Hot Stuff

Burning issue, my arse

You know, I really do try to not fall into the idiotic trap of hating anyone under the age of 18 but this week, I'm afraid, I've reneged on this personal promise of mine. Yeah, yeah, I hate myself but I've been privy to some of the most wankish yoof behaviour I've ever seen.
This week I've had to call the Fire Service three times because I've witnessed teenage boys setting fire to the hillside opposite my home. For fuck's sake. It happens every Easter after a dry spell when the molina grass on the hillside is nature's equivalent of barbecue briquettes. I even wrote about it for The Times two years ago because it's such a bastard problem. The arson, I mean, not the bloody grass.
Anyway, I've had the harrowing opportunity to view idle yoofs at their best as they walk along said hillside with a lit branch setting alight to tufts of grass. And by alight I mean really fucking alight. I'm on about rapidly spreading blazes that take hours to put out because they engulf the entire hillside. On one evening this week in the time it took for me to dial 999 these troll-like fuckers had lit five small fires along a path. By the time the Fire Service had the chance to dispatch an engine, get it close to the hillside and then trudge to the top with their fire-beaters the blaze was razing entire trees to the ground.
Why in the fuck would anyone do this? Why? When I researched my Times article I found that it's mainly a social and cultural problem. I'd still kick the little fuckers into submission if I could get my hands on them though.
For a start, what in the fuck is with yomping up into the local woods to set fire to a few acres? How blindingly bored and stupid would you have to be? Jesus, I could be idle to the point of counting my own pubic stubblings and not come up with such a cock-headed idea of entertainment. And what's with the parental supervision? Yeah, I know you can't keep an eye on everything but don't the parents of these little shits notice when they come home stinking of smoke? That clearly didn't happen this week because the three consecutive evenings that fires were started, the same little fuckers were the arsonists. 
Funnily enough, a mate of mine is a fire fighter and he's been dispatched to these very fires year-in, year-out. He's also chased an arsonist, catching the little fucker and handing him over the the police. Problem is, the police refuse to do anything with 'em because they're so reluctant to get involved with the problem. It involves them having to put down their doughnuts or something.
All of which means it's up to the likes of me and the Fire Service to keep the town from going up in smoke. I don't have an answer to the problem but I do have some rather scorching ideas about how to make the fire-lighting fuckers pay. I don't know if tying them to trees and chucking lit matches at them would do any good but it would make me feel one hell of a lot better. At least the pee running down their legs would help put out the flames. And who knows, it might teach them a lesson or two while we're at it.

Going Postal

How much? Hahahahahahaha...

Excuse me? 60 fucking pence for a first class stamp? Tell you what, it's not often I'm rendered speechless but this news turned me into a mouth-breather for a full hour because my jaw refused to resist the dropped position.
60 fucking pence for a stamp! The Royal Mail must be suicidal. Perhaps it's hanging onto some deluded belief that the country can't live without it and that us saps customers are still going to flock to its endless queues to stack up on extortionate square inches of perforated paper. Laughably, though, I'll bet my thriving arse that this time next year it'll be whinging about the sharp decline in customer numbers. 
Worse, is this humiliating scheme whereby people in receipt of state support have to prove their financial status before receiving stamps at the pre-hike price. And I don't mean humiliating because they have to flutter their DWP letters at the local post-mistress. I mean humiliating because they have to do this just to buy a stamp. A stamp. It's like Communist fucking Russia. As if people on benefits don't face enough isolation what with the lack of money to travel or invest in computers and email. Now they're being marginalised from the basic communication of letter-sending. Tell you what, perhaps we could introduce bread-queues by Crimbo too, you know, just to give the UK winter an authentic Siberian feel.
Mind you this is good news for the Scouts' Crimbo postal service. By January the streets will be littered with exhausted little helpers, woggles dangerously askew with exhaustion. 
And what does the Royal Mail think it's going to achieve with this shoving up of stamp prices? Well, does it matter? This is the problem with the Royal Mail monopoly. With no real competition and now the freedom to charge whatever the fuck it likes for it's shabby service I dare say the Royal Mail really doesn't give a shit. Monopoly? Someone hand it a Go to Jail card. Please.

