There really are fewer than seven giants left in this world. They are a dying breed, after Anthony, God of Storm and seventh Asguardian of the Heavens was killed in a bar in Soho three months ago the heart has gone out of these survivors. Sheila, his eldest daughter, and the only daughter left alive mourned so vigorously that Swedish scientists began to posit theories for why the rain had turned salt. Hildegard, the youngest of the seven sobbed for seven minutes and was then distracted by ice cream. She is only two, so it is difficult to find fault. Alan, the second and now only Giant Guardian of the Heinzgate, and also Anthony's brother has reverted to pizza and coca cola and as a result is becoming huger than ever. Before this tragic event he had slimmed down to a size 34, but now he simply binge eats all day long. Susie, always the temptress refuses to acknowledge her giant background. She is the smallest of the seven, aside from Hildegard, but Hildegard is turning out to be growing so fast she may outstrip Susie fairly soon. Susie is a prostitute in Didsbury, Manchester and does filthy things for money. She doesn't need the money, she just enjoys her job. Giants are and always have been immune to all STD's, after Karl, the almighty Keeper of the Gates of Doors and Peace, subsection profligility. realised that they were dying out and tried to help. It didn't work, for besides disliking sex in general the giants were dying out more in accidents concerning the human drinking habits.

John, John and John; the other three are keeping themselves to themselves on the matter, it is unsure whether they actually know. Some of the giants complain about Susie but these three put her filthiness into the class of dishes that have been washed with Fairy Liquid, which if you ever talk to the fairies involved bacomes exceedingly repugnant. Lets just say you don't want to know which bodily excretion the "liquid" is. The GJs or Giant Johns live in a squalid flat in Bermondsey, in an even squalider menage a trois. Let us gloss over this for the moment.

Anyway out of these seven we need to pick the next keeper of the Mighty Mighty SchlossHome. The ancestral home of the giants has never been a des res, being on a mountain in Croatia, and bloody cold into the bargain. When you feel the cold in your bones, James the Eldest Caretaker of the Mighty Mighty SchlossHome used to say, it isn't fair that those bones have to be three times the size of everyone elses.

Please leave comments and questions, I will be more than happy to fill in any blanks I may have left in my description of them. I daresay there are things which you might find important which I simply overlook. Anyway the seven choices are:

1 Sheila- cries a lot
2 Hildegard- only two, but easily placated
3 Alan- likes his pies
4 Susie- complete slapper, voracious meat eater
5 John#1- sick bastard, very into S Club Juniors
6 John#2- sick bastard, fond of birch trees
7 John#3- sicker bastard, it was all his idea

At the end of the day this is your decision, and I leave it to you to choose well. At the end of the day it makes very little difference but I would like to know your justification for appointing your chosen giant.

p.s Giants don't eat people, except Susie, and she doesn't...you know what I mean
None of them are any good at housekeeping, thats why James is still around.
- posted by Buntifer @ 6/28/2003 12:01:00 pm

 
The stars looked like glowworms staying in exactly the same place
against a really pure and fine dark blue blanket. Ollie sniffed and quaffed. He
was drinking tequila, which slid down his throat like tequila slid down the throat of a hardened tequila drinker. He was also very, very (and that is not a superfluous superlative, I mean very) drunk. He was also fairly melancholy as his collie dog, Mishka, had, this afternoon taken a long walk off the proverbial short pier, (it was actually the West Pier) and drowned. She had later washed up amongst a group of school children down the coast several miles causing great distress. Ollie did not know this, he
mourned for his loss. He drowned his grief with tequila as Mishka had drowned in the scummy Blackpool water.

The lights flashed.

Ollie kept quaffing.

Sixteen young men, all Arsenal supporters were ejected from a nightclub.
They proceeded to beat each other senseless with traffic cones and beer
bottles.

