iPhone 5 Kylie App Fail

Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook has apologised today, saying he is ‘Really very sorry’ for the lamentable failure of the iPhone 5 in regards to its Kylie service. The continuing war between different phone providers, to provide an increasingly silly phone to replace a previous phone they had sold that could almost certainly still phone people, already hit headlines earlier this year when in keeping with the beliefs of the late Steve Jobs Apple took a holistic approach to their services. Caught between the burning need for every Apple product - and the products applications as regards crystal healing, candle magic, and aromatherapy - Apple sales dropped sharply as no small part of its target market combusted in screaming, divided rage.

The latest launch (intended to top the Android’s selling point of its Sporty Spice in every box) boasted a grinning Kylie app but Apple has been unable to fulfil demand leading to an often faulty Kylie. Users led to expect a fully working Agent Provocateur Kylie blowing a strand of damp hair from her forehead have reported instead a Neighbours-era Kylie that has widely been condemned as being ‘really, just annoying’.

Probably The Casual Vacancy Outrage

Reviewers have almost certainly slammed J. K. Rowling’s new novel The Casual Vacancy today. Rowling, the author of a series of children’s books aimed at children, having finished that series of children’s books aimed at children (and similarly having probably dared to write something else) is very likely coming under criticism by journalists who want to have done that too.

            The Harry Potter series has long been criticised by adults for its flaws, most especially concerning the way it seemed be a series of children’s books written for children. Coming under flak for being about a child that discovers magic and does magical things in a children’s book written for children, adults have long been upset about Rowling’s inclusion of a wizard with a beard. The most common criticism however relies of the admittedly farcical assertion that in a public school with elves and magic there is absolutely no mention at all of progressive rock music. This damning indictment of the series (whilst being only slightly ahead of whining about there being a villain, that is dark, and uses dark magic, in a series about children doing magic in a children’s story written for children) has probably led to adults now complaining that Rowling’s book most likely contains nothing of the sort.

            Maybe in newspapers today J. K. Rowling has been condemned for her latest novel, not a children’s book written for children, for thinking she is better than reviewers by writing something else.

            Probably.

Cheltenham Militia For Gentlewomen

Today is the 70^th anniversary of the formal closure of the Cheltenham Militia For Gentlewomen.

            Founded some fourteen years previous to that from various other bodies that had previously competed, overlapped and in two cases fought an especially nasty exchange in what was then known as the Battle of the Spa, the CMFG came about when women of good breeding, of good blood, or of a suitably sporting nature put aside their differences under a single extremely well made banner. Comprised of experienced adventurers, two soldiers, a noted Arctic explorer and members of the then recently disbanded militant wing of the Women’s Institute the CMFG courted scandal in an age when women were only, at best, supposed to be the power behind their men. In a spirit of solidarity all women were allowed to advance a petition for membership (save for those considered wet, weedy, tedious, soppy, or given to fits of giggles at the expense of their own gender).

            Members were expected to drink wine like a Spaniard, shoot like a German, dance like an Italian, eat like a Frenchy, but most importantly bluster like a Britain. They proudly defended the rights of women to indulge in extremely expensive under things but with a caveat that all such garments were better served cushioning skirts of stout tweed or britches of a corduroy twirl. Their skill at needlepoint and a well baked bun was famously judged in comparison with their accuracy with a service revolver. Whilst certain segments of society mocked them, it is true to say not for very long. A letter from the CMFG weighed heavier than an elephant, and they bagged a few elephants so as to make sure.

            When in 1940 Antony Eden called for men to join the then Local Defence Volunteers (soon thereafter to be renamed the Home Guard) the CMFG was amongst the first to step forward. Such was the power of the body that no one really wanted to say no. They absorbed and spread until by 1942 had taken on such numbers that they were amalgamated more formerly as the Women’s Auxiliary Balloon Artillery, members of which continued to serve at the front until 1947 (two years after the formal cessation of war, but only when they were themselves convinced).

            The CMFG is little known about nowadays although I hear that in tearooms and certain haberdashers it never entirely went away.    

Mitchell And The Pleb

Senator Davidius Mitchell has come under fire in recent days for allegedly referring to one of the Praetorian Guard as a ‘Pleb’. Mitchell more commonly known for his flat dead eyes, scathing wit, and the controversial term he spent as the Legate of the Xth Legion facing down Sextus Pompey is said to be astonished at the outcry of the mob.

