Well it said on his flyer that he’s a ‘specialist’, it also said he had inherited his father’s supernatural powers of clairvoyance.  It was at that point the flyer hit the bin.  Six months later flyer number two arrived, claiming the same facts as the first one, so I marked it under ‘blog’ and here it is…

Mr Kabassa certainly has got some amazing talents, except the one subject you really need to make a flyer readable – the Queen’s English.  But hey, if he can offer ‘Relief from being bewitched’, who needs a GCSE in English language!  He can for example, ‘Return immediately and definitely the person you love.’ Now, I have no idea what that means, but it all sounds very, very impressive, if you’re on the incorrect amount of magic mushrooms. 

As you read through his list of skills, you can’t help think, “This bloke probably wasn’t born in dear old Blighty.”  You name it and he will either get rid of it or make it twice the size Mrs!  He specializes in witchcraft, black magic and bad luck, but if you’re suffering from the first two problems, bad luck would cover that surely?  Well, I guess everyone adds some bullshit to their CV don’t they. 

Out all of his talents my favourite is this; he claims a ‘100% success rate’ in protecting you from ‘all dangers’!  Well I’m sorry, but even on my medication I find that hard to believe.  I mean, he’d have to be fricking omnipresent to carry that off surely!  You might find yourself down the whelk stall, when suddenly the proprietor is attack by a rabid hedgehog.  How the hell would the amazing Mr Kabassa get there in time to save him if he’s collecting his boots from the menders?

Overall, it seems there’s nothing he can’t put right, oh yes Mr Kabassa is one regular 24 carat smarty pants.  But you know; I can’t help feel there’s a bit of ‘Del Boy’ in his character.  There’s a phone number to call, but no business address.  His flyer goes on to say that, ‘He can come to your home to see if there are evil spirits’.  He also says, ‘Send me a photo and a stamped addressed envelope’, but he doesn’t say of what!  And then he rounds this boast off with by adding that he, ‘guarantees prosperity’. 

Well, call me old fashioned and very slightly picky but, the only person that’s going to profit in this situation is the man himself.  He’s got a shot of your house and the address, so all he needs to do is sit outside your gaff until you go out, break in and nick the silver!  I won’t be calling on his services, but being all knowing and psychic I’m sure Mr Kabassa will know this, so seeing flyer three looks doubtful.  I’ll keep you posted…

A true story

It was a simple request.  “Would you do some pruning for me?”  Now in the whole scheme of things it seems like a harmless question doesn’t it?  Not if you’re a Walton.  I said yes of course, how can turn down helping out one of your best friend’s mum…

It was pretty clear from the off that this would turn in to one of ‘those’ jobs.  Why I was surprised I don’t know, this stuff has followed me about since I can remember.  So I turned up at my chum’s mum’s house one sunny afternoon around 2pm.  We had the usual catch-up chat and tea in the best china, after which I made my way to the garden looking for the pruning shears.  But low, no pruning shears did I find.  No, what I found was a long pole lying on the lawn.

Just then a cherub flew past and whispered, “You’ve don’t it again you prat,  you’re not clipping the roses cocker, the 25 foot lance is for cutting back that bloody great tree.”  Still, how bad can it get?  You won’t believe it!

Initially I had some difficulty in handling the elongated device, and I can safely say I spent more time waving the thing about than actually cutting back the branches.  However, after a couple hours the job was complete.

All was fine, well when I say fine; I noticed a sort of dull ache at the base of my neck.  As I drove home the ache turned into a series of sharp stabbing pains and by the time I reached the high street my brain had informed my agony receptors that I had the mother of all migraines coming my way.  I could see red and green spots in front of my eyes and my whole head felt like it was on fire. 

The situation was getting dangerous as I drove into the sun and tried to navigate my way down the road.  A bus appeared out of nowhere and then vanished and it was at this point I realised I’d turned into a Cyclops!  Oh I still had two eyes alright but for some reason my right eye had shut down for the night!  After the hot sweats stopped the cold ones began and I could feel my lungs being affected as well as the muscles in my limbs, and I thought I was going to faint.

The bus re appeared and so did the cherub.  “See, that’s what happens when  you say yes to something without finding out all the details first.”  I made it home, but was still trying to work out what had happened to me and more importantly, why?  After 8 eight hours of horrendous pain the penny dropped.  Holding your head back for more than two hours crushes the brain stem and the nervous.  The result: unimaginable pain, temporary blindness, breathing problems and muscle weakness.  I’ve never eaten a prune or pruned since…

Anyone who wishes to sign up to ‘Forward’ the bipolar newsletter I write for can do so by sending a blank email to ashby300@hotmail.com 

Just put the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject box at that it.  We cover bipolar and other mental health news stories from around the globe.  We also have a humour section and it’s a free publication.

