Feral Friday Favourites (& Meursault Gigs)
First things first: business, I’m afraid. We are trying to organise a UK tour for Meursault. Given I have never organised a tour before, I thought I might enlist the help of my Toady friends, because you know about the place where you live far better than I do.
Basically, if there is a venue or a promoter in your neck of the woods who you think I should get in touch with, please let me know. We’re just looking for someone who puts on vaguely Toad-friendly lineups in half-decent places and is likely to draw a reasonable crowd. Not massive, of course, but they don’t want to be playing in front of five neds in the local Slug & Lettuce if we can avoid it. The venues don’t have to be massive – 50 would do the trick, as long as it is likely to be quite busy. Basically, you know the kind of gigs myself and my Edinburgh pals go to around here, so if you think you can hook us up with one of those please let me know – no matter if it’s Dundee, Dubai or Droylsden. Well actually, not Dubai, because we can’t afford the air fare. So there we go, if you want to see Meursault appear in a town near you in May, just point me in the right direction and I’ll do the rest.
Now, back to the more serious business of disrupting everyone’s Friday productivity, which I don’t believe for a second was up to much to begin with. Are you all looking forward to our Valentine’s podcast tomorrow? It won’t be pretty, I can promise you that. We will get home, heat up some fine scran, pour a couple of whopping gins and burble our way through an hour of misanthropy and cynicism for your listening pleasure. Fantastic. Then, in the evening, I will leave Mrs. Toad by herself in the house and bugger off out to a gig by myself. Romantic as fuck, aren’t we?
Now, I’ve seen your conversations on Facebook walls, there is no privacy in the 21st Century, so I know there are lurkers out there who can’t quite be arsed to join in.  Well fuck you, get off your lazy backsides and play along! Haven’t you heard of the ancient Chinese proverb which states that ‘Those who do not play nicely with the other Toadlings will not get their hole on Valentine’s Day’. So unless you want to be chasing the witless, pig-ugly, incoherently drunken dregs of humanity around the dancefloor at a quarter to three on Sunday morning peruse our five questions below, mull it over intelligently for a while, and then jump and say something inappropriate and make a tit of yourself. Makes a change from me doing it all the time.
1. Most evil elbow you have given.
2. Most evil elbow you have had.
3. Best Valentines present.
4. Most failed attempt at an exotic sexual practice (chocolate smearing etc).
5. Best single sad sack Valentine’s day.
The Wedding Present – Don’t Take Me Home Until I’m Drunk
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Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash – Girl From the North Country
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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Girl at the Bottom of My Glass
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No Age – My Life’s Alright Without You
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And one for my girl, because she fucking loves this song, and always reaches for this one first when we start playing vinyl in the evening:
Stiff Little Fingers – Alternative Ulster
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1. Generally, I just stop calling. But once I was walking back to my block of flats with girl I was seeing, and she kept stopping and saying that she wasn’t going to walk any further if I didn’t stop being mean to her. It was kind of getting on my tits, so when she did it again, ten yards from the door, I just went inside and let the door close behind me and left her stood out there. Never did hear from her again, now that I think about it.
2. My first really serious girlfriend dumped me for a blond, German Elvis impersonator called Boris. Not a word of a lie. Still it worked wonders for my confidence because, face it, everything’s going to just get better from there.
3. Mrs. Toad’s total indifference, nay outright hostility, towards the whole shooting match.
4. I can’t do dirty talk. I’ve been out with a lot of girls who’ve liked it, but I find the whole practise too fucking silly to be sexual. Struggling to keep a straight face does not improve that sort of thing, apparently.
Oh, and I tried the whole ‘coming on a girl’s face’ thing with a girlfriend once. That was crap. Instead of looking like a degraded whore, which the porn movies tell me is the point, she just looked royally unimpressed. The look on her face was so funny I just couldn’t face trying again, because it still makes me laugh just thinking about it. Best kept for debauched one-night stands, that one, I think.
5. Erm, bottle of gin, bucket of limes, thimble of tonic, stack of vinyl, spare speakers in case yours melt, and no neighbours – perfect.
