ALIAS POOR YORICK

Fuchsia, Arpeggio ... come here immediately. I'm appalled. I ask you two to plate up and you barely even show up. Not in any real culinary sense. What is this ? Huh ? What is it supposed to be ? Call this zabaglione ? This is rubbish. This lacks spiritual and structural integrity, and metaphysically it's just a mess. Zabaglione should taste like the sweat off an angel's neck. This ..... Unspeakable. I'm sorry but you'll both have to go. Pack your bags  and get out. FUCHSIA & ARPEGGIO:  But Daddy, we're only eight years old Eight ? Don't make this any worse. Young Cordelia Smith-Jones. Perfect profiteroles. What is she ? Six ? Can barely pronounce profiteroles, but she shows up and she plates up. Like a proper child. Go on, get out ! FUCHSIA & ARPEGGIO:  But Daddy ... After everything we've done . I could weep. Your mother and I took you to elBulli in utero. You'd both eaten $900 worth of squid-ink ice-cream before you were born.  Now...

Happy days; Dr Geoff "Hepcat" Edelstein has found our email address on the back of an old Gucci wrapper & sends this thought - If you still think money can't buy happiness, you're just not shopping at the right place What can we say. Conspicuous consumption, my friends, is not for the faint-of-heart or the feeble-minded. Okay. Well. It's not for the faint-of-heart.

Now if I can be perfectly honest about this ( there's nothing like a change) I love a good weasel word myself. Frankness is a laudable quality in communication, but it can get messy. And you know that's going to happen when someone says "Don't take this the wrong way, but .. " There's the first clue. Nothing good ever comes after "but". ..I love you madly but I've been having sex with your sister & her friend Gunther. And their goat . Who, by the way, is very fond of you and feels intensely guilty about the whole thing. As do I. Well maybe not intensely, but definitely guilty. For sure. Should I shut up now? Okay. Yes . What are you doing with that knife ? But back to "Don't take this the wrong way...."  Here's a thought : put it a different way. "Don't take this the wrong way ... leads to "I've always loathed you, your children are ugly and stupid. and your wife is the spawn of Satan"  And I alwa...

I say, I say, I say ... Who was that lady I saw you with last night ? That was no lady, that was a friend of mine called Gunther who's decided to live his life as a woman. He's going through a particularly difficult gender-reassignment & I was offering him a shoulder to cry on. We went down to the Elephant & Hearing Aid and heard about  about this really good support group. Now we're both addicted to spiced-apple chai, and I still haven't found how to get mascara stains off the shoulder of my shirt.

              I'm a man of small ambitions: I'd like to see a Persian carpet shop have a 'closing down' sale, and then actually close. I'd like to see America admit that the real reason it's in Afghanistan is because "it looked funny at them" in the pub. I'd like to see the PM, faced with an awkward question during a TV interview, just go "Look ! A giraffe !" and run away Friends, work with me;  we can make this happen. Legislation. Whatever it takes. Let's make ourselves a promise that by 2020 no child need ever have to say "That's my Dad over there. The white guy with dreadlocks" I want a t-shirt that reads "Fountaingate: where the weak are killed and eaten" I want to see music writers required to sign an agreement that they will never refer to a band as having "visceral intensity" when what they mean is the band plays really f-----g loud. I'd like to see increased respect for the ...

We are in the back bar of the Elephant & Hearing Aid where Moses is drinking gimlets with an Australian film producer while they discuss plans to film an all-new version of the Ten Commandments. And yes we know for a fact that Moses drinks gimlets because we looked it up. No, silly, not the Bible. Wikipedia. Moses is becoming frustrated because the producer is insisting that ten commandments is way too many and is going to slow down the action. He thinks five is plenty. And "commandments" is a bit control-freak. Couldn't they be like you know .. "directions" ? Moses insists no, that's it. There's Ten Commandments. End of story. The producer stamps his foot and says "Look, it's not like this is all carved in stone, is it" Moses starts laughing and the producer retreats to the bar for more drinks. We zoom in on Moses phone as he texts: God you old bastard. You invented irony without telling me. LOL. Moses

An Irishman, an Australian, and an Englishman walk into the front bar of the Elephant & Hearing Aid. The barman asks them what they want to drink and the Irishman says "You know I'm really sick of all this racial stereotyping". The Englishman agrees and the Australian says "And you know what else, I don't even know why we're in the pub again: I'm getting worried about how much I drink" . So they all go to a nearby bistro and enjoy a nice spiced apple chai. The barman turns up and complains that he was there at the beginning of the joke but now he has nothing to do. The four men decide to form a support group and develop an interactive theatre piece referencing their search for identity as individuals and as a collective & to try an find a punchline for the joke. They apply for an Australia Council grant to stage the production and the vote is swayed in their favour when the Englishman says "And one of us could be a trans-gender pole ...