In possibly one of the worst ever examples of pun-led posting, I thought I’d let you have my fourpenneth on Glastonbury…

I was all set to go a few years ago, because my squeeze at the time was very keen; she’d been several times, and described it as “amaaaaaaazing” - although to this day, I’m never sure whether she was using the word to cover a post-coital yawn or not. Thankfully, she had the good grace to ditch me before we got around to buying tickets.

What’s the point? You end up camping in a big field, cheek-by-jowl with all the same Islington-dwelling pricks who you normally labour to avoid like the plague, listening oh-so-post-modern-ironically to Shakin’ Stevens, plus a bunch of indie shite which you’ve never heard before and certainly never will again. You might as well spend the weekend sitting / sleeping in your garden day and night, irrespective of the weather, listening to a CD of John Peel’s shittest ever sessions at full blast. (For the fully authentic Glasto effect, make sure you leave your beer out of the fridge, invite your neighbours to take a piss on your marigolds and then spray the area in the foulest-smelling bleach you can find, and of course burn a tenner once an hour.)

Even if you’re not there, it’s a bunch of arse.It takes over the TV schedules for the entire weekend - something which only sport has the right to do (isn’t that right, girls?) It didn’t even have the good grace to piss it down with rain all weekend, despite a promising forecast. Bah.

(BTW, the headline act was apparently a break-dance chap of whom I’ve never heard called Jay Zed, or something. LZ - any relation?)

Half time at the European Championships final, with Spain leading 1-0 and unlikely to relinquish that lead (although it is the Germans we’re talking about, so penalties it will probably be). People are talking about it as one of the better recent tournaments, but obviously Italy went out at the quarter-final stage having played terribly, so that appraisal can’t possibly be accurate. I’ll limit myself to 2 observations -

1) Team of the tournament? England. For not qualifying. For sparing us a month full of xenophobic bullshit in the press and fat bald angry BNP-loving white-van-men attaching England flags to every available square inch of the country. For sparing the gentle citizens of Austria and Switzerland our horrible, horrible travelling fans. (Every match, apart from Germany - Poland, has seen the official “fan zones” populated by mingling, friendly, moderately-drunk fans from the opposing countries, as opposed to a concentrated replication of Friday night in Newcastle on a daily basis.)

2) Why is it that English commentators insist on pronouncing every foreign “s” as “sch” these days? It’s almost as if they’ve been told “if in doubt, pretend you’re Sean Connery” - thus we have Schimao, Schweinschteiger, Torresch, Crischtiano Ronaldo… I think I even heard “Schpain” at one point during the first half.

Irrespective of Motschon and Lawrenschon, this second observation brings us to a wider point. It’s a thorny issue, raised initially in the 1980s by Moira Stuart insisting on pronouncing “guerilla” in a Spanish stylee on the 6 O’Clock News. Should our newsreaders / commentators attempt to affect foreign accents when pronouncing foreign names? Should it be sar-COH-zee or (hawk up some phlegm) sar-queau-ZEE? Where do we draw the line? Elaborate hand gestures when saying “Berlusconi”? Screwing up your face a la Father Ted when talking about Hu Jintao? All thoughtsch welcome…

…. and then she’d gone, leaving only the faintest lingering suggestion of her cologne, a pair of shorts and a skimpy towel as a keepsake, the scintillations of her super-fine mind, and that FACKING LOGO which TM - sorry, TOG (you can consider that an official promotion) - didn’t get round to removing before going on holiday. Excellent work, LZ - a guest editorship which’ll be hard to top.

Et moi? This week, I arr been mostly getting drunk and eating pizza, with a side order of getting into arguments with stupid women at boot fairs. In LZ’s honour, I’ll tell you all about it short-ly.

And now, as we approach the vinegar strokes of my guest editorship of this fine blog, we can prepare to spend the rest of the day in blissful pétite mort, reflecting back on what has been, hopefully, a fun experience even if the earth didn’t actually move for you, and looking forward to the return of the infinitely more satisfying blogular romps at the hands of Tafkass.

I have been asked whether, given the new Equality Bill, I shall be expecting to be as lavishly paid for my services as Pal Pito and Technical Monkey. To them, I reply that the chance to take the helm of Very Poor, complete with fawning acolytes, and the fuzzy warm feeling that comes from writing for you good people is payment enough for me. Oh, and by the way, I prefer red wine and used banknotes, thanks.

