#maslin

[...]

It’s awards season and if you, like me, are criminally under-recognised in your own era, it can be a somewhat galling time of year.

Here you see a fleet of pampered celebrities trudge onto a stage to regurgitate nauseating speeches about “equality”, “respect” and so-called “basic human dignity” before receiving shiny baubles purely for pretending to be someone else. And yet when I’m caught pretending to be someone else, the courts deem it “impersonating a police officer with intent to deceive and defraud the elderly”.

Nevertheless, it won’t surprise you to hear that I consider myself an optimist. It’s hard not to be when you own a vast and profitable media empire and several of the smaller Canary Islands. So I always try to work on the basis that, at any moment, my unique gifts and achievements will be showered with the praise they so richly deserve.

Such fateful days can emerge from nowhere, like an embolism, and you must be prepared. That is why I always carry around with me a ready-made all-purpose acceptance speech which allows me to appear eloquent and insufferably entitled with the greatest of ease. With a few slight tweaks and tucks it can be made to fit any occasion.

Now, for what I am surely about to receive, I say the following:

[...]

It is with profound and heartfelt contempt that I most humbly accept this [lifetime achievement award/best-in-show rosette/rear-of-the-year prize/court summons – delete as applicable].

On this momentous day, several thoughts occur to me, thoughts such as: it’s about damn time; what took so long?; how did this not occur to you sooner?; etc.

Although, as a shameless egotist, I feed off adulation much as a hummingbird frenziedly gorges itself on nectar to survive, I want to be clear that I hold your esteem in utter disdain. The [academy/general public/grand jury] are philistines and the daily insult of their disregard for my colossal achievements and versatile talents was, in itself, the greatest compliment I could possibly be paid.

One always wants to be revered as a cultural and intellectual titan; it’s just a shame those inevitably doing the revering are themselves so wholly without merit. Perhaps if you buck up your ideas, then I might one day receive your commendation with the humility and grace that you were probably expecting. But it is not this day, you hamwitted proletarian backwash.

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge my parents. This award stands as a shimmering monument to what can be achieved by vigorously spurning their every hope and expectation for you. They wanted me to become a human rights lawyer. Now mine is the name that human rights lawyers whisper, with ashen faces and sorrowful hearts.

Beyond that, I owe them nothing. Not even the polish for their dilapidated, moss-scabbed graves.

I wouldn’t be here today – literally – were it not for the repeated botched assassination attempts commissioned by my loved ones, past and present. Your ineptitude in hiring contract killers has been a source of constant amusement and gratification to me.

Nor would I be here without what others have given me. Often one hears about standing on the shoulders of giants; I stand on the smouldering heap of lives I have ruined. Enemies, colleagues, tax collectors – I stand astride them all like an Olympian and gaze into the red heart of the brave dawn I have fashioned for myself.

But, much as I often insist to the contrary, it is not all about me. I hope to be an aspirational beacon for future generations (though, of course, only those who come after my death – I don’t appreciate direct competition). To the bastard progeny of the future I offer you this advice:

Never let anyone tell you what you can’t do. Not your family, not UN Peacekeepers, not those pen-pushers at the Hague.

Never let anyone tell you something is impossible. Not your family, not NASA, not your own lawyers when you try to plead pre-emptive insanity in your trial for war crimes at the Hague.

Above all, be yourself. Because no one can else can do it for you.

Apart from Joaquin Phoenix.

When Hollywood finally gets over what it has described as its “severe moral reservations” and gets around to producing the biopic of my life*, I have no doubt Phoenix would make a more compelling version of me than even I have. He has the range: the perfect blend of quiet charisma and bonechilling insanity that such a challenging role demands.

And you know what, I hope he wins another Oscar for it.

But until that day, you’ll just have to learn to appreciate the me that you’ve been blighted with.

You don’t deserve me. Now summon my carriage.

[Exeunt]

__________________________

[...]

"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man." – Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

That quote says all that need be said about me and about why, on the eve of the 2019 General Election, I have produced this… this… obscenity; this affront to all decent people.

Regular readers will be keenly aware that I have form for unpleasant and painfully unstimulating erotica but even I thought I had some limits. In the end what makes us truly human is our capacity to learn new and distressing things about ourselves all the time.

Read on, poor fool, and you too may learn something new and distressing about yourself.

Consider this an early present – intended with malice and unleashed upon a world not equipped to cope with it.

Merry Christmas. May God spare us all another year.

[...]

Arabella walked idly down the long hallway of her Kensington flat. With each step she tapped her stiletto heels twice and listened to the echoes skitter ahead of her. She was always like this before seeing a client, pacing around her home; not nervous, exactly, but expectant. She had to gear herself up to accommodate the entire hideousness of the men that she serviced. She enjoyed her work at times but evenings like this one would inevitably test her resolve.