            Pressed on the issue Mitchell refused to back down, saying ‘Well he is a fucking pleb. He’s not a slave, nor a member of the patrician class. He’s a pleb. That’s what he is. If you’d read history at Cambridge then you’d know that,’ and then to our reporter, ‘Whereas you’re just a cunt.’  

Sex, Reincarnation, and Babylon 5

First we heard that chocolate is set to become pricier that anti-matter and radium (which price by weight was only commonly exceeded by Citadel Paint), then there was the news that the Arctic icecap is set to be gone within four years. Now scientists have revealed that by 2023 sex will also be running to such a low that it will have to be rationed in order to propagate the species. Results of recent experiments have shown that sex, thought for quite some time to be a limitless resource, is of a finite quantity.

            The population explosion in recent decades (due in no small part in the western world to a draw down in the number of explosions amongst the population) has led to more people being alive than have ever lived before. Ever. With reincarnation exhausted circa 1969 the human race was forced to recycle the souls of monkeys, and a small form of bear from the Paleogenic era that would shit itself to death if another small form of bear just like it thought something that the first thought was good, was not. With both species of soul already in maturity and no further forms of soul compatible to the human genome the finite resource of sex has come, to use the technical term, to spanking point.

            It’s widely been known for some time that this would most likely be the case. As little as three hundred years ago the human sperm emerged from the male as a single, slightly furry spermatozoa somewhat smaller than a mouse. Birth control of the time centred around the catching of the seed in a linen bag whereby it could be beaten to death with a shoe. The modern discharge standing as only small amount of wand-vomit, within the next three years even this is almost certainly going to be reduced to a tiny, soft fart of only moderately potent pink smoke. Whilst for parents a limitation on sex will present no very big change at all plans are for the rest of humanity being drawn up to allow each person only a certain amount of sex over the course of their lifetime.

            Since this will be back-dated to 1969 it’s bad news for those who were promiscuous when young as they will have likely already exceeded their established quota. The further propagation of the species then will rest in the hands of those that did not fritter away their ration; however unknowing.

            Babylon 5 fans are said to be thrilled.

Sandy Denny, Earl Grey, and Blake's 7

Sandy Denny’s not been having a good day.

            “I’m not cut out for this sort of work,” she’s been telling me. She’s not cut out for my tea either it seems as every sip is accompanied by a wince. She shouldn’t look so surprised, it’s not like I’m swopping the mug between each as she works her ways along what is on offer. What is on offer is supermarket Earl Grey. She doesn’t think it should have milk in it, nor sugar, but this is builder’s Earl Grey. For builders who build art galleries. “I keep on trying to contact the other side, but it always hangs up.”

            Poor Sandy, the surprise with the tea is just the last in a long line of surprises (not the least of which was finding out that everyone had it that she had died back in 1978). Even back then no one really wanted to know, they all missed her so much. Or so she says. I couldn’t say, I was ten years old at the time and Blake’s 7 had just started so it all went rather over my head. She’s been in Tolly Maw for most of the time since. That’s the thing about Tolly Maw; you get stuck here. The old bastards in the pub don’t want to hear about Fairport Convention either, just the one track she sang with Robert Plant on Led Zep IV. They lose interest when it turns out not to be Stairway. That it was Battle of Evermore is one of the reasons she’s started trying to speak to people outside. The Hobbit movies, Tolkien, it’s all related. You can’t tell the old, hardened drinkers in the Supreme Being & Templar that there are other songs but Stairway. It upsets their eels. You what eels are like about Led Zeppelin. I say, “Look, there are oodles of fans still out there. Some of them even know who you are. Girls, mostly.”

            “They just hang up.”

            They do too. In an effort to keep them on the phone she tells them straight off that what she has to say is a very important message – and then click. But she’s been persistent. Because of her phone experience she’s gotten work at the local council (actually, everyone’s local council). There’s this new initiative to encourage people to have new windows fitted, I couldn’t say why, and everyone that agrees to it gets bottles of lovely red wine and chocolates. That’s what the form says. I’m not much of an expert. Red wine always makes be vomit. It’s on commission and given that there’s no catch at all, and it’s free, you think she’d be onto a winner. Not Michael Winner. Michael Winner prowls the lanes after night terrifying nervous lovers, in a greasy mackintosh. It’s probably a different Michael Winner. So she’s been phoning up from the windows helpline but before she can get onto the lovely red wine and chocolates everyone just hangs up.

            Sandy Denny has not been having a good day.   