Back to Normal
Thank fuck for Jennifer Garner, actress, wife of Ben Badflick and now mother to three Flicklets. Here is a photo of her mere days n weeks after spawning her third child. And doesn't she look gloriously normal? Her hair is scraped back, she's hiding her eyebags with shades and she's layered up to the max to hide her still-bulging tum. 
She's also got a fucking huge smile on her face because, hopefully, she just doesn't give a shit that she isn't already back into a size 8 bandage dress and six-inch heels.
This is what women should look like just days after shouting obscenities at a midwife. Forget the twisted 'normality' of Beyonce and Victoria Beckham. Garner's, bless her glorious chops, has got it spot on.

Motherly Madness

Chuck yourself on, why don't you?

You know, as a mother I've been privy to all sorts of child-rearing bollocks, but fuck it. If a mother wants to breastfeed until her kid's graduation, I really couldn't give a shit. Yet (yeah, you knew it was coming) there is one trait displayed by some mothers that makes me twitch violently: self-imposed martyrdom.
Sorry, but I find motherly martyrdom so fucked up that my brain sweats when I think about it. And by martyrdom I mean that thing when some mothers proudly announce that they haven't shaved their legs/ cut their hair/ moisturised in four years because they love their kids too much to spare the time. 
I'm not banging on about being too busy to take a shit. Jesus, that's all of us. I'm talking about the giant, flag-waving gesture of renouncing the person you really are because this, apparently, makes you a better mother. 
Look, motherhood changes everyone, and not just from the ladygarden down. But this notion that you have to sacrifice yourself in some ritual burning of your entire pre-kid life and personality is about as healthy as chewing glass. I've watched some mothers wither away after adopting this wild-eyed notion and it's abso-fucking-lutely terrifying. 
When I got knocked up I promised myself that, whatever chaos raged, I would always put on my mascara, just because it reminds me that I matter too. I know! The audacity! And fuck me if I've stayed true to my word, even when it's been done to the tune of infant shrieking. 
See, I'm the opposite of martyred mothers. I take pride in taking time to paint my toenails. And no, this doesn't make me a less caring, loving mother, as much as my blog makes some of you want to call Social Services. In fact it contributes to the notion that all of us, in this little kraken family, matter. Not just Kraken Junior, but I, the Kraken, and Conjugal Kraken too. And that means we all grab a slice of the happiness rather than handing it lock, stock n barrel to Kraken Junior for her to snot all over it. What in the fuck would be the good of that?
So can we pour cold water over these personality pyres that some mothers light when their offspring slop from their bodies? It's like some twisted form of imprisonment, with the kids rattling the keys. Fuck knows, motherhood can be cruel enough as it is don'tcha think?

The Dark Age

A small, small man

Dennis Waterman. What a complete and utter fucker. I would like to go even further and use the C-word but I fear for the heart rates of some of my readers. Anyway, like I said, fucker. 
Why, pray? Cop a load of this stool water that, sadly, parade as real quotes from the vile Waterman's mouth: 
Of ex-wife Rula Lenska: "She certainly wasn't a beaten wife, she was hit and that's different."
and
"It's not difficult for a woman to make a man hit her."
and
"The problem with strong, intelligent women is that they can argue, well."
and
 "I'm actually quite Victorian in that way. It's been suggested that I'm chauvinistic but i don't think I am, I'm just...I think there is a place for women at home."
There really aren't words to describe this bunch of bollocks is there? Oh, oh hold on, I've managed to find some. And at the risk of incurring Waterman's ire with my display of feminine intelligence here are some answers to his questionable opinions:
"She certainly wasn't a beaten wife, she was hit and that's different." 
What a stunning display of semantics, Den love. Is that the same as you talking shit but not saying shit? Or humming the theme tune rather than singing it? Buy a dictionary, you dull, dull fuck.
" It's not difficult for a woman to make a man hit her."  
Ah, but the other half of the black n blue equation is that it's not difficult if the man in question is a woman-hating, enraged, frustrated, retarded, uncontrollable has-been actor. Spot the weakness, Dennis. Go on, have a go.
"The problem with strong, intelligent women is that they can argue, well."
Well, let's face it, Den would have a problem with women of any level of intelligence, seeing that even pond slime could out-argue his laughable reasoning. Jesus, he'd walk into a fruit n veg shop and feel outwitted.
"I'm actually quite Victorian in that way. It's been suggested that I'm chauvinistic but i don't think I am, I'm just...I think there is a place for women at home."
For once I agree Dennis. There is a place for women at home. Ideally standing behind the front door with a loaded gun, waiting for backward-thinking fuckers like you to return.
Twat.

