Ah, greetings from Sunny Minsk, where we are being mostly big fans of your English popular music.
Oh yes.All your English popular music instrumental groups would be finding great welcoming should they be obliging us with rock and roll extravaganzing at the lovely Minsk Apollo (two floors, 500 capacity full and dancing till 9.30 in our executive Beetroot Beatgroup Ballroom and Grill, oh yes.)
We, here in Minsk, are the biggest fans of your stellar stratosphere popular musical groups. Many people here are proudest possessors of 1972 ticket stubs from Showaddyway sell-out live performancing. Les and his musical collaborators proved so populist that there was no feet of the tiger available for purchasing this side of Siberia! Lots of limping tigers that year – great Minsk joke, no?
As well as Les Gray’s Showaddywaddy, Minsk has also been hosting many other great decadent western rock icons – your Joe Dolce, your Goombay Dancing Band and your Baccara (Yes sir, they can boogie in beautiful Bielarussia, boogie woggie all night long – and night can be very long indeed in not necessarily sunny all the time Minsk!)
But greatest excitement of all was when beautiful rock chicken Dana came to Minsk in 1974. Such great mounting excitementness sent Minsk, rock and roll capital of former Soviet Union, into Rock Around the Clock type frenzying. Many seats were ripping when Dana belt out great rock anthem, All Kinds of Everything.
Very quiet day at tractor collective next morning, with Minsk moshers missing quarterly quota by 2.3 per cent (seasonally adjusted). But when beat hits crazy Minsk people, tractor quotas go out of the window.
After great tumulting with legendary rock chicklet, Dana, rock and roll music banned from city of Minsk by local communist party officials and Dana Fan Club of Minsk forced to hold secret meetings in underground baserments, where much discrete dancing to Everything Is Beautiful and other throbbing power hot tunes!
Finally, with falling of Berlin Wall and smuggling of bootlegging Baywatch David Hasselff compacted discs, Minsk once again bopping and pogoing to your decadent western rock monsters. Sadly Dana no longer available – as she is working on tractor quota bill in your Eire Republic of Ireland Parliament Tractor Quota Legislation Department.
Heavy irony not lost on Dana Rock and Roll Fan Club of Minsk!Then in 1998, great liberal reform sweeps former Soviet Union with grand civic re-opening of Minsk Apollo by Alvin Stardust – with first notes of My Coo Ca Choo setting the nation state rocking, Minsk rock and rollers hear the sound of freedom. Sadly lovely Liza Goddard is not rock and rolling with Alvin Stardust but is in pantomime in Godalming and so misses re-birth of Minsk rock nation whilst at the top of one of your comedy beanstalks!
Following Alvin Stardust rock and roll renaissance, only one of your musical groupings can top that! People of Minsk send out heartfelt impassioned plea for rock and roll super-group Steps to be headlining at 1998 Belarussia New Metal Festival.
Sadly powerful music quintet Faye, Lisa, Lee, H and Claire cannot travel to Minsk for new annual Trash Metal festival as H has chiropody problem – another victim of decadent rock and roll park your Rolls Royce in Municipal Swimming Pool lifestyling no doubt!But rocking and rolling Minsk population is nothing if not resourcefulness!
Pretty damned soon Russian Steppes, world’s first Ukranian tributing bound is formed – Olga, Ivan, Ivan, other Olga and Cyril Ik (H name not translatable into Russian alphabet but is great wacky joke by Minsk Rock and Roll fan club, no?)
Sadly, due to oversight on very careless assistant airport petrol pumping comrade at Volgograd International Airport, Tupolev T-16 Badger carrying Russian Steppes crashes into Siberian ice mountain. Is Tragedy like of which English supergroup Steps makes top smash hit record with.
All members of Russian Steppes later found by highly trained ice mountain rescue team of East Siberia – tragedy again – all frozen together in icing cube and no longer able to Keep on Moving, like great rock and roll classic contemporaries, axe heroing S-Club 7!Russian Steppes now top only exhibit in Minsk Rock and Roll Museum (formerly Beetroot Beatgroup Ballroom and Grill!), where every day, as top man curator, I am dusting them off and turning heating down.
Russian Steppes, unlike Engish supergroup namesakers will never split – not without utility of top quality Minsk ice axe! Rock and Roll forevering!!
