Ins & Outs - September 2015

ins......

• Monkey boots {oxblood obs }
• Not rising to the bait,
• Zero mostel,
• Not bragging about bragging,
• Remembering and enjoying cruel stories {weirdo }
• Being nostalgic about getting a hiding,
• Running off with your auntie,
• Writing out big money bets you have no intention of putting on,
• Knowing what a pint of fifty is,
• Salt and vinegar flavoured beer mats,
• Beer mats,
• Ogling optics,
• Waiting up to catch rats,
• Dipping yer kids christening money,
• Boring the arse off everyone you meet,
• Going to hell,
• Appealing to someone’s sense of fair play,
• Still bunking the ferry,
• Lapses in security,
• Sitting off on the roof,
• The feather cut revival,
• Taking shite,
• Making a final change,
• Giving up nothing for lent,
• Knowing too much
• Corbyns vest.
• Gaining insight into ones third Chakra.
• Musing earnestly about salad dressings.
• Hurling mung beans in the general direction of Nazis.
• Being expelled from the labour party for being an ex-ginger.
• Reconnecting with long lost pricks on Facebook.
• The sinister emergence of Mungo Jerry type sidies.
• Inauspicious use of a shower head.
• Salacious use of panna cotta.
• Changing your cats name to Jeremy 
• Tony Blair going to jail.
• Democracy.
• Unable to grasp the concept of earl grey tea.
• Chewing the TV cable
• Having a fight with a fart on your fiftieth
• The Corbyn effect
• Snarling at your pastie
• Bumping into Dick Witts at work
• Storing lolly ices in your loft
• Tripe-y  underpants
• Playing waterpolo on yer roof
• Using ice hockey sticks as cutlery
• Crotchless Samba
• Big hairy busses 
• Oxtail soup wraps
• Understanding Jane
• Dirty Donna from Dovecot
• Snakes wearing stiletto’s  & stockings
• Wishing for the sweat to stop
• Bouncing celery off yer nans head
• Stuffed sparrows in the front parlour
• White Man in Hammersmith  left luggage department
• Waking up on Sunday morning and sounding like a Tom Waits album
• Singing ,” oh dye yer bastard dye” to yer aunty Bridie
• Steak & Kidney pie flavoured aromatic candles  (4 for£1 in B&M)
• Fighting your Cousin
• Fighting your Couscous
• Dunking a chicken and mushroom pastie in your coffee
• Reading the new ins & outs at a Farm gig in the Echo Arena
• Japan to win the Rugby world cup

 

outs..

• too much talent,
• Being lovely,
• Getting excited about piffling things,
• Rugby union like,chums,
• Being ponderous,,
• Strangling yourself,
• Being glad when its all over,
• Slinking off to a brass house
• Tinkering with things you know fuck all about,
• Original sin, 
• Having sympathy for a scouse fox lost on the Wirral,
• Breaching confidentiality
• Still being a sly arse
• Buying your own ale,
• Hiding behind the couch,
• Remarkable shirts,
• Snake belt chic,
• Leaky things,
• Not saying to be fair,
• Worrying about space cakes,
• Having a big red arse,
• Smokey Moe’s loyalty cards,
• Dates in Smokey Moe’s,
• Smokey Moe’s xmas menu
• Hating refugees because they are better dressed than you
• Remembering Eric's demos. .
• Nazi marches.
• Holistic blow jobs.
• Blaming it on the "Boogie".
• Tristham Hunt.
• Liz Kendall's permanent look of vapidity
• Burnham's   plastic features. Leather Beards
• The release of someone else’s fart when you sit on a pillow they dropped one into a few minutes earlier.
• Rugby
• Facebook propagandists spouting fear and lies about people fleeing war and devastation
• Complaining that you have eyebrow cramp
• Yer boss in his / her normal daytime clobber
• Finding a tea bag string hanging out or yer birds arse on the morning after
• Self appointed gobshites
• Forming a tribute band called Spandau Belly
• Lad
• Knowing who Dick Witts is
• everyone
• Unproportioned  penis’s
• Being a shit dad
• Ins and outs
• Stuffing underpants into your socks to impress the ladiesssssss
• Shitting in the next cowboy hat you see
• Finding out the truth
• Remote control nostril hairs
• Frigid Frida from fazakerly
• Recurring dreams that you’re wearing Althea Redfern’s white leather catsuit, whilst committing blatant bus fare dodging.
• Claiming to be related to Gerald Stinstad
• Going to Bootle for your Hols

Potter's Poems! Mick Potter is back.

The Dingle Liverpool 8 wine and cheese festival now in its 10th year got off to a lively start when a young chap entered the stage  (uninvited it has to be said) during a poetry recital. The fact  that he was on a scrambler bike at the time pursued by Mersey polis added to the sense of drama.....”Just like last year”, one local remarked,.