Again?

That bloody stork...

Tell you what is the oddest thing I've found about my single season of spawning, it's that getting knocked up after 20 years of infertility just isn't enough for some people. I still get asked when I'm going to have 'another one'. By another one, I take it to mean child rather than breakdown although there is certainly room in my life for another trip to the psych unit. 
So in an effort to allow the world to move on, I'm laying out my top five reasons for never, ever creating another human being ever again, ever. I said ever, d'you hear? Here, my little kraken lovers, you go:
1. As a woman who, post partum, lost her plot so profoundly that deep sea submersibles were drafted in to recover it, I will officially be fucked if I am going through all that again. 
2. One exploded vagina is quite enough for one lifetime. Women say that you forget the pain of labour. Ha, I'll be fucked. Every single day I remain grateful that I will never again have to feel a Winnebago reversing out of my love tunnel. 
3. Why in the frig would I want to be left in charge of a newborn again? It was the most horrifying, confusing and exhausting twelve-month of my existence. Jesus, it'd be like soldiers returning to Kabul for a reunion bombing, ie. plain sodding stupid.
4. No, I never understood which cry meant hunger and which cry meant taking a shit, so every time Kraken Junior opened her mouth I was pitched into a panic-stricken bout of tick-boxing. The guesswork. Oh Jesus, the guesswork. 
5. Creche fees. Do you realise that, had we not spawned, we could have spent the creche fees on three round-the-world trips on a cocktail-laden, gold-plated magic carpet and still have come home with enough change to buy an island such as Australia? 
So hopefully this is enough of an explanation to allay the fears of those who think we are taking our time in producing yet another little kraken. There will be no other little kraken. We are kraken-lite. Not least because the little kraken that we do have just can't be bloody beat.

Sleeptalking

Yeah, knackered.

Look, before I start, I want you to know that I've always despised this club mentality of parenting. You know the sort of thing, that because you haven't squeezed another human being out of your vag you can't possibly understand what it's like to live in chaos or rinse shit from under your nails. I hated all of that before Kraken Junior slopped into my life and I still hate it now.
However, and I am really fucking sorry about this, there is just one club rule to which I subscribe and that is to know the true meaning of sleep deprivation. Really, until you've had a kid or been tortured by the Iraqis you just haven't even got a vague understanding of what it means. That's because the term 'sleep deprivation' only tells half the story. The phrase should read 'sleep deprivation and an avalanche of screeching chaos to deal with as the shit-laden nappies and puke-riddled muslins pile up around your feet'.
See, it's because parental sleep deprivation isn't just about being awake in the night. It's about being awake and having an infant scream at you every hour until dawn as you feed/ change/ jig it through the tears of your exhaustion. For six days in a row. And then having to do all the usual kid-rearing crap during the day too. No lie-ins, no catch-ups, no cat-naps. Just endless mind-tearing torment. What the fuck the Americans are doing with waterboarding is beyond me. Just give the Guantanamo inmates a shrieking, purple, colicky newborn at 3am and they'd be spilling secrets like dropped Smarties.
And no, until you have done it you don't know how it feels. Fuck knows, you can't even start to imagine what it is like. I've had mates attempt a comparison with such gems as, "Oooh, I know how you feel. I was out clubbing until 5am last week!" or, "Oh I know, the blood dustman wakes me up at 7am every Thursday morning".
Excuse me? Are you out of your tiny frigging minds? Do you honestly think that choosing to snog and booze your way though a weekend with your mates is in any way comparable to being woken every hour by a raging offspring? Or averaging three hours a night for a month? No, no, no, no, no. And again, hell no. 
I'm afraid parental sleep deprivation is the equivalent of conquering Everest or having a car fall on you. Until it happens you haven't got a fucking clue what it feels like. Imagine having your senses ripped out through a hole in the top of your head and then run over by a shit-covered dumpster truck driven by Jonathan Aitken. Then scrap that analogy because it doesn't even come near it.
So while the 'club' is one that I'll never join, I'll give it the nod over this 'un. Or perhaps I'm just too fucking tired to get my arse in my hand for once.