I spent my 18th birthday alone in a hostel, watching telly and munching my way through a packet of ginger biscuits. It wasn’t Valentine’s, but it was quite sad.
Fucking hell, that turned into an essay!
It’s so quiet.
I miss Tom.
Under normal circumstances I would insist on your Friday 5 before you start making remarks, Barticles, but today it appears that we’re in no position to be making demands around here.
1. Nothing that evil, just blind ignoring calls and the sorts.
2. A girl broke up with me while we were having sex. I’m not sure if it was because of the sex but I can report back that I’ve got a lot better.
3. I have only ever recieved shit presents, I even got a jamiroquai album once, that relationship didn’t last. I’m pretty lucky that my lass couldn’t care less about Valentines day.
4. Not sure, I once got a terrible blowjob that made my willy all sore and red.
5. I spent one valentines day with my dad watching fucking mr bean. It was a low point.
What was it – like – off a goose?!
That sentence is even funnier if you swap a few of the words around!
I have no idea what the deal was I just remember thinking ah this is a bit sore, just try to ignore it, a bad blowjob is better than none.
How wrong I was.
The sentence is funnier swapped around and makes the “it was a low point” part really apt.
1. I have tried both ignoring them or being honest and frank, both are pretty brutal. Lying doesn’t work – I once told a girl that I was going travelling only to bump into her a few weeks later in a pub.
2. Despite having being a total cunt a lot of the time, haven’t been dumped, yet..
3. I dunno. Herpes. not really though.
4. That asphyxiation thing that did in Michael Hutchence, when my gran found me, she just didny get it.
5. Came home to a shared flat i lived in a few years ago to find that one of my flatmates had been dumped, he was pretty cut up and in a drunken stupor wearing a kids plastic bicycle helmet (the ones with the plastic visor) a very strange night was to follow.
“I once told a girl that I was going travelling only to bump into her a few weeks later in a pub.”
Clapclapclapclap!
Jamiroquai is an instant dumpable offence. With the possible exception of Toploader there is nothing more stomach churningly appaling to find in a woman’s music collection. Ack.
Dav, do you think she was considering not chucking you, and decided mid-coitus that all that grunting and sweating just wasn’t worth it?
By the way, Dylan & Bart, unless you two have never interacted with a woman in your lives, you both get yellow cards for commenting without fivesing. Jump to it, young men, jump to it.
The basic problem with these questions is that the Edinburgh alt.folk scene isn’t going to reveal rather private and intimate details about past relationships and sexual escapades to the public at large via the internet.
it only ever does that through song.
I thought you would have understood this by now.
Not least because you’d all end up ratting out someone you know as an abominable pervert.
Mind you, most folk only moved here in the last four years, so it can’t go back all that far.
I’ve already said too much.
It’s valentine’s day tomorrow too. You lot are all so unromantic.
1. I finished with somebody at a valentine’s day party. I also managed to generally just be quiet and sullen until she had to say ‘you’re finishing with me aren’t you’ instead of having to take any sort of initiative myself.
2. Nah, it’s always been fairly straightforward. Although once a year or so after being dumped I met her at a party where she was busy with her new woman.
3. The one I just made.
4. I could claim that a very very very very long ‘outside late at night’ session was evidence of marvelous stamina and all but really it was just about being very cold (it was new years eve) and very drunk
5. It’s been a long long while. A general beer/food/film/football kind of setup probably prevailed.
1. deserves considerable praise. You bastard!
Is it Valentine’s as well as Wales v. England?!
Can we have a separate Friday Five all about rugby?
No.
Go on..
One question could be:
Where do you think Dylan’s Wales shirt is after last weekend?
Maybe we’ll find it that way!
One question would be: does anyone give a shit about rugby, and after everyone answered no to that, the other four would be somewhat superfluous.
1.Got very drunk in a nightclub and ended up in a clinch with someone who wasn’t my boyfriend, who was there though. Genuine error.
