Speaking of self-righteous pricks, one of the few pleasures that lifts Jeffman’s otherwise dull and dreary weekdays watching a wall in case it decides to change colour, is occasionally listening to the abject nonsense that spills with seemingly carefree abandon, and no due consideration for nearby animal or plant life, from the mouth of a man he is forfeit to share office space with.

We have met this particular character before. He was number five of Seven things you needn’t know about Jeffman. From this moment on we shall refer to him as Case M.

Not that he’d recognise himself were he to happen upon this page whilst scouring the internet for topless photographs of Margaret Thatcher or PDFs of the Daily Mail Guide to Social Justice and Enriching the Dispossessed Classes (Page 1, string the buggers up). Not even if I were to post his full name, his address, and the combined age and shoe-sizes of his wife, cat and dog. Such is Case M’s almost terminal condition of self-absorption, self-importance, and misguided self-belief that elevates him to the same pedestal of self-centred idiot presently reserved for the likes of Simon Cowell, Jeremy Kyle, Piers Morgan, and anybody who considers themselves worthy of a place in the Big Brother house.

Case M would have you believe, given half the chance, that it was he who discovered fire, fashioned the first wheel, put a bullet through JFK’s skull, and single-handedly raised the Mary Celeste with nowt more than a rubber dinghy and a fishing rod liberated from a passing garden gnome.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

The Not What it Used to Be TV critic, Jeff Mann, braves new show Britannia High and quickly wishes he hadn’t:

It would seem that creativity has rolled out the off-white rag, hoisted it from the highest flagpole, and died ceremoniously on its arse. As far as British TV is concerned anyway.

Anyone who’s brave enough to have read any of this nonsense once and then without so much as a ransom note written in their first-born’s blood, returned to read it again, will probably know that I’ve railed against the saturation of village idiot television on more than one instance in the past.

But last weekend, finding myself once again confined to barracks with a cold, the likes of which has not been seen in mainland Britain since the glory days of the Black Death, I was unfortunate enough to witness some of the tripe first-hand. Force-fed intravenously to me via the life-support machine in the corner of the living room.

Now I would like both myself and those of you taking time out from your busy schedules to read this, to think that I was the cut of chap that would wilfully put himself through all the excruciating crap that pollutes the airwaves so that you don’t have to. Unfortunately I’m not. I lack the necessary cast-iron stomach for the untreated sewage-water that is The X Factor, Hole in the Wall, Little Britain USA, or anything else of their decidedly dodgy ilk – in fact, my views on The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and Simon Cowell in general, have been well-documented on previous occasion.

But before I’m detained on suspicion of leading you up the garden path, there was something last weekend that managed to steal two minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I refer to the heavily publicised Britannia High, upon which I drunkenly stumbled last Sunday evening.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

If you’ve arrived here expecting to find a well-researched and informative article on the modern banking system and the current mire within which it is sinking ever deeper and deeper, I would turn back now, my friend. You won’t find anything in the next few paragraphs that’s backed up by a single shred of researched evidence.

To be honest, I couldn’t be arsed, as I didn’t particularly wish to sully myself any further by peering into the festering pit populated by the scum, the Flash Harrys, and the hooray Henrys that make up the world of banking. Plus, any attempts at reading more than one line of information regarding the world of banking veers me ever closer toward that coma I promised myself in No. 29 So Bored my Eyes Bled.

If however, like me, you don’t need evidence and just go on instinct, then read on. After all, isn’t that how real journalists work?

Anyway, Jeffman was reading an article by the late, great Hunter S. Thompson entitled “The Hellfire Club” where he discussed the phenomena of ‘Rake’s Clubs’ in 18th Century England in relation to the disgraced 1980’s evangelist and vile hypocrite, Jimmy Swaggart.

These ‘Rake’s Clubs’ were made up of the sons of the aristocracy, who after getting mortally drunk would pile out onto the streets beneath the cover of darkness and rape, maim, and beat any other human being unfortunate enough to cross their path, regardless of sex or age. They got away with it for so long, because back then only the rich were allowed to carry swords, meaning they wouldn’t meet with any opposition, not even from the Watch (pre-cursor to the police force), who were also fair game for a right royal rogering.

