Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Hubble bubble toil and Fiona Phillips


I CAN think of nothing more appropriate than turning on the television on Halloween morning to find Lady Heather McCartney Mills and professional harridan Fiona Phillips huddled around the cauldron that is the GMTV coffee table.

What on earth are we to make of this shrieking barmpot? And that Lady Mucca woman is a bit barking as well.

OK, so she committed the cardinal sin in the eyes of women of a certain age by marrying a Beatle, but she’s hardly done herself any favours with her needy, pathetic whining, has she? And does she honestly believe that we’ll accept that she’s had “a worse press than murderers and paedophiles”?

Personally I couldn’t care less about the domestic arrangements of a hard-faced, one-legged ex-soft porn model and a moon-faced, peace sign-waving Frog Chorus composer with badly dyed hair and an unshakeable, if faulty, conviction that everyone loves him. They’re both damaged goods, snapping and snarling like irritable poodles over obscene piles of cash. Let’s just let them get on with it and save our pity for the poor child in the middle of the rich-for-life bunfight.

Still, you can’t fault her workrate. In just one day she mithered GMTV, Radio 5 Live, This Morning, BBC News 24, Radio 1, the Six O’Clock News, Newsnight, Panorama and Desert Island Discs … quite exhausting. I bet she couldn’t wait to get home and put her foot up.

THE DAY didn’t get any better. I can’t be doing with this crappy American Trick or Treat nonsense, so on Wednesday night I had a choice to make. I could either pin up on the door one of those stickers the local dibble will give you reading “Go away and don’t hurt me – I’m an old lady”; I could turn all the lights out and pretend not to be home; or I could be honest and front up all the mini Draculas who came calling. Stupidly, if honestly, I decided on the latter course of inaction.

It was hardly a brave decision. In my nicely middle-class village the only kids to come calling are pre-teens in costumes accompanied by their yummy mummies, so it was unlikely that I’d be knifed or would have the house burnt down. So the knock comes on the door and out I go.

So there’s a five-year-old witch and her six-year-old brother, who had a bit of a Bela Lugosi thing going on, either side of a rather fit 30-something corkscrew-curled blonde in a white polo neck and shortish skirt. I have a good look and then say: “Sorry, but I don’t really agree with trick or treating. I think it’s a tacky, commercial, American affectation and a bad example to our children.” And then I gave the kids some sweets anyway.

This displeased Blondie greatly. “How dare you spoil Halloween for my children? You should be ashamed of yourself,” she shouted. (If she’d had a Geordie accent she’d have reminded me of the one-legged whinger.)

I calmly tried to reason with her, pointing out the fact that for 364 days of the year she tells her children not to accept sweets from strangers in case they’re kiddy fiddlers, yet on one night she positively encourages them to dabble with “paedo horror”. To no avail. The lady was not for turning. Never mind, I thought. At least it’s not me dragging my children around the village on a schoolnight extorting sherbert dabs from old ladies.

And when I left for work the next morning, someone had keyed my car. So it goes. Next year I’ll be wearing one of those Scream masks when I open the door.

SPEAKING OF barmy blondes, the hideous Diana inquest hobbles expensively on with a Usual Suspects line-up of paparazzi in the dock this week. Apparently, even if it can’t be proved that they were to blame for causing the crash anyway, we should still vilify them just because they earn their living by dabbling their fingers in people’s private lives.

Two things: Photographers take pictures – that’s their job. There is even a kind of dislocation between what’s happening in their heads and what’s happening on the other side of the lens. They can’t always understand what they’re seeing and just keep pressing the button regardless, hence the brilliant news pictures that document our history.

Secondly, why were at least seven paps pursuing Di and Dodi? Because they knew that the right picture would earn them lots of money from primarily British newspapers. And why would British newspapers hand over hundreds of thousands of pounds for the right picture? Because they know that you – yes, you – will buy their newspapers to look at the pictures.

It’s not the paparazzi that killed Diana; it was the Great British Public.

WE MAY
as well go for a full house of dysfunctional blondes by casting another stone in the direction of Kate McCann and her steely-eyed hubbie. Whatever sympathies you have for their circumstances (and at least they’re not having as bad a time as poor Lady Mucca), dipping into the Find Maddy fund to make two mortgage payments on their £400,000 home in Leicestershire was a monumental mistake.

My granny didn’t send off her pension money (consequently having to live on cat food for a week) just so a pair of middle-class NHS professionals could spend another month on holiday in Portugal. The million-pound fund isn’t there to finance the McCann’s household expenses; it’s there to finance really important things like sending the couple to Spain, Italy and Morocco; employing a spokeswoman who ran up bills of £51,000 in salary and expenses – much of that spent in Praia da Luz restaurants; sacking her and then taking on another PR man on at least £50,000 a year (although I’d guess it was nearer £100,000); setting up a website where mad women with crazy hair can post their conspiracy theories; and spending £80,000 on an advertising campaign in North Africa and across the Iberian peninsula.

Just thought I’d clear that up. We wouldn’t want them to get a bad press, would we?

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why did Macca marry such a harpie? A man of his means can afford a constant supply of firm, fit, four-limbed fanny.
Remember the three effs Paul:-

Find 'em.
F*** 'em
Forget 'em.

10:10 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not guilty as charged for the Diana thingy, don't give a hoot about her now and didn't 10 years ago either,in fact i found all that public hand wringing most embarassing, never have so many people misplaced their emotions.

12:39 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Embarrassing? I found it totally fucking hilarious! If only we could have a 'Royal Grief-fest' every other week life would be one long laugh. Dog

12:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Marry a mackem at your peril.

1:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Someone rang the radio the other day to say that he entered into the spirit of trick or treat and offered sweets to the kids that came knocking, only to have one of their parents turning up later complaining that the sweet their little darling took contained nuts, lecturing them on being more responsible next time. You couldn't make it up.

11:16 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Money can't buy me love.........

2:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Trick or Treating not only is it a case of accepting things from strangers, but isn't actually the same as mugging people on their own doorstep (give me treats or else!) and don't we normally lock people up for this ? Diana, class bird got divorced and in an amazing show of self-sacrifice demanded to keep her title Princessof Wales...hello you ain't no more, get over it.
And assuming next weeks cover the brazilian plumber who got himeself shot - could someone point out that if he'd gone home when his visa ran out he wouldn't have been there when the bullet arrived - so self inflicted then?

12:32 AM  
Blogger Grumpy Goat said...

My normal response to Trick Or Treat is to shout, "Trick!" and hit the little darlings with a well-targeted squirt from a water-filled Fairy Liquid bottle.

2:09 AM  

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