Ollie was sitting on the flat roof of the arcade on the West Pier, he
fancied if he looked hard into the sky that he could make out a canine
outline woofing gently to him. This may have been an effect of the
tequila, for it was potent, or it may have been his mind. It may also have been
a freak astronomical fluke, but this is unlikely to have occurred with no
record. He wondered where she was now, whether there were bones in dog
heaven, whether there was a dog heaven at all. Ollie punned about dogs
and gods to himself, for there was no one else listening; or so he thought.
I can shed no more light on whether there was anyone else listening, but
he thought there was no one else. There may have been, but, well, that's
beside the point. He wept, for short periods of time, but often. The
tequila lowered his emotional resistance to melancholy, and so even
being fairly melancholy could make him cry. He was far too drunk to stand up,
which was a good thing, given that the tide was out and that he was
likely to fall to his death in the very spot his beloved Mishka drowned that
afternoon. He finished the first bottle of tequila and hunted in his
bag for the other one. The first one he hurled in the direction of the
fighting yobs, it took out the nearest lamp, but fell nowhere near the scrum of
bleeding skinheads.

Ollie was the CEO of a minor biotechnology company. His employees
called him Mr Collingworth, but everyone else called him Ollie. He had not
meant to be a CEO of anything, and had been surprised to find out that his
father had left him everything when he died in a freak table tennis accident at
the age of sixty-three. Ollie had been left the business and the house, in
which he was to allow his mother to live until she wished to move out or
until she died, whichever came the sooner. This made him a millionaire
several times over, but only if he sold the business, which he was not
allowed to do for at least fifteen years. As it stood, he was making,
with no work involved, approximately twenty thousand a year. Ollie thought
that this was a good thing, even if all it meant was that he could just about
afford to live without working. He was getting bored of not working
though. He had been round to the offices of the business, and been told that he
was not really qualified to be dealing with any aspect of the business it
self and that they didn't think it prudent to employ the owner of the company
in an office junior position. Ollie had stormed out. "They" were running
the business very well without him, "they" being the two other directors and
their secretary. His father had been the sleeping partner anyway,
fronting the capital and baby kissing. The other two directors had been appalled
by his death, and had no intentions of defrauding anyone, it was just that
they couldn't really communicate their ideas about the firm to a twenty five
year old, semi alcoholic, only just ex student bum. Ollie was missing
university. He supposed that with the twenty grand a year he could go
back and study something else, but it was not the studying he missed, it was
the cruising and boozing, the good life between the lectures, with weed and
bars, girls and far too much beer. Ollie wasn't really a beer drinker,
he preferred Campari, but it was difficult to get nostalgic over that.

He looked up at the sky. The glowworms were fuzzier and moving in small
circles, which could have been the tequila, or the glow worms. Ollie
sniffed and quaffed and felt in his pocket for a spliff. He was too old
to go back to uni. His friends had all left and were doing proper jobs,
except for one, who was doing a PhD and was far too hard working for her own
good. Ollie had thought about doing an MA but decided against it, it was too
much like hard work, and the university probably wouldn't have him anyway. An
MA in combined studies would be an odd one, Ollie had specialised in
winding the course director up with his choice of units. this meant that he was
a generalist, he knew so little about each thing that his combined
knowledge
was probably that of fifty toddlers with separate interests. He was
unemployable really, and he knew it, so he drank and smoked drugs. He
had no real drive, he had always wanted to be rich enough not to have to
work, but had never really thought through what he would do with his time if
he ever became so. It had been a not very realistic dream, and yet now he
was rich enough, and could think of nothing to do. The problem was that he
wasn't rich enough, when he dreamed he imagined millions and millions of
pounds with which to do exactly what he wished. In this current
scenario he didn't even get enough to buy a cool car, not that he could drive. He
began to make a list of the things he was going to do with all his spare time.
Learn to drive, being twenty-five and unable to drive was not cool at
all. Learn to speak Esperanto, or was that incredibly stupid. Ollie spoke
English, the most spoken language, although actually more people spoke
Spanish. Perhaps he should learn Spanish, nobody spoke Esperanto, it
even had a stupid name.

He sighed, and then remembered the spliff, which he lit and began to
smoke, sitting up so the embers didn't fall in his eyes. Learn to drive and to
speak Spanish, maybe find a girlfriend. Ollie had had a girlfriend, but
had lost his mobile and her number with it. She only had his mobile number,
so all in all he was stuffed. Ollie thought, carefully, perhaps he should
not try to find a girlfriend, perhaps he should try to find his girlfriend.
He knew she lived in Plymouth, just not where. He had been too drunk by
the end of the nights he had visited. Her parents lived in Buckinghamshire,
but he couldn't remember the name of the village. Her name was Susie, but
her second name was forgotten. (Not actually Forgotten, but he couldn't
remember it.)