Have you noticed since ‘er nibs celebrated 86 years of free food and holidays, and 60 years on the throne, how many war related programmes have been aired?  We don’t like to mention it, although we still do with regularity.

Why don’t they just record a song with a chorus of, “Two World Wars and one World Cup,” and be done with it?  I know we have to remember the ultimate   sacrifice the men and women made for their country, and label it under, ‘Never again’, but has anyone stopped to think what the war dead would make of it?
Would they want a street party celebrating how many naughty Germans they killed?  I doubt it.  My guess is they would probably rather forget it all happened.

However, there were some internal casualties higher up the chain of command, not deaths as such, more, ‘Thanks for all you’ve done – you’re fired’.  Once Hitler discovered his mother didn’t really like him much either, he went for early retirement and it’s probably just as well, he really was a little shit wasn’t he!  And Churchill of course was ousted from government as soon as WWII ended.  But there were others, and like our Brandy swilling PM, and most of them were completely off their respective trolley too. 

Here’s a name you may not have heard of before and he was instrumental in pioneering the use of the country’s radar defenses and his name was Air Chief Marshal Hugh Caswell Tremenheere Dowding.   Now there’s a name to go to bed with!  This was big stuff during the war, and it gave our ‘Brillcream boys’ in the Battle of Britain, a 20 minute advantage over any German squadron who popped over for a sight-seeing trip, then decided to bomb our chip shops.

Dowding was passionate about his work and his pilots.  He was also a pain in the arse, but that’s par for the course I feel.  Airmen aged 19 could go up in a Spitfire once never to return, so Dowding went to the Air Ministry with a request for 2 inch bullet proof glass for the cock pits and they just laughed at him!  It makes you wonder what the pen pushers sitting in a nice warm office were on back then. The only lead they faced were in their pencils. 

It’s probably just as well the country wasn’t aware that Churchill suffered with manic depression, it wouldn’t have looked very good on paper back then.  Position: PM.  Illness: Mad as a bear that’s been poked with a stick a lot. 

Hugh Caswell Tremenheere Dowding, on the other hand, was further out of the tree than Churchill.   He was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society and he believed that fairies were “essential to the growth of plants and the welfare of the vegetable kingdom.”  I’m not even going to write the next six words, but you can imagine what the Germans most burning question still is can’t you…

Anyone who wishes to sign up to ‘Forward’ the bipolar newsletter I write for can do so by sending a blank email to: ashby300@hotmail.com                                                                    

Just put the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject box at that it.  We cover bipolar and other mental health news stories from around the globe.  We also have a humour section and it’s a free publication.

Well I’ve heard some old twaddle in my time on the planet, but taxing the heat in food has got to be the most ludicrous idea yet. 

Who the hell’s in charge of thinking this stuff up?  More importantly, how much are they being paid?  Why stop there; why not have a wind tax?  Anyone caught in a force 10 gale will pay more Wind Tax than someone standing in a light breeze, for instance.  Bloody idiots!

If this is the shape of things to come, we should all gird our loins for more inane tax schemes.  For a start, I don’t see the ‘value’ in Value Added Tax; it just amounts to forking out more cash because some arse in a suit says so.  It’ll be candles next, you wait. 

“S’cuse me madam, do you intend lighting that?”  “Err, yes at some point.”  “Thank you, that’ll be 69p extra.”  What about an extra tax on coffee?  You’ve been down the high street and you fancy a drink.  You walk into a coffee bar, place your order, then a government official steps out and sticks a thermometer in your drink to see how much more you should pay.  In turn, you go out on to the street and measure the temperature outside the building and come to some arrangement about the bill!

You may laugh, but this is what the pasty tax was all about.  So in essence what this means is, on a warm day your lunchtime fill of pulped scrag-end and nuked vegetables, wrapped in a high fat content envelope, will be VAT free.  But on a colder day, it’ll cost you 20% more.  Here’s the breakdown. 

Monday: sunny and warm, £1.35.  Tuesday: naughty clouds and wind, £1.62.  Have you ever heard such a load of old bollocks in your life?  And this, apparently, came out of the head of a government official who probably went to Oxford or Cambridge!  Personally I believe you’d get more sense from a recently sectioned patient!

Well thanks to a U turn by the twits in charge of the country, your pasty is safe for now, but what else will they come up with respect to taxing heat-related items?  My money’s on hot bread!  But when it’s cooled down it’ll be cheaper.  If they really want to go for broke, how about applying a sun tax?  When it’s out, we all use it and what a little earner that would be.  The only problem I can see is how would they calculate how much ‘current bun’ we would use individually?

