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Christmas Lights

Well so that was Christmas and what did you do? Another year older, 20 bottles of shampoo.

Thank Gucci that’s the end of another season of comfort and joy darlings. I have been to more openings, closings, celebrations and no-excuse parties than Jimmy Choo has seats in heaven. I have been ankled, I have been boogalooed and I have been well and truly cabbaged. Old man Bollinger has opened another orphanage for starving Biafrans and I damn well expect a plaque on the wall.

I know you want the skinny on the festive fiesta but you have to understand that some of the names, times and places have not so much been changed to protect the innocent as become somewhat tangled in Lady P’s Bollie-addled little mind. Sorry sweeties. I did see the irkesomely lovely Katie Winslett play a novel form of backgammon with podgy-faced Welsh newsreader Huw Edwards. I witnessed trampette Amanda Holden do a brutal little parody of poor Les Dennis trying to put his socks on. And I saw Angela Rippon go an entire half-hour without trying to make a man out of Henny Throckmorton’s nephew. Actually, I may have imagined that last one. I think it was only ten minutes.

I went to Nice and the Isles of Greece and I sipped champagne on a yacht but I never managed to go to a single bash without Richard Branson trying to introduce me to the delights of Virgin travel. If that man is not on the blessed V then Manolo Blahnik can’t make shoes.

I think it was at Octavius Markham’s soiree in aid of alcohol where I saw that Ulrika Jonsson woman. Mutton dressed as dog if you ask me.

My footballing contacts assure me that the average boot has eight studs but from what I could see Ulrikaka had 14.

I am told they were collectively known as Coventry City Football Club. Meiow.

I am hardly one to cast judgement on a fellow girlie and her interaction with the opposite genderatalia but mark my words sweeties, the Scandanavian strumpet is drinking at the last chance wine bar.

Other Christmalian highlights included Lesley Ash getting so liquorished that her new lips burst and covered the ghastly Neil Morrisey in the fat of some long-dead cow. No change there then.

But Christmas is not Christmas without thinking of our Lord. And I hear there was quite the firework display at Jeffrey’s house. It wasn’t exactly planned but just after midnight the fragrant Mary discovered that Little Lord Jeff had “I love Bubba” tattooed on his right buttock. Such a little buttock too.

Oh did I say that out loud?

Toodlepip.

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Review of 2002

YEARS ARE like pipes – you can look back at them, up them, down them or  along them but you can’t change the crap that was in them. And as I always say, if it’s true in plumbing then it’s true in life.

In January, Johnny Foreigner and his continental cousins threw away their money and started spending this new Euro thingy instead. Quite right too, I say. If we have to go to their hot and smelly countries on holiday then there’s less chance of us being confused by all the different funny money they used to have. Just don’t try the same with the pound, Johnny!

Then in February, the nation was gripped by curlers for the first time since Hilda Ogden went to that great corner shop in the sky. If only Rhona Martin hadn’t looked like Lily Savage’s harder sister then she’d have made a fortune.

All in all, 2002 was a good year to be a friend of Dorothy. Paul Burrell didn’t get knicked for thieving Diana’s gear, Will Young had his first number one and Michael Barrymore learned to swim. Sadly, it was the year of the queens but not the Queen’s year.

After 50 years on the throne (a plumber’s nightmare if ever I heard one) her Maj and the rest of the nation were in mourning in March for the dear old, darling Queen Mum, cruelly taken from us in her prime. Never again will those lovely yellow teeth light up our lives. Never again will the smell of
stale biscuits waft down the Mall in the morning. It was the annus horribilus to end all annuses. Oh and Princess Margaret died too.

In April Little Lord Beckham broke a bone in his foot and suddenly the metatarsal was the country’s most famous bone since Linford Christie retired. There is clearly some link between bones, dogs and South Korea that runs alongside metatarsal, Victoria Beckham and the World Cup but it’s beyond me.

