Sandwiches Corner

The (possibly) greatest song ever written in the rock ‘n’ pop canon about being electocuted for devious crimes, accompanied by a samba backing track? Yes, so many times it becomes “yes x infinity + 1″.

So, hey, my picture has been accepted and is now part of Schmap’s gallery for London Zoo! A small but lovely validation.

Dogs Breakfast aka me on Schmap

Although I’m not sure about zoos… still, bit late now!

Eee, when I were a lad, Mr Men books only went up to number 39, Mr Slow. Take a peek at the back cover of any recently published tome in the series however, and there are apparently 46. The reason for this being creator Roger Hargreaves passed on in 1988, after which son Adam carried on the good, lucrative work; fair enough, but the last, and definitely least entry in the series (Mr Good, a halfhearted featureless white body with a crap green hat) is not kidding anyone that he’s a real Mr Man (if such a measure of ‘Mr Manliness’ can be made, and I believe it can).

However, there were 2 books in the series not even published in English. I know, I was amazed too.

Mr Crosspatch (or ‘Monsieur Bagarreur’) is just a fucked up perversion of all-time MM icon Mr Bump, so we’ll gloss over that. This is the guy who’s rocking my world: Mr No, or far more charmingly, Monsieur Non.

NO.

Now there’s someone for the kids to look up to - a bastard Frenchman who embodies negativity to such a degree all he just says no to the damn lot of it.

A new hero is born. A $200m Hollywood reimagining in which Monsieur Non is transplanted to LA and is helped by humble bistro-waitress Kirsten Dunst to get back in touch with his positive attitude surely beckons.

Yay! It’s the greatest economic depression in the history of the known universe! Coupled with the average Cornish wage being barely sufficient to rent an abode large enough to raise your arms in, let alone swing any kind of animal around, it’s unsurprising that any opportunity to snap up a home of your own that doesn’t involve working until the age of 400 or blackmarket vital organ trafficking (how much am I bid for one kidney, a bit manked up?) is likely to snag a few takers.

Desperate times these may be, but I’m still not handing over my lifetime savings of £17.45 and a bag of shiny buttons on the strength of a promise made by a weirdo on a billboard.

Would you cripple yourself with debt buying a house from this man?

There are 2 main reasons I find ‘Andy Parsons’ - if that is his real name - somewhat dubious.

a) “Owning your first home has never been easier”? Really? Maybe in some parallel dimension it has, one so absolutely contrary to our own that dogs shit rolls of fifties and Mr. Tickle has just been appointed governor of the Bank of England. But probably not here.

b) You look fucked, man. What the hell where you drinking last night? Is it cheap? Where do I get it?

Scope yourself out a good cave now and get a shotgun, that’s what I say. I’m hoarding every last bag of Monster Munch in mine, in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, so if you were thinking of popping down the shop for a bag of Pickled Onion, forget it.

Schmap! is a pretty cool interactive mapping service which includes slideshow photo sets to illustrate places of interest and similar popular attractions.

There is a fourth edition coming up and one of my photos is up for consideration to illustrate metropolitan animal-caging facility, London Zoo.

Why not make the editor’s life a misery by bombarding them with relentless emails of support for my depiction of bovine beauty? Go on, if I get my picture included, I’ll chuck a big party on Gorilla Island.

If you were to picture Land’s End in your mind’s eye, it may summon the image of a rugged, windswept panorama of natural beauty, perhaps bring to mind the myths and legends of Celtic folklore, or give cause for contemplation as to what it means to inhabit this peculiar island of ours. I would lay good money on the likelihood of whatever vision you might conjure up not normally involving Dr Who – and that’s because Dr Who has absolutely no connection to Land’s End whatsoever.

"What the fuck am I doing here? What's that big blue thing? God, my legs are fucking killing me"

Nevertheless, here it is, just as you didn’t expect, an enormous plywood Tardis-shaped cash cow presumably for the benefit of not only the BBC (who are already skating on thin ice as far as my licence contribution is concerned – and that’s just for their occasional employment of Lenny Henry - which yes, does also include when it’s for charity), but also for the owners of Britain’s most south-west extremity based family time-killing jamboree.