Jonty Hood

This piece used to head up the first look of the Slide and it occurs that with the changes since it’s nowhere to actually be seen now. This is shame since whilst there are the usual faults that draw my eye, it’s still rather sweet.

Behind Jonty is leaning Mitzi (more clearly seen below). They’re both characters in Rob Nott’s TVC game of which I should perhaps soon post!

 

 

Exams, The Cure, and Joyce Grenfell

Teachers are said to be relieved that once again Whitehall has changed everything in order to make the exhausting and under-appreciated profession have something to do all day. ‘Being given everyone else’s puberty-ridden ratbags for the day was actually getting a bit easier since the last sweeping changes were almost understood,’ said secondary school teacher Joyce Grenfell today. Joyce having entered the profession in order to be closer to middle-class white boys that think themselves to be gangstas, cockneys, or the occasional member of The Cure goes on to say that ‘I’d almost managed to get an evening back and was worried I wouldn’t have anything to do,’ something that thankfully looks set to change.

            Not long back at school with the new term, Miss Grenfell admitted that having some of the summer off was frankly too much of a chore, ‘Long days filled with not a single rude girl hurling abuse at me for daring to raise the subject of the apostrophe saw me seriously considering a job with a lower level of stress and responsibility, air traffic control or bomb disposal for example’.

            The new system set to replace GCSEs, the EBacc, goes back to a more worldly age when far from having to work much during class young people are able to let it all slide until the last minute and then cram like a bastard, doing a half-arsed job for a single exam. Experts suggest that the new system, nothing at all like O Levels then, prepares students more fittingly for doing everything at the last minute, in a panic. It has been suggested indeed that A Levels will in future be dependent on blaming someone else and claiming credit from the smart kids who have the sheer temerity to think that they should get a pass based on some sort of merit.

A Martian Tourist Guide to London

Whilst for many England is a popular destination for our holidays there are certain myths about how we might be greeted there. On many levels this is our fault; Britain and Mars have very different cultures and we should be aware that just as we might object to Victorian gentlemen and Yankee reprobates tearing around in skyships freeing the Thark population so too might our actions there cause similar ire.

One. Do not mention the war. Whilst the conflict between our two planets was way back in the last years of their 19^th Century our minds immeasurably superior to man did rather make a mess of the place. Whilst it could be considered that we lost the foray, it was very much an away-game for us and a lot of people are still pissed off about the red weed.

Two. The British people speak orally. Whilst varying between a polite people and ravaging hooligans neither appreciate the simplicity of a bio-organic speaking tube inserted in what we often wrongly assume to be a communication sphincter.

Three. Contrary to popular opinion British food is not all that bad. The ribaldry results from a time on our earliest visit when contrary to the current habit of eating the meaty bits the British diet consisted almost solely of offal. There is now a great deal of good, tasty British food. It is called curry.

Four. British people travel through the use of wheels. Continually banging on about tripods is at best going to result in the usual argument about how three legs are silly, what if one is broken? Pointing out that they only have two is a sure way for offence to be taken.

Five. The British are a reserved people when it comes to recreational procreation. The British male is proudly very bad at the sexual act, whilst the British female (although stagnating in a broth of frustration and personal abuse) rarely finds our mollusc pheromones quite as alluring as we tend to believe in Earth’s higher oxygen atmosphere. Generally if a British female wishes to pass a month or two in the ecstatic pleasures we are able to grant them she will indicate her preferences by turning orange and screaming at one just like her a lot in the early hours of the morning, beside a kerb slick with sick, and by producing liquid from the oral receptors that will leave thick, gungy marks down each cheek. Typically if one is asked if one is a footballer the polite response is ‘Yes’.

Six. Westminster Palace is referred to as the ‘Houses of Parliament’ not ‘Target 2’.

Seven. A Martian should never when in Woking, Surrey be heard to remark ‘I remember when all this was crater’.

Eight. HMS Belfast is a museum; it is not the Thunder Child.

Nine. A British Princess is very different to a Martian Princess. Contrary to what the French may think one should not expect their royalty to be dressed in little more than bejewelled wire and a scrap of silk.

Ten. Once the most popular stop off for a Martian tourist (seeking to see if he can make out his home from there) the London Planetarium no longer offers a truly magnificent spectacle of the universe through the use of lasers. It is now a part of Madame Tussauds - which is firstly a waxwork exhibition, and secondly (and related to firstly) shit.

These are the basics. Other than that try not to make any heat-ray jokes. British humour is very different to Martian humour, Are You Being Served the exception rather than the rule.