Well luckily I have the answer – made-to-measure solar panel sandwich boards.  We’re all different sizes, so based on that, this will aid the calculation.  And overall it will encourage the bloaters amongst us to lose weight and stop clogging up the hospitals.  No, no, there’s no need for thanks, just send cash…

Well, it all kicked off in Hertfordshire last week!  In fact it got so bad the powers at be had to pull out the big guns and employ the services of… The Wheat Police!!!  The home secretary, who was at home at the time typing, gave his consent so it must be serious. 

One of the concerns of the anti genetically modified food campaigners is that the cereal and the insecticide used will contaminate other food supplies.  A spokesmen for the research unit said, ‘The wheat is going nowhere as it’s kept behind a high steel fence in case it makes a break for it.’�
  �
Isn’t it typical though, this story hit the British press like there was a new Nazi uprising.  When in reality all that happened was a bunch of University students broke in and tried to trash the crops.   Can you imagine the scene? “I say come on Bertie, Biffo and Egbert, shake a leg and let’s sally forth and strike a blow for English flour.  And tomorrow we can have a damn good rousing peaceful protest while banging tambourines and singing rowdy rugger songs!”         

A local man, who only had three testicles at the start of the trials and now has seven said, ‘If it’s not dangerous why do you have to go through two security barriers and then walk  for a mile to get to the most closely guarded plot of earth in the UK?’  And if you think about it, he does have a point.   

We have a food mountain here every year on a regular basis and starving people on the other side of the world.   Now call me stupid, but surely this means we are producing too much food?  I believe someone has lost the plot with all of these insecticide trails and how to kill the naughty aphids.  I mean, you have to keep an eye on the crops, but when all said and done, if the soil is knackered, we won’t able to grow anything anyway.

Why use chemicals at all?  With the current unemployment figures as they are, here is an ideal opportunity to reduce the numbers by 62%.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to be an apprentice aphid flicker and squisher for God sake! 

Weetabix, the cereal company where unavailable for comment, but the BBC are set to film a fly-on-the-wheat documentary about the firm.  Sources say some supermarkets are offering a ‘buy-one-get-63 free’ offer and financiers can’t see how they will make a profit with a deal like this.

Anyone who wishes to sign up to ‘Forward’ the bipolar newsletter I write for can do so by sending a blank email to ashby300@hotmail.com
�
Just put the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject box at that it.  We cover bipolar and other mental health news stories from around the globe.  We also have a humour section and it’s a free publication.

A true story…

A friend and I had arrived at Liverpool Street way too early so we headed for the station’s cafe to ordered some tea and toast.  After breakfast, we found we still had some more time to kill before going our separate ways, so with loose change to hand, we made tracks towards the station’s photo booth. 

In went the cash, and almost immediately, the silly posing began, followed by the obligatory face-pulling, kissing and general prating about until the machine stopped flashing at us.  Once outside, we heard the whirring and clicking as the processing began and, sometime later, out flopped our photographs.

I pulled them out of the tray, but didn’t look at them right away as they were still tacky, so I began waving them about to dry them off.  I turned them over to see there was a dramatic blemish in all four photos. 

With the back of the prints towards Judie’s face, I said with a deadpan look, “Spot the problem,” and flipped them over?  With in seconds of focusing on them, she collapsed into a heap of giggles, closely followed by me.  Despite spending the vast sum of £1.50, the machine had only taken shots of one person and it wasn’t either of us!

We composed ourselves and took another look at the snaps.  It was no good, our giggle buttons had been fully pushed, and it didn’t help when I said our mystery man looked like a serial flasher.  He had a potato-shaped head and his glasses would’ve have made an ideal set of spares for the Hubble telescope! They were like coke bottle ends and were set in a pair of thick dark frames. 

He also wore a scruffy black jacket, a bright green shirt, and around his neck was a brown tie.  Judie and I were well into two solid minutes of laughter, and character assassination, when suddenly she looked over my shoulder and then fell silent.  Her jaw dropped wide open and she had a vacant look on her face.

While I was still chuckling I heard a squeaky voice say behind me, “Excuse me have you seen my photos?”  When I spun round, the bloke we’d just been barracking was standing in front of us!  It was a tad embarrassing I have to say, and I still had the photo sheet in my hand.  He must have heard us giggling like a pair of school kids beforehand so, acting like one; I shoved the sheet in my bag!

While we were both still cackling, we had to listen to a long drawn- out saga of how two days prior he’d used the photo booth, but nothing came out.  I never did discover how Judie stopped herself from completely. 

