Suicide And Cheese: Part 3

That evening was the first night in my life that I cried.  The next evening was the second night in my life that I cried.  The third evening wasn’t without its share of tears either.  My eyes were as red as Babybell wax and my cheeks were so salty that crystallised formations were beginning to form on my face.  Breaking off one of the stalactites and crushing it onto my chips, I realised that I couldn’t continue like this.  That’s when I decided to take my own life.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that to commit suicide is the cowards way out, that it is an act of weakness.  Well, let me assure you that taking my own life was probably the most daunting task I’ve ever attempted.  After all, there was a significant chance that I might miss tomorrow’s episode of Jeremy Kyle.  Regardless, I rallied my strength, fetched a large pile of newspapers and my faithful lynching rope from the garage, and began to set up my deadly apparatus in the bathroom.

As I stood atop my newspaper pillar with a noose loosely dangling around my shoulders, I inhaled deeply as I prepared for my short drop and stop.  Since this was the last breath I’d be taking, I decided it had to be a good one and I wanted to enjoy it.  As my lungs filled with oxygen, my mind began to fill with the faces of my loved ones, past conquests, and fire breathing dinosaurs that I thought would be awesome.  Once my chest was as full as it could get without implants, I opened my eyes, looked down at my destination, and lifted my foot in readiness.

Just then, I noticed something printed on the newspaper underfoot that caught my attention.  It stopped me in my tracks and, frankly, it saved my life that day.  I’d spotted a discount coupon giving me half price entry to Alton Towers.

As I started to loosen my noose and tried to remember where my scissors were, I noticed an article next to the coupon about The Big Cheese Society.  It was an interview with Herman Whiff in which he reviewed last year’s annual Cheese Fair, declaring it to be a success.  I reread the interview and I was repulsed to find that Herman was being depicted as a decent, upstanding gentleman and a pillar of the community.  This immediately angered me.  If only they knew the real Herman; the squandering, bestiality-indulging, glutton that he was.  An inferno was opening up in my stomach as I ruminated on this, so much so that I had to drink a whole bottle of Gaviscon to calm it down.  It did little to quench the intense flames of revenge that were burning within me, spreading across my internal forecourt and getting perilously close to the petrol pumps of my heart.

It was somewhere around this point that I decided not to kill myself.  Besides, you can’t really take your own life, if you think about it.  I mean, how can you take something that already belongs to you?  At least, that’s what my stoner brother once told me.  I didn’t kill myself that day, but to appease Karma, a life had to be taken.

I had to kill the president.  Now there’s something you don’t get a second shot at.

It would be difficult to gain access to the Cheese Halls again, especially after the way in which I was ejected, so a plan would have to be hatched.  First of all, I needed a method in which kill Herman, something fitting, ironic and subtle.  Perhaps I could feed him curdled milk, or get a bull to gore him behind a stable.  I couldn’t think of a way in which to enact such plans, so I decided I’d turn to the Internet for answers.

Now, I’m not much of a computer user, but I do remember managing to knock up some rather fetching posters for the annual Cheese Fair last year on a computer.  They featured a large photograph of me guzzling gorgonzola and were pretty spectacular.  Anyway, I’d heard that an Internet resource named Mr Google would be able to find anything I wanted.  I typed in “Dear Mr Google, I require your assistance on finding ways to kill the president.  Hope to hear from you soon”.  I was surprised to find that it found 1,793,000 results in 0.073 seconds, which seems a tad faster than second class post.  Anyway, after doing a lot of research on various message boards, I decided that the best way to deal with this was a good, clean stabbing.  Perhaps this method of dispatch was a little bit more visceral than I’d originally intended, but you don’t have to buy anything special and the weapon is rather easy to dispose of or plant on someone else.  Time and cost were big factors in my decision.

So, after selecting a suitably large knife (a cheese knife that the society had gifted to me last Christmas), I settled down on the sofa and decided to hatch my plan, in between the ad breaks of course.  It occurred to me that the next Cheese Fair was only two weeks away, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to catch Herman away from the safety of his cheddar-laced sanctuary.  Revenge would surely taste like a particularly mature Red Devil; fiery hot and dripping with sin.

