Three Little paragraphs.

So he got ten years. Perhaps my post from yesterday helped. Will Smith must be delighted – ten years and he doesn’t have to attend a single Oscars ceremony. Perhaps he did it on purpose. Of course, this sets a precedent and now everyone will have the same idea: anything to avoid having to attend four hours of gratuitous arse licking and puke mongering. Next year’s ceremony will be a bone crunching affair as everyone finds more elaborate ways to get a lengthy ban. Benedict Cumberbatch will be beaten half to death by Reece Witherspoon, using a cricket bat studded with rusty nails. Morgan Freeman will pepper spray Robert De Niro and then take one almighty swing at his balls. And Meryl Streep will watch aghast from the stage as a single red laser bead works its way up her body to settle on her forehead and promptly has her brains blown out by Whoopi Goldberg with a high velocity rifle. The year after that, with nominees realising they can dole out all kinds of damage, get banned for life and still win an Oscar will be all out carnage, the entire place strewn with body parts, slippery fat and thick pools of blackening blood. There will be an orgy of violence which will result in almost half the attendees dead and many more facing serious, life changing injuries. Eventually the Oscars will be scrapped and there will be a short, secret ceremony instead, during which participants will just form a circle and finger each other’s private parts as they recite lines from their most worthy movie moment of the year. And all thanks to Will Smith.

This is not the only news from today. Britain is currently gripped by yet more travel mayhem, as millions of people aim to get away so they can celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ by being kidnapped by a cartel outside a Mexican nightclub, choking to death at an all inclusive buffet or trying to score drugs at a caravan park somewhere in the Loire valley. As I write this hundreds of flights have been cancelled because there aren’t enough staff to get the planes in the air, and if there were there probably wouldn’t be enough to get them back down again. Airport lounges will be filling up with thick, stale air and the energy expelled from relentless eye rolling and tutting. Just as tattoos and personalised number plates are the ultimate waste of money, so being delayed in an airport is a most sinful waste of time. And what will hurt the most will be the lies, any kind of lie just as long as the airlines and airports don’t have to admit that they’re fucking useless and are staffed almost exclusively by idiots. Every time I fly I promise myself it will be the last time, but I suppose I’d get bored of Butlin’s sooner or later. Even if you’re not flying you’re in a pickle. Thanks to the underhand, thoroughly shitty tactics of P&O last month cross channel ferry services look very undernourished, though many will struggle to even get to the port. As it stands the M20 is choked up with hundreds of lorries, desperately wishing Brexit had never happened. It is reckoned that this formidable fleet of heavy goods vehicles will produce as many as 200,000 plastic bottles of piss and 30,000 discarded KFC boxes by the time it gets to Easter Sunday, so let’s hope that if Jesus does come back he won’t land anywhere near Dover. I suppose if he did he’d be unlikely to stick around for too long; Dover is no place for the son of God. Dover is no place for anyone with a soul.

And today is the Grand National, and it is the first time in three years that the public has been allowed to attend. I’m not sure how relevant that is. Would the horses run any faster if they knew they were being cheered on by a coked up hen party and a leathery Irishman with a pickled liver? Perhaps we’ll never know, but as things stand horse racing is still the source of great mystery to me; if I tried to place a bet online right now I’d probably end up mistakenly adopting a Nigerian or sponsoring an alligator in Berlin Zoo. A long time ago I asked a friend to help me place a bet and so we went to a betting shop and he showed me what to do and so I did it and my horse very much failed to run the fastest out of all the other horses in their race. Because I didn’t have a clue. You see, this is the problem with betting on horses. At least with human sports you can get a good idea of confidence levels and humans can try little tactics to give them the edge. Unfortunately, horses aren’t quite so articulate about their feelings before a race. I mean, it’s a given that any horse being entered into a race is going to be able to run fast, but they can never really tell you much beyond that. Instead we are obliged to place bets based on a number of factors, which include: whether the horse is alive and has a full set of legs, what ‘form’ the horse is in, how tiny the jockey is and what they had for breakfast, what sort of a daft name the horse has been given, the odds (which are as familiar to me as Chinese algebra) and, of course, if we have a really good feeling about this one. That said, while normally I would insist that betting on horses is as big a waste of time and money as getting a tattoo of your personalised number plate across your chest whilst camping on the floor of an airport for a second night, I realise that given the current state of the world there are far dafter options out there. I must be mellowing with age.

G B Hewitt. 09.04.2022