In May, Roy Keane left the Irish World Cup camp in the huff. It left Mick McCarthy without a pyschotic, leg-breaking midfielder but he failed in a last gasp bid to call up Martin McGuinness as a replacement. By June the World Cup and the Jubilee were in full swing and flags of St George were
selling like pillow cases at a Ku Klux Klan convention.

In July a man waved a fake gun at Hear’Say at a motorway service station. Fake pop band, fake gun, seems fair enough. Next thing you know someone will be waving an arse at Robbie Williams.

Guns were in the news again in August and September when America was terrorised by the Washington sniper, or George W Bush as he is known. George has disproved the myth that any American boy can grow up to be President. Now you don’t even have to grow up.

One of the most tragic moments of the year was in October when 128 people died after the siege of a Moscow theatre. The biggest tragedy was that Will and Gareth hadn’t been on a tour of eastern Europe at the time.

In November our brave, heroic firefighters bravely and heroically laid down their poker hands to stand bravely and heroically on the picket line to demand a 40 per cent pay rise, a new cue for the pool table and an ACAS agreement on whether one-eyed jacks should count as floaters.

In December Cherie Blair got into bother over her involvement with a lying conman. She was also in trouble for her relationship with Australian fraudster Peter Foster. Lady Macbeth was also shocked by reports that Osama bin Laden wore a Cherie Blair mask for Halloween.

When we look back on 2002 and remember floods and fires, lost jobs and lost Royals, we shouldn’t be too gloomy. Don’t think of 2002 as the year of economic and environmental disasters, instead remember it as the year Jeffrey Archer spent in jail. Wasn’t so bad after all, was it?

Plumb on

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Cherie Oh Baby

Who amongst us hasn’t enlisted the help of the convicted fraudster boyfriend of your former soft-porn actress best friend in order to save a few quid on a house? No, me neither.

Does Mrs Blair really believe we will all fall for that quivering lower lip, I’m just a girlie, don’t really understand business, my poor son is leaving home, Tony is too full of the milk of human kindness, yada yada yada sob story? I should cocoa.

I can see why she would want to avoid putting cash into Gordon Brown’s pockets seeing as her old man hates him but when you wait on nature’s mischief you get yourself in a heap of soapy bubble.

Let’s face it, hell is nowhere near as murky as the spinning cesspool of doo doo created by Alastair Campbell and his spin liars. If they think they are going to get a plumber to clean up this mess then they can think again. This plumber’s not for churning.

Can you believe that the chiselling Cherie even has the cheek to suggest that she is getting a hard time because she is a woman? Unsex me here, she cries. No thanks love, you appear to be chewing a bag of spanners and that’s not a particularly attractive look.

The brazen barrister even thinks it’s okay to nobble judges to stop this crook being chucked out of the country. I don’t know how much it costs to bribe the bench these days but it will be a pretty penny. Has she pinched that money off Mr Brown as well? We should be told.

Anyway, what’s the world coming to when Australia start sending us their convicts instead of the other way round? This Peter Foster bloke has been up before more judges than… well, Cherie Blair. Yet who would have thought the man had so much dirt on him? Not Cherie obviously. If only she’d had some knowledge of the law she might have been okay.

As I always say, if you can’t stand the crap then get out of the bathroom. And, as we all know, if it is true in plumbing then it is true in life.

Out, out damn Cherie! Out, I say!

Plumb On

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Firefighters

Now I’m the last man to stand in the way of someone earning a decent wage but those firefighters are getting right up my hooter.

How can they honestly expect a 40 per cent pay rise for sitting around playing pool all week and rescuing cats from trees? The odd chip pan fire and the occasional terrorist bombing hardly justifies 30 grand a year now does it?

Your average fireman’s average week may make him an expert at 13-card brag but it doesn’t make him a proper tradesman

Sparkies, chippies, builders and God’s own plumbers are time-served craftsmen who have honed their art over years of slavish public devotion and commitment to their art. Firemen are labourers. Admittedly they are labourers that I would be happy to call on in the unlikely event of my gaffe being on fire but essentially they are navvies in uniform.

