What made Brian angry today?

“Mummy, do you have some paper”
“Mummy can you draw me a butterfly”
“Mummy where are we”
“Mummy so you have any paper”
“Mummy”
“Mummy why is the bus not moving”

Dear god shut the blazes up, can’t you see I‘m trying to read here urchin, what ever happened to the wonderful Victorian ethos of children being seen but not heard? Of course I would rather than are nether seen nor heard but I realise this wish is going to be quite hard to make reality. It might not have been quite so bad had, the trout faced, so called, mother she was with, tried to respond to the child to keep it entertained and thus quieter. Alas clearly the mother hated the child as much as the rest of the bus did for, rather than respond to a single question, she just sat there staring into space with a look on her face that said:

“I wonder if I could just hop off the bus and leave her here. No one would even know, I could run away, maybe to Kathmandu to live as a monk perhaps, just think, no more infuriating questions, there’s a thought…”

It was a very wistful look I assure you, unlike the look of pure rage that was visible on my face.

Sadly things were only going to get worse, for when child and mother waddled off the bus they were replaced by a much more malevolent force – yammering youth with phone. Doing the classic thing of speaking very loudly in a mixture of foreign and English. This is infuriating as not only can they speak more languages than me they also draw you into listing to how so and so’s a bitch because she… We’ve no idea cause you suddenly swap to foreign mid sentence. This is immeasurably selfish if you ask me.

“Yeah I’m gonna kill the bitch right yeah cause they garble garble garble. Yeah everyone knows me as garble garble yeah, like in Southall, Ealing, all of west London yeah, they all call me that yeah…”

Do they, do they really? I live in west London and I don’t recall calling you anything, other than annoying loud mouthed yute hag, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a name you would be proud of. I’m fairly sure the other people on the bus glaring at your massively annoying face also don’t know you by this gangsta street nom de plume you lay claim to. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that no one calls you anything cool at all. I’d go as far as saying that I’m quietly confident that it’s all in you head, I would say in you mind, but I’m not sure you have a brain in which to store a mind frankly.

The whole sorry affair was bad enough, but having got to Ealing town I realised that I forgot my wallet and thus my oyster card, so I had to take two more bus trips, risking thrice the amound of annoyance than normal which could have been a disaster, luckily a crisis was averted by the busses being devoid of plebs for the return trips… Rapture!

I had call to buy a suit the other weekend, I perused the available options, visited several outlets, weighted up the cost to quality ratio and in the end plumbed for a natty little number in fetching bright red, with a built in hood no less. It came with a nice belt, and according to the bumph, in the packaging, a beard.

Yes it’s a Santa suit, but don’t fear rage fans, I’ve not got into the seasonal spirit, on no. It’s intended use was for Santacon, an all day boozefest in central London for a sizeable gaggle of freaks dressed as Santas. My main plan was to try and get so drunk that any children spotting me will realise that Santa is all wrong and will thus grow up loathing Christmas as much as I do.

Anyway I digress, for tragically, there is a fatal flaw in the plan, you see the the suit that I paid ten, yes ten, of my finest British pounds, the suit that was clearly advertised as containing a beard, did not, in fact, contain a beard at all. Now, if I am not careful, the children that spot me swilling from a bottle of meths will see the lack of a beard and realise that I am indeed a faux Santa and thus my plan will be thwarted, this won’t do, it won’t do at all.

So now I have to either trudge all the way back to the frankly horrible shop and enter into an argument about the presence, or lack there of, of a piece of tat that surely costs no more then 5p or try and buy another one somewhere else.

Knowing full well that attempting to argue about a beard would send me into a rage I opted for the other option, buying a beard (that sounds like it should be a euphemism, I do hope it’s not). So I spend my own good time trawling the swankiest pound shops West Ealing has to offer, does this quickly yield what I want, does it bollocks. You see whilst they are happy to sell tons of hats and other Santa crap it seems beards is not something that’s easy to get hold of.

In the end I had the indignity of buying another Santa suit as the only way to get a beard, luckily it was only a £1. A whole suit for a pound, surely a bargain.. Well no, it was a suit, and thus a beard intended for a 5 year old. Although it must have been a MASSIVE faced child as it was pretty much adult sized.

Anyway a suit was formed, £11 was wasted, the trousers lasted about 3 hours before succumbing to the perils of alighting a dodgems car too speedily, what a waste of cash. The colossal hang over I awoke with the next day with vague memories of being accosted by a family of holidaying Peruvians for photos on the journey home did not really help the sense of loss I felt on spying the ripped ruins of my former trousers.

I wended my way to Westfield again in a vain effort to keep the ailing economy on it’s feet, such a financial hero that I am. I decided that lunch was the order of the day and so descended upon Pho, a pseudo Vietnamese noodle bar establishment.

As with all of these eating places at lunch time there was a queue, apparently no one phoned ahead to inform them of my impending arrival, how rude. Of course, I should have burnt the place down just for that, alas I had left the office without my incendiary kit so I decided to wait. Sadly, as it the wont of such places, the ordering process is miserably designed, people taking drink orders at one end, food orders at the other, a stream of irate people in the middle not quite sure what’s going on. In the queue to the front of us there was a hag so old and senile the very ordering process confused her poor deluded mind, behind there was a Dutch woman. On the other side of the counter was some nice chap, who did not speak the finest English, trying valiantly to marshal the orders correctly and smoothly.

Of course I handled this perfectly well, I waited calmly, read the menu, decided on what to have, prepared for my turn. A smooth transaction was had, tranquillity was rife in the world. The plebe behind however should have been chop sticked to death at once by a hidden Vovinam assassin.

As we know, the Dutch are an odd bunch at the best of times, but normally they seem pretty well educated, fluent in several languages as a rule (I remember the wonderful day when a homeless looking mugger in Amsterdam outsmarted a friend and I with fluent German and English, if only I knew Welsh maybe we could have foxed him… I digress) . I wondered then why she was totally unable to read the rather plain and straightforward menu, a menu that has been designed for stressed shoppers for ease of use and speedy comprehension.

Pancake smoking Dutchie - “Yesh hello, Do you have any Dutcsh beersh?”
Serving chap - “Sorry?”
Pancake smoking Dutchie - “Heineken?”
Serving chap - “err”
Pancake smoking Dutchie - “Do yoush have any Heineken? Beer, yesh?”
Serving chap - “We have Halida… it’s is popular…”
Pancake smoking Dutchie - “…”
Pancake smoking Dutchie’s friend/care worker - “I think we’ll have two of the popular ones thanks…”

The look on the face of the pancake smoking freak was one of shear disgust, like that of someone who’s just been subjected to a bout of projectile vomiting by a gang of unemployed begging estate agents. How dare they not have a nice Dutch beer in a Vietnamese noodle bar! The outrage of it! I’m writing to my MP at once, we must put a stop to this discrimination…

I note a couple of things about this interaction:

1. If you want Dutch beer, fuck off to a fucking Dutch eatery you stupid fucking women, there’s one in Ealingtown, one in Leicester square, hell there’s bound to be more, I’m sure they’d all be more than happy to accommodate you and you stupid needs.
2. Heineken? Are you serious, you actively choose to drink that awful crap as a first option? It’s not even the best beer to come out of the brewery let alone the Netherlands. Do you hate your taste buds or something?
3. Counter staff should be allowed bludgeon to death one person a day without fear of legal repercussions, it’s the only way we can stamp out these imbeciles from the gene pool once and for all.