Guys, it’s been an absolute pleasure and you’ve been wonderful. I would like to recommend Technical Monkey for promotion to Technical Organ Grinder for his sterling work and patient explaining of the complicated VP technology. Thank you to everyone who commented, everyone who voted for me as World Leader in my surprise unanimous victory in the poll, and to Tafkass for trusting me with his precious site for a couple of weeks.

So, without further ado, I would like to present the one… the only… Tafkass!

*cue applause and throwing of flowers*

ICANN, the first person singular ripper-off of Bob The Builder and Barack Obama’s tagline, have announced with a massive drumroll that top level domains are to be deregulated. Having braced themselves for a great swathe of handwringing, gnashing and wailing about the chaos this is bound to cause, they’re probably rather disappointed to find out that it has been met with about the same level of interest as a report on the lifecycle of the Gaboon viper at an Apathetics Anonymous meeting.

You see, it’s all very well to gush about how we’ll all have sites at .sausage or .codswallop, but will it actually make a blind bit of difference? When was the last time anyone actually typed out a full web address instead of just putting ‘wikipedia’ or ‘coprophilia-related blogs’ into the Google search bar? And I have a funny feeling that everyone will just stick to the good old .com in any case, because it’s so ingrained in the web psyche. Even my mum, who once panicked that she was going to be arrested because the computer said it had just performed an illegal operation, knows enough to type in whatever she wants with .com on the end. True, the internet isn’t quite sophisticated enough to deal with
www.picturesofthatblokewhowasinthatfilmyouknowtheoneImeanthemanwiththehair
wasnthealsointhattvprogrammewiththatwomanaswell.com but it’s only really a matter of time.

Still, it’s best to keep up with the times, and in the interest of staying a la (Depeche) mode, I’m sure that Very Poor will have its own top level domain name any time soon. Any ideas, folks? Perhaps a simple .blog, or for the nostalgic, .shit . Maybe in an attempt to attract some slightly nearer and slightly less taken eco-girls to the site, he could go for .italianstallion . The world really is your bivalve mollusc.

If anyone has £100,000 kicking around, and fancies buying me www.littlezoe.wench, I’d be much obliged.

I apologise; that was dreadful. And the post doesn’t even have anything to do with Yorkshire.

I have come to the conclusion that, present company excluded, just about everybody on Ebay is a retard, or just bloody weird.

I’ve had a massive clearout since coming home, and have thus put various old clothes, DVDs, games etc on Ebay, all the while thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have a social conscience and so am happy to make a few quid out of them instead of giving them to a charity shop. And I really, really don’t understand Ebay buyers; they defy all logic.

I’m getting rid of a pair of incredibly garish multi-coloured patchwork corduoroy trousers that even a colourblind hippie whose sense of taste has been surgically removed wouldn’t be seen dead in (to explain, I bought them for £1 a few years ago from a charity shop as a joke to wear one Christmas). About six people furiously tried to outbid each other on them, and some nutter ended up actually paying £26 for them, and I have absolutely no idea why. They truly are dreadful trousers. Conversely, I also sold an absolutely gorgeous blue cocktail dress, that I wept when I outgrew, which eventually went for 99p. ‘What the hell?’ doesn’t even cover it.

Earlier this year, I sold some tickets to Phantom of the Opera in London. Second row seats in the stalls - and the Army decided that my boyfriend absolutely had to go on a course with a name like ‘Pro-active and Dynamic Management With Actionable And Mission-Critical Paradigm Shifts In A Goalable And Profitised Core Competency’ or something. Several deep breaths and counting-to-tens later, they were up for grabs, and shortly won by some bloke called Jason. This ‘Jason’ dude turned out to own a shop selling, shall we say, speciality leatherwear. Given the BDSM undertones (or should that be overtones? Is there even a difference?) of the show, I did feel a little bit funny about that.

What really gets me is the ridiculous questions I get from people. Some woman with all the initiative of wallpaper paste would rather message me to ask if a DVD (of an English film, I might add) had subtitles, and wait a day for a response, when it would have taken her approximately thirty seconds to check for herself on Amazon. Another girl asked me hundreds of complicated questions about whether some jeans I was selling had a certain type of stitching on the hem. It took all the willpower I had not to fire back a scathing reply along the lines of, “You’re buying second-hand clothes from a complete stranger off Ebay (I mean, at least at a car boot sale or something you can check to see whether the person selling them showers regularly), and you’re getting fussy about stitching?”

