Federast Funnies 11

As Boris announces that Parliament will be prorogued to stop the Federasts from implementing their cunning plan to put some backbencher into Number 10 Downing Street, the Guardian promptly went into a meltdown that is even more entertaining for normal people than the one they had in the aftermath of the People's Vote in 2016.

"Guardian meltdown will commence in three, two, one: meltdown commence now," was my comment, a remark that was quickly deleted by the Guardian's Mrs Grundy.

This comment did not last much longer, but at least I managed to grab a screenshot of it before Mrs Grundy could delete it - she did, by the way.

I have now been put in pre-moderation, thanks to all the precious, weeping Federasts who complained that I have invaded their safe spaces or something. Not that it matters; what matters is that the Guardian's finest feel like shit.

Which is what they are.

Federast Funnies 10

I haven't created a Federast Funny for over a year which is far too long, especially when the Guardian gives me such an open net to score in. Today, one of their hacks came up with an interesting piece which drew lessons from history to illustrate its pro-EU point. Fair enough thought avuncular old Uncle Ken, who then proceeded to do the same with this comment:

Now, I wasn't being entirely 100% serious with this quick comment, but I don't think that it is too bad and it is certainly in keeping with the piece that I was commenting on, so who could complain?

Well, It seems that an awful lot of Guardian webmongs did not agree and the little retards began by missing entirely that fact that we were supposed to be drawing lessons from  history:

I was tempted to ask Marcel which war he wanted me to get over since I did discuss about three in my comment and I was also tempted to tell Herman that I was gonna call him Arminius whether he liked it or not just for giggles.

Alas, the Guardian's Mrs Grundy responded to all the Federasts whining and deleted my comment and its very engaging replies before I could do any of that. However, that was not before I had grabbed the screenshots to provide you with some free entertainment this fine Sunday afternoon.

All good fun, people, all good fun.

Titania McGrath is Brought to Life at the Edinburgh Fringe 2019

Titania McGrath was created by the satirist Andrew Doyle as a series of tweets, which then grew into a book and has now been brought to life on the stage by Alice Marshall. If you hurry you can see it as I did last night as it runs up to and including Sunday. Tickets cost just over a tenner, which as Titania says is only the price of a decent flat latte.

So who is Titania McGrath? Well, she is everything that normal people hate, but according to her, she is a typical Kensington girl, with a modest trust find and a burning desire for social justice. In other words, she is a parasite who wants to make the lives of the rest of as difficult as possible. The Titania's of the country have been riding the cultural wave for several decades now and as anyone who has ever read the Guardian will know, the Brexit vote has created terror in their ranks as they contemplate what the plebs who outnumber them could do if they set their minds to it. 

Andrew Doyle's creation is the start of the process that will hopefully end with the real-life woke warriors back in their boxes having learned the meaning of the word defeat. We have a long way to go yet, but the book and now the one-woman performance can be said to mark the start of that process.

How good is the play? Well, it is good, but it still needs a script that has been tightened up some more, since it tends to wander from one thing to another until it ended up as a mixture of stand up comedy with some vignettes added. I liked the running joke about Titania's plans to set up a new political party called Shame UK, and it might have been a good idea to make the whole 45-minute performance the introduction of the new party. 

That said, when you look at the way that the Federasts are behaving both inside and outside the Commons, you might argue that it is impossible to parody the parody of British life that they have already created. That is doubly so when you consider that some of them blame Dad's Army for Brexit and others hold that air-conditioning is inherently sexist. Only then can you consider just how difficult it is to parody people who are so lacking in self-awareness that they do not realise how risible they are to normal people.

I was also dubious about interspersing Titiana's execrable poetry into the play, but that might just be me: I tend to the view that poetry by its very nature is pretty bloody execrable.

The Edinburgh fringe is the place where new works get their first outing before the changes are made that lead to their successful transfer to the London stage and given what I saw last night, this one should be odds-on the make the transfer very soon. Especially if the producers keep Alice Marshall in the title role.