The poem in question by mutual consent is kindly offered up for End readers  to digest ....entitled;

 “Max Spielman where are you now”?..(author anon).

I’ve been skint /stoned  on Everest, fought giant bats up a belfry

Or was it the hallucinogenic drugs mother Mary help me

But I’ve never ever felt so low that I had to take a selfie

 

I’ve wore flares, let off flares, hitchhiked down to Chelsea

Swear down dead lad, lad lad lad I’ve never took a selfie.,

This techno marvel "get me in ,one more, that’s a belter 

Cyber world miley seconds my Warhol hall of fame

My nose looks big  i blinked I think please do it again  again !

I’ve battled wid mancs, Took on chieftan tanks

Asked many a shrink to help me,

just like me ol mate, that bat, stuck up a belfry

I’ve never took a fuckin selfie.

29 photos later  the faces get fatter

Banal fookin’ chatter, But it doesn’t matter

We’re by the Adelphi, Somebody help me 

Pray for my soul, I’ve just took a selfie

Book Review- Bobby's Boy. by Mark Wilson

Having read a number of books by Mark Wilson (the Deadinburgh Trilogy, and Head Boy spring immediately to mind, and knowing that Bobby’s Boy was part of the Lanarkshire strays collection I was expecting Bobby’s boy to carry on where Head Boy left off. (A Scottish gangster tale telling the rise of a young upcoming pyscho, taking on the established old school gangster family). 
I was wrong. 

Mark Wilson is nothing if not undefinable. He changes genre like I change my undies and he appears to do it with consummate ease. 

Nothing Gangster about this book..and no ringed / zombies..this is a coming of age tale of love and loss, drink and drugs and rock n roll.

As usual I’ll try to summarise without the review turning into a plot spoiler.

The story revolves around a young boy’s (Tom Kinsella) sometimes tragic upbringing. Having to be moved into his Uncles care following the deaths of his father and later of his mother and stepfather.

Under the care of his, delightfully charismatic, Uncle Alec, Tom discovers his penchant for reading writing and Music and of how he has inherited these traits from his father (Bobby).

After building a reputation as a creative and honest music reviewer he is offered a long term job touring America and Europe with Rage Against the Machine and their support act Anal Seepage. Its Tom’s dream job. Unfortunately the job offer coincides with the flowering of his first true romance with his soulmate, Cathy. 

After much soul searching and with Cathy’s full blessing he takes on the job and is taken from his humble background in Bellshill, Scotland to the big wide world. He becomes close friends with the members of Anal Seepage, in particularly with the understated, likeable Donny. At first Tom is understandably naïve and overawed but his penchant for the drink soon helps him bed in to the Rock n roll lifestyle and all the other temptations that a rock n roll tour would bring.

As with most people, the drink and drugs take their toll and Tom changes drastically, physically and mentally and this in turn has a destructive effect on his relationship with Cathy, who has moved on with her life adding new skills and new friends to her life (something Tom has great difficulty accepting in his then state). 

Rather than deal with the situation in the way one would hope, Tom instead immerses himself even more into the rock n roll lifestyle and exacerbates the problems greatly. The situation with Cathy becomes drastic and she gives him an ultimatum to clean up his act of ship out for good. The good times with the band become dangerously violent and untenable and its hard to figure out how he will turn things round until he meets an unexpected old friend on the streets of Paris, whose wise words and compassion help Tom finally figure out the demons that are causing his destructive behaviour.

There are parts of this story that are explainable right to the end, where we have a customary Mark Wilson-esque twist. 

It turns out that this was the authors first ever novel and given the other titles I have read by Mark Wilson I could imagine that if he wrote this tale now, it would take on a some slight changes of direction and the end would be slightly different ( I was actually slightly disappointed with the ending paragraph where he meets a stranger on a bus) and this as well as a couple of  slightly unconvincing coincidences (Toms sister meeting and marrying the son of a New York publisher his father had met and considered working for in his youth decades earlier), but that and any other coincidence is dealt with when we get to the end and discover the twist, but they did irk me a little as I went through. 

Having been through quite a few of the problems Tom went through in this story (losing a father at an early age, suffering with consequential insecurities as a result, resorting to drink and drugs through my late teens and half of my twenties) I found the book incredibly moving and at times painful. It got to the point where I bought into the story so much, I wondered whether it really was autobiographical. (A point a raised with the Author after I finished…but that conversation remains under wraps). That’s what Mark Wilson does. He creates worlds where you really buy into the characters and the worlds they live in. I would highly recommend this book to all. For a first novel it is outstanding. I have no doubt that .Mark Wilson is one of the most vital writers in the UK at present, I can't wait for his next project.