Ollie lay back and smoked, the tequila lay forgotten in his hand. The
glowworms in the sky began to dance and whirl about in strangely
beautiful patterns, and for a time, it was good. Then Ollie began to feel
peculiar, this soon progressed to feeling distinctly unwell, and soon he was
clutching the gutter being copiously sick onto the caravel below. He did feel
marginally more sober, but only in the way that imminent death
concentrates the mind. Ollie was white and shaking, he felt as if his stomach was
trying to hurl itself off the edge of the building, and that it didn't care
whether or not the rest of his body came with. It was possible that this was
the meaning of life, he pondered, but it was unlikely. His stomach was
still lurching even after he had emptied it of its contents, he groggily
wondered if tequila might calm it down.

Twenty minutes later he was happily swigging tequila, the miracle
lubricant, as it had recently occurred to him to call it, and munching on a cold
pasty he had found in his bag. He was not however, partaking of any tetra
hydro cannabinol related substances. This, he felt, was a substance best not
mixed with the miracle lubricant. He began to feel inexplicably joyful,
and rose slowly and unsteadily to his feet for the first time in several
hours.
The glowworms were beginning to lose themselves in the gradually
lightening sky, and the skinheads had gone home, taking their wounded with them.
The only living beings were Ollie and the first few seagulls that had
carefully fled their nests in search of pre sweeper chip bags. He felt good
coursing through his stiff muscles. It was cold out, but fresh, and the clouds
in the sky promised a beautiful, chill-perfect day. Ollie yawned and
gasped at the freezing freshness of the air.

He laughed, and his voice was the only one to be heard, he shouted, and
his voice was blown back into his face by the wind, clean and happy to be
released from the trappings of dark. Ollie could almost feel the
shadows around him lifting as the sky became lighter. He lit a cigarette, flame
guttering in the wind, the smoke whipping so fast from his mouth it
might not have been there.

The wind picked up and Ollie found he was able to lean into it, a
figurehead for the pier, blurry eyes and stubble chinned, clutching a cigarette and
a tequila bottle. A fitting figure head for Blackpool, he thought. The
street sweeper turned the corner and began to traverse the littoral,
cleaning last nights parties away ready for people to begin dreaming the
new day. Ollie felt ready to be swept up, the freshness of the morning was
beginning to get to him. His addled brain was shaking itself by the
scruff of the neck and shouting "Get to bed" into its ear. Ollie felt like a
shower and some darkness again. He could see the brim of the sun
appearing from behind the horizon and knew that soon the day would begin in
earnest and that there was no place for him amongst the early morning crowds,
with their kids and their buggies, loud voices and pets that would chase
balls and sticks across the still empty beach. Ollie was leftovers,
unappealing and ready to be disposed of. He felt tears beaten out of his eyes by
the buffeting of the wind, and knew that they were not simply that. Mishka
had been mourned, and Ollie was ready to begin the next period of his life,
he could take the next step unhindered by emotional baggage and free from
his past. Ollie resolved that this next step would be soon, and it would be
into a warm and welcoming bad. Failing that he would sleep on the train
home

Ollie collected his bag and let go of his cigarette butt. It flew off,
caught in the wind, and disappeared into an air vent. He packed the
remains of the tequila reverently and looked for the pasty wrapper. This too
had been taken by the wind and was performing suicidal twirls near the edge
of the building. Ollie decided he was a little inebriated to play catch
with a plastic wrapper, and paced to the drainpipe up which he had ascended.

He slung his bag across his back and climbed down. He was brave and
resourceful, ready to face the new day and begin his new life. He
headed East, into town, he had friends who might let him in, if not he knew how
to let himself in as long as he could find his way into the garden. He
headed past the tower and left into the burban streets where he would find his
friends. He was in luck, noise drew him to their house, and it was only
when he was halfway up the garden path that he realised that it was the
neighbours having the party and not his friends. The house which was
the object of his mission was closed and cold, lights off and the occupants
probably next door partying with the rest of them. He snuck round the
house to the garden and readied himself at the bottom of the tree. He took a
slug of tequila to steady his nerves and began to climb. This tree had been
a back way into the house ever since he had first dated the girl. She had
been sixteen to his eighteen and the father had been mightily
unimpressed. Their relationship had necessitated a fair amount of army manoeuvres in
entering and exiting the house, luckily the father had been foolish
enough to have planted a tree outside his darling daughters room some sixteen
years ago, and had not noticed the potential for climbing. It felt oddly
familiar and yet somehow wrong to be climbing this tree again. Ollie and the
girl had parted on less than perfect terms but he was sure that she would
understand his need, especially if he coupled it to the sob story about
Mishka.