Monday, 14 February 2005
Ilkmoor Parish Council was unique among the 472 local residuary bodies that constituted the self-sustaining moral high ground of much of Middle England.
It wasn’t that it failed to share, with its 471 fellow committees, the single-minded conviction that people of other cultures, classes or pigmentation would never really be happy in its own leafy environs.
Nor was it that it had proved to be any less enthusiastic in its belief that there were few social ills, locally at least, that would fail to be solved by a really good whist drive. However, this solidarity nonwithstanding, there was one area where it diverged from its fellow flocks of vicars' wives, former postmistresses and men in slacks.
Street lighting.
Provision thereof.
Mrs Valerie Dwyer, second cousin, twice removed (once forcibly) of the Archbishop of Pym had made the abolishment of all forms of freely-funded public illumination “a pivotal plank” in the night of the not-terribly-long-but impeccably-polished-bone-handled knives that had swept her ever so becomingly to power.
She was now alderwoman of Ilkmoor’s traditional parish council, a parish council that could trace its roots back to 1972 and the back room of a grocer’s shop owned by Mrs Dwyer’s late father, Gerald Halboard.
“Pivotal planks”, although explicitly banned under sundry provisions of the HSE, were nevertheless something a draw among the concerned enfrachisees of Middling England and saw Mrs Dwyer enjoy a groundswell of support, seldom seen since that her of predecessor and sire.
It was Mrs Dwyer’s unwavering belief that individuals obliged to have recourse to electrical means of brightening, funded outwith the public purse, were up to no good – particularly with regards to matters of flaunting the male member in a way her late father had graphically and religiously described to her each Sunday over nutmeg tea and scones.
Any stouthearted yeoman obliged to nocturnally traverse Ilkmoor’s sundry floral byways would surely ensure suitable illumination from from his trusty tinderbox or the dipped headlights of his Nissan Frontier, she argued to the muted, but enthusiastic cheers of an audience of three (not including the ethereal but abiding presence of the late Mr Dwyer, whose passing on had enhanced neither his unobtrusiveness or loquacity).
And so, under the enthusiastic tutelage of Mrs Dwyer, one by one, the lights went out on Ilkmoor village.
The sundry discomfiture occasioned to the general populace of that fair borough was as nothing to that inflicted specifically and individually upon one Bernard Hockley.
If Bernard Hockley had had any friends, they might have referred to him as “Old Bernie” or even “Hockers”, but, as he had none, the matter is one of mere conjecture and speculation.
To himself, for no good reason that he could discern or recall, he thought of himself, (as he did frequently, if not exclusively) as “Mr Whimsy”.
It was his habit, as with many others of his persuasion and bearing, to refer to himself solely in the third person – as though wishing to express some degree of separation, no matter how flimsy or self-evidently untrue, from the sordid and unpleasant individual even he perceived himself to be.
As with many others in the area, Mr Whimsy could trace his lineage back for countless generations in Ilkmoor. But whilst other more noble families signalled their passing through wedding banns and property transactions, the Hockley’s would have been better served by using their sense of smell to uncover the unpleasant spoor of their own historical passing.
The DNA code of the Hockleys, if ever cracked, would spell “dysfunctional” in seven foot high flashing neon letters visible from orbit, but the good folk of Ilkmoor had no need of genetic fingerprinting to know a “wrong’un” when they saw one – although, indeed, matters more olfactory in nature were more a testament to the the proximity of a Hockley.
The persistence of the Hockley gene within this rural locale was a mystery of considerable import to the burghers of Ilkmoor. It seemed highly unlikey that anything with any degree chromosomal compatibility or sentience would deign to procreate with a Hockley. And indeed, countless years of “keeping it within the family" threw considerable uncertainly over the fecundity of any resultant off-spring.
Moreover, the likelihood of the recombination of any of its currently constituent gametes producing an entity capable of stereoscopic vision seemed low.
Just as the predominance of “Farmers”, “Smiths”, “Coopers” and “Fletchers” in the area’s strictly limited edition of the Thomson’s Local, testified to the proud professions bestowed surnameanouysly upons subsequent generations, so too did “Hockley” bear witness to the pre-occupations of Bernard’s own forebears.
In times mainly Mediaeval in nature, a “Hockley” had been a derogatory term for any male villager prone to exposing his pizzle to a female resident thereof without prior invitation or solicitation. It was a name and tradition that the Hockleys had borne, proudly, yet covertly, since Wednesday June 22 1722 at about four O’clock, although stories differ.
