The Reign in Thpain

‘Hi nigh brine kai?’ is often the first sentence you will learn in Received Pronunciation (RP) – how to enquire about the health of a brown cow at a precise moment in time.

Of course, the Queen’s English is used not only to establish the welfare of tan cattle, but to impose the way people expect us to speak. And by ‘people’, we mean society. One needs a clipped accent to be respected or to have one’s authority accepted, in order to advance in life.

What might not be appreciated so much is that that word ‘received’ is loaded. The suggestion is that one’s pronunciation should be something that should be communicated or despatched (from the ruling classes) and accepted (by the hoi polloi) i.e. received. The pronunciation must be registered (in our minds), much as one might in analogy sign for a courier-delivered parcel to verify its receipt. By wiggling one’s finger across the screen of that big mobile phone thing couriers hand you.

‘Is that OK?’ you ask the courier. ‘Is that alright as my signature?’

‘Yuh.’

‘So, I could have just twitched; squiggled anything? And you would have accepted that as my signature?’

‘Ar.’

‘Or I could have forged the signature of the person who this package is for? Like forging banknotes, but instead of making fake money you can spend fraudulently, getting something random you might not want from Amazon? Like unexpected socks?’

‘Alright, mate?’ says the courier by way of taking his leave, finding an excuse to terminate the further probing of the verification process. He is on a mission to deliver as many parcels as he can, aspiring to prove to Jeff Bezos that he can meet the minimum wage on a zero-hour contract if he works fast enough and doesn’t waste time on signature talk.

It wasn’t though, as commonly thought, the British who invented Received Pronunciation. That honour belongs to...

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Squeaky Nikes

Church: The theatre of revelations, both spiritual and trainers related.

Oftentimes it is only when we step into country churches that we realise that our trainers have developed a squeak. We try to act detached from the squeak, but there it is a constant companion as we step over to read that intriguing bronze plaque. ‘This one died in 1724!’ you exclaim to your partner who will certainly be as interested as you in finding the first recorded dead person in the church. But then you venture forth, checking out a bit of apse or a section of nave and the squeak tells everyone else in the church keeping it quiet (like you’re supposed to), that yes it is you making the noise. You needn’t look around trying to work that out any more. Yes, it’s me with the heretical trainers. Satisfied now? People from the country, meanwhile, know exactly where they are wearing wellies. The welly is consistent, dutiful. True to form it makes a jaunty clumping noise with every step, be they old or new. And the welly will always drag your socks off inside the boot after a short walking distance. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Bonus-Bonkers Bankers

'Oi! 'ope you washed yer 'ands,' a Cockney will ask of a Merchant Banker offering to shake hands.

Bankers are terribly misunderstood. It’s not surprising that they misbehave when we consider that they are confined to gated communities. This is what people do if they are put behind bars. They become institutionalised. They live cheek-by-jowl with other bankers, learning from each other how to do things like claim tax credits when they haven’t paid tax in the first place, how to restructure debt and refuse to lend to other people. So that when they get out and into the office, they fall into learnt patterns of behaviour.

We can just imagine how they’re brought up. ‘Did you tidy your room?’ asks a parent.

‘No. If anything it’s messier,’ answers the latent banker.

‘Not good, Stephen. There’s only one thing for it. I’m going to have to raise your pocket money.’ (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Moody's to Boobies

‘We’re downgrading you from AAA to AA,’ say Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agencies (CRAs). ‘And that’s a bad thing,’ they add, in case you didn’t know it. Basically, what they’re saying is we look at your country’s economic health and come up with some letters to show how worthy you are of borrowing money. All seems a bit abstract until we realise that the system of categorisation they use draws parallels with bra sizing’s. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Diving Divas

Diving foreign footballers are often blamed for the ruination of the English game, which makes us wonder what impact imported talent would have on the sport of high diving? Some would say that a career change from football to diving is a natural transition. After all, a certain type of foreign player has not only a highly developed eye-to-foot, but very good arse-to-surface co-ordination. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Wannabe Wallabies

Getting Medieval on your Arse

The punishment for adultery in Medieval times was a very poor joke (see clip below).

Non-Secateurs Non-Sequitirs

Triple Jumping for Joy



A depressed-looking triple jumper.

Miffed marbles players, hacked-off hockey players, pissed-off polo horsemen and horseladies. All sports people are prone to depression. But the worst afflicted have to be the triple jumpers. When you’re low, the last thing you feel like doing is skipping and that’s exactly one-third (33.33%) of the tasks demanded in the triple jump, otherwise known as the ‘hop, skip and jump’. Picture this scenario at an athletics meet:

‘What was that?’ demands the depressed triple jumpers’ coach after a sub-standard attempt.

‘I don’t know. Don’t feel like skipping. I’m fed up,’ retorts the triple jumper skulking off.

‘You hopped and then you jumped. You didn’t even make the sandpit.’ (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Familiar Faeces

The default singing accent in pop music is American. And for a reason. Had the band Tears for Fears sung ‘Mad World’ in a Scottish accent it would have been quite a different song. Instead of a soul-search for the meaning of life, it would have been about a sewage engineer trying to sort out a pipe blockage (see clip, below, for confirmation).

Public Enema No.1

How the slightest change in singing style might radically transform the message of a protest song - from the dangers of swallowing spoon-fed propaganda, to the way an enema is applied.

Table Tennis Elbow

We think of people taking smack cocaine on dirty mattresses first getting into drugs smoking marijuana tablets; or accidentally sniffing Pritt Stick in Arts and Crafts lessons; or through preparing to compete in the men’s 100 metres. Similarly, table tennis is a gateway sport encouraging people to become addicted to the full-fledged ‘furniture-less’ tennis.

A tennis pusher grooming through table tennis.

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2012 Vision

Samuel Johnson on Milton Keynes

It Takes 17 to Conga

CERN Goes Public

The search for the stray particle widens...

Best in Peston

Robert Peston, economist, sage, ponderer of the demise of the West. Here he is at his most profound.

Not Seeing the MDF for the Trees

We’re all looking for the next Age. We had the Stone Age, a period of assailing animals/fauna with flint. We had the Iron Age. The Bronze Age also; followed up much later on by a Brass Age in the 1970s when horse brasses were used substantially to decorate pubs serving Watneys ale. All revolutionary ages of man profoundly marked by the adoption of a new material. A lot of us, however, little realise that we are in fact sitting in an Age at this very moment. The MDF Age.

It’s been very difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Iron Age or the Bronze Age started. But we do know that the MDF Age began precisely around 7pm on the 4^th September 1996 with the first episode of ‘Changing Rooms’.  The DIY show, marked the first time we had seen a clone of Frances de la Tour from ‘Rising Damp’ (right). (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)