If I've Said it Once...

You reckon?

You know what's really fucking hard about parenting? The repetition. Endless, bottomless, infinite repetition. Not so much in actions but in speech. If I say one thing to Kraken Junior every day I probably say it a thousand sodding times, usually twice before she responds and three times before she acts. By which time I'm physically smashing my head against the nearest hard surface at the scorching frustration of it all.
Do you know what phrases I use the most in any given 24 hour period? Do you care? Too bad, because, in a stunning fit of irony, I intend to repeat them here:

• Teeth! Teeth!
• Can you actually hear me?
• Just because, that's why.
• Shoes!
• Just sit still to eat your tea.
• Hands!
• You want what?
• Come. Back. Here. NOW!
• No, just two stories.
• For. Fuck's. Sake.
• Do you need a wee?
• You tit
• I said slow down!
• Just give me one bloody minute, OK?
• Do you need a poo?
• Can't I have a shit in peace?
• I love you.
• I need a drink.

This is it. This is frigging it, the soundtrack to my life. It used to be the latest from the Ministry of Sound or Pete Tong but now it's the endless fucking barking of instructions at a four year old who swears blind that she knows better than her 40 year old mater.
In fact, said repetition has even turned me hoarse. There have been nights when Kraken Junior got just one short story because my voice wouldn't have survived even more infuriating repetition by way of We're Going on a Bear Hunt or the bloody Gruffalo.
Jesus, and they say having kids broadens your outlook.Well, it does exactly the frigging opposite to your skills of erudition. Conversationally I've regressed about thirty years since KJ slopped into the delivery room. Oddly enough, the first words she heard were "For! Fuck's! Sake!" and "I need a drink". Yup, I should have known even then.

Page Turner

Biting her tongue, thank Christ

Whoa there! Am I going mad(der)? Is it true that bob-brained popstress Jesse J has signed a deal with a major publisher to write her autobiography? Well, fuckadoodledo. So it's true that any old bugger has a book in them then.
What, pray, is with this business of squeezing autobiographies out of people who have done fuck all? I mean, what's Jesse J going to write about when she finally learns how to hold a pen properly? A trip to the Brits and her laughable choice of body stockings? 
OK, so she is doing well in a furiously competitive industry but how about giving it another decade or so before cramming the tale into 80,000 words? Yeah, I know that probably doesn't fit in with the marketing plan that's been crafted around her (so much for ignoring the price tag, eh, Jess love?) but, strewth, surely an autobiography has to be based on more than when when the subject matter finally grew pubes. 
And yeah, I know that such book fodder have sprawling fan bases to screw money out of, so there are plenty of eager teens desperate to read this tat, but come on. Don't the likes of Jesse J, and anyone else wedged into such a deal, also wonder what the frig there is to write about?
Christ, perhaps I am old fashioned and equate autobiographies with a lifetime of successful endeavours or political, scientific and cultural insights. Perhaps I like to pick up said tomes with burning anticipation at learning from a life well lived. Sorry Jess, love, but something tells me that your scribblings won't necessarily fall into these categories. Although I dare say it'll educate me fully on the joys of studded lipstick and the writing of banal pop warblings. 
And yeah, I do realise that this makes me some sort of literararary snob but that's what you get from an ex-journalist: the urge to read something of value, and not just to the record company's bean counters. I reckon Jesse J's insights will fall into one of those categories and I sure as shit know which one. 

