AUTHOR | ELDERLY SCHOOLBOY | IDIOT
Due to less than stellar book sales – which I’m going to attribute to the effect on the markets of Brexit, Covid and Putin – I’ve gone back to school.
Like an addict mistaking sobriety for enlightenment only to return to the bottle, I’ve decided to hobble around Portsmouth University on a bad knee like a fat ghost, hoping against hope that Student Finance England will get their act together before all my credit cards are maxed out. Continue reading “Diary of an Elderly Schoolboy: Part 1”
My God, how is it almost May?
Well, a lot’s happened since I last posted here. The Omicron variant kicked our booster shots in the teeth, then all the armchair epidemiologists became experts in Russian/Ukrainian relations and the Tories ramped their brand up to 11, lying under oath and smirking at our grief.
Keep it light, Parlett. This is supposed to be an advertisement.
So here I am, enjoying this nice Dark Horse Malbec from Commiefornia as the world burns and coughs and shouts itself horse enough to require deworming. It’s a lovely bottle of red – good and rich, a nice return to that thick spicy flavour other budget Malbecs miss. Still quite a way off from better, more developed examples though and at seven quid I’ve had better. Bit flat with the aftertaste as well. In its defence it’s slow and relaxing, lending one to thousand-yard stares in the supermarket car park pondering the reasoning behind releasing the new Ghostbusters movie during Transgender Awareness Week.
Britain is a completely normal island littered with people who’ll bark at you their unsolicited opinions on the way you look, act or talk. I grew up hearing a whole bunch of wild shit that’d get me cancelled for repeating online yet sometimes you’ll still hear it blowin’ in the wind.
Kids whose dads used to sucker punch weirdos like me in the back of the head are more progressive now than their fathers. They’ll still call you a name for not dressing like them or having the same haircut, but where daddy shouted, “Queer!” while running away, baby keeps his hands in his pockets and calls you a faggot to your big fat faggoty face.
It has been brought to my attention that my last two ‘reviews’ veered quickly away from meaningful critique and seemed more preoccupied with my own general malaise. Do please allow me to make recompense with this humble submission.
France is a country, known for many years as a producer of wines such as red and white. The best bottle of French wine I ever had came from a petrol station just outside of Paris. Everything since then has been a disappointment – but let’s try to just stick with wine for now.
An old French friend once taught me that the quality of a bottle is related to how far you can stick your finger into the bottom. True or not, I still use that as an indicator to this day. In retrospect she was probably just flirting with me.
If you’ve seen the news you’ll have learned that Britain is only ever a gallon of petrol and a wiped arse away from barbarism.
Due to a baffling shortage of workers, we’ve got soldiers on the streets delivering fuel to petrol stations – it’s a presence that will hopefully have women at last feeling safe from the police.
In what is hopefully the tail end of a pandemic reported to have killed almost 160,000 in the UK – not including the terrifying number of excess deaths – it’s still hard to watch global news and imagine the past eighteen months were anything other than dinner and cocktails before life takes us home and stealth fucks us over the dirty dishes in the sink.
So I went to Asda. Back to the performance art of masked shopping among the maskless.
You ever feel like you’re living the radio edit of your life?
I’d joined up to another one of those lockdown wine subscription things on a trial and funnily enough – considering how a friend is planning on moving there – it turned out to be Romania month.
Continue reading “My God, it’s Full of Plums: A Wine Oddity”
I was given a very kind and thoughtful Christmas gift of a boxed whisky tasting but rather than drink it down the harbour with the dog and save us all this indignity, I promised that I’d record one last liquor review.
Continue reading “|13| The Last Liquor Review | Tomatin Legacy | Cù Bòcan | Adnams | Ensō Japanese Whisky | 1776 Rye Bourbon”I was quite impressed in editing how the shadows under my elf hood would combine with my poorly trimmed beard and general fatness to give me the jowls of a creature from Labyrinth.
Working off a script would have kept the length down if I hadn’t chosen to review seven bottles at the same time. My delivery is a bit off but this isn’t really a format that lends itself to multiple takes. If there’s a fine line between witty spontaneity and making a script reading sound natural, then I fell off it and spilt drink down my trousers.
CHRIS PARLETT 