Suicide And Cheese: Part 1

To whoever may read this,

Please take this as a full and frank confession.  The events that you are about to read are as true and accurate as I can recall.  Night after night of trying to erase these memories with Toilet Duck have left my recollection slightly hazy, but the main details I believe to be accurate.  I hope that this declaration never sees the light of day whilst I am still alive.

You see, dear reader, this is a story of triumph to tragedy; of morals to mortality; of prestige to pauperism.  It is the story of how I went from being an esteemed man of integrity, to the underhanded and deceitful husk I am today.  It involves an underground society that I was party to, and my shameful dismissal from which ruined my life.

The Big Cheese Society was my entire world.  The society, in simpler times, used to be known under the less gaudy moniker of Curdled Dairy Appreciators Anonymous.  That is, until a major incident in our history forced the necessary name change.  Back in the 50’s, our members used to wear yellowish-white hoods with sacred swiss cheese holes.  We then used to advance through poorer communities in order to spread the good word of cheese.  Since our group consisted mainly of part timers with lives and jobs, the rallies were conducted in the evenings to fit around employment commitments.  As such, lit torches were often carried to see in the bleakness of the night.  Unfortunately, another group who called themselves “The Klan” planned a demonstration on the same night, and the Curdled Dairy Appreciators Anonymous ended up being tarred (and feathered) with the same brush, and pricked with the same pitchfork.

After this disgrace, a young upstart in the organisation led a coup, wrestling control from the former president, changing the society’s name, and installing himself as head honcho.  His name was Herman Whiff.

Herman was a talented cheese genius in his youth.  He could identify subtle nuances in a gorgonzola that simply could not be rivalled.  His palette was more finely tuned than an autistic piano played by Exact Van Pinpoint, the famous musical perfectionist.  When I first joined the society, I had the honour of selecting a new cheese for Herman to taste, while blindfolded, to which he would guess correctly and elaborate on its age.  I chose a rather nutty Reblochon which I thought might catch him out.  Not only did he identify it correctly, he also asked for an Atlas, and drew the exact location where the nuts had been grown.  His talent was astonishing.

Sadly enough, he was also one of life’s squanderers.  He was the type of person who, if he was lost in the woods with 7 other people and he was put in charge of the food supply, he’d have scoffed the rations in a private banquet on the first night, and by morning would be mopping up the remnants of his colleagues with a slice of crusty bread.  Naturally, with all this power and talent, he soon started using his status in foolish and reckless ways.  In the early days of his reign, the drinking and lewd behaviour wasn’t quite so apparent.  However, when he tried to snort a line of blow off of the vice-president’s youngest daughter’s naked backside during a public tasting display, it became too difficult to ignore.

How I envied Herman.  I despised his fat lips, the pop-eyed, rotund, git!  As I watched him age, slowly becoming more and more haggard from the drink, drugs and brie, I started to detest every aspect of his sickening physique and behaviour.  His years of cheese consumption had left him with a waistline that would instil jealousy in a Japanese Sumo, and he had a laugh that sounded like the death rattle of a walrus that was drowning in custard.  Yet, despite these hatefully grotesque attributes, he always came out on top in any given situation.  As an esteemed member of the society, he always had his pick of the ladies.  Women seemed inexplicably drawn to him as though he existed solely on a diet of magnets.  It must have been the whole power thing that made him irresistible.

Over the years, I myself also started to garner the approval of my fellow enthusiasts.  After a particularly tough taste challenge in which I nailed Julian Kenworth 11-9 (I can’t believe he failed to identify a moist Munster!), I found myself elected into the Elites, a subgroup within the organisation who decided and voted on matters of importance to the society.  Being part of the Elite Four was not only a privilege, but it came with a £10 voucher for the cheese counter at the local supermarket.  I still have that voucher, and although that supermarket closed five years ago, I will pass it on to my grandchildren.

