I Could Be The Hands That Breaks The Chains That Set You Free: Gary McKinnon, Frustrated 90s Popster

This evening I went round to my mother’s on the back of an invite for a spot of cold night hot Sunday Roast, which mainly consisted of heated up burnt things like spuds and carrots to eat.

So I expected to walk in to a big spread with loads of meat and veg’...presenting with wispy wet pallid steam rising in snaking random plumes from it all and smelling great...but instead I came in through her side door to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a collage of Dear Deirdre articles that she’d cut outta The Sun spread out in front of her.

She explained to me that she were making up an epic narrative from these Dear Deirdre strips, combining the photo stories with the letter problems. I don’t know why, it must have been my mood, but I embraced this keenly as an inspired though overall-ly original art venture. So much so that the specific particular emotions, palpably yielding a notable chemical movement in my mind, turned up a memory of Outsider Artist Henry Darger and his Vivian Girls epic.

When I went back home I was frightened and disappointed to discover someone had put a banger through my letterbox. All the junk mail that had collected in the corner was burnt up into a black shiny mush and poor Boke the Cat was cowering in the corner licking his tail, which was all singed and baldy at the end.

I closed and double locked the front door and poked about in the big pile of ashes the remains of all the many sad months of junk mail and found amidst it all a day-glo post-it note untouched and perfectly preserved miraculously like a Ark Of The Covenant type divine relic.

It read:

“From your intel contact, Rueben.

Gary McKinnon stumbled upon something v.big. US Marines being trained by ET in specially fitted anti-grav’ bases on the moon. Check it out...

PS G.McKinnon was a try-hard pop star in the ‘90’s. Look it up. Then look further.”

I fucking hate Richard Madeley. Actually I once had an idea for a programme I thought might have a chance of getting made by one of the major networks, called 'Madeley Feeds Africa', where Richard goes to Africa and visits 3 starving townships who are required to put on a show so's to provide him with the utmost entertainment. At the end of each episode Madeley decrees which township put on the best show and for a prize this township receives a free UN food drop for a whole year. The two losing townships however are machine gunned to death by Judy Finnegan in an overflying Apache Helicoptor, while the pineal glands of the still warm corpses are to be extracted and fed to her in a vain attempt to cure her alcoholism.

So I sent it into them.

And still haven't heard back.

I Loved You Before I Could Even Call Your Name

I got off the bus at the Europa and walked through the arcade, stopping at the front steps next to the bronze washer women and rolled a total miscarriage of a smoke due to my unfeeling cold numb fingers. Cold’s crept up quick and quiet like a dark corners rapist.

I smoked the wrinkled banana bent fag and stared at the bronze washer women. I bet you the one who made them calls them ‘wemmin’ on all his pamphlets. One of them put me in mind of Julian Simmons. I imagined him dressing up like one for his nightly Corrie intros.

They’re weird those bronze washer women. They’ve got tennis rackets and rolling pins and all types of kitchen utensils stuck to them. These items seem to be growing out of them – or are somehow part of them anyway. Made me think of the Philadelphia experiment where the US Navy sent this frigate full of seamen forward in time to 1984 then back again to 1943/44, I think it was. When they got back they’d bits of the ship sticking out of them (like guardrails say) and some had become entombed in the walls. Others had their bodies sticking out of the floor – and some – were merged together, half and half like too Siamese Siamese twins.

Which reminds me of a Madeline McCann joke – What do Madeline McCann and a submarine have in common? They’re both at the bottom of the ocean filled with seamen....!!

So I stood musing over these washer women when I noticed this girl walk past, all of 16. She was the spit of Amy Winehouse – and had obviously aped her style to make her look even more so. I’ve always had a thing for Amy Winehouse and that combined with my look-a-like fetish had me nearly tailing this girl home. But I didn’t – when I remembered that if she was only 16 – and she looked that more or less that – then I’d not be able to rattle her anyway, seeing the age of consent here was 17 (as far as I know?)

Then a great memory entered my head when I remembered how Loaded in the 90’s had a page of Porn-a-Likes where they had shots of these porn actors who looked like famous people: Richard Madeley, Lorraine Kelly, Torville and Deane etc etc. So I have decided to host my own weekly Porn—a-Likes here in honour of this Loaded tradition – which was, in all honesty, one of the only good things about it.

At home I started in on the porn then. I sort of knew what to look for – or the general direction to take. Porn is one of my major habits. Or hobbies, whatever you like. It makes for a better hobby anyway than what I filled in on my 3rd year career class questionnaire, which was: Hobbies in ascending order – 1. Home and Away 2. Dreaming 3. Going to the toilet to drop one.

Eventually I found what I was after. It was entitled ‘Amateur takes it from behind from big Jamaican. Sweet.’ In it there was a girl who looked the AW. And the guy looked a little bit like Seal. Plan to turn this into a weekly (or twice weekly) feature, depending what the frequency of my porn viewing is, which at the minute averages out on 3 times a day.