must dwell in t'unknown. Sweat. Panic. Develop an ulcer.

Perhaps now you will understand the prevailing flavour of the Kettle-sphere, as I weekly await your chronicled guff, blisslessly unaware of the depths to which your sub-lithic drill will this time descend.

Don't be so arrogant as to assume I can't find three deadbeats so gagging for "airtime" they'll comply with every edict. ONLY I AM IRREPLACEABLE.

Discounting the stints in which you did in fact replace me. But not REALLY.

I'll always be here.

You hear me?!

Here it is. The final panel in the tript(d)ych.

The jet nary touches the runway before the first gaffe. You and your cohorts in claptrap need to get your act together. COMMUNICATE.

The last discharge was NOT the “canonical 37th episode”, you loser. I gave you fellas the benefit of the doubt. Yes, you held the fort. But now the commander has returned from a battle of sorts. Maybe it's time he (I) put his goddamn foot down. Maybe even feet.

Shine your shoes. Clean your rifles. SMARTEN UP!

‘Failure is a badge of honour. It means you risked failure.’

So insisted Charlie Kaufman, penner of such populism-renouncing flicks as Synecdoche, New York and I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

Tell that to the orphans and widows of the Challenger disaster, Chuck. Go scream that at the rabble queueing up outside Jobcentre Plus*. At best, your aphorism is birdbrained and callous. At worst, it legitimises and indeed glamourises wanton sloth.

Call yourself a writer? Berk.

Failure now hath made his masterpiece with this A/V donation. Two hours of two wallies talking about things I don't understand.

Oh, and the brown sauce on the bacon? We're getting untold minutes of their truant third rabbiting on about trivia.

Wonderful.

*Yes, I have from time to time found myself in solemn procession, sloggin t'ward the unholy tap of HMG lucre. But there was more dignity to it back in the day. There just was.

They've been doing this podcast for a year. If there were a listenership with whom to share a sense of ceremony, 't'would be an occasion worthy of observance. As such, it has been acknowledged. And now move on from it with haste do we.

So Halloween “Month”, is it? So social media (YOU) would have me believe. “Christmas Month”, one has made one’s peace with. Though commercialism, pluralism and abyssal cynicism hath mugged Noël of its riches, there is still nestled within its pocket, corroded and clock-beaten, a bronze farthing. If one were to look closely, one might discern the words “FAMILY” or “GENEROSITY” inscribed upon it. A dead currency, yes, replete with the ancient engravings of an archaic tongue, but nevertheless something we vaguely understand as once having meant something to us.

But HALLOWEEN MONTH?! What is Halloween? WHAT. IS. HALLOWEEN? WHAT is it? What IS it? It’s important to you, is it? What does it represent? What do you celebrate? What is it?!

How dare you accuse me (I infer) of cantankerousness! ‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ I imagine you submitting. I’m all for fun. I am proponent numero #1 of fun. If you wish to play fancy dress/objectify yourself, get soused and cavort, i.e. the comportment characteristic of any other weekend but clad in novelty rags, you go right ahead, miss(ter).

Have your silly, silly day.

But making a month of it? Doth indulgence know no end?

Moreover, I thought it was Black History Month? Not Halloween MONTH. If you’re going to go through the tedious process of assigning each month its “___ Month”, you need to convene a symposium to get your act together. One can’t imagine you intend on consolidating the two.

😱 😱 😱 😱 😱

I never ask how YOU’RE doing*. How ARE you? Keeping WELL?

Good, good.

I attended a funeral last week. Nobody of particular personal significance, you needn’t send your sympathies†. H’was a business associate from the years of yester. Pitiful service. One gladdens in the plausibility of the family’s denial in insisting that the meagre turnout was a result not of Penguill’s odiousness but of the travel strains imposed by the Sinovirus.

Penguill Penfold was not a likeable man. And until one of his nearest/dearest follows Funlimited on our(my) various platforms, I say that without reservation.

What’s more, those grieving chumps had the audacity to employ Sinatra’s “My Way” as the soundtrack to Peng’s end credits. I balk not simply out of revulsion of cliché. Nor gustatory aversion. Indeed, I have some fondness for the tune and the specular qualities of its libretto.

But few do it “their way”. If doing it one’s own damn way was so commonplace, Sinatra’s dogged affirmation’d’ve been met with a resounding ‘So what?’ Doing it “your way” is an exceptional if morally neutral undertaking. Qaddafi did it “his way”. You, like most, Penguill, kowtowed to management, genuflected before your wife and generally toed the damn line. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if your dry-eyed widow selected the song ironically, peacocking to those of us in the know. Even in death, she mocks you.

One could perhaps accept “My Way” being chiefly regarded as a crooning dirge if it wasn’t almost always peppered, infested, PUTRID with delusion.

Enjoy the podcast.

*Amicably ignoring the fact you never ask me.

†Amicably ignoring the fact you never would.

Oh, and the contributor what contributed the error in the first has asked me to point out that he meant Be Cool, not Get Shorty. Pillock.

Chop the powder. Clear the decks. Brace your metaphysical vulva.

Your head a-spin after that gloriously mongrel triplet, I dance toward you, a fuzzy apparition in the whirling panorama. As your inner ears re-acclimate to terra firma, I take thy wrist and guide thee away from the meta-go-round. We migrate t’the underpass, not for anything predatory or anything if you’re a woman or anything scandalous if you’re a bloke, where I gaze into thy eyes (you still quite ashen) and whisper, ‘I am returned. I am returned to liberate thee from Pfidze’s cookie-cut Hades.’

You are grateful.

Yes, chaps and flaps. It Is I. The jaffa ‘neath the choc. The Alec of the Baldwins. The Kettle post-Jeremy.