Natterjacks

Wrong ones

What the frig is it with these talking heads that seem to litter every show about popular culture? Like it's not bad enough that Channel Four thinks that great telly is strung together with 100 'best of' clips, it then has to intersperse these individual segments of weepy films/ 70s adverts/ decommissioned sitcoms with the likes of Lucy fucking Porter babbling about shit all.
Just who is Lucy Porter anyway? And does she actually exist outside of her role as a professional talking head? Jesus, she could form an opinion on the spawning of a tag nut if some production company or other promised her a spot on prime time TV.
And that's the thing with these talking heads isn't it? Either you've never frigging heard of them or they're wallowing in their z-list status as the opening acts at supermarket launches. Worse, someone, somewhere thinks that it's OK for these creatures to spew their underwhelming opinions at the public over and over and over again in the name of entertainment. Entertainment! Like I give a shit about Kevin Bridges' feelings towards the Spice Girls, Nicki Chapman's adoration of the Smash adverts or Jeff Brazier's take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards Dad's Army.
Problem is that these shows need lots of talking heads and, if your idea of good quality TV involves the budget-free dredging of telly archives, then you've not got the money to pay 'em. So what are you lumped with? No, not George Clooney leading a discourse on modern cinema or an Archbish hosting a debate on the role of religion in society. Instead you've got some one hit wonder from the 80s fawning over a fucking Cointreau advert.
So spare me, will you? Unless you have a decent opinion to offer or a fresh insight into some moral dilemma keep it shut. And that includes you Lucy Porter. Leave the inane opinion-making to people like me, OK?

Dropping Off

It looks like I feel

Right then, my kraken loving loons. You know by now that I've had a few skirmishes with the black dog of depression, the arse biting little bastard. So I've set up a new blog especially for my musings, rantings and general bus-station burblings on said subject. It's called - wait for it - www.thekrakensleeps.blogspot.com. Look, just go with it ok? For fuck's sake, humour me. 
Anyway, you've got a lovely new link to the blog up there on the right of the page. Right now it contains my previous wibbly insights but I'll be throwing more on there as and when I get up wind. 
See you on the dark side!

A Snort of Derison

Please fuck off

I gather, from my morning's cyber-wanderings, that the snortastic poster boy Pete Doherty  - oh,and alleged musician - is 33 today. Well, fuck me. 
Outside of the entire Tory party, is there really anyone in the UK today who is more likely to make you want to kick to death the nearest puppy? Jesus, there's something about Doherty, the man with more lives than a big cat enclosure, that sends me so far over the edge that I'm in grave danger of never making it back to shore.
Perhaps it's his stupendous ability to avoid doing porridge even though he's paying rent on some on London's busiest courts. Or perhaps it's his pork pie hat-garnished doughball of a face which more often than not looks so vacant that I expect him to have the word 'toilet' tattooed on his forehead. Or it could be the way in which his 33 years has been sprinkled  with a light covering of dead fellow junkies.
More likely, though, is the baseless glory that some people chuck at him. As I alleged above, he's a musician but that's just what I've been told. Whenever I've heard his vocal outpourings for myself I've mistaken them for the dying squeals of rats after indulging in a saucerful of poison. I'll be fucked if there's anything remotely musical about the bloke, let alone any reason to bang on about just how fabulous he is. But then again, such burbling usually comes from the type of people who'd leap on a bandwagon even if it had two loose wheels and the Grim Reaper at the wheel.
So I'd wish Doherty many happy returns but I must dash. He's reminded me that I have to clean out the slime from the bottom of my frog pond. Then again, he's probably too busy holding a shaking lighter underneath a spoon of something restorative to notice. The overrated twat.