On a totally irrelevant note (because it doesn’t warrant a post on its own but I wanted to slip it in anyway), I was at a dinner party last night. We played a Jeopardy-style game in which the aim is to come up with the best (though not necessarily most sensible) question for a given answer. I was rather pleased with my winning checkmate of a question to which the answer was “A swimming pool”: “What extra weapon features in the new Michael Barrymore edition of Cluedo?” Heh heh.

And now, the moment you’ve all been dreading: Little Zoë hijacks Taf’s Tune Of The Day Or Week Or However Often He Can be Arsed To Change It. I know you’ve been expecting some godawful piece of jazz that sounds a bit like John Coltrane has stuffed a particularly vicious cat into the mouth of a trombone and then interfered with it. Or worse, some French soft rock.

But rest assured, dear readers, my intentions are no more sinister than to simply raise the standards a little of the music you have previously been subjected to at the hands of that melodic philistine we call Tafkass. Is it so very wrong of me to want to enlighten you, good people, to the dulcet tones and delicate cadences of some real music?

And so, without further ado, I present to you something a little more highbrow than Iron Maiden and their gratuitous and blood-filled depictations of anglo-saxon battles. A little more subtle in its melodies and chord progressions than some chaotic rock song gorging itself on power chords and guitar distortion. Instead, revel in the intricate lyrical beauty of this cantata, this masterpiece that is so celebrated by scholars of music. It is nothing less than Shakespeare in arseless leather trousers.

As you listen to this talented artist’s most famous chef d’oeuvre, note the potent and varied imagery, comparable with such poets as Paul Eluard or Emile Verhaeren. His mellifluous words are tinted with a mournful tone as he expresses so beautifully all the many things in this world his personal attractiveness exceeds; yet, with stoic goodness, he continues to work through such suffering. It is a lesson we could all learn much from.

Every so often, I will find myself singing along to a CD or the radio, and I’ll stop and ask myself what the lyrics actually mean. And invariably, the answer is, “I have no idea, but I bet it’s a load of wang.”

Now, some songs are painfully transparent in their meaning. I love Marvin Gaye like a fat girl loves cake, but it has to be admitted that he is not the most subtle of lyricists. You can be pretty sure that any song he sings will basically be something along the lines of, “Sleep with me. No, really, please sleep with me. Go on. You’ll like it. Honest. Please? Pretty please? It’s got, like, health benefits and everything. Oh, please sleep with me.” And I, y’know, respect that.

But other songs - and there was an influx of it in the sixties and seventies for some reason (almost undoubtedly herbal in nature) - are more oblique than a T.S. Eliot poem written in invisible ink. In Swedish. In the dark.

The classic case of, “What the hell is this song supposed to be about?” is, of course, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’. I will give 10 brand spanking new, dictator-approved, shiny Beneficent Leader points to anyone who can explain the meaning of it to me, and a bonus 5 for anyone who is geeky enough to know why that song always makes me think of mushrooms.

The next contender is ‘Macarthur Park’ by Donna Summer and some bloke whose name I can’t remember and who probably isn’t important anyway. Leaving the infamous ‘cake in the rain’ line to one side, you’d be hard pushed to find a worse and more pointless metaphor than this:

“As we followed the dance between the parted pages and were pressed
In love’s hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants”

Then we have the whiny Jeff Buckley, who thought he’d capitalise on his reclusive genius image with another obscure and vaguely poetic but ultimately meaningless song - surprise, surprise in a minor key - with ‘So Real’. I find it difficult to take any song seriously when it begins with the line, “Love, let me sleep on your couch tonight”.

Last but by no means least, there is the truly nonsensical ‘King Of Rock N Roll’ by Prefab Sprout. My mother always told me not to trust bands named after synthetic vegetables (sound, if unusual, advice), and she was right. “Hotdog, jumping frog, Albuquerque” sounds like an ecstasy-fuelled game of word association to me, not a credible song lyric. The fact that it namechecks a regular Very Poor contributor only slightly redeems it, I’m afraid.

If anyone can tell me what the hell any of these songs are actually about, I’d be grateful. Also, feel free to suggest your own songs with bizarre lyrics. NB: ‘I Am The Walrus’ by The Beatles doesn’t count, as that was deliberately written to flummox an English teacher who had been getting his students to analyse Beatles lyrics.