Bernard’s not so great, great, great, great, great, grandfather, Jasper Hockley, had been something of a pioneer in the business of the furtive pizzle presentation. Had the ingenuity which surrounded his bids to ensure high levels of pizzle visibility in a post-dark situation in a pre-electric age been usefully employed elsewhere, the Hockley’s heritage might have been best sought in plaques on public buildings rather than in the residual snatches of medieval bawdy baladeering still employed in the shower room of Ilkmoor RFC.
It was Jasper that pioneered the technique of holding aloft a flaming torch of goat fat in one hand whilst successfully negotiating the complex unfastening of a smock with the other that was de rigeur among the pizzle exhibiting cognoscenti until well into the nineteenth century.
Among his lesser known achievements – and largely due to the failure of his early experimentation with the use of goat fat as a mean of genital illumination - he was also among the first to invent the flame-retardant merkin.
Little did Thomas Edison suspect in 1878 as he uncovered his invention of electricty to a grateful toasterless world, that it would prove an equal, if not greater boon to that section of the community that wanted to unfurl their male members in an iridiscent environment, although it was also to sound the death knell of the goat fat industry.
For nearly 150 years those of a penile exhibitionistic tendency had cavorted and frolicked in Bernard’s home town, free from the centuries old worry of sustaining injury from dripping ruminant remnants, jigging in their long coats and bicycle-clipped trouser bottoms as their engorged manhoods proudly reflected the street lights of Ilkmoor.
But now, the one woman “lampdown” of Alderwoman Dwyer had put the cause of the village’s todger toreadors back into the dark ages, literally and figuratively.
Perhaps it was the purity of the bloodline that coursed, albeit lumpily and hesitantly, through Bernard’s veins that drove him that night.Perhaps it was some medieval contretemps between, the Halbards, the alderwoman’s paternal forebears, and the Hockleys, that had yet to be played that out led her take the wheel of her Nissan Frontier that night.
On thing though was for certain - the closure that night of the A698 bypass on the outskirts of Ilkmoor was no co-incidence borne of the malice of ill-resting Medieveal spirits with a score to settle. It was, in fact, the direct results of a coachload of inebriated tourists on the return leg of a visit to the nearby Strangepool Distillery and Gym colliding with the annual Muckle-by-the-Barbie Young Farmers Combine Harvester Stock Race and grill.
The emergency services and the county’s crack farm-equipment recovery unit had long departed now, leaving only a brightly twinkling parade ground of solar-powered LED flashing beacons (Model R247) in their wake.
Enjoying the silence and darkness as well as the occasional satisfying crunch of under-wheel wildlife, the Alderwoman’s four-wheel driven Japanese psuedo-jeep nosed towards destiny. A keener sense of smell would have seen it recede quite rapidly.
On the side of a hill, by the wrecked remains of the A968 bypass, her nemesis took several intermittent pisses and a swig of cider.Bernard Hockley staggered up to the top of the rise and into neon nob nirvana…
Mentally clocking up her eighth ex-squirrel of the trip, Mrs Dwyer gunned the motor as the bypass loomed.
And suddenly there was a brightness, a brightness that her own by-laws had specifically prohibited. And out of that brightness lurched a figure, a figure struggling to undo its heavy topcoat even as one and a half tonnes of imported motor vehicle careered towards him.
In a second it was over. And so was the Nissan, with Bernard, last of the Hockley’s, embedded in its windscreen.
The Alderwoman was found alive some two hours later and proved no longer capable of advocating planks, pivotal or otherwise and, indeed, no longer capable of enunciating anything more distinct than an occasional sad despairing whelp.
Strangepool’ s fire chief, Brannigan O’Hare, raised his protective helmet briefly and scratched his sweaty scalp. He could just about understand how the poor man had managed to end up with his nether regions jammed upside down in the alderwoman’s front windscreen.
And he could possibly imagine that the unfortunate’s trousers and underwear had been lost in the impact, but what cruel twist of fate had secured a still twinkling accident beacon so firmly to his exposed member?
“We’ll have you out of there soon, love,” he said to the still-trapped Alderwoman. “And we’ll get him moved as soon as possible...”
Mrs Dwyer, for her part, sat, her mouth opening and clothing silently, her gaze never wavering from the intermittently illuminated object dangling scant inches above her forehead...