The doorbell cut through the silence like a knife; charged; almost erotic in itself. Arabella walked the corridor, still slowly but in a more direct line. As she approached the door, she straightened a framed photo of her mother that was slightly askew. The extra half second would, she calculated, bring her client’s desire to a rolling boil as he stood, perhaps with trepidation, perhaps just excitement, on her doorstep.

She opened the door. A pregnant moment for them both.

“Good evening.”

“Erm… Tally-ho!”

Arabella took a moment to drink in the sight before her, like a bitter draught of sewage.

“I’m here about the IT lesson,” he said in a loud and unconvincing voice, before whispering: “Could uh… I come in? I don’t want to be seen out here. I’m quite a… er… important person.”

Surveying him with a faintly scornful eye, she was surprised to hear that he was quite an important person. He was stocky but almost formless; like an overlarge large business suit stuffed three-quarters full of hay. This scarecrow appearance was compounded by the crown of piss-yellow straw carelessly scattered on his head. In spite of this inhuman physique, his face was a rudimentary sketch of features flanked on either side by distended, fleshy jowls that flushed a feeble crimson with faint embarrassment.

“You had better come in Mr…” The client hadn’t left a name when booking.

“Uhhh Gove. Michael Gove.”

Arabella wordlessly beckoned him inside. She walked in a studied seductive manner, while he audibly loped behind with heavy, graceless limbs. He knocked the photo of Arabella’s mother from the wall and it smashed on the floor.

“Oh crumbs, I er… do er… accept… sincerest apologies… humble…” he sputtered in a tedious approximation of Hugh Grant trying to swallow a plum without chewing.

“That’s quite alright,” Arabella replied. She would make him suffer for that.

With a hand gently pressed to his shoulder, she guided his corpulent frame onto the sofa. He collapsed with a weighty thump, accompanied by a chorus of springs groaning under his density.

She handed him a glass of white wine which he grasped in his pudgy hand.

“Thanks!” he gasped, before tilting it to his mouth and spilling much of it down his chin.

Arabella surfed the brief, hot waves of revulsion that pulsed through her.

“You know,” she said mischievously and with some relish, “you look an awful lot like the Prime Minister…”

“No!” the figure cried as though he’d discovered a wasp nest in his trousers. “No. I… I… get that quite a lot. Must be my… shoes… No, as I say, I’m Michael Gove.”

“What, former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and current Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove?”

“Not, uh… Not, uh… Not necessarily. Just a Michael Gove. Just if the press happens to ask.”

“Understood Michael. You can call me Mistress Thunderlash. Other than that, I would prefer it if you did not speak. Shall we begin?”

The honeyed sheen of arousal clouded over his tiny pink-rimmed eyes. He licked his lips.

“Cripes! Yes, please Mistress.”

She shuddered involuntarily at the thought of having to satisfy the carnal desires of this lazily-conceived Beano character, but she artfully transformed it into a sensual roll of her shoulder, before leading him with her gaze towards the Red Room.

Hoisted by his own lust, he leapt from the sofa and padded towards the door, effortlessly shedding his clothes en route like a snake wriggling from its discarded skin. She watched his surprisingly small buttocks as they meandered away from her with the kind of mingled disdain and nausea usually only found at a BMA committee meeting the morning after payday drinks. Reluctantly she followed.

By the time she caught up with him, he was spread-eagled on the bed, his promptly stiffened member jutting violently upwards, puce and tumescent, like a foul red beacon; already making love, as it were, with an easy arrogance, to the evening air.

In truth, this macabre sight left her nethergarden more parched than she could ever remember. She deftly moved to her dresser drawer and applied the artificial lubricant that she so sorely required. Saying a brief but directionless prayer for forgiveness – for whatever God or gods might exist, regardless of the articles of faith they embodied, they surely would not readily excuse her for what she was about to do – she ascended this hummock of bovine mass. And then, in a moment that she would recount to her therapist in years to come, an instant that would live long in her recollections of personal infamy, she invited the slightly crooked protuberance of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom into her resentful cleft.

After several complex minutes of movement, gripping with her thighs and rolling her hips to try to maintain her shifting centre of gravity, she reckoned that she could commence the more enjoyable obligations in her remit as Mistress Thunderlash. She eyed his chest and the tender buds of flesh rising like islands from saucer-sized areolas. Readying her long, wine-red nails, she aimed a punishing flick at his large pale nipples.

“Yowee!” he howled.

“Silence, you unspeakable swine,” Arabella shushed, gripping one of the nipples fiercely. The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, imbibing the heady cocktail of pain and pleasure. His tongue lolled out over his wet, meaty lips.

Arabella dragged her neatly painted nails in scything arcs down his chest and heaving gut. He squirmed with a piggy glee, snorting with delight.

Without warning, Arabella dismounted, her enthusiasm for this grim task increasing. She walked over to the cabinet and took out something that the man could not clearly see. All he could identify at first was a slight glinting in the darkness; this proved to be a buckle on a strap. Then the faint outlines of Arabella’s body as she lifted her legs, first one, then the other. As she stepped closer, his eyes gradually made it out; the length of a forearm, topped with bulb the size of a fist; dark, a polished ebony so dark that it swallowed all light.