Picture the scene. Little Zoë is relaxing at home, reading New Scientist magazine*. Ideally, there would also be a number of men in loincloths fanning her with palm leaves, feeding her grapes and dancing for her enjoyment, but unfortunately, this is not the case. Nevertheless. Things will change.

She reads an article on how athletes have started taking Viagra as a performance-enhancing drug as it improves blood flow, especially in high-altitude sports. “Excellent!” she thinks. “I’m sure I can write some pithy** comments on that.” Then she thinks about the readership of Very Poor, and the amount of time before a joke about pole vaulting is made, approximately half a mikasecond***, and decides that it might not be such a good idea after all.

A little while later, she reads the absolutely fascinating study of differing brain structures between homosexuals and heterosexuals, suggesting a physical and genetic factor in homosexuality that is fixed at birth. “Wonderful!” she thinks. “I can blog about that.” Then she is struck with a mental picture of the results of Tafkass and Hotdog the Barbarian discussing this issue, which looks remarkably like the aftermath of Hiroshima, and decides against it. Blood is so difficult to get out of the carpet.

Then, finally, she hits on a goldmine: Real Snail Mail. A couple of students have come up with the idea of using actual snails to carry mail, which can take up to weeks or even months to reach its intended recipient, much like the Royal Mail, only without the cost of a stamp or the bullshitting that, “We promise we won’t lose it/steal it/eat it”. Yes. That ought to about do it. This is El Zee, your favourite friendly world dictator-to-be, bringing you quality blogging about gastropodic epistolary delivery.

(Uh, I believe a, “Come back, Taf, all is forgiven,” is probably appropriate here)

* Just count your lucky stars it wasn’t The Linguist, okay, because it could have been so much worse for you.

** At least in the sense of ‘covered in nasty-tasting white stuff’, if nothing else.

*** The mikasecond is the shortest unit of time heretofore discovered by scientists and is defined as the amount of time needed for nausea to set in once a Mika record begins to play.

It seems that the French might not be the cheese-eating surrender monkeys* we thought them to be. Sure, when it comes to global politics (or any kind of politics, come to think of it), they might have the moral fibre of a thrice-dunked Rich Tea biscuit. Even I, with my incredibly French way of viewing certain issues, raised an eyebrow at Sarkozy’s recent decision to reduce the army by 17%, ostensibly to save money for new and more efficient technology. I mean, I know inflation is sphinctre-tighteningly high at the moment, but how much can a white flag really cost?

All that aside, it must be said that, when it comes to the crunch, the French are good at standing up for what they believe in. We are talking about a nation whose second-favourite pastime, after pétanque, is going on strike. They are certainly not to be sniffed at (assuming you’d ever want to sniff a Frenchman in the first place) when it comes to the really important issues. War on terrorism? Bah. Global warming? Non, merci. Smoking ban? Mais oui, bien sûr!

Across France, ’smokeasies’ are being set up in private flats and advertised, as is the modern custom, on Facebook. A few enterprising individuals are making an absolute killing** by installing extortionately-priced bars in their apartments and charging entrance fees for those who wish the privilege of puffing on their Gitanes from the comfort of an armchair, instead of desperately trying to roll one in the pouring rain with frostbitten fingers. And good luck to them. Customers in bars and cafés have fallen by ten to twenty percent since the smoking ban was imposed, and it’s not difficult to see why. It’s inordinate cruelty to deprive the country who coined the word ‘cigarette’ from actually enjoying them in the social setting they were designed for. Why not go a step further in this gallic torture and ban wine in public places too?

It may come as a surprise to you that, as a non-smoker, I am so vehemently against the smoking ban. Frankly, my reasons are purely selfish. I hate having my night disrupted by fag breaks. The majority of my friends are smokers, and it irritates the hell out of me when, every half an hour or so, they all disappear outside and I’m left by myself, guarding the drinks. The alternative is to go and stand in the cold and wet with them, which isn’t a particularly attractive option either. I understand all the passive smoking arguments, but to be perfectly honest, I’d rather put up with smoke if it means I get to enjoy the uninterrupted company of my friends. Provided they don’t actively blow it in my face, I’m not bothered by it. For those who are, we used to have a little invention called smoking and non-smoking areas.

Vive les français. 

* My lawyers would like to point out that this usage of the word ‘monkey’ was in no way intended to be derogatory to the fine simian population of this blog.

** In more ways than one! Did you see what I did there? Did you? Did you? Aha..ahaha..aha… Oh, forget it. I’m bloody wasted, I am.