It wasn’t that it failed to share, with its 471 fellow committees, the single-minded conviction that people of other cultures, classes or pigmentation would never really be happy in its own leafy environs.
Nor was it that it had proved to be any less enthusiastic in its belief that there were few social ills, locally at least, that would fail to be solved by a really good whist drive. However, this solidarity nonwithstanding, there was one area where it diverged from its fellow flocks of vicars' wives, former postmistresses and men in slacks.
Street lighting.
Provision thereof.
Mrs Valerie Dwyer, second cousin, twice removed (once forcibly) of the Archbishop of Pym had made the abolishment of all forms of freely-funded public illumination “a pivotal plank” in the night of the not-terribly-long-but impeccably-polished-bone-handled knives that had swept her ever so becomingly to power.
She was now alderwoman of Ilkmoor’s traditional parish council, a parish council that could trace its roots back to 1972 and the back room of a grocer’s shop owned by Mrs Dwyer’s late father, Gerald Halboard.
“Pivotal planks”, although explicitly banned under sundry provisions of the HSE, were nevertheless something a draw among the concerned enfrachisees of Middling England and saw Mrs Dwyer enjoy a groundswell of support, seldom seen since that her of predecessor and sire.
It was Mrs Dwyer’s unwavering belief that individuals obliged to have recourse to electrical means of brightening, funded outwith the public purse, were up to no good – particularly with regards to matters of flaunting the male member in a way her late father had graphically and religiously described to her each Sunday over nutmeg tea and scones.
Any stouthearted yeoman obliged to nocturnally traverse Ilkmoor’s sundry floral byways would surely ensure suitable illumination from from his trusty tinderbox or the dipped headlights of his Nissan Frontier, she argued to the muted, but enthusiastic cheers of an audience of three (not including the ethereal but abiding presence of the late Mr Dwyer, whose passing on had enhanced neither his unobtrusiveness or loquacity).
And so, under the enthusiastic tutelage of Mrs Dwyer, one by one, the lights went out on Ilkmoor village.
The sundry discomfiture occasioned to the general populace of that fair borough was as nothing to that inflicted specifically and individually upon one Bernard Hockley.
If Bernard Hockley had had any friends, they might have referred to him as “Old Bernie” or even “Hockers”, but, as he had none, the matter is one of mere conjecture and speculation.
To himself, for no good reason that he could discern or recall, he thought of himself, (as he did frequently, if not exclusively) as “Mr Whimsy”.
It was his habit, as with many others of his persuasion and bearing, to refer to himself solely in the third person – as though wishing to express some degree of separation, no matter how flimsy or self-evidently untrue, from the sordid and unpleasant individual even he perceived himself to be.
As with many others in the area, Mr Whimsy could trace his lineage back for countless generations in Ilkmoor. But whilst other more noble families signalled their passing through wedding banns and property transactions, the Hockley’s would have been better served by using their sense of smell to uncover the unpleasant spoor of their own historical passing.
The DNA code of the Hockleys, if ever cracked, would spell “dysfunctional” in seven foot high flashing neon letters visible from orbit, but the good folk of Ilkmoor had no need of genetic fingerprinting to know a “wrong’un” when they saw one – although, indeed, matters more olfactory in nature were more a testament to the the proximity of a Hockley.
The persistence of the Hockley gene within this rural locale was a mystery of considerable import to the burghers of Ilkmoor. It seemed highly unlikey that anything with any degree chromosomal compatibility or sentience would deign to procreate with a Hockley. And indeed, countless years of “keeping it within the family" threw considerable uncertainly over the fecundity of any resultant off-spring.
Moreover, the likelihood of the recombination of any of its currently constituent gametes producing an entity capable of stereoscopic vision seemed low.
Just as the predominance of “Farmers”, “Smiths”, “Coopers” and “Fletchers” in the area’s strictly limited edition of the Thomson’s Local, testified to the proud professions bestowed surnameanouysly upons subsequent generations, so too did “Hockley” bear witness to the pre-occupations of Bernard’s own forebears.
In times mainly Mediaeval in nature, a “Hockley” had been a derogatory term for any male villager prone to exposing his pizzle to a female resident thereof without prior invitation or solicitation. It was a name and tradition that the Hockleys had borne, proudly, yet covertly, since Wednesday June 22 1722 at about four O’clock, although stories differ.