2.Text message – not necessarily evil, but really really cowardly. Be a man for crying out loud! Cowardliness should be one of the seven sins if it is not already.
3. a home made card with a tube of smarties – back when romance was made of simple things.
4.I’ll go with the outside one too – it’s such a beautiful, romantic concept. In reality it’s all nettles, stones and people walking dogs.
5.Valentines Day is essentially a marketing ploy – if I want to be sad and sit in the flat with a case of red wine and some terrible terrible chick movie where the lead always ends up with the guy no matter how dull/geeky/ugly/annoying she is, and mutter incoherently at the TV, I’ll do it at my leisure, not because some saint was martyred years ago …
Actually, there is a dark side to Valentine’s day falling in conjunction with a Six Nations weekend.
There a lot of wives and girlfriends of Scottish rugby fans who are – even as we speak – getting excited after being promised a romantic weekend in Paris with their men, but failing to realise that all they’re going to see of their men tomorrow are their naked be-kilted arses waving in the air as they throw up in the gutter again next to 100,000 other rugby fans!
1. I’ve done that in the past. Top bastard points!
Are we just a website populated by Valentine’s haters? Does anyone have anything nice to say about the bloody thing?
Now, even I can enjoy that!
It’s like a Valentines Day power struggle between Matthew trying to keep on topic with Dylan grasping his ankles trying to get people talking about rugby. i think everyone else has logged off!
Sorry – i missed Matthew giving in and talking about rugby – kind of
That wasn’t just about rugby. It was quite a good compromise actually.
Or the other way that conversation could have gone..
“Alright, love. I’ve made bookings to go to Paris for Valentine’s Day, how about that?!”
“Oh, darling! You are romantic. I love you so much! kiss-smooch-cuddle”
“Hang on. You’re not coming.”
That could be a good answer to number one for someone, actually!
Actually, I’m submitting that for all five questions!
That would be world championship bastardry.
1. You would never believe me, so I’m staying schtum.
2. This could be an essay, but I’ll keep it brief: I discovered she was sleeping with someone else – the someone else turned out to be 3 other people (all oblivious to the others); confronted she disappeared only to return the next night while I was out & cleared the place out with a help of her friends; I then discovered she had stolen £2,500.00 from my bank account (by faking signatures & getting a bank card);(for months she’d been preempting the situation by feeding them all stories that I was a right fucking bastard, so they immediately thought I was the bad guy in this, so…) her warren of friends hid her from my efforts to find her & retrieve money, which led to her accusing me of harassment & I was arrested (on a Christmas Eve!) & questioned for 7hrs before being bailed & having the case referred to the CPS for prosecution; I waited until end of following January before police informed me the CPS dropped the charges entirely & I received a formal apology from the police for false arrest; she became the subject of an investigation into theft & bank fraud & wasting police time, but she fled to Hong Kong (where she still lives) & is now on the Scotland Yard absconder list; I never got my money back.
3. Bareback anal (giving not receiving)*
4. Scene setter: 17, my best friend & I cooked a meal for his girlfriend & her friend (who I wanted to ‘get off’ with) – except we didn’t; his father had cooked everything & delivered it to us at my house before they girls turned up… Denouement: week later the girlfriend & friend invited my best friend & I to her place as they had cooked us a meal in return, only they got pissed in the process & burnt everything. Being gentlemen we decided to eat it anyway (it was grim), after which my friend & his GF ‘went upstairs’ leaving me with ‘my’ lady. She led me outside to a small footbridge over a stream &, in the moonlight, leant in, doubled up & puked all over herself. Righted herself & then planted one on me. Yummy.
5. (I rarely pay any attention to it).
*that’s the jokey answer.
Bareback Anal?
Wasn’t that a cowboy movie with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall?
It’s a rugby term Dylan. Surprised you don’t know it.
Someone has sent me an anonymous secret answer to #4: spray cheese. Spray fucking cheese? Christ!
Spray Cheese: it’s a lesbian thing, whereby the participants feel like they’re canoodling near a man part. Ask Tart.
