BIG CHILL PRETENTIOUS MOI

I see MIA thinks wearing a burka on the red carpet. I did it last year for four whole days. It's hot, but strangely sexual

Now I believe in God

FRESHIE NEW LIFE

Keen to understand the passion our elders hold for all things conservative, I’ve decided to become a Tory. After all, I share rather a lot in common with them. I too was educated in public school, talk complete nonsense for a living and harbour fantasies of a leather-clad Edwina Currie whipping my bare buttocks red raw while rapping Rule Britannia through mouthfuls of parsnip quiche.

Transfixed by my new leader David Cameron’s groin-grabbing smile, I’ve taken the bold step of furthering his Hug a Hoodie and Love a Lout policies by introducing my own politically naïve manifesto, with the aptly meaningless but hip title Cool Cats & Underdogs. It features such momentous maxims such as Dote on a Desi, Adopt an Auntiji, Roger a Rudeboy, and my personal favourite, Fondle a Freshie – quite simply because it means I get to do what I do best – play with myself.
But you’re not a Freshie you fat freak, I hear you cry. Well weep not so gently into your heaving moist bosom oh my sister, because despite the fact that I’m one of this nation’s great unwashed and thus far from fresh in the scent department, I am a bona fide first generation boatman, raised in the motherland by goats and fed on a diet of daal, jackfruit and petunia petals dried in the basanta sun.

Not a lot of people know this, but that’s only because not a lot of people want to know me, but it was only at the age of 13 that I left the humble surroundings of the chandelier and marble-floored mansion in the Bangladeshi tea estate I grew up in, to find a better life in Peckham. Armed with a heavily Banglacised accent and snatches of lingo borrowed from The Dukes of Hazzard, I arrived at an over-privileged toff’s school to embark on a pastime that would repeat itself throughout my life; getting my head flushed down the toilet by little fat gay boys (although I didn’t have to pay for it back then).

After laboriously mutating myself into something quite alien to my Bangladeshi background by replacing hilsha fish, baul music and disco lunghis with mushy peas, baggy jeans and injecting N-methyl-D-aspartic acid into my eyeballs, it’s been some time since anyone asked me to prove my Britishness. I thought having two beautiful half-English children and the ability to whistle the entire Chas & Dave catalogue through my rectum would be proof enough but oh no, apparently that wasn’t good enough for that lousy Labour lout Charles Clarke. You see, while shedding my inherent Bangladeshi identity was easier than the girls in the office get after a few shandies, my inherited British nature has meant I’ve been too sodding lazy to go about getting myself a British passport. And now that I want one (a decision kindly cemented by the visa department at the American Embassy who saw my first name Muhammad and laughed far too loud and far too strangely), I’ve had to take a British Citizenship Test to prove I’m worthy of owning one.

Now I don’t know how many of you born and brought up here ever felt the need to justify your existence in such a way, but I’m pretty sure none of you thought your cultural identity hinged on questions such as: What is the percentage of children in Britain that live in a step family? What is the difference between the House of Commons and the House of Lords? How often does Prince Charles make tender, fervid love to his pot of geraniums? So I made the last one up but, really, what a nonsensical way of assessing whether someone knows enough about this country to rightfully belong here.

Now had they asked me to down 12 pints of warm urine, pulled my pants down and do a moonie while projectile vomiting kebab missiles, I’d forgive them for doing at least some research into the ways of this country – and don’t forget, this test is designed to prove you can adapt to this country, not that you can memorise pointless stats and facts parrot style. If you wanted to find out if a guy was from the Punjab, for instance, asking him to name its five rivers proves nothing. On the other hand, if his limbs fail to instantly jig when you play him a boliyan or turns down the offer of an aloo paratha and Bacardi breakfast, you won’t have to think twice before carting the impostor to the nearest deportation centre.

Even though my friends assured me that if the inbred in the butcher’s shop managed to pass the test, I should sail through it, I was still stupidly nervous before the day of reckoning. I didn’t feel particularly assured when the Spanish girl at my local taco shop advised: ‘If you don’t know the answer, just say The Queen.’ All that did was put Bohemian Rhapsody in my head (Bismillah! No will not let him go!), and meant I gave up my planned last minute revision for a night at The Queen’s Head pub getting trashed.

