Banks and Lloyds TSB especially

What does the word “Bankers” rhyme with? Tankers? Close. Rankers? Not really. Ah, I see by the smile on your face you have worked it out.

British banks are wonderful things aren’t they? Imagine if you will that you are incredibly rich. You live in a whacking great big house, several cars, acres and acres of land, and all the Polo Ponies you could ever possibly eat. You work in the City earning more in one lunch time than some poor sods will clock up in a lifetime of toil and drudgery. No doubt, every single day of your life, your post box is full of offers and offers of money from a variety of high street banks at almost laughably low interest rates? Lovely. Now the scene switches. You are now a single parent in a nasty area of town. You work two days a week in the local supermarket and a couple of nights here and there in various pubs. Your children and you survive in your one bedroom flat on a terribly unhealthy diet of micro chips and blue pop. You are in debt up to your eyeballs and everywhere you turn there seems to be another bill leaping up to snatch away any tiny sum of money you may have. You desperately need financial help, so you go to your bank and explain your situation. When they have finished pissing themselves and wiping the tears of mirth from their eyes, they will no doubt show you the walls, the floor and then the door quicker than you can say “F*CK OFF”. You end up going to a money lender and eventually losing your flat, your pride and your knee caps. All thanks to British banks! HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Banks survive in this bizarre world of altered logic. You write a cheque for £21.54 for some shopping. If the bank had decided to honour this cheque it would have taken your account £4.26 into the red. So instead, they bounce the cheque. They then write you a letter, telling you they have bounced this cheque as it would have taken you £4.26 overdrawn. They also tell you that because they have written you this letter telling you this, they are going to charge you £35 for doing it. Because of this, instead of being only £4.26 overdrawn as you would have been if they had honoured the cheque in the first place, you are now £17.72 overdrawn. This will then no doubt give them carte blanche to fire off any number of further letters telling you about how overdrawn you are and charging you like a wounded Elephant in the process. HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Banks only survive by keeping as many people in the red as they can. They are like parasites, slowly bleeding the host to death to keep themselves alive. Most have all the conscience and general decency of a particularly loathsome and down at heel psychotic cockroach with a personality disorder and halitosis. They are merchant bankers of the highest order and they deserve to rot in Room 101 for eternity. HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Rap "Music"

In recent years, you will have noticed on nearly every radio station around the country that is broadcasting "yoof choons" (young people's music to you and me), 90%+ of all songs seem to have sampled (i.e. nicked) a bloody great chunk out of some older song. Usually the older song is far superior in every way, but people still refer to this butchery and robbery as music. Once the person in question has nicked this bit of older song, he or she repeats it ad nauseum and sticks an annoying repetitive drum beat over the top. You will also know you are in the correct genre of "music" as before anything has even happened on the song, the gentleman or lady who is "performing" it will have informed us on numerous occasions:

1. Their name.
2. Their name, again.
3. Uh-huh.
4. Oh-yeah.

and last and by very no means least:

5. You know what I'm talking 'bout.

This is all very well and good, but I mostly haven't got a clue what they are talking about, and to be brutally bloody frank, I couldn't give less of a toss if my life depended on it.

Now things get really bad. Not content with knackering a perfectly good older song they proceed to "talk" over what is left of it. That's right (you know what I'm talking 'bout - to coin a phrase), not sing, or dazzle us with musical virtuosity on some instrument, no they simply talk. What sort of things do they talk about? Something pleasant or time passing like the weather or how the match went for City at the weekend? No, it usually revolves around shooting people, slapping women around and the size of their own genitalia. The videos that accompany these noises, for want of a better description, usually involve the "artist" themselves, surrounded by lots of his or her chums, similarly attired in either combat gear, American sports wear or lots of brightly coloured fur coats. They shout and point at the camera a lot. Their jewellery seems to consist of the contents of several Argos catalogues, and one or two of them have their trousers at half mast. Now if someone turned up at your local hospital and acted in this manner, the psychiatric nurses wouldn't even let them home for their pyjamas. The finishing touch to these videos are the near endless parade of gargantuanly chested young ladies in minute bikinis who seem to find a man with his trousers round his knees and a hat on backwards stupifyingly sexually arousing.

What REALLY annoys me about rapping and the "music" that goes with it, is the way the music press and some serious newspapers treat it as an art form. Someone shouting about the size of their wedding tackle infront of a drum machine beat is, I am sorry to say, NOT an art form. It is simply musical dexterity taken to the lowest common denominator. You could possibly call it poetry, but poetry with a minute "p" and of the same level of dexterity and sophistication as E J Thribb aged 17 and three quarters.

The final annoyance of rap music with me is the way it turns all cultures around the world into the same run down "ghetto in the west side". You can be driving through the most delightful old English village, and there, slap bang in the middle of it will be three spotty teenage half wits, trousers at half mast, covered with cheap gold chains and wearing "Public Enemy" and "gangsta rap" t-shirts and hoodies. This sort of outfit probably looks pretty cool in the Bronx or Watts, but in Little Dozy-on-the-Wold it just looks bloody silly. To recompence matters I personally think we should insist that all modern day Huggy Bear types in the lower east side should be made to wear yokels smocks and play CD's by the Wurzels very loudly in their pimp mobiles. I suppose I am a little naive, but when the rap group NWA brought out their album "Straight Outta Compton" I imagined they were refering to Nether Compton just outside Yeovil.