Yet because they have mastered the art of turning on a hose and pointing foam at a fire they think they can hold the country to ransom. You’re not on, Fireman Sam.

And that’s another thing, name me a famous fireman. Go on. If you’ve come up with anyone other than Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb then chances are you are a fireman and you don’t count. Firemen aren’t famous because manual workers are ten a penny not 30 grand a year. Could they re-route an ABS sweep while no-hub clamping the outlet of the sweep to a drainage system? No way. Could I interrupt a game of rummy to turn on a hose? Oh yes, I think so.

My old gaffer always said to me that if you hired monkeys then it was perfectly okay to pay them peanuts. He knew there was no need to have a time-served artist stick his arm down the pan when there was an apprentice happy to get shite on his hands for £3.60 an hour. And if it’s true in plumbing then it’s true in life.

If Fireman Sam and his poker-playing pals want to retrain as surgeons or computer programmers then they’ll be entitled to whatever they can earn. But oh no, they cant on account of the fact that they are too thick. And more importantly it would mean giving up the brag school and not using lines about shiny helmets, poles and long hoses to women stupid enough to fall for anything in a uniform.

Anyway, personally I’ve always thought a well-ironed set of overalls much more fetching than any uniform.

Plumb on.

Peter Plumb

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Butlers

Well sweeties! Aren’t the ghastly red-tops having fun with the butler and his boisterous bedroom behaviour?

Your ring m’Lord? Meiow.

Henny Throckmorton stayed over at the Windsor’s once and was so disgusted at not getting rogered by the staff that she nearly asked for her money back. She says it was the first time she had ever asked a footman for a nightcap and actually got a drink. The poor darling nearly fainted. Henny said there were sweet uniformed stud muffins at every corner but each and every one were limper than Peter Lilley’s majority. Honestly, there’s nothing more horribly disappointing than a fanciable footman who prefers to use the tradesmen’s entrance. But I simply cannot see how anyone could be surprised at the sudden if admittedly forceful realisation that there is more than one queen at the pink palace. How green was that valet? Nor can I find any simpers in my soul for the frightful Burrell chap. He spilled the beans on the Spencer trampette so he can hardly complain when someone blabs about his own free-time frolics. A case of the biter bit methinks. Or the pillow-biter bit as the case may be. Meiow.

I was at the Bush-Cheneys for the weekend and the jungle drums were beating non-stop about butlers, Barrymore and bottom drawers. Virginia Bishen-Bedi said she thought two of her men might be a bit light on their livery but I happen to know that nothing could be further from the truth. Oh darlings, thank goodness not every servant is a sodomite. Scrumdiddlyumptious I can tell you. Later we were talking about which of the top family were most likely to be visiting the valet in the middle of the night. Admittedly I’d had a tankful of Bolly but I could swear that Octavius Markham said the old Queen Mum had a liking for Lady’s Fingers.

Oops! Did I say that out loud? Toodlepip

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The Burrell Collection

Having previously written about Mr Paul Burrell, former butler to the blessed Diana, and suggested that he was a thieving git who should be executed, I now discover I was wrong.

Mr Burrell is in fact not a thief. He told her Maj the Queen that he was going to ‘safeguard’ a few items of Diana’s things and therefore was quite entitled to take 284 personal items and hide them in his loft. Her Maj’s memory isn’t quite what it was and her recall was only jogged by the prospect of some dirty royal linen being laundered in public. God bless her.

The law of the land has ruled that Mr Burrell was entitled to get his hands on Diana’s bits and bobs and therefore it must be true. If the gaffer says it’s Friday then don’t bother trying to tell him it’s Falkirk. And if it’s true in plumbing then it’s true in life.

