All right, we've been a bit busy lately and the last Wanker of the Week reigned for slightly more than his allotted seven days. About 900% more, if truth be told. But that's no reason for people to write in and complain. Get real, we all have off-days. I just had 63 of them.
Anyway ...
It's terribly easy just at the moment to select a new Wanker of the Week. It would be a complete no-brainer to settle on some "celebrity" no one's ever heard of, or one of the many politicians one wishes one had never heard of, or some public servant with an inflated idea of their own importance who's been flinging his weight around. Absolute piece of cake, in fact.
There's Gordon Bloody Bastard McBroon, for instance, who thinks that the way to win hearts and minds is to hear what others are saying and simply say the opposite. You know, pundits and columnists point out that Britain took longer to weather the recession than almost every other country and it was Gordon's fault, and he grandly claims that the economy will be and always has been safe in his hands and he brilliantly steered us out of the red (and never mind a public debt of £32,000 for every single household and growing - see here). When whistleblowers and civil servants describe him as a gross, potentially violent and abusive bully, he launches a whole election campaign on the basis of "character". He's got balls, you have to say that for him. The bastard.
Or how about the Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, who said that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson should not have been prosecuted in an adult court for killing toddler James Bulger? She argued that children under the age of 12 should not be prosecuted for any crime and that even the most hardened of youngsters could still be frightened. Aah, bless. Don't want anyone to be frightened, do we?
She thinks that children younger than 12 don't understand the enormity of their actions and therefore can't be held responsible for them. Quite apart from the peculiarity of suggesting that on the morning of his twelfth birthday a young thug has a sort of epiphany and is suddenly a fully-fledged and responsible adult, there's the gross inconsistency: Gary Fisher from Solihull was recently convicted of stabbing his own 17-year-old daughter to death in his car, then drove her body around for about 10 hours before being stopped and arrested. He made no attempt to speak in his own defence during the trial.
Fisher is plainly dotty. He'd spent months picking up his children, including the daughter, from his estranged wife and driving them aimlessly round all day, and had been behaving more and more erratically. But did he get the chance to plead diminished responsibility on the grounds that he is a loony? No. Did they even consider a charge of manslaughter? No. He was done for murder. In other words, they set out to prove, and the jury accepted, that he killed the girl deliberately and with malice aforethought, that he planned it and then carried out his plan, that he is a cold-blooded intentional killer.
Yet there are those in positions of authority and influence who are quite happy to claim that a sad, loony adult is completely responsible for his actions, but a child who kills his helpless victim in a calm, considered and very brutal way should NOT be held responsible but get a nice cuddle, a glass of milk and a chat with some psychiatrist with a third-class degree from Walsall polytechnic. I must be getting old, because I just don't get it.
As for celebrities ... well, just don't get me started, all right? Who the hell is Rufus Hound, anyway?
But we at Grumpy Old Sod like to be egalitarian and ... well, inclusive is the modern buzz-word. We don't want to be banging on about famous or quasi-famous people all the time. Anyone who's already in the newspapers doesn't need any extra publicity from us. No, let's pick some unknown, some unsung and unrecognised hero of the World of Wankerdom. Let's give some unsuspecting person their own five minutes in the limelight. It might make their day. Well, week.
You may not have heard of William Kotzwinkle, but he's apparently a rather successful author. Among other things he's written a series of books about a dog who farts (and let's face it, we've all met one of those. Great to have a bit of gritty realism in children's fiction). There's Walter the Farting Dog, Rough Weather Ahead for Walter the Farting Dog, Walter the Farting Dog Goes on a Cruise, Walter the Farting Dog: Trouble at the Yard Sale, Walter the Farting Dog Farts Again, Banned from the Beach, Walter the Farting Dog and the Windy Day, Walter, Canis Inflatus which is in Latin, Walter El Perro Pedorrero in Spanish, and Walter Le Chien qui pète in French.
You can find all these books on Amazon, as we did. And it was there that we found this week's Wanker - a modest and unassuming Wanker, a tiny little insect wanking hesitantly among the leaf litter on the floor of the great Forest of Wank, but a Wanker nevertheless, small but perfectly formed. She is Sarah Whittle from Peterborough, who describes herself as "Sarah the Carer" in her review of Walter the Farting Dog on Amazon.
Her review reads as follows:
This book was read out at the 2006 Disability Inclusion Conference to show that children have to be taught segregation and that it does not happen naturally. It is a lovely example of how we can accept people for their gifts and not there challenges!
Now Sarah, we're not going to be picky and complain that you don't know how to spell "their" more than once in a paragraph. We'll rise above the fact that your first sentence makes no sense whatsoever and that we very much doubt if you have ever observed segregation being taught, and that it does indeed happen quite naturally, every day and in every sphere of human and animal activity. Boys play football with other boys in the playground, while the girls stick together and gossip. Monkeys tend to stay in groups and avoid the company of predators - unfairly, no doubt, but that's what they do. Posh people go to dinner parties in other posh people's houses, while remarkably few football hooligans grace the salerooms at Sotheby's, neither do their girlfriends show off their hats at Ascot.
No, Sarah Whittle, our beef is with your conclusion. This isn't "a lovely example of how we can accept people for their gifts and not there challenges", it's a book about a farting dog, you tosspot!
Oh, by the way: farting isn't "a challenge". It's just a fart. What did you think? - the grizzled leader of the pack stands triumphant on a dustbin at the corner of the alley, farting his defiant challenge to all who might have the courage to face him? It's just a fart, for God's sake, not a challenge. You wait until you're seventy. You don't understand farting until you're old enough not to care what other people think in the queue at the post office.
What a Wanker.
And just an even more modest lollipop to end with, not so much Wanker of the Week as Masturbator of the Minute. In response to an article about all the potholes in our roads after the winter, and the way they're damaging people's tyres and suspension, Edward Green of Leeds wrote to the Sunday Times "In Gear" Magazine "I wonder if the drivers who complain about potholes are the same ones who go straight over mini roundabouts and disregard speed humps".
Well, Edward Green, you tiny little infinitesimal masturbator, before I go to bed tonight I'm going to get down on my knees and pray earnestly to the God of the Self-Righteous that next time you're out in your Nissan Micra, driving at 27mph and weaving your way delicately round the potholes, next time you slow right down for a sleeping policeman or carefully drive in a complete circle round a mini roundabout regardless of traffic conditions, overwhelming smugness will rise up in your throat like bile and choke you to death.
And that then a raucous flock of men in white vans and noisome bikers in leather jackets will descend on you, tearing your Micra to little shreds and carrying them off, clawing and picking and fighting over your lifeless corpse until finally the last one rides off leaving just a brief smear of self-satisfaction on the road.
The GOS says: By the way, about farting in the post office. There is no better way of getting to the front of the queue at NatWest, Nationwide, the Norwich and Peterborough Building Society, and Bradford & Bingley, but it doesn't work at all at HSBC which appears not to be staffed by humans at all.
Our investigation at Banco Santander was inconclusive, mainly because we didn't understand their cries of "¿Buen dios, cuál es ese olor repugnante? ¡Salga inmediatamente, usted malandrín mayor!"
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