Despite the fact that I went on to score 24 out 24 questions correctly, I’m in no mood for celebration. I resent having to prove my identity in such a faceless manner (the only people I spoke to during the test, other than the computer that was to judge me, was a chap with a Caribbean drawl at the reception desk and an invigilator with a comical Chinese accent who asked whether Muhammad was a Muslim name). So do I feel any different now that I am a true blue Englishman? Am I somehow less of a potential terrorist threat just because my passport goes from green to burgundy? Will I suddenly start talking like the Queen Mother? Will all those banks that I’ve been scamming and taxes I’ve been dodging with variant spellings of Muhammad suddenly catch on? Too late, you can’t deport me now.

I don’t care who or what this government, or anyone else for that matter, thinks I am. I know who I choose to be. And at the moment, I choose to be a raging Tory. Although my most recent undertaking, Groom a Gay has found me in a drunken stupor, trimming the handlebar moustache of a rather burly dead ringer for Freddie Mercury, but then God Shave the Queen is the quintessential British mantra, right?

Bismillah? Nah. He will not let me go…

test

What's on our minds?

I know what you’re thinking. How can this fat bloke with a crap beard possibly be able to fathom what is going on in the mind of such a complex woman as I? I could, of course, prove you wrong. It doesn’t take much scratching beneath the surface to unearth the depth of your thinking process: the longing for a pair of Manola slingbacks, the perils of a Pina Colada cheesecake, the delights of dry-weave top sheet with wings. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong – but frankly, I don’t give a damn.

Not in the I’m-so-hard-I-don’t-care-what-people-think fashion and certainly not because I don’t value your opinion, but because – as a free thinking, confident and independent woman – you can think what you like.

So why aren’t men allowed to get lost in our thoughts without you turning Spaniard with your inquisitions? Cracking your whip and shrieking ‘ariba, ariba, andale, andale!’ while we’re hurriedly trying to think of a suitable response to your demand: ‘what are you thinking? Tell me now! Tell me now or I’ll kill you.’

‘Uh… I was thinking, you know, how much that thingy you’re wearing makes your tits look lovely.’

‘Liar!’

Trust us. You don’t want to know the truth. Go on. Take a guess. Football? Any man that sits around daydreaming about fit men playing with their balls has no friends. Sex? It’s undeniably in the back of our minds, but it’s at the back of yours too – we don’t sit around having vivid fantasies about bonking when we’re in public. It’s a private matter between us and the pullout lingerie section inside this month’s Bliss magazine. Beer? Don’t be silly – if the option of alcohol presented itself – we’d be in the pub drinking it. Fact is, unlike you, guys don’t sit around thinking about things that they want to do, or should be doing – precisely the reason we don’t make lists or come out with banal requests like: ‘Can you remind me to buy some eggs tomorrow? We’re going to need eggs tomorrow.’

So what does go on in the mind of a man? Before I reveal the truth, once and for all, let me ask you this: why do you want to know? Don’t answer that – I can’t hear you. Even if you’re convinced you have this weird ESP thing going on (if I had a penny for every woman who has dazzled me with her sixth sense, I’d be skint right now). My extensive research in getting into women’s minds – it’s all I can do, none of you let me go anywhere near your body – has given me some fascinatingly dull insights. You want us to share our thoughts because you can’t stand the uncomfortable silence, or you’re worried that vacant stare in our eyes may be the first signs of action myoclonus renal failure syndrome, or you’re fishing for us to give away some important information about ourselves in a moment of weakness – so you can use it as an emotional missile to nuke us with at a later, more vulnerable date.

But mostly, you’re begging us to tell you what’s going on inside our heads in the hope we’ll have something interesting to say, because there’s nothing of note going on in yours.

Or, more worryingly for us, there is something going on – and you want to reveal all, in blow by blow detail, all about how your so-called friend Anuja, right, she only goes and gets her nails manicured in the same salon you booked to get yours done, two weeks before you, how dare she, the evil harlot, together we must destroy her. Can’t you just accept we don’t want to know? Isn’t the fact that we don’t share our inane thoughts with you a clear signal that you don’t have to speak and we could just, for once, watch a programme or listen to a song without interruption?

So what’s on our minds?

It’s not what you think. And those of you who wish you were, or believe you are (wrongly I might add) mind-readers, let me assure you that one peek into the dark and sinister filth inside the average man’s mind will turn you instantly insane.
Because unlike you, we don’t think with words. Not in the way you do. Sure we tell our boss to shove it where the squirrels hide their nuts in the privacy of the toilet or give interviews to Rolling Stone magazine when we’re on the bus – but most of the time, we just feel and act upon it. Hungry? Must eat. Horny? Must look at woman with big jugs across the street. These aren’t detailed instructions. Unlike you lot, who analyse every tiny aspect of any given situation, thinking about what other people think or may be thinking, until you turn into total paranoid wrecks.