Paul Burrell is not a thieving git. However he is a hypocritical, money-grabbing traitor who won’t spill the beans in court but is happy to do so in a tabloid newspaper for £300,00. Is that still a hanging offence?

Plumb on

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Posh Kidnap

What a rumpus about that so-called kidnap attempt on Mrs Posh Beckham by a gang of crazed Romanian gypsies. As usual the newspapers got it all wrong.

Fair enough, it wasn’t nice that the gypos wanted to abduct Lady Victoria, hold her for a £5m ransom and threaten to chop her up into tiny pieces. That kind of behaviour just isn’t called for.

But everybody seemed to miss the point. If a gang of hooligans is going to kidnap your high-profile celebrities, why do we need cheap overseas labour to do it?

There are plenty of kidnappers in the UK who could have done the job just as well. In fact they could have done it a whole lot better. How difficult can it be to get an Essex girl into the back of a van?

But oh no, forget the fact that there’s shedloads of honest, tax-paying British villains who would kill for a chance to kidnap the Beckhams. Instead just get some scab Johnny Foreigner labour to do the job for half the price. No wonder this country’s going to the dogs.

And at the end of the day we all pay the price. Do you think that Albanian assassins pay their stamp? No and neither do Polish plumbers, Kosovan carpenters or Namibian navvies.

Scabs the lot of them, prepared to work for washers and do your honest, local tradesman out of a job. Okay we may charge a bit over the odds and change a perfectly good u-bend for no reason, but that’s what living in a democracy is all about.

Put it this way, if you get an Afghan asylum seeker round to sort your cistern and tell him your ballcock needs twisted back into position then you better make damn sure he speaks the proper lingo.

I always tell my apprentices that it doesn’t pay to put a two bob washer on a ten quid tap. And, as we all know, if it’s true in plumbing then it’s true in life.

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys, you pay scab labour and you get scabs. Simple law of physics.

Mr David Beckham should just be grateful that it wasn’t a gang of proper, registered, time-served British kidnappers that were after Mrs Posh. She’d have been sliced into thin (even thinner) pieces and popped through his letter-box before you could say Dago Forlan.

Buy British, pay for proper plumbers and save celebrities from assassination. You know it makes sense.

Plumb on.

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Diana and Burrell

Is there no end to the indignities that poor Princess Diana must suffer?

It’s bad enough that she is being portrayed as a slapper whose ex husband is cavorting around with an elderly horse-faced woman. Now we are told that her butler has been knicking all her best gear.

First of all, just because the lovely Diana had personal relations with various members of the armed forces, society high-flyers and the England Rugby Union team doesn’t make her a slapper. It wasn’t the whole team.

Secondly, Mr Paul Burrell has not yet been convicted in a court of law so he remains innocent until proven guilty. The thieving git has yet to be judged by a jury of his betters and we need to wait till he’s banged up till we officially shout The Butler Did It. But I ask you, what kind of man would take 284 bits of gear from the blessed Diana’s house and make off with them into the night. A thief that’s what kind. A desperate thief with little taste in fact. Among the stuff he half-inched was a Leo Sayer album and a Cliff Richard cassette. That poor woman.

Being a plumber you get to access all areas when the client lets you in for a job. Who amongst us hasn’t taken a peek in the cupboards or had a look under the duvet. Or is that just me? But I’ve never pinched anything. Well apart from Mrs McDougall in Glebe Street and she didn’t complain.

If I’d got the call to plug Diana’s cistern then she could have rested easy in her grave that her Chris de Burgh CDs would have lain untouched. It’s all a matter of trust. As I always say, there’s no point in having a good washer fitted by a bad plumber. And if it’s true in plumbing it’s true in life. You can’t just go round lifting Versace dresses when you feel like it. Where would plumbers be if they helped themselves to a Cartier clock or a Sassoon coat every time they fitted an s-bend? It would be bad for business. Treason is still a capital offence so they should hang the traitor Burrell. String him up while playing Leo Sayers Endless Flight and make him listen to the whole thing before they open the trapdoor.