She really did bring the character to life, and everything about her performance reeked of the privilege that the metropolitan woke generation regard as their right to impose on the rest of us. Sadly, the audience lacked a few members of the pure at heart who can be expected to make a loud exit half-way through a performance such as this and provide easy laughs for the rest of us. I believe that on other nights there have been such disruptions and that Alice Marshall is now pretty adept at making sure that they exit the theatre with their tails between their legs which is the way it should be. Alas, none of them was in the almost full house yesterday.

At the end of the play, I asked her to sign my copy of Woke, which she did. She was also, I thought, pleased that I called her Miss Marshall and not Miss McGrath, which leads me to wonder if some people do not believe that the actress really is the character. If they do, then I think she should take that as a complement to her theatrical presence, as she really did allow Titania McGrath to shine, in all her loathsome splendour.  

Titania McGrath is on at the Pleasence Courtyard, Edinburgh, up to and including Sunday, 25 August.

My Family and Peterloo

Today is the 200th anniversary of Peterloo and in the 1880s a photograph was taken of a group of people which was published as The Failsworth Veterans of Peterloo, and the first time I saw it I damn near choked on my tea. Sitting at the front of the group the fat man on the left is Thomas Schofield, with Alice, his wife who is dressed all in black on the right. When I showed this photograph to my parents in the 1980s my dad remarked ruefully that you expect buggers like the Schofields to have been involved in events like that.

My mother's family rented 29 Old Road, Failsworth, Manchester, from the Schofield family from before the Great War to about 1960 when we moved into number 31 right next door. My mother told people that we had the gipsy in us, you see...

No matter which house it was the Schofield's owned the whole block and every time it rained the tenants had to put buckets in the bedrooms to catch the water. If we had a typical British summer then my dad got very little sleep as those buckets filled very quickly and needed regular emptying. In winter the back yard became a skating rink, which made a trip to the bog an interesting experience.

A descendant of the Peterloo couple was Redfern Schofield who was the head of the family when I was a very small boy. He became a conscientious objector in the Great War and was always called Old Conchie by my time. 

On my wall today I have the above photo of my mother's maternal uncle, Fred Burden, his wife Maggie and their daughter. When my maternal grandmother died in 1920 her three brothers met up, in a pub of course, and decided what to do with her three children. Fred Burden got Rose, my mother, and she joined his family as one of Old Conchie's tenants. The photo was taken in about 1916 and shows Fred Burden proudly wearing his army uniform as one of Kitchener's Volunteers. He died in 1926 at the age of 40...

Fast forward to 1939 and Dick Schofield, Redfern's son, was also a conchie, and he was known as Young Conchie to differentiate him from his dad. My father, who married my mother just after the war ended, served in the Royal Artillery and helped lug a 25-pounder around Europe. My mother worked six 12-hour shifts a week at the Avro-Roe factory that built the Lancaster bombers that did so much to dehouse the population of Germany during the 1940s.

This photo shows the whole block that was owned by the Schofield family. On the far left you can just see the Schofield's shoe shop at number 27 Old Road and across the street and opposite was their furniture warehouse, since demolished. One night in the 1950s some blokes were hard at work breaking into the warehouse and my mum woke dad up to tell him. He told her to go back to sleep and ignore it, which she did.

The Schofield family was made up of Nonconformist, Liberal, teetotal, sanctimonious, anally-retentive, self-righteous gits. My father was a labourer, my mother a dressmaker and they were both low-Anglicans who voted Tory because you don't vote for the landlord's party, do you?

Just over a decade after Peterloo the Great Reform Act was passed which enfranchised the Schofield men and their ilk. They became the local petty capitalists which was the sum total of their desires. I suspect they were like Thatcher's family and people like that are always loathed by the bulk of the local population who would make a point of adopting a political view contrary to theirs because their interests are invariably not ours. It is probably why when the bulk of working men got the vote in the 1880s many voted Tory; my family certainly did and the first time my parents ever voted Labour was in 1983. They recognised in Thatcher a creature so loathsomely typical of the petty capitalist class that she forced them to break the habits of a lifetime.

So, when looking at Peterloo, you need to remember that many of the demonstrators were not proto-Leninists who battled to overthrow the existing order. They were aspirational arsewipes who wanted to enjoy their place within that order and pretty soon after 1819 that is exactly what they did.