We don’t worry about things like that. We fantasise about things that aren’t real, you worry about things that are. But you don’t have to worry anymore – I will now, on behalf of all men, reveal exactly what is on our minds, constantly, from the moment we wake to the second we pass out. Ready?

We’re thinking about how much we love you.

Back biting

Are you sitting comfortably? I’m not. See, I have this royal pain in the backside, as if a crown of thorns has been unceremoniously shoved up there by the king of all pains.

If it sounds like I’m talking out of my arse, I am. Unlike my anal passage, I’ll come clean. I have haemorrhoids, which is as difficult a word to spell as diarrhoea and, when you have one – you’d better pray you have the other. Otherwise, wiping yourself after relieving yourself is like reliving your most fierce, masochistic nightmare. My name is Kismet Hardy and I have piles. There I said it, I don’t feel better.

For some reason, no one wants to know. While the girls in the office think nothing of shoving their green lurgy in my face as a demand for sympathy or go to great lengths to point out the blood gushing out of their nether regions is justification for stealing my lunch – the moment I try to share my piles with them, they squeal, like little piggies, calling me a fat freak. Butt seriously, why should I keep this a secret? Have the afflicted no voice? Ooh, ooh, you have turnips on your rump, let’s poke you with a stick. Well, I’ve had enough.

The first time this happened to me, a matter of days after my 30th birthday, it was an incredibly lonely experience. Without any warning, a crack troop of these round helmeted Nazis armed with bayonets invaded my crack and started stab, stabbing with such ferocity, I woke up fearing the worst. I had been drugged. That innocent bag of crack I had ingested the night before was in fact rohypnol and I’d been gang raped by a team of vicious donkeys. But the truth was far worse. I was getting old. Piles is what old people get. Then they die, diseased and smelly. It was with this thought, a heavy heart and a heavier bucket of butt wad that I crawled to the chemist to seek emergency aid. But who should be there behind the counter but a sweet little 15-year-old girl, clad in a Muslim headdress, already eyeing this groaning, shuffling mass of humanity approaching her with much suspicion. There was no way I was going to tell her about the fungi sprouting out of my butthole so, instead I asked her if she had anything that soothed intense pain. She gave me a tube of Deep Heat. Back in the safe haven of the office toilet, expecting a cool rush of ecstasy up my rectum, I applied this serum. The scream that ensued was prolonged. The pigeons in Trafalgar Square fluttered their wings in fear and fled, never to return.

I’ve since discovered the joys of Anusol (and they say pharmacists have no sense of humour), in particular the suppository, which involves shoving a gloopy rocket up a passageway that up until now always read ‘exit’ and never ‘entrance’. I kind of like it. See, the male G-spot is an inch and a half up the back alley (precisely the reason why men enjoy spending so much time in the bog) and when the piles pilot explodes his Anusol missile up there – heaven hath no joy, let me assure you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have piles, I say, you ought to try it anyway.

Funnily enough, none of the men I’ve passed this pearl of wisdom on to have shown the slightest inclination to partake in this experience. Some have even gone so far as to saying: who are you? Why are you in my house? Leave now or I’ll have no option other than to stab you in the head.

Men, I’ve discovered, have a problem with their buttocks. It is the hub of our sexual confusion, the abyss that should never be gazed into lest it gays back at us, the bent tunnel that leads straight to the gates of Sodom. Sod it, I say, if you’re not sure of your sexual workings, you probably are a bumhole engineer. Deal with it.

As a professional heterosexual who adores, worships and pervs shamelessly on women, I find this male fear of their own backsides fascinating. I blame you. Women are always going on about men’s bums. Ooh, he’s got such a cute bum, don’t you just want to bite it and squeeze it and take it shopping?

It’s a fact. Human beings are obsessed with fatty lumps of flesh. We love your breasts; you love our bums. But while you can utilise your breasts to gain power over us by bouncing them or revealing just enough to show you’re in charge, we know full well that butt cleavage will never be in fashion. We don’t like our bums or anyone else’s. When we see a babe with her big butt sticking out we think of Alpha Romeo convertibles. When guys ask if we have a match we say: yeah, your face and my arse.