It’s the people running ‘The Lost Labyrinth’ next door I feel sorry for. Spend years building up a cave-oriented attraction and what happens - here comes Auntie to piss on your chips. Fair enough though, I wasn’t paying to go in either of them, even with the promise of a full scale animatronic diorama of William Hartnoll punching Peter Davidson in the nuts, mainly for abusing time-travel to return to a point just before lunch in order to steal his sandwich, but also just because he was a bastard.

Other attractions on display include a genuine Cornish rescue helicopter, mounted at such an angle as to suggest a plummet into the icy coastal waters is imminent, an impression aided by the admittedly effective decision to enhance the realism of the scene with two pilot mannequins, each disturbingly slumped over their controls as if having suffered simultaneous airborne heart attacks, which if I was capsized in the Atlantic or stuck up a cliff face, would seem to be just rubbing my face in an already trying situation.

Recovering from all the excitement whilst perched on one of the many finely crafted benches available, I actually overheard a fellow visiter grumble: “you come all the way here, there’s not even a lot to see, and the Dr Who merchandise is terribly overpriced”. Hopefully, someone involved in the planning of future attractions at Land’s End may happen to read this, and the penny will finally drop – what the people of Britain want is not staggering natural beauty, carefully preserved flora and fauna or the opportunity for calm reflection and contemplation whilst enjoying the diversity of local wildlife in it’s natural environment – what they want is cheap, pointless tat peddlers by the dozen, and as close together as possible, so they won’t have to walk too far. Slap down a Primark and a Maccy D’s and you’ll really be coining it in.

You may as well go on holiday in Croydon town centre, you fucking moron.

I can’t even be bothered to be sardonic about this (I had to look that up to make sure it was the right word; I’m fairly sure it is). This really speaks for itself.

“I’m actually flying commercial. That’s how high gas prices are. … Tell whoever the next president is we need to bring gas prices down.”

This is just beyond words fucking stupid.

The summer’s most interminable transfer saga has taken a shocking new twist just days before the transfer window slams shut until January, with the news that Cristiano Ronaldo is to get his move away from Manchester United after all – although it may not perhaps be the ‘dream’ switch he had hoped for.

Whilst participating in an empty, vacuous photo-opportunity arranged by his handlers in poverty stricken Guatemala in an attempt to convince the Portuguese virtuoso’s merchandise hoovering public that he’s not quite the slavering greed-merchant he so patently is, Ronaldo’s trusted agent and close friend Juan-Pablo Handwash had to break the surprising news that the English champions had decided to cash in on the want-away winger by offloading him to Deportivo Impetigo, regional champions in Guatemala’s premier Leprosy League, played out between 20 neighbouring village teams, and known as one of the world’s toughest and most demanding competitions.

With a colossal fee funded by the national government’s handing over the entire nation’s annual GDP in order to bring a bit of much-needed glamour into their peoples’ lives, the player’s wages will be subsidised by the introduction of a new ‘Stepover Tax’, in which every leg shimmy performed by the starlet will require a local family to give one of their children into slavery, stitching together £45 replica jerseys at an enormous sweatshop churning out Ron-related cobblers to the masses.

Boarding a luxury private jet bound for Rio, Ronaldo’s team of advisors seemed as bemused as anyone at the unexpected turn of events, or at least, they were all smiling very widely. Even whilst being weighed down by innumerable bulging suitcases of cash, they were kind enough to share with Sandwiches Corner the exclusive information that part of the megadeal involved the construction of an enormous 3G base station so that Ronaldo could use his diamond encrusted iPhone to get in touch with former mentor Alex Ferguson for tactical advice, and to plead between sobs for a return to Old Trafford, even when the team are playing away from home. However, in a desperate telegram to our sports correspondent, Ronaldo has claimed there were critical problems with the transmission equipment, as several ‘confidential’ calls to the fiery Scot had returned only the sound of roaring laughter and whisky bottles being knocked over.

How do you improve an elephant? Why, with an extra trunk of course.

Mask, in paper, crayon and glue. © The Artist

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