The Duchess of Pap Street

Mme. Roux is going hunting. There’s rarely anything like the sight of an occasional visitor cleaning an elephant gun at the kitchen table to put one off the cornflakes. I’d not heard the news you see. She has and she has it in mind to bag a few Frenchmen. “See how they like the long shots,” she says.

                          It seems that the Duchess of Cambridge was photographed topless whilst abroad. Not being someone to play up to the paps on the way up and now whining when mission accomplished it’s all a bit seedy for me. Put it this way, if I found some toerag with a big camera lurking near my windows I’d probably have certain opinions on the matter. Oddly it’s because the Duchess seems like a nice girl in a young marriage that it offends Mme. Roux so much. Certainly it’s not because of some rosy image in the Royal line. Mme. Roux knew Prince George Edward back in the 30s during the days of white mischief. A fellow who’d bed anything that could get into it, alleged lover of Noel Coward, and drug fiend - Mme. Roux wouldn’t care if he had been outed. Which he had, but not everyone cares to know.

                          “Edward VII brought the monarchy back to popularity,” she says, knowing my mind. “Son and heir to Victoria, the Empress was so unpopular in her later years that it took her rogering, illegally gambling, famous friend-to-Parisian-brothels offspring to make things right in the world. Edward VIII shacked up with that blasted Simpson woman, and I can tell you tales of the whips and the mistress there!” she doubtless could too. I’ve heard all about Mountbatten from her in much the same vein. Indeed, the current so-called scandals in more recent years pale to rather ordinary little affairs that elicit outrage only amongst those that don’t care to spend a few minutes on the history of the 20^th Century. “And as for Peggy,” she means the Queen’s sister, “well, we had some times.”

                          So because of this it offends her that where a marriage is young and without scandal in the House there has to be one; that isn’t one at all. She laughed off the recent story of ‘young, single army officer about to go to war caught with a woman in the privacy of a hotel bedroom’ but this, this seems to have been the point that has set her to deerstalker and thrashing stick. “Plunge the hypocrites and rotters,” she says, “but not those yet to be, if at all.”

                          I can’t say I blame her.

Bloody Crows

Bloody crows.

They’re not gathering for me but they’ve been poking in through the window, and let’s be frank now crows aren’t ones for passing on a little sauce to their mischief. Without any silver coins to nail to door and windows I’ve had to fall back on common cures. This morning I ground out all the peppercorns in the house between two old iron weights we use on the scales. The iron means nails and the smell of it on the pepper sent their pointy faces to wrinkling - and the letter I nailed nailed upside down to the gate caused the least of them to squabble and hurt their necks.

They’re not stupid; notoriously so. But they’ve not one scrap of wisdom between them. Set them a puzzle, a lock, or a twist of thorn and wire and they’ll solve it in a minute (with fifty seconds of that just looking). But set a padlock on a hasp, on a wall, and they’ll wonder having opened it where the door that never was, went.

I’m a country boy at heart. I was to-and-fro the city half my boyhood since the wettest lump of my family is Lambeth dipped and dripping. And we know these things. We know when you meet a crow on the road that you don’t take gifts, even directions (which are as much the one as the other). We know that the smell of burned hair without fire means that a crow has stepped back into its feathers. We know when they talk it is to learn, because our heads are just another lock. As I say, they’re very good with locks. We know that a crow is always two decades behind in fashion, often more. That they dress smartly, but never well.

They never cook, they never hunt, they thieve by habit and culture but only anything lost, or lost enough (which can mean left on the lawn). It’s been easier since we’ve come along because we domesticate, so we own, so that lambs belong and so can be taken. They hate clocks, proper clocks with cogs – I don’t know why.

And they come to ground before storms.

And they’re loyal to their enemies. Don’t kill crows unless you bury them, and deep. Don’t burn them. Never eat them. And worst of all don’t sell them.

They don’t like pepper. They can’t sneeze and when outside their feathers that’s a real problem because they need to, so they stagger and huff and sniffle and snort and have to go back to the wing.

Bloody crows. 

The Fab Four (and the Catastrophe)

In the Miss. Π stories, or rather where she appears, the agent for The Garden never sullies her hands in the scrap and bustle (or at least not in those that I’ve read). In each she had near to hand a number of fashionably suited henchmen. Each is a rather clear pastiche of whatever pop band was riding high in the charts and the culture of the time. In Jennifer Lions (one of Holbourne’s few full-length novels) the ‘boys’ are clearly The Beatles.