No, Mr. Dyran, that was Oklahomo
I had to read all these things to figure out what elbow is! Speak English ffs!
1. Invited to her birthday party, arrived with flowers, whisked into the kitchen and told the “other woman” was in the living room! Ouch.
2. Only ever did this badly once and that was well deserved as he thought I was worth pushing around (a one time occurance a d he regretted it!). He came home to a breakup note and all of his belongings on sidewalk (half having been thrown there from second story window) hehehe
3. Treasure hunt with the lovely M. Chutney in lace sprawled on the bed as the prize.
4.
I am not at all convinced I want to hear Tart’s answer to #4.
Dangit!
4. A ridiculous episode involving a paddle, cling wrap, and a webcam.
5. I hate VDay
A ridiculous episode involving a paddle, cling wrap, and a webcam. – can we have the Youtube url for that one?
Oh DC, no. Think of the cost in lost mystique.
From X-men? She’s involved too? I definitely want to see the tape then.
Jesus wept.
He’s in it as well?! Was it his second coming? (boom tish)
Now I don’t just need a pint. Now I need a fucking gin enema for my brain.
It’s certainly a picture: Tart, McChutters, Mystique (as anyone they request) & our Lord the Little Baby Jesus; all cling filmed up & paddling for moicy. Amen.
(or should that be Ahh… men!)
WITH cheese whiz
cannodle that one fellas!
1) A girl asked me what we were doing next week and I said ‘sorry, but I have to move to America’. She was surprised.
2) Never had a bad one of these. I married my first proper girlfriend. Although this means that I could write a list of answers to number five a mile bloody long.
3) Dinner. Always wins. It’ a nice excuse for a posh dinner.
4) Sorry, not writing this. Mum reads this blog.
5) I always do shows on Valentines day so my wife has to come to them alone. My Dad took her once because he felt so bad. I’m crap.
Oh, and I tried the whole ‘coming on a girl’s face’ thing with a girlfriend once. That was crap. Instead of looking like a degraded whore, which the porn movies tell me is the point, she just looked royally unimpressed. The look on her face was so funny I just couldn’t face trying again, because it still makes me laugh just thinking about it. Best kept for debauched one-night stands, that one, I think.
How did I miss that paragraph the first time around??? Damn my fucking iphone, grrrr… Well, all I have to add to that is that admitting one’s inadequacies is a rather good thing in and out of the sack. Quite endearing as well, gave me a chuckle here! xoxo
P.S. if you don’t really get off on er, facing it, don’t fucking offer, duh :-p
Darling, I love you so much I’m prepared to emigrate to avoid you.
Cheese Whizz – the golden shower you can eat!
P.S. if you don’t really get off on er, facing it, don’t fucking offer, duh :-p
She may not have, Tarticles, but I don’t think she knew that at the time. First times etc etc.
1. My friend and I once went out with twins. I guess we thought it was funny or some shit. Anyway, they were both assholes but that doesn’t matter when you are 15. What did matter is that they tried to take us bowling with all their mates one night.
Have you seen those fucking stinky rented clown shoes you have to wear? Deeply uncool. We ran away while they were changing, went to a gay nightclub on the Champs Elysees, sniffed poppers and got weird on the dancefloor. Bowling. Fuck me.
2. I take getting dumped extremely personally. I could have been trying to pull the trigger for weeks but if a guy cans me, suddenly he’s Brad Pitt and I’m Glen Close complete with rabbit and pan. So I have been dumped many times. But they aren’t around to talk about it.
3. Nothing. I am indifferent to the whole shit. its just another consumer ostentation performance hoop to jump through.
4. I once was bought high length kinky patent boots by a chap. Now, I quite liked them in abstract. But anyone who gets off on licking Ann Summers £49.99 patent boots really can inspire some loathing by the time they slobber their way to knee height. Luckily, these are the sort of people who ENJOY being kicked, abused and rejected.
