Is it just me ...............

On Christmas Day evening as everyone else was watching TV I sat down for a good read. I had treated myself to Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit?
(Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur) which has been one of the hot sellers this Christmas (source: Sunday Times book charts and Amazon Hot 100) and here was a chance to find out why. It was a promising start - amusing attacks on “modern culture, phoney ideas, cretinous people, useless products” (as it says on the tin). Fairly quickly however I found myself becoming irritated with the liberal use of expletives, often accompanying vicious attacks on people or organisations. The subject matter is arranged alphabetically and by the time I arrived at the C’s I was having serious misgivings. When I reached the entry for Charles, Prince of Wales I knew that I’d made a mistake parting with my cash.

More of that in a moment but firstly, a couple of random examples to illustrate my point. Comedian Jimmy Carr is described as a “grasping c**t “ - now, is it just me or is that not funny? Powerpoint - “the Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like f**kheads.” How clever is that? I think that particular term could fairly be used to describe the authors of this rubbish.

Returning to our future king. This is what the authors say:
“f**king freak” …….. “usurious c**t” and, saving the most disgusting bile for the end, “loony feudal shithead jug-eared parasite bastard”. Whatever your views on the value of royalty, the vitriol fired at Prince Charles and others in order to raise a cheap laugh exposes this compilation as the worst kind of offensive, puerile humour which doesn’t deserve to have made it into print.

The authors have an interesting pedigree - Steve Lowe has worked for Q and Big Issue magazines (do they have a section for juvenile anarchists?) . Alan McArthur is a former deputy editor of Solidarity (the publication of the Marxist / Trotskyist organisation - the Alliance Workers’ Liberty). Well I just bet that Solidarity is a rollicking good read - excuse me if I don’t bother to find out - I’m trying to subdue my Trotskyist tendencies - although I do support McArthur’s campaign for free education (just what would he teach them though?).

Actually, I found this book an education. Quite why a major international publisher should put their name on this rubbish is a mystery to me. Time Warner Books did, that was an education. Now, in order that it should be a free education, I returned it to Waterstones and got my money back - I know that Lowe and McArthur would have approved of that! Maybe volume 2 of ‘…Shit’ (next Christmas for sure) will be free? If it is I might even pick up a copy - there is bound to be plenty of inspiration for another irate blog before I drop it into the recycling skip.

To finish on a pleasanter note - here's a secret that I'm letting you into. Fru-Grains! You will probably never have heard of them and you won't find them in the supermarkets. Here's what you do now. Get to your local healthfood shop and grab a couple of boxes. You can trust me on this, you'll be wondering why no one told you years ago. They taste wonderful on cereals or just munched out of the box if you're feeling slobbish. (I've received no reward for this endorsement from those nice folk at Mapletons, but if they want to slip me an envelope full of cash I'll not turn it down.)