Mop tops, smart clobber, and a mention of Liverpool - where they go the screaming youth are sure to be waiting for them. Albeit that in the post-catastrophe dying world of Holbourne here they are killers brought in to mop up whatever horror has been uncovered by Miss. Π. There’s nothing subtle about them. Chauffeured and grinning like feckless monkeys they dash from car to door whilst their fans faint from seeing them. In part of the shifting world of the end days described it is such devilishly fab killers that are the celebrities.

Really they aren’t central to anything. I don’t think they appear in their own story (though they might well, there’re a lot of them I’ve never even seen, let alone read – and doubtless some I’ve never even heard if) but rather form a cameo when Holbourne’s story is not about describing lengthy gun battles and two-fisted fury. It happens, it resolves, but off page as it were.

And when Miss. Π is the hand that has pulled back the veil, it is the popular hit men that cruise in to seal the fate of that week’s horror to the adoring wailing of hundreds.

A Birthday Again

 

Another year, and a birthday again

Efforts against as ever in vain

I’ll try not to mutter, to scowl, and complain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

A little more tummy, a little less brain

A little less fire, a little more pain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

When once again I will have to explain

That yes, I want cake, be it orange and plain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

With presents, toy soldiers, a small model plane

Perhaps a wee pint, dear god no champagne

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

I want to be awful, I want to profane

But instead I will shiver, and so will refrain

Another year and a birthday again

 

Another year and a birthday again

And yet despite all I’m the same chap in the main!

But he’d laugh, and he’d scoff; he’d be so inhumane...

Another year and a birthday again



Chelsea & The Bomb (Pt. 9)

The cats have inherited the city. Hundreds, thousands, all day they’ve been with us but just now and they’ve gone. 

Warned long before the final trumpet of the old air-raid sirens the great and the not so good had already closed up their houses in Mayfair and Belgravia and decamped to the Grosvenor Hotel. They had remembered that longer war when luxuries such as lobsters and oysters had escaped rationing; when caviar had required no coupon. The grand hotels already built like fortresses the ballrooms and bars below ground had been so sound-proofed that in the Grosvenor a man had to be sent to announce the all-clear. Expecting some repeat and the occasional broken window I can only imagine what they must have made of the tomb that had been made by the single mushroom bomb that had fallen in Chelsea. Trapped like rats, Mme. Roux had opined that their very fine educations would have stood them in good stead. The weak had doubtless fed upon the strong. I can see them now from our perch, the strong that had at last emerged perhaps chortling and jolly, strong from their blue blood pudding.

Tower Bridge had still been standing. We had crossed the top and from there seen the stumps of London and Hungerford, both weakened and crumbled in the years now gone to leave pillars from shore to shore. London is very green now. The roads cracked and covered by weeds and grasses in a bed of fallen, broken glass. We heard a building collapse coming here but saw it only by the snowstorm of birds that had blown out of Catherine Street as we passed by Strand station. We sheltered in the empty skull of a tobacconists. Not for a minute did Mme. Roux or Cecil suggest we go below; the tube would be a mortuary of tangled bones and whatever it was that had grown to like it there. The image of the neat line of pipes in that shop eerily untouched by shockwave, time and nature bothered still me for some reason.     

I am still mystified as to why we came to London at all. No one I’ve met since the little war ever went to the cities. They had become savage places briefly before the old, eager plagues settled there with the inhabitants. It had become a habit and of course the capital having taken one for the team had been a hot spot where it mattered for long enough that perhaps by some unconscious folklore no one I’d met had ventured there long since the rain and time had put all that aside.

We’re on the roof of the Windmill Theatre. Below I can see what Mme. Roux tells me are the Chelsea Hunt. Given the crater there now it carries a number of meanings. The survivors of the great hotels, gas-masked and dusty in hunting pink and bowlers, prowling with knives and sabres, the mask’s respirator tubes are cut and perished. I don’t care to think what they hide.

I say, “Why have we come to this ghastly place?”

The former-Captain Cecil gives me a smile he’s hired by the minute; he was short changed.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Zombie Apocalypse

Triffid-Knacker

I was somewhat flattered today to find out that in the coming zombie apocalypse I am to get myself down to Devon with ‘whichever is your favourite child’ where I will see out the inevitable fights about the barricades in the River Cottage HQ.

Long preparing for the inevitable, hedge-wizard Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been laying up against the slight possibility of the world not being overtaken by zombies by cultivating Triffids. ‘Zombies by their nature only last so long,’ reads the blurb in the email, ‘but Triffs provide near limitless energy through their cultivated oil, acts a feedstock for cattle, and are the only free range salad that can reliably prosper in the wild’.