Pursuing as I have sedentary rapture for the last month or so, I did indeed command Pfidze to lift extracts from my bibliography and present them for your edification and, dare I say, education. Did she include any of my seminal travelogues from Indochina? Did she include my hauntingly prescient meditations on the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (spoiler: it’s a terrible business but thank God it’s scarcely zoonotic)? Did she include my jaunty limericks?

RHETORIC.

She didn’t.

I wish I had more to divulge re: my protracted contemplation but, if I’m being honest, what I hoped to be a continual constitutional tumble t’ward Jeremy-joy was scuppered and swallowed by the experience of experience itself manifesting as a Radar poised to detect the sundry nuisances of being, each bleep (oh dear God, the bleeps) perversely startling me to my very sub-anatomy as surely as they grew in frequency, until the Radar itself, unsated by its unique commission to perceive, resolved to build the very ships what it did bleep, like the most cynical of gumshoes moonlighting as the most heinous of villains.

Anyway, I’m back. And I’m fucking staying.

Hi hi hi, draugai. Pfidze in presence. Because Mr Kettle is in quote, pursuit of sedentary rapture, unquote, he asks me to go through his archive and choose poems and memories and reflectives for blurb-stuffing. So this is such.

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July 29, 1999 - Stephen Wu (Free-Form Absurdist Verse with Northern Stylings):

‘How many legs would a Woodlouse have if a Woodlouse could have legs?’

‘Six,’ he says, ‘it's not rocket science.... it's entomology.’

Looks at me, he does, his stare penetrating mine,

Says, ‘Stephen Wu, nice to meet ya.’

‘To meet ya nice,’ I says. He laughs that... Eastern laugh,

Six hairy legs, round, beady little eyes, not your typical Woodlouse.

His voice, deep as the sea... the South China Sea...

Drinking whiskey, barely a care in the world,

I says to him, ‘So, Stephen, how'd's a chap like you end up in a dive like this?’

He sips and he says, ‘I just wanted a drink.’

I nodded... I knew what he meant...

That was the time I met Stephen Wu.

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Thank you for this week. Hear from us again next.

Hi hi hi, draugai. Pfidze in presence. Because Mr Kettle is in quote, pursuit of sedentary rapture, unquote, he asks me to go through his archive and choose poems and memories and reflectives for blurb-stuffing. So this is such.

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April 14, 2012 - Paltry (Poultry) - A Poem:

‘T’was a vulgar lass

Who in front didst pass

In a most unwelcome fashion,

Her hair in a Croydon,

Her squirt with a toy gun,

She aroused an invidious passion.

Her window descended,

Her digit extended,

Her mouth spewing lingua latrine,

Then onward she pressed,

More souls to molest,

As the red stole the light from the green.

With godly lament

And fevered assent,

The Fates wove a tapestry pure,

And so I approached,

Beyond all reproach,

A fairer world to restore.

One nobly meted:

‘Your quotient’s depleted,’

And readied for underclass rage,

She offered a snort

And clucked a retort,

The council house hen in her cage.

Amber gives way

And night turns to day,

But providence canst pay the bills,

So hold thine head high,

Look swine in the eye

And escort it back to the swill.

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Thank you for this week. Hear from us again next.

Hi hi hi, draugai. Pfidze in presence. Because Mr Kettle is in quote, pursuit of sedentary rapture, unquote, he asks me to go through his archive and choose poems and memories and reflectives for blurb-stuffing. So this is such.

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March 27, 1983

Mabel has gone home. In vain were my efforts to keep buoyant the honeymoon weekend. I will be the first - in this case, second - to admit that Wolverhampton is not Paris. But the deal needed closing and who needs the damn French anyway?

I have composed a tone prose in dishonour of the experience.

ANHEDONIA (A WOLVERHAMPTON WEEKEND):

The only thing for which to hope is hope itself. The people of Anhedonia no longer live. They bear the load with clouded eyes, sallow skin and interiors once decorated with dreams. They don't eat. They feed. They don't make love. They rut because nature compels. They touch. But they don't feel.

Strangers are bade by an array of miseries. Pills and poisons. Wounds of all shades and voids of all diameters. Hugh's daughter drowned at a pool-party and the grief pushed his wife to the grave. Sheila bet her inheritance on the horses. Jeremy came here for business and thought he’d kill two birds with one stone and instead kill- (PFIDZE HERE - CANNOT COPY NEXT TEN LINES BECAUSE INK BLOTCHED) All prayers are forgotten in Anhedonia. The churches here are pharmacies.

Sodium floods the alleyways,

The drains deploy the stench,

The drizzle becomes a torrent,

The dirt defies the drench,

The future shrinks against the tide,

Receding in their stares,

The children trog and trick and treat

And trade their youth for wares.

I think I may retire here,

I’ll quickly settle in,

For while this town is wretched,

It's home for suff’rin’s kin,

I’ll pitch a tent on Zig-Zag Road

And contemplate the ruin,

The air aching with aimless pain

And easy murder brewin’,

The anguish willn’t overwhelm

For I’ll be apathetic,

Hell is not a scorching blade,

It's just an anaesthetic.

Oh God, I think my marriage is over.

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Thank you for this week. Hear from us again next.

Hi hi hi, draugai. Pfidze in presence. Because Mr Kettle is in quote, pursuit of sedentary rapture, unquote, he asks me to go through his archive and choose poems and memories and reflectives for blurb-stuffing. So this is such.

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November 15, 2012 - Post-Modern Haiku:

Pathos, a prowler,

Swiping the crown of rigour,

Bathos is shiter.

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Thank you for this week. Hear from us again next.