Eventually the law of the land did catch up with these loathsome lords and banned the forming and membership of such clubs…

… But it would seem that they are very much alive and well in this day and age. Where the son’s of the aristocracy carry on this tradition of rape, maiming and beating with equal disregard and arrogance, albeit at a hypothetical club called the stock exchange where the unfortunate victims have been the savings of you and I.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Pubs are closing down at a rate that will terrify men of words and forward thinking, the length and breadth of the nation. The reported figure is just shy of an alarming four a day! Yes!! Four a day!!!

There was a time when a man only had to step outside the front door and he’d find himself in the warm bosom of his local hostelry. A pint of his particular poison in the one hand; a cheroot, a pipe, or whatever his chosen method of tobacco intake was, in the other.

Not anymore. A man can walk for days before even so much as catching the faint whiff of stale beer, sweat and dried blood that is oh so familiar and like an ethereal comfort blanket to him. It is a sobering image that springs to mind when you think of a man losing his home from home, cast adrift from his community anchor and left to wander aimlessly in search of another that will reward the hard work and years of loyalty he’s put into his very own haunt.

What comes as an even harder kick to the knackers is what they do to said pub. Once time has been called on that final emptying-of-the-barrels lock-in and the heavy doors that would’ve stood firm to an assault from William Wallace and his band of loonies, have been bolted shut.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

We here at Not What it Used to Be are fortunate enough to be graced by the presence of the incorrigible Lord Thackery Fotheringay-Fanshawe, who has so generously agreed to give up a portion of his valuable time to speak at us all on a subject he nurtures close to his own good heart.

By Jove! Whatever happened to the working classes?

There was a time when a chap of certain breeding could lay back in his favourite chaise lounge, take in the summer air, and dwell on a fine summer’s afternoon in the safe knowledge that his income was being maintained by the lower orders doing what it was they were born to do.

A Lord, like one’s self, was kept in the manner with which he was accustomed by the legions of drones that were ready and willing to forfeit their free time in the pursuit of contributing to the upkeep of what is the divine right of all members of the higher orders, one’s self in particular.

But by the gads! They suddenly stopped working.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

If, like me, you experience on a daily basis the displeasure that is public transport then you’ll already know where Jeffman’s coming from.

There are those less charitable than my good self that might say the problem with public transport is that they let the public use it…

Well. There was a time, in some long-forgotten and rose-tinted past, when buses were exciting. Yes, you read that right, exciting.

Now before you dismiss this as the half-cut ramblings of some toothless, retarded deviant with an unhealthy bus fetish, who bolstered by a Methuselah of rum has decided it’s time to make his very own public confession of a sordid  past of bus-based self abuse, allow me a moment to explain.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

There was a time when you knew where you stood with the common or garden village idiot. He (for they were invariably always male) would sit on his wall at the edge of the village watching the world go by in blissful ignorance, only stopping every once in a while to fall off.

But nowadays, it would seem, the tranquil pace of village life and the occasional loaf of gratis stale bread are not enough. For the villages are missing their idiots en masse.

So what evil has lured the idiot away from the safety of his wall and thatched-roof cottage upon the village perimeter? Well it would seem that like moths to a living room lamp on an unbearably hot day, the village idiot is being drawn to the deceitfully bright lights of television.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

I may have promised mobile phones and hi-technology for the next post, but that’s been postponed for another time to make way for something considerably lower in tech. What will be the start of an ongoing profile of one James Gordon Brown, elected leader of the Labour Party and unelected leader of the United Kingdom.

Now it’s unfair to say that Gordon Brown’s not what it used to be, as I’m sure he’s always been a sack-faced, penny-pinching miser with all the charm and political conviction of a dull spoon.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

…

Nothing to say?

…

Hmmm. The art of conversation is not what it used to be.

…

Tickled your fancy? Read on…