Fearnley-Whittingstall with his self-sustaining lifestyle, whole-food organic farm, and guns, has been since long before his rise to celebrity preparing for the worst. As one of the ‘Old Ones’ he has through the centuries been a wielder of the Light against the Dark, the latter which whilst almost always rising has in recent years reinvented itself as the Cool. Six talismans having been cast across the world only by assembling them can the Cool finally be defeated. Given that this will otherwise result in a zombie apocalypse I rather worry that Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recent mail suggests that he has been unsuccessful.

It comes to everyone I suppose. The old ones invite you round for tea, and the cool doesn’t want to know.

Cabinet Reshuffle

Today’s cabinet reshuffle has left certain parts of the Liberal Democrats sceptical about their role in the coalition government. Whilst Tory stalwarts Sir. Arthur Streeb-Greebling and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton have been moved to Fluffy Kittens and Nice Holidays respectively the current Lib Dem members of the cabinet have been rather forced into en masse into the new ‘super’ Ministry of Benefits, Pensions, Health and Taxation. Lib Dem MP (for Surbiton-Waitrose) Barbara Good has been outspoken in her wariness at her new brief which she claims mostly carries the responsibility for being booed at.

            A spokesman for the cabinet officer was quick to scotch rumours regarding the divide of new cabinet positions, especially that of the new Minister of State for Scotland Ria Parkinson (MP for Butterflies) who will have sweeping powers to be responsible for Scottish devolution. ‘Mrs. Parkinson’s bloody tedious ongoing experiences she subjected us all too in the late 70s to early 80s on BBC2 will stand her in good stead when it comes to the Tory heartland looking to blame someone for the break-up of the United Kingdom’ said Sir Humphrey Appleby today. Likewise one has to presume for fellow Liberal Democrat MP Penny From-Just-Good-Friends who has been moved to the new Looting, Rioting, and Vikings office currently being relocated to Lindisfarne Abbey.

            Former antiques dealer and Conservative MP for the extremely marginal Never-The-Twain seat Simon Peel has been moved to head up the newly formed Ministry of Football.

            Frankly, modern government is becoming more like some bloody awful sitcom every day.

Una Persson & Catherine Cornelius (1)

 

 

Almost the end of the summer hols and with most of a day tomorrow with Q not at work I can just about, almost, if I stretch, see a day when I can really get back to some actual graft again. It’s been all very wonderful of course, but we’re all looking forward to the start of term. So because I can do it whilst keeping a wary eye, the start of a sketch that will I think actually see some inky completion. Here and more Moorcock; Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius (and perhaps depending on room maybe even a Jerry peering from behind).

Oddly chopped off round the edges by the scanner.

Everything thinks it’s a critic.

The iShagged

 

People seem to be very excited by the new iShagged that’s come upon the market recently and I have to confess that like all new technology I don’t really understand it. A natural progression from the iPod where you can own a million albums you’ve never listened to, and the Kindle where people formerly not possessed of a book now possess a thousand-thousand novels they’ll never read the virtual world has arrived now with a bang.

Almost literally. Although being virtual, as in ‘not real’, then we’ll just for the moment (and in expectation of the wrath that follows) suggest that almost-literally means not-literally, or to be more precise figuratively.

Just as with books and albums the iShagged is a list of things you’ve had, and in this case people. Now you can download a list of people that you say you’ve slept with, although you haven’t, but which can bolster your self-esteem and provide fodder for those all important blathering at about the seventh pint down the pub. Since just as people already own a little box that says they own thousands of books and records, now a very similar box says they’ve been a lot more promiscuous that they really were. The top sellers seem to be ‘Girl I met on holiday’, ‘her from the office where I used to work’, ‘that one before she was famous’ and in a furious fight back ‘pirate’, ‘highwayman’, and oddly ‘Derek Nimmo’.

Since any non-virtual liaisons are effectively a product of memory anyway – and not normally widely witnessed (though you can download any number of those to rectify that) then the iShagged is if anything more real than mere curmudgeonly reality.

A more woman-friendly iShagged is due out later this month. It changes from the original only in that rather than adding virtual past lovers it serves to officially edit out real ones. Already the advance orders for ‘fucker who wasted a year of my life’ , ‘two-timing husband’ and ‘that in hindsight ill-advised second bottle of Cava’ are breaking current records.