Me?  I adopted the, biting the inside of my mouth approach, and as much clenching as my facial muscles would allow, before cramp set in.  How I didn’t hit the deck slapping the tarmac, begging him to stop talking, I don’t know and, when I realised he was wearing the same clothes as in the picture, I had to walk away…

Well, if you thought television couldn’t get anymore boring, you wait for the next 70 days.  The UK’s media are following the progress of the Olympic flame.  And if you’re unlucky enough, you’ll be able to watch every single inch of the footage.  By unlucky I mean bedridden of course…

Well worth the license fee I reckon!  Listening to the reports from the crowd at Land’s End, where the whole dreary saga began, and the gushing old twaddle coming from the news correspondents, you’d have thought a Royal baby had just been born.  Which reminds me, ‘er nibs will be celebrating 60 years of our money.  I’ll support British, but I didn’t put my name down for the Greek and German element of the over privileged few.

Oh yes, there will be a celebration of fitness for the running, jumping and hopping idiots, which we can’t afford, and the Royals will have some much needed holiday time away from their holidays, but has anyone calculated the carbon foot print from these farcical festivities?  I think not.

Let’s just think about how many planes will be in the air when Liz is out celebrating 84 years of free bed, board and food.  Then count up how many helicopters will be used to film the pageant up the Thames; hoping all of the potential sniper points have been covered by the military.  There will be thousands gallons of 4 star wasted on that.  And then you’ve got to add the cars, coaches and boats following the both parties.  Build a cancer unit?  Naaa, bollocks to that – let’s ‘ave a party! 

So what’s happening with that iceberg?  Well right now it’s fracturing nicely.  Yes, gently and below the hearing range of the human ear, the fractures in the ice are slowly joining up.  I’ve been in touch with the scientist following this potential travesty and after thumbing through this month’s copy of ‘Scandinavian Eye Wrestling for Beginners’, I presented my findings. 

So fragile is the Antarctic at the moment that all it will take to shift 17 square miles of naughty frozen water is this, two English celebrations running in parallel.   The first phase of the ‘big melt’ will be caused by exactly 8,000 people carrying an Olympic flame from one end of the country to the other, over a 70 day period.  The heat generated by the very last torch will be enough to trigger the iceberg to drop into the sea.  And the next day on the news you’ll here this. 

NEWSFLASH: entire Royal family drowned in the Thames after a surprise tsunami hits the south coast. 

Anyone who wishes to sign up to ‘Forward’ the bipolar newsletter I write for can do so by sending a blank email to ashby300@hotmail.com
�
Just put the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject box at that it.  We cover bipolar and other mental health news stories from around the globe.  We also have a humour section and it’s a free publication.

So, you’ve just finished pushing a boxed jelly fish through a round mold, when a council representative walks up to you and says, “Tomorrow the M.O.D is going to slap a rocket launcher on your balcony.”  What do you say?

It doesn’t matter, they’re going to do it whether you like it or not.  It’s true the Olympics will bring some much needed employment to the area and there’s been a lot of interest, at the job centre, about becoming an official Olympic suicide security guard.  But honestly, where can you train for a career like that?

The residence of the Lexington House in the Bow Quarter, east London seem a tad worried by the possibility of a surface to air missile launcher being bolted to the top of their water tower.  I’d say that that’s the least of their worries.  I’d be more concerned about a local gang member shinning up the tower and nicking a few whizz bangs for the scrape metal! 

Logically, it isn’t the people behind the missiles that should be worried.  I mean; the retro thrust might singe the odd curtain or fry a roving hamster, but that’s about it.  No, I’d be more inclined to worry about being in a five mile radius from where it was fired, because that’s their range.  And, let’s face it; what’s left after it explodes, and what it hits, could land absolutely away.  I can see the insurance companies making up the claim forms and the adverts already.  

I guess you have to ask yourself, why did the military select a residential block as the location for the missile battery?   It’s not that difficult to work out.  Pull a PR stunt where the locals are bound to be up in arms and down in the mouth and it’ll hit the media quicker than pedophile’s hard drive. 

So it really boils down to down to a psychological advertising campaign to all would-be terrorists that backfired (pun intended).  I mean, you’ve got to be extraordinarily stupid to believe the launch sites have been filmed or disclosed, and MI6 said to the advertising controller, “Here, stick this on after the Weetabix commercial will you, and see if you can get on the 9 o’clock news too.”  

Well, if this is the way things are shaping, I want my own form of protection; you may feel the same way.  I contacted Sebastian Coe and asked him to forward me at least two anti personnel mines for the front path, four bazookas and an assortment of grenades.  Do you know what he sent me, a standard issue Olympic catapult?

Anyone who wishes to sign up to ‘Forward’ the bipolar newsletter I write for can do so by sending a blank email to ashby300@hotmail.com

Just put the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject box at that it.  We cover bipolar and other mental health news stories from around the globe.  We also have a humour section and it’s a free publication.