My theory is this is why the piles keep striking – to punish me for not loving my bum. From now on, I will look up to my bottom. I shall no longer turn my back on my backside and leave it behind. Maybe then the piles will go away of their own accord but until then, the bottom line is, well, lined with turnips…

Pregnant pause

Shaving is so much more of an intense experience than getting periods. For proof, ask any man. Bleary eyed and reeling from dealing with our morning glory, we trek the dangerous route to the toilet mined with your piles of big underpants, then butcher ourselves with a blade that’s rusted because you took it to task on your stubbly legs, only for all our hard work to get overshadowed come five o’ clock. And this is something we have to deal with every day, whilst you suffer the breakdown of your ovary walls but once a month. Accept it, men will never understand periods because we don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.

My views on this have less to do with sexism as they are all about envy. Not because I secretly yearn for my one-eyed goonda to erupt with fiery liquid every time the moon goes full, or due to my fetish for strapping on the dry-weave top sheet with wings and pretending my old chap can fly, but because ever since I was a wee baby, I wanted one. Not just any old weeing baby, but my weeing baby, created not merely by the fruit of my loins, but right here inside my body.

It’s not fair. I’m fat enough to be pregnant, but I have to live with the fact that I will never be able to reach that higher state of procreation that only a woman can ever achieve. All I can ever do is reliave myself and sit back, watching the result slowly grow inside you, only to get physically involved once the diapers are filled with green, sticky goo.

There’s a very good reason why philosophers are all men. Oh Kismet you lardy freak, of course there are female philosophers, I hear you cry. No there aren’t. Women ask profound questions like: ‘is love eternal?’ or ‘do my boobs look aligned?’ and ‘why don’t January sales last all year?’ This is because women aren’t burdened with that one fundamental question that sends every other thought spiralling into the abyss of confusion, doubt and helplessness: what is the meaning of life? The answer, as every woman with a biological bone in her body knows, is that life is all about creating more life. Every living thing on earth, be it insect, mammal or bacteria, knows this instinctively. Survive, shag, multiply, die.

What’s the point to a man’s life? Is it any wonder we spend our existence seeking things to validate our reason for being on this earth? A shiny new Lamborghini will make it all worthwhile surely, and a season ticket to cheer on men who play with balls; we need to make lots of money and wear pinstripe pants, drink beer and eat sausages with lard and make big, fat bombs and kill some people. Let’s rule the world and act like gods, rid history of any such thing as a goddess because if we start accepting that every living thing on earth is borne of woman – there really is no hope for mankind.

I can only imagine what it must be like. To nurture a tiny amoeba into a fully-grown walking, talking human being; to have two hearts beating inside you (though I grant you the idea of a penis growing inside you is nuts) – to create life. Now that’s what I call playing god.

And the maddeningly beautiful thing is, women all over the world are happy to accept this gift, this awesome, divine power, as a simple fact of life. How you cope with such a physical and mental transformation (it is a biological fact that a pregnant woman’s brain shrinks in size to help rid her of thoughts that get in the way of her mission), I shall never know. There’s something so loveable about an expecting mother flopping down with a how-the-hell-did-I-get-here look on her face that just makes you want to put your arms round her big belly and hope something from that magic bump rubs off on you.

Men who don’t find their pregnant wives attractive might pretend it’s because they like their women slim and supple, but in reality it’s because they are jealous. But like closet gays who go overboard on heterosexual activities, they mask their fear of what they secretly want to be with outward shows of disapproval. Men are too terrified to even consider the undeniable truth that other than providing a few globules of semen, you don’t need us. The sperm bank is our collective kryptonite because if that bank was big enough, men could just disappear off the face of the planet and you could go about creating it all over again. But where would the human race be without the female of the species? It’s called Mother Earth for a reason. And who’s the most famous father on her planet? Father Christmas, and all he’s good for is filling his sack, sneaking around climbing the walls and getting bladdered on crap sherry.

Which is why men and women will never be equal. You put up with us because we are a necessary evil, whereas we put you down because we can’t accept this makes you better than us. We watch you transform, from young girl to motherhood, while boys – for want of a meaningful purpose – will always be boys. In a nutshell: women are mutants and men never evolve.
Granted, the morning sickness, hormonal psychosis, back pain, stretch marks, epidural and brief stint as a shrieking monkey possessed by the beast of hell, aren’t things a sane mind would voluntarily wish upon oneself, but what is life without pain?

Men have to abuse our bodies, torment our minds and make mortal enemies to achieve the kind of pain that makes us feel alive. I’m sorry you have to go through all that hurt to create life. Well, you shouldn’t have eaten that apple in heaven.
Personally, I’m pretty sure I can take the pain. Although the thought of having to shave tomorrow morning is making me cry like a baby already…