Twatters

Need a brain

The level of idiocy displayed on social networking sites never ceases to amaze me. In fact the keys on my laptop are coated with a crust of dried spittle from where I regularly splutter over the information that people post. It's like watching some giant collective brain haemorrhage where the globe's twitterererers and the like fail to maintain control over their own thoughts. 
And you know who the greatest miscreants are? Those who criticise their employers. Online. On Twitter of all places, for fuck's sake. What in the frig goes through anyone's mind when they decide to announce to the world that their boss is being a complete and utter twat? Or when they think it's imperative that they inform their followers of the almighty fuck up that is their line manager? Apart from the these being the actions of someone so desperate to be sacked that they're this close to holding a knife to their HR director's throat, I'm at a loss as to why anyone would do this.
Yeah, bosses can be bastards and I've met a few of those. And yeah, I've moaned and sobbed in the toilets with the best of 'em. But naming, shaming and sticking all of that on Twitter so that it can be duly logged by said boss as ammo for the next appraisal? Oh, come the frig on.
Laughingly, I've known a few people do this and then complain when they have been given the business end of a written warning, as if being taken to task for publicly slagging off their boss is so unreasonable that it defies the very laws of humanity. One acquaintance tweeted that her boss was a bastard while she was in the office, only to get a tweet from said bastard by return, asking her to pop into his office for what eventually became a sacking. I don't know what was worse. The stupidity of her tweet or the scorching indignance she displayed at her tweets actually being read by the very people she addressed it to. 
I dunno, perhaps it's Darwinian, like the nutbags who lock themselves in washing machines  for a laugh and then suffocate in a hot wash. Perhaps Twitter is society's way of weeding out the potential employees who are hard of thinking. Sod the CV. All you need is a twitterer's name and you're off. Off the shortlist, that is.

Wheely?

Trucking hell

Whoa there! What in the frig is with this show that I've seen on the telly, Eddie Stobart: Trucks & Trailers? I've only seen a few minutes of it, thank fuck, but I feel as if I've witnessed some atrocity or other. What a complete and utter pile of festering shite. Who, exactly, watches this stuff? As far as I can gather it's a reality show about people driving vans and lorries. So far, so blood-clottingly dull. 
Even worse than the stultifying subject matter, though, is the way in which it is treated. In a vain and hysterical effort to inject some sort of excitement into the show, footage of men driving vans is accompanied by dramatic voiceovers about fuck all, pseudo-scientific displays of maps and delivery routes and molehill-sized cliffhangers about whether Dave the White Van Man will be able to reverse around some tricky corner or other. It's like trying to glamorise the drying of non-drip gloss or suck wonder from emptying a bin. The only affinity it gives me to the drivers and truckers of this nation is to want to lay under 30 tonnes of metal as it thunders down the motorway.
Will Bill deliver his load of widgets from the Eddie Stobart depot to Orpington in time? Like I give a shit. Will Mike be able to negotiate the narrow lanes in notorious Aberdeenshire? Er, wake me when it's time to give a fuck. Or will Steve be able to fit all the cardboard boxes in the back of his van? Oh, sorry, I slipped into a coma then. What did you say?
Mind you, this is nothing compared to the distress I experience at the thought of people actually sitting down to watch this foaming bottle of toss. Can you imagine checking out the TV listings only to see this clogging up the arteries of entertainment before making a point of watching it? Just how entirely fucking dull would your life have to be if this is what gives you enjoyment or makes your heart race. It's unimaginable, and I speak as a woman who had a breakdown and spent a year in bed staring at the wall.
So may I suggest some true excitement to the producers of this hideous show? How about a finale, where all the vans and trucks race to a particular point in the British Isles? And I think I've found the perfect one too. It's about 20 feet to the west of the cliffs of Dover. Dunno about you lot but I'd watch it.