5. My worst Valentines days have been ones IN a relationship where it was early doors and there was a big deal made of it. Now, I firmly believe in my thirties that the twenties are age days of conforming. I deeply regret the days of troughing a nervous steak in a packed tense restaurant before going home and strapping into a lacy concoction preparatory to thinking of England in some suitably athletic fashion to mark the day.
Every February 14, horrendous, heaving, humping Britain. Gasping, smooching and most importantly spending our way through the sole Saint’s Day that has survived the reformation, subsequent persecution and wholesale state rejection of Catholicism.
Isn’t it odd how the only Pagan holidays that survive are those involving presents (Valentines is an extension of a Pagan fertility rite ultimately)?
Notably, those that celebrate comradeship, heroism, sacrifice and sharing such as May Day or the Armistice are just called Bank Holidays. Theres no cash in that shit.
You have to question a society that celebrates love through consumption. Perhaps the ultimate perversion but hardly one to crack a joke about.
Ok, so I’ll buckle to the peer pressure of the technological age. Although, most everyone else is probably in the pub at this point – stupid time difference.
1. I once dumped a guy via email. However, a friend of mine once told some drunk kid who was hitting on her that she was studying to be a nun, and therefore couldn’t go out with him. Maybe not evil per se, but pretty hilarious.
2. Well, I technically did the dumping, but I found out later that my long-term boyfriend cheated on me with an overweight self-harmer. They’re getting married next spring, I believe.
3. A book of Ben Folds piano music. I probably even still have it, somewhere.
4. Going along with the outdoors theme – beaches are not as fun as they sound. The sand, the sand… *shudder*
5. Watching TV alone while my then boyfriend was playing Magic: The Gathering with his friends. I got a potted plant exactly one month later as a gift.
I do love all the adverts that start with
“If you love her…”, “show your love with…”, “show her you care…”
That said, my wife has a cheesy cards fetish that at this point has become endearing.
The female version of those ads tries to persuade you that, unless your man has just mortgaged both your futures for a $30,000 diamond necklace that you can wear to two functions per annum, he is probably shagging someone on the side or wishes he was.
True love says it with diamonds these days apparently. Staying awake long enough afterwards for a cuddle used to suffice.
Mrs. Toad, why would you be thinking of England? You’re Irish.
Dylan,
I’m half Irish. The other half is from the shit end of Fife, specifically the sort of ex-mining village where people publically wrestle with their Dobermans for amusement, so you just watch it.
BTW – you deffo had your rugger shirt when you left here, in a cab. Which begs the question, what the hell happened after you got out of the cab home?
And why did you think it was a good idea to down glasses of neat Genever (Dutch gin)?
Okay you win!
Please never mention the genever again..
It is disgusting stuff. I am pouring it down the fucking sink. You will be safe.
bit late sorry.
1. got my mate to phone her on christmas day and say “your dumped”.
2. moved to the other side of the fucking world!
3. on saturday my girlfriend let me cancel our valentines meal because i was too hungover to keep seafood down and didnt moan once.
4. ever try and make your own film and realise your just not very physically attractive?
5. every single fucking one.
1. Just stopped answering calls and rubbering them every time I saw them in the street etc. (Non Scots see number 4 here http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rubber)
2. Finally realised it was over when he was spotted snogging his new girlfriend in the street outside my house
3. I hate valentines but a now ex BF did buy me a day racing a Lotus Elise round Silverstone race track…..I loved every fucking minute of that one, even with a speed limiter on them they are as fast as a bastard and shag the road
4. Couldn’t conjure up the good manners not to cry with laughter and derision when the fluffy handcuffs came out
5. I just try my best to ignore the whole ridiculous stupidity of it. Where I live, this year they organised a whole weekend of activities for singles to “forget that they are single and meet other singles” Cunts!
“forget that they are single and meet other singles”
As if anything could be better designed to achieve the precise opposite!
“ever try and make your own film and realise your just not very physically attractive?”
No, but someone whose house I was living in did once. Even though I only caught a glimpse of the film before fleeing the room at pace, the sight of his pudgy, pudding-textured body flopping about on top of some poor, desperate, mousy woman has never ceased to terrify me to this day.