Rap music is annoying, repetitive, repugnant and silly and fully deserves to be put into my Room 101 forever.

Gillian McKeith

Gillian McKeith. Sorry, Doctor Gillian McKeith. Or should that be "Doctor" Gillian McKeith? (Heck, if I knew I could get a medical qualification and a Channel 4 TV series from the University of Rednecks in Hicksville, Louisiana, I would have applied years ago). For those of you not in the know, and surely there can be few of you, Gillian McKeith presents a toe-curlingly embarrassing TV programme on Channel 4 entitled "You Are What You Eat". If this title is to be believed then "Dr" McKeith has obviously been chowing down on Gollum's little brother of late. Every show is the same. First we see some human being, who appears to be the unnatural off-spring of a doomed relationship between a water-bed and a gannet, who spends every waking hour shovelling every conceivable item of high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food into their gaping maw. Then "Dr" McKeith arrives with a face like Kenneth Williams sucking ear-wax off a razor blade. She rummages through their fridge, freezer and food cabinets. Guess what she finds? Well, lawks-a-mercy! It appears to be piles and piles of high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food! Goodness me! Does she find any fresh fruit or vegetables? Well bugger me backwards, no she bleeding-well doesn't. Is she pleased? Her normal facial expression goes way off the top end of the "SOURNESS" richter scale, but at this juncture in most programmes, she is positively stratospherically sour. Next she gets all the junk food that the aforesaid water-bed/gannet hybrid has managed to chomp through in a week, and piles it up on a table for the poor mongrel to look at. She asks them how they feel about it. Lets be honest - most of them are thinking "PARTY!" and are just preparing to launch themselves into a swan-dive onto the profitterole and chicken nugget mountain, when they realise that the sour-faced hobbit creature infront of them is expecting a slightly different reaction. So they obediently shake their heads and tut-tut quietly to themselves. Next we come to the highlight of every show. "Dr" McKeith gets the water-bed/gannet creature to shit into a tupperware sandwich box. Fantastic! Who said variety was dead? She then analyzes the turd and invariably reports back to the poor sod who has brought this upon themselves, that their crap "stinks". Now, stop me if I am wrong, but have YOU ever, EVER crimped off a length and then found yourself going "blimey, that smells good! A sort of subtle mixture of parma violets and fresh mown grass..." NO! Of course you haven't. Crap stinks! I would be round at my Doctor's surgery (that is a real Doctor of course) first thing if I ever produced a Dreadnought that smelt of anything other than fecal material. Finally, she tells the huge person that if they keep eating the high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food, they will die. Now you don't have to be a rocket-scientist to work that one out. I could have told them that. My four-year-old son could have told them that. Bloody hell, even George-W-fucking-Bush could have told them that! She ends up leaving them with piles of fresh fruit and veg, half a ton of her own curious mixtures of mulches, weeds, seeds and brown knobbly things and buggers off. And guess what? When she comes back - THEY HAVE LOST WEIGHT! "Dr" McKeith invariably puts this down to the healthy food she has left for them. I reckon the poor fat bastards have simply starved rather than eat the food Gillian has left which appears to be the scraped out remnants of a recently used cat litter tray. This woman has the gall to call herself an expert. Telling fat people to stop chomping chips, chocolate and fizzy pop drinks or they'll die is about as medically astute and clever as pointing out to someone about to leap off an office block that they might do themselves a mischief when they re-make an acquaintance with terra firma. And yet Channel 4 are obviously paying her vast sums of money for this "expertise". For that reason alone she would deserve a place in Room 101, but it is her complete lack of a sense of humour. Have a look at any of the pictures of her on the internet where she is "smiling". I have to put that in inverted commas as she is not smiling, she is simply contorting her face into what she thinks is a smile. Another reason I cannot stand her is how she looks. If she is supposed to be an advert for her so-called healthy diet then pass the lard, please. She hasn't even got an arse! Look at her! Most women have lovely rounded bottoms, even very skinny women. But "Dr" McKeith appears to have had a buttock-ectomy. Either that or she keeps two planks of 4 x 2 down the back of her slacks. I can think of no-reason why this woman should not be condemned to my own personal Room 101. Oh, and she has funny low-set ears which give her the impression of having just been welted on the back of the nut with a shovel.

The Daily Spleen - Here to stay

Here it is folks. The best way to preserve my sanity. What is it in life that REALLY gets your goat? What or who in life makes you want to stick your foot through the TV screen everytime you see or hear something about them? I know what does it for me, and now it is your turn to hear it.

Some years ago my wife and I decided to have a Room 101 party, based on the BBC TV show where various celebs come on and condemn things they hate to the mythical Room 101 - never to be seen again. My wife told me I was such a grumpy old man that I could never choose just four things (our limit for the night). And she was perfectly correct of course. I could have gone on listing for a fortnight. No one was safe from my wrath! As the party wore on and all our guests were listing their pet hates, more and more things kept occurring to me. Places, people, songs, films, you name it - I could find something I hated and wanted rid of - and now at last I have the blog site where I can do this. And no one can stop me... Well, apart from the obvious solicitors and other legal gits. But please come back over the next few weeks. Take a look. Read my rants. Let me know if you agree, or don't.

It could be interesting.