He reached the little roofette that lay above the back door to the house
and below the window he had his eyes on. Gently steadying himself he
reached out a hand and tapped the window. There was no answer. He gripped the
sill and pulled himself entirely onto the roof, his face coming right up to
the glass of the pane and peering inside. He could see no lights, and thus
very little inside the room. The light the early sun was shedding was still
pale and weak. Ollie prised his fingers into the gap between the two window
panes and pulled. The bottom frame slip upwards an inch; he looped his
fingers underneath and pulled it up, wincing at every crack and snap.

When the gap was large enough for him to climb through he did, head
first, checking if there was anyone in the bed, there wasn't. He pulled
himself inside and stood up, wincing as his back protested. He grabbed the
tequila from his bag and took a mouthful. As he stood there, bottle tilted up,
throat working to swallow, the door opened. Tequila went all over his
shirt and chin.

"What the...? Who the...? Ollie you f*cking idiot, what the f*ck are
you doing in my f*cking bedroom? ..... you f*cking sshole!" She hissed.
Ollie shrugged. She hit him, just below the rib cage, in the site
guarenteed to wind. Ollie wound up gasping on the floor. "Fcking
tequila?" she took a mouthful. "Got any weed?" Ollie nodded at the bag on the
floor. She picked it up and found the baggy, rizla and tobacco. "My father has
me in virtual f*cking rehab!" she spat, "first term at uni, and the first
time I get my stomach pumped he drives up to uni, picks me up and f*cking
pulls me out. Jesus!" Ollie had forgotten how much she cursed. "Anyway,
what the f*ck are you doing here you b*st*rd? After you f*cking ran out on
me with that Hare Krishna wannabee..." She finished the spliff, shoved the
window open and sparked up. Ollie felt sick, although he wasn't going
to be sick. He swallowed some tequila. "I need your car." He gasped, "and
those." He pointed to some "Teach yourself Spanish" tapes that were
lying on the shelf. " "You can't f*cking have my car. I'll nick my Dad's keys
for you if you don't mind it being reported stolen some time today though?"
Ollie nodded keenly, her Dad drove a Merc. "When did you learn to drive
anyway? I thought you'd f*cked it off." Ollie nodded, and made vague
indicatory motions with his hand. "Cool, well hold this," she gave him
the spliff, " I'll get the keys. You want to be away soon before f*cking
Hitler wakes up." She dashed from the room. Ollie decided not to smoke any of
the spliff, and wondered why he had split up with her, especially for the
Hare Krishna wannabee. She soon returned, triumphantly waving a chunky key
on an executive looking keyring. "Here you go. I'm keeping the weed as
payment." Ollie felt his heart leaping, he was on the way to success in his goals.
He soon remembered that they had been made in the spirit of keeping himself
occupied for some time. Never mind, he could always make some more, and if
he couldn't find Susie then he was coming back here. He collected the
keys and the tapes and gave the still sleepy girl a kiss on the way out. She
cursed a couple more times and told him to come back safely. Ollie
assured her that he would and climbed down the tree. She blew him a kiss from
the window, already skinning up again.

As Ollie settled himself into the plush leather of the drivers seat, and
pushed the first cassette into the tape player he felt the joy he had
earlier come flooding back. He took a deep swallow of tequila and
settled the bottle on the passenger seat. Ollie reached for, and slowly turned
the key.

"Bienvenido in Espanol, la lingua di amore..."


- posted by Buntifer @ 6/17/2003 04:55:00 pm

 
This is a short appeal for anyone who is reading my blog just to let me know. Click shout out to leave a comment but I'm feeling awfully alone in here. I disapprove of prosaic day to day blogs and try to keep mine as far apart from that as usual, coupled to the fact that my day to day is sodding boring but it would be pleasant to know whether I should wory about giving my readership regular tidbits or whather I'm typing to myself...I hope to hear from you.
- posted by Buntifer @ 6/09/2003 10:16:00 am