Bernard’s not so great, great, great, great, great, grandfather, Jasper Hockley, had been something of a pioneer in the business of the furtive pizzle presentation. Had the ingenuity which surrounded his bids to ensure high levels of pizzle visibility in a post-dark situation in a pre-electric age been usefully employed elsewhere, the Hockley’s heritage might have been best sought in plaques on public buildings rather than in the residual snatches of medieval bawdy baladeering still employed in the shower room of Ilkmoor RFC.
It was Jasper that pioneered the technique of holding aloft a flaming torch of goat fat in one hand whilst successfully negotiating the complex unfastening of a smock with the other that was de rigeur among the pizzle exhibiting cognoscenti until well into the nineteenth century.
Among his lesser known achievements – and largely due to the failure of his early experimentation with the use of goat fat as a mean of genital illumination - he was also among the first to invent the flame-retardant merkin.
Little did Thomas Edison suspect in 1878 as he uncovered his invention of electricty to a grateful toasterless world, that it would prove an equal, if not greater boon to that section of the community that wanted to unfurl their male members in an iridiscent environment, although it was also to sound the death knell of the goat fat industry.
For nearly 150 years those of a penile exhibitionistic tendency had cavorted and frolicked in Bernard’s home town, free from the centuries old worry of sustaining injury from dripping ruminant remnants, jigging in their long coats and bicycle-clipped trouser bottoms as their engorged manhoods proudly reflected the street lights of Ilkmoor.
But now, the one woman “lampdown” of Alderwoman Dwyer had put the cause of the village’s todger toreadors back into the dark ages, literally and figuratively.
Perhaps it was the purity of the bloodline that coursed, albeit lumpily and hesitantly, through Bernard’s veins that drove him that night.Perhaps it was some medieval contretemps between, the Halbards, the alderwoman’s paternal forebears, and the Hockleys, that had yet to be played that out led her take the wheel of her Nissan Frontier that night.
On thing though was for certain - the closure that night of the A698 bypass on the outskirts of Ilkmoor was no co-incidence borne of the malice of ill-resting Medieveal spirits with a score to settle. It was, in fact, the direct results of a coachload of inebriated tourists on the return leg of a visit to the nearby Strangepool Distillery and Gym colliding with the annual Muckle-by-the-Barbie Young Farmers Combine Harvester Stock Race and grill.
The emergency services and the county’s crack farm-equipment recovery unit had long departed now, leaving only a brightly twinkling parade ground of solar-powered LED flashing beacons (Model R247) in their wake.
Enjoying the silence and darkness as well as the occasional satisfying crunch of under-wheel wildlife, the Alderwoman’s four-wheel driven Japanese psuedo-jeep nosed towards destiny. A keener sense of smell would have seen it recede quite rapidly.
On the side of a hill, by the wrecked remains of the A968 bypass, her nemesis took several intermittent pisses and a swig of cider.Bernard Hockley staggered up to the top of the rise and into neon nob nirvana…
Mentally clocking up her eighth ex-squirrel of the trip, Mrs Dwyer gunned the motor as the bypass loomed.
And suddenly there was a brightness, a brightness that her own by-laws had specifically prohibited. And out of that brightness lurched a figure, a figure struggling to undo its heavy topcoat even as one and a half tonnes of imported motor vehicle careered towards him.
In a second it was over. And so was the Nissan, with Bernard, last of the Hockley’s, embedded in its windscreen.
The Alderwoman was found alive some two hours later and proved no longer capable of advocating planks, pivotal or otherwise and, indeed, no longer capable of enunciating anything more distinct than an occasional sad despairing whelp.
Strangepool’ s fire chief, Brannigan O’Hare, raised his protective helmet briefly and scratched his sweaty scalp. He could just about understand how the poor man had managed to end up with his nether regions jammed upside down in the alderwoman’s front windscreen.
And he could possibly imagine that the unfortunate’s trousers and underwear had been lost in the impact, but what cruel twist of fate had secured a still twinkling accident beacon so firmly to his exposed member?
“We’ll have you out of there soon, love,” he said to the still-trapped Alderwoman. “And we’ll get him moved as soon as possible...”
Mrs Dwyer, for her part, sat, her mouth opening and clothing silently, her gaze never wavering from the intermittently illuminated object dangling scant inches above her forehead...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)