Caption Competition

We found it in the field...

Credit Crunch Tales - Terrance of the tree house

Terrance lived in the tree house for several reasons: solitude, the escape from modernity – but mainly it was because of tax and a hefty credit card bill.

Terrance had certainly lived the high life. He was only an assistant at a local B&Q (a bad one at that), but that didn’t stop him living like a millionaire. His house had all the mod cons – SkyPlus, HD TV and a six-slice toaster. Women would be showered with gifts, friends would receive expensive birthday presents – but the dream had to come to an end one day.

The credit crunch came and Terrance fell off the debt merry-go-round. After narrowly escaping a bailiff, Terrance retreated to the local forest. He spent a few nights sleeping rough, but soon realised if he was to carry on his Robin Hood lifestyle he would have to find a new home. He found an old oak tree and planted his flag.

Running away from his troubles, Terrance became a tree person.

Terrance’s idea of problem solving was escaping to the woods. He had done this when he failed his GCSEs, when his Dad left and when his football team had been relegated. He even ran away for a week when his Mum told him he couldn’t have a second slice of gateaux. But this was the first time Terrance had decided to become full-time feral as a means of solving his problems.

His days at B&Q were not wasted – stealing supplies from the warehouse, for which he still had keys Terrance went about building a tree home. He built a fairytale home where he could run away from his debt problems and live tax-free. But it is a lot harder to build a liveable home inside a rotting tree than Terrance thought. In the end, after several attempts to make it like an ‘arbour-Ikea’ Terrance settled with a mouldy shit hole with windows.

He tried to make pets of the squirrels that shared his domicile. They didn’t acquiesce – they bit him, stole his cereals and pissed all over his toaster. Since then squirrel and the man have led a cold war of attrition in that old tree - Terrance ate one of their babies in the spring, so the squirrels gave him rabies by September.

Terrance can’t go back to the modern world now. He has sunk too far into the wood - he is a Wildman or Sasquatch, a myth that financial advisers tell their indebted clients. And he still owes Barclays around £7,000.

Maybe if you wander down to the woods one-day, you will see Terrance in his little home. He hasn’t had a job for a while, and can’t bring girls back to his tree home, so he spends most of his days unkempt, searching the wood for discarded porn.

"Madam, your discretion would be appreciated"

A blogger, a 21st century version of being a diarist

In 1666, Samuel Pepys* documented London in all its seventeenth century glory. Well, sort of:

"I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition."

He was like the blogger of his age. Pepys was most famous for writing an account of the Great Fire of London, but he did more than that. He had a go at women, he talked about farting and he drank too much. He was like a one-man Nuts Magazine, circa 1670.

He documented the ups and downs of the day, mused a bit and generally wrote what he knew. This is what the Hellfire Club will do - it will be a diarist of its day, but will probably write less about houses that were burning down with children in them. And maybe more about farting. And if, fingers' crossed, there are some more hangings at Charing Cross, the Hellfire Club will be there, documenting for the ages.

Also, Pepys did drink in the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street a fair bit, as does the Hellfire Club. If that pub was serving the same toxic piss as it is now then somewhere in London there may be some missing chapters of old Sam's diary, where he yells at his wife, craves a kebab and then pisses himself.

We don't know what Samuel started his diary, probably why this blog has been created - a mix of boredom, narcissism, egomania and the desire to get his point across. He, like the Hellfire Club, probably got bored of his desk job, saw what other diarists were up to (farting, shagging, burping and such) and thought he would have a pop at it. So here it is, the diary of its day. In 450 years from now, kids may be dissecting this very post and writing a little comprehension on it. On a computer made of lasers in space.

The Hellfire Club is the same as Pepys diary. It sees what other bloggers are doing and scoffs in the face of mediocrity and badly spelled anecdotes - the time is now to create a fucking good blog that's funny. Welcome to the Hellfire Club.

*pronounced 'Peeps', as in "The paedo peeps into the little girl's bedroom from the vantage point of a big tree"

Fizzy Milk

Fizzy Milk.

The wheel reinvented, Jurassic Park set loose. That's right, Fizzy Milk. Coca Cola is set to launch Vio, a carbonated milk.

Coca Cola "scientists"* have developed the drink at the firm¹s laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia. The only thing it will curdle in its 8oz aluminium bottle is the boundaries of your mind.

The Times says one of Coke’s copywriters claims it tastes “like a birthday party for a polar bear”. I would have thought that tasted more like butchered seal and ozone, but anyway. Perhaps a better tagline would be “like a birthday party for a polar bear who’s mind has comprehended it’s approaching extinction with acute lucidity”.