If he’s guilty.

Plumb On

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One Law for the Rich

There’s an old newspaper saying that Man Bites Dog is not a story. Dog Bites Man, now that’s different. So why is it when an out of control bull terrier belonging to our beloved Princess Anne savages two young children is it suddenly news? It’s just another example of media bias against our Royal Family that’s what.

Now they are demanding that the Princess Royal and the honourable Commodore Tim Laurence appear in court. In court! A public court is the place for the unwashed asylum seekers and drug-frenzied youth of this fallen nation – not the noble, blue-blooded stock which put the Great into United Kingdom.

I’m only a simple plumber and apart from a misunderstanding about a consignment of mixer taps I have never had a brush with the constabulary. Yet I know that public court is inevitably the place for the likes of me. I tell my apprentices, you can take the piss out of the toilet but you can’t take the scum out of the gutter. And as I always say, if it’s true in plumbing it’s true in life.

But sadly it seems that Tony Blair’s town council, cloth-capped, champagne cronies have control of our sacred judiciary as well as every other sector of this once hallowed land.

How else can you explain the inexplicable decision to have the lovely Anne and the decent Tim dirty their brogues in the undignified squalor of the magistrates court. It is a slap in the face to the family which has led this country through two world wars and the Royal It’s a Knockout Tournament.

What on earth were those children doing gamboling in Windsor Great Park in the first place? They were just asking to be savaged. Personally, I blame the parents.

Moreover the incident in question took place only two days after the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, God rest her soul. The poor dog was almost certainly out its mind with grief and could not be expected to be thinking straight.

Sadly the savaging, however innocent, has only served to feed the frenzy of the anti-monarchist rabble who claim our splendid Royals are merely descendants of robber barons and take money from the mouths of impoverished foundlings to fund skiing weekends in Kloisters.

Don’t you find that people’s views on the Royals are matched by their bathroom facilities? Your decent working class type with matching pan and basin know their place and worship the ground that Diana slept on. Then there’s your upwardly mobiles that keep pot plants in their bidets – they can be a bit bolshie but aspire to a bit of four-poster themselves. The real rabble-rousers are your middle class intellectuals who actually use their bidets for their bits and bobs. They’re the troublemakers.

So I say no your honour. Magistrates court is not for the likes of Anne and Tim. Don’t give in to the republican rabble. Free the Windsor two.

Plumb on.

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Major Major

Old John Major, eh? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, say no more.

Who would have believed that the old grey man and the egg lady had been going through the yes lobby together all these years? Mrs Thatcher must be turning in her grave.

And yet Mr Major’s episode of shame could so easily have been avoided if he had remembered the plumber’s code.

If I have one golden rule it’s never lend someone your tool unless you are sure they will look after it. And as I always say, if it’s true in plumbing, it’s true in life.

Mr Major clearly forgot this rule and gave Ms Edwina his tool without a thought to the consequences.

Now his reputation’s gone down the plughole. Or has it?

I reckon if he decided to run again as Tory leader then he’d be a skoosh to get back into Number 10. Phoney Tony’s cap would be on a shoogly cistern if there was any half decent opposition. That clearly doesn’t apply to Ian Duncan Thingy but the new dynamic Johnny Major would be right in there. Okay, the Downing Street caterers would have to run for cover but that’s a small price to pay.

As for Ms Edwina, well she’s a womanly wench isn’t she? Or should that be a womanly wrench? The kind that once it gets a good grip on your nuts it never lets go.

We all know her type. Gold taps and no washers as my old gaffer would say. She’s the kind who you would give a good deal on fitting a new bidet as long as she kept it quiet and then before you know it she’s told the whole street.

How Johnny must regret all those nights he told Norma not to bother with dinner because he’d be getting stuck into a curry at the office.

Plumb on.