“By Jove! Jacob told me about this bit!”

Ah yes, Arabella thought, the man who looked like a haughty cadaver and insisted on calling her Nanny. She had wondered who had recommended her.

“I call it…” she said “…Black Rod.”

“Cripes,” he whispered, his voice clogged with desire, fear, and awe. He clearly struggled to break eye contact with the imperious device.

“Ready yourself,” she warned, simply. “This will be as long and as arduous as negotiating a free trade agreement with the European Union.”

In one fluid movement, she sank the prodigious length of Rod up to its hilt. The man tensed, gasped, before relaxing, allowing movement. He muttered guttural nothings under his breath, as though speaking some mysterious language of arousal. Arabella picked up speed, moving through the gears. She felt herself moving in and through the Rod; she became at one with it, remorselessly ploughing the furrow of national leadership; she was a piston, a hateful piston, hammering away; she had never felt so powerful; she had never felt so alive; she would cleave this worthless hog in two!

“I’m approaching…” the man rasped. “I’m approaching…” Runnels of sweat slid across his brow. “I’m approaching…” The final word was strangled, almost mewled: “…climax…”

She knew he was already over the brink; the gravity of his orgasm was drawing him on inescapably to the depths. Now was the time. She knew what she wanted him to hear as his body was wracked with grotesque pleasure.

“Oh!” she moaned, smiling to herself in triumph. “Oh, Michael Gove!”

“N-n-n-n…”

The man spasmed, tried to recoil, tried to escape. But it was too late. The Right Honourable Member for Uxbridge gouted thick ropes of oily sputum into the night, all the while tormented by the images of his colleague’s spite-mottled face. Arabella disengaged and heard him panting sadly in the dark.

“Leave now,” Arabella said, throwing his discarded clothes at his feet.

“I… you’ll ruddy well…” But he knew there was nothing he could do. One phone call to the press would be the end of him and his ill-deserved career. Even his uncanny ability for failing upwards in life despite no discernible talent would protect him here.

“Leave means leave,” Arabella said, pouring herself a glass of red wine. “Best of luck in the election. Consider that pre-emptive revenge for the country.”

Măslinul: Simbol și semnificație

[...]

It's been seven and a half years since I last wantonly scattered pixels on these hallowed pages, and yet somehow my child is still only fifteen months old.

I prefer to think of it not as gaining a son, but as losing vital parts of myself forever. There is much to mourn the loss of.

My aggressive metabolism, once my stalwart companion and saviour, has now abandoned me. I have, in one year, grown a paunch that a decade of wild dietary excess could not inflict. 

My luxuriant hair. Gone. We will not see its like again. The central quiff has been caught in the ruthless pincer movement of a senseless and unjust war of aggression. Eventually it will find itself surrounded, cut off from rescue, before being erased completely; a victim of the insatiable territorial ambitions of my own shiny forehead. 

Exhaustion has even eroded the contours of my very personality, its edges blending with those of the bottle steriliser. We both have similar, thankless roles, spend much of our day sitting sadly in the kitchen, and occasionally emit a low grumbling noise to confirm we are still alive.

Truly, parenthood has been everything I feared and I was wise to avoid it for so long.

Yet, against my best judgement, I have resolved never to pay others to raise my child for me; a resolution that now seems foolhardy. Instead of entrusting my son to the arms of a loving professional, he has been consigned to the care of a rank amateur. The boy has spent his formative months sat in the corner of my office, functioning as an effective - if occasionally pungent - paperweight. Yet he shows no taste for port and cigars, no inclination to write and, most shamefully, little or no sartorial flare. Give him a pocket square and he simply chews the corner of it. I fear he may never become the elegant but troubled genius that I need him to be.

But change - like the complex odour of nappy cream and excrement - is in the air. 

Now, whether in a quest for food or in urgent protest at my lively but one-sided conversation, he has begun to walk and therefore has finally become very much someone else’s problem. As he totters down the Office hallway like an inebriate giraffe, I find myself temporarily freed up to once again lavish the minimum of time and energy on you, my readership; my neglected first child. 

After all, I poured so many hours into cultivating you, moulding you in my gnarled image, inspiring in you a combination of lust and awe. Since you’ll bear the scars forever anyway, it would be a shame to waste it altogether, eh? 

And, as that achingly healthy breed of absentee father, the Cycling Dad - clad in his lycra and treating strangers and squirrels to bellowed insights about marketing strategies in the nation’s quietest and most idyllic parks - will attest: it is important, nay essential, to keep up your own interests in the face of new responsibilities.

That is why I have dipped my toes back into the viscous mire of political machination; the swamp into which I wade with such practiced, amphibian grace. On the 17th of May, I managed to wangle my way into giving a speech at the much-chortled-over proceedings of the National Conservatism conference earlier this month.