The Elites answered directly to the vice president who chaired the meetings, who was then underneath Herman as President.  For a few months I was content with my new position and the newfound respect that came with it.  Making the new members cower as I came towards them with the Initiation Dildo of Cheese will always be a particular highlight.  My skill in this field eventually led to my promotion to Vice President within the year, after the previous VP was fired for eating Primula cheese.  This is the most blasphemous act that can be conducted in our society!  Nevertheless, his shameful exit led to the most glorious day of my existence; the day I was sworn in as Vice President, and the vow I gave to believe in the cheese, denounce the lactose intolerant, and spit on vegans in the street.

To say I was pleased with my promotion was an understatement.  My unbridled adulation was so vibrant that I was voted “happiest man in the world” by Time magazine for that year.  Well, by Time magazine I actually mean a pull out supplement in The Tumbridge-Wells Times, but that’s close enough for me.

Unfortunately enough, my sub-reign was all too short, less than a few weeks in fact.  I was to be knocked off my ivory perch by a man more vile than an ambergris sandwich.  You can probably guess to whom I refer.

Brain Shits - Vol.2

I decided to try another Brain Shit.  I hope these are as much fun to read as they are to write.  As before, this is completely uneditted apart from spelling corrections and addition of a few images:

Have you heard the saying “Oh, if these walls could talk!”? Why?  What if these walls could talk? What are you expecting them to say? Perhaps they’ll fully educate you on 13th century French philosophy, whilst discussing Sandra from the office and her bingo wings. Maybe they’ll tell you all the latest gossip from the latest UN summit on third world debt. “Boy, the German ambassador has gotten faaaat!”

I imagine that if walls could talk, they’d threaten us. They know that we can’t really fight back. Seriously, try punching the next wall that smart talks you and you’ll end up with a broken fist and a night in an asylum. Plus, we can’t take out the wall because the building would fall down. It’d be like having a floorless disco.

They're wathcing me

I had a friend who tried to live his life without floors. That was the fastest New Year’s Resolution to get broken in the history of the world. He made the papers and everything. Unfortunately, he felt so ashamed about the whole thing that he tried to commit suicide. He wanted to throw himself off a 30 storey building, but he couldn’t find one, so he threw himself off of a 2 storey building 15 times. I felt sad watching him drag his broken carcass back upstairs to fling himself off again and again, but like a wildlife cameraman, I felt I couldn’t interfere with the forces of nature. Instead I filmed it and sent it off to the BBC. I met David Attenborough who did the voiceover for it. He gave me a Werther’s Original and a rare cane toad found only in Papua New Guinea.

I named the toad Samson. You know, after that guy who got all his strength from his hair. It’s ironic because he doesn’t have any hair, being an amphibian. But then, it turned out not to be ironic because the toad was physically weak, like a withered shrub. He couldn’t leap more than 0.5 millimetres and suffered with bronchitis. In the end I had to put him down; I was so sick of carrying him around. He didn’t do much better on the floor, and died shortly afterwards.

This had me contemplating death for the next few minutes. What happens after we die? After my granddad died, we went and had a few sandwiches, then some people cried and we all went home again. But what happens to the person who dies? My girlfriend doesn’t like me discussing this at the dinner table as it’s morbid, but I want to know how much flesh a single maggot can consume in order to calculate decomposition times.

A young Heston Blumenthal tries to fix his car with liquid nitrogen

Speaking of breaking things down, my father once had a break down. His car stalled on the M1, and the constant rush of traffic as he waited 6 hours for the AA to arrive made him have a nervous break down too. Unfortunately, there’s no recovery service for that kind of break down. When I tried to get him covered by the RAC, they asked what make and model he was, and I said “He’s bald and a terrible role model. I once caught him eating biscuits before dinner!”. The man said I should never call back again, but I did call again later that day, wearing a fake moustache. This time I spoke to a lady who said she’d be happy to cover my dad, or perhaps I’d like to cover her in Maple Syrup instead. I told her I don’t like to mix sweet and savoury, and hung up.

Shortly afterwards I watched George Alagiah’s Dastardly Flying Machines. It’s a reality show in which the news reader is sent into a surreal cartoon set during the war, and he tries to stop a carrier pigeon delivering messages with his asthmatic pooch. It wasn’t that good. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to vote anyone off via a premium rate phone number.