It comes in four “natural” flavours: peach mango, berry, citrus and tropical colada (straight from the Colada tree). It has 26g of sugar a bottle, and 1.5g of fat.

This is it. Seriously, It¹s the End of Days.

Some of you readers will be already reaching for your gas masks and baseball bats, ready for the impending maelstrom of discontent. And good on you - science has finally destroyed nature.

Someone takes a sip they think: “Huh, Fizzy Milk? not bad”. Then, a week later you¹re having a coffee, avec fizzy milk, when some axe wielding lunatic comes smashing through the window of a Café Nero screaming GOT MEEELLLLLK?’

Milkmen will be pushed from their cabs as the hoards upend his cart, dancing naked on its ruined, milk-stained corpse. Cows will be set alight, punched to death and garrotted as the fields are stained with red.

People will come to fear the moustache, a sign of the fizzles, a madness induced by the realisation that everything is nothing, up is down, milk is fizzy.

Someone has a lovely bottle of fizzy milk. Then they start thinking “Wait a sec, why can’t I ride my bike into the sea?”. The financial markets fall, everyone sinks into depravity and primitive stupor. Statues of the Virgin Mary in the Vatican begin weeping fizzy milk. Soon you'll be having sex with your pets while your Mum, caked in her own defecation, watches while drinking a fizzy latte.

Everyone starts chanting, “Fizzy Milk Fizzy Milk Fizzy Milk Fizzy Milk” in anticipation of the arrival of a giant moth to take everyone away. It never comes.

I can¹t tell you how dark this is.

*Not really scientists. Men and women who try and cure cancer are scientists; people who put the rover on Mars are scientists. People who fanny around with sugary liquid aren't scientists. Their "lab" will look like Professor Burp's Bubble Works and they will all wear over-sized top hats.

We are all going to die

Set your coffee down gently. Okay, I have some terrible news for you. Terrible, horrible news. We are in the midst of a pandemic in this City, one which will pretty much bring society to its fat bloated knees. In a bitter twist of irony, it’s the tiniest being on Earth that is the most powerful.

SWINE FLU. N1H1 motherf*cker.

It’s here, in London town, ready to finish off what the Black Death and the Nazis started.

It wouldn’t be scary if it was just flu oh no. And it isn’t scary if the virus just has a code (SARS? Please, that only killed the Chinese.) We had Bird Flu, but that just screwed up Bernard Matthews. No, this monster needed a name that envisages terror. The pig, the animal people most want as a pet but don’t have, is now the source of the world’s most deadly virus.

This is how it starts, the old apocalypse, a gentle stream of news reports providing the hacking, snot-filled background music to your everyday life. You’re not really listening that hard to the Swine Flu warnings as you’re more concerned with buying a load of coloured jeans from Uniqlo and going up to Shoreditch to eat a soft cheese sourced from Peru. Then it turns out you have an acquaintance that’s caught it, but that doesn’t really phase you as whenever you met this kid he always had an off yellow tint, he was never one of Gaia’s foot soldiers.

So, you buy a magnum and forget about it and oh look, Peaches Geldof went a disco last night. Thanks, London Lite. All the while micro terrorists are zipping through the tube lines and handrails, declaring a tiny Jihad on your immune system.

The Government are setting up committees and hotlines and getting a lot of grief for not giving clear guidelines for pregnant women. This debate doesn’t seem to have much to it – pregnant women should avoid public transport at peak times and crowded areas. Hardly rocket science is it? Not getting on the tube while duffed up should be good advice anyway. There’s no place for a bump at rush hour - I’ve seen someone pour a frappe in a Louis Vuitton handbag and that’s worth much more than a baby*. It’s difficult down there at the best of times, especially without the threat of a highly contagious disease breeding in amongst the squalor of London.

If this is the end of civilised London society then it won’t be all bad. I’ve long since held the notion that I would thrive in a post apocalyptic landscape, living in Big Ben, living off tinned peas and firing buckshot at mutants. I’d marry the one of the only beautiful girls left in the world, then chuck her when a slightly prettier one comes along (don’t judge me, it’s Darwinian).

So this is it. Some reports suggest 100,000 people will die, some say slightly less people will die of Swine Flu than regular flu. But who cares? This is it, the end of days. Go and tell that girl in accounts you want to do horrible things to her in the break room, steal something from Boots, tell your Mum you hate her, rob Topshop, do anything – because tomorrow you might have quite bad flu.

*We’ve looked into it.