Of Legal Age

Gits

Oh, spare me, will you? I just read an article in a local rag about a 71 year old woman who has been fined for littering. Problem is that she is quoted throughout said piece, saying such irrational bollocks as "How dare they treat me this way. I'm an elderly woman!" and "It's disgusting that I've been fined at my age!"
What, pray, the fuck? This aged protestation has all the logic of Justin Bieber actually making a living from singing. It's incomprehensible. So does this woman mean that the injustice of this entire debacle is down to the fact that she is old and because of that it's just not fair that she should be fined for littering? Excuse me for spelling it out but that's the only way I'm able to get my sweating brain around it.
So does this mean that when you reach a certain age, by dint of the fact that you've somehow survived 65 years, you should be exempt from the law? Oh yeah, right, that's fucking genius isn't it? Tell you what, perhaps when Rose West finally reaches pensionable age she too can throw a fit over how cruel society is when it locks away the elderly. And fuck knows how Peter Sutcliffe must be dealing with the injustice of it all. He's 66, one year past his bus pass eligibility, and still roaming Broadmoor, the poor, poor bastard.
Look, no one denies that the elderly have put in the legwork and that they've seen off the enemy once or twice. Thank you, really. I love that tonight's dinner is beef stew and not sauerkraut. But the idea that this is enough to exempt the old from the laws and social mores of the nation in which they live is too insane for a decent explanation. 
No, you arses. Society just doesn't work like that, does it, eh? You don't just turn off your social and legal responsibility according to a date on the fucking calendar. Otherwise every nutjob and pervert would wait until their 65th birthday before merrily killing and kiddy fiddling their way through their twilight years, safe in the knowledge that they can't be, er, fingered for it. And does that sound even remotely sane to you? 
So, my elderly beasts, tuck away your pension books and curb the griping. Oh and put that get-out-of-jail free card back in the Monopoly box while you're at it.

Only the Lonely

A better kraken than me

Whoa there, Great Britain, hold your frigging horses. What the frig is with the demonisation of single mothers, then, eh? Have all 62,218,761 of you lost your Daily Mail-poisoned minds? Because if you ask me single mothers should be kissed on the collective arse, what with them inhabiting the seventh circle of hell otherwise known as being the permanent and sole target for feeding duties/ tower building/ bum wiping.
What I mean is, I'm struggling to raise a kid with the help of Conjugal Kraken and assorted family members. How the fuck women do it when they are completely alone is beyond me. When do they ever get to drink a hot cup of tea? Or get dressed? Or take a shit?
Christ, I haven't taken a shit on my own for four years. How I'd manage if I was the only parent available to said offspring fills me with the sort of terror that turns my bladder icy. Seriously, it'd be me wearing the nappies just so I could get through the day.
And how the frig do single mums manage when they've come down with the lurgi? Just the thought of it makes me weep. Imagine crapping and puking your way through days of gastroenteritis all while building marble runs and grilling chicken nuggets? At what point, pray, would you get the chance to lay face down on the floor of the bathroom and weep yourself to death?
Really, it's a mystery to me how single mothers aren't single-handedly keeping therapists and counsellors in gold bullion. I sprinted over the edge even with a phalanx of willing assistants. Without them I'd have barely left the delivery room. In fact I'd probably have been transported straight from there to the psych unit just to save on the middlemen.
Which is why ripping apart these women is so pitifully short sighted. Forgetting the political and moral blatherings, they're working about as hard as it's possible to work without visiting a Gulag camp. And, OK, if they have fucked up on the procreation front, it's safe to say that they're frigging well paying for it when they've had four hours sleep for ten days in a row.
In fact, they don't need the pitchfork waving masses to point out pitfalls of single motherhood. I dare say the downside crosses their mind 40 times a day, like when one hand is filled with shitty wet wipes, the other hand is holding a wrigging baby and they need another hand to...oh.
So let's just give the babymama bashing a rest eh? Think about your own parental chaos and wonder how the fuck you'd have managed on your own. I dare your bladder to survive the sudden onset of an ice age. Brrrr.

Life Lessons 2
Another student gripe, if you will:
Right at this moment I'm in my local coffee shop and you know what utter fucking imbecility I've just witnessed? Thee three people in front of me in the queue - all students - each bought a cup of coffee with their credit cards. Yes, a cup of coffee. With their credit cards. By the time I was served I was almost squirting HP sauce into my own eyes with the frustration of it all.
For. Fuck's. Sake.