94: Kippers

Brandon’s new brand of bread has Bobby Kipper’s upper body emblazoned on the pack, as though he were more Brandon than Brandon could be …. The similarity crumples the CEO’s legs as his eyes roll from the paper’s full-page ad to the ceiling, and the office lobby fades into a doughy darkness. On the way down, he makes the decision to purposefully extend his fall and collision with the floor, into a deep and restful slumber, after which an hour of yogalates and a double espresso could shuffle him into the grateful claws of the working day… But this liminal limbo is shut up on its high-shelf, as the sirens softly shatter the scene. Brandon, spends the night quietly sobbing and inhaling SedaFix in the cupboard under the stairs, until he’s spun out into a warm and infinite supernova. His daughter knocks at eight AM to collect her school shoes, slipping them unsympathetically from under his head, which lolls and bounces slightly on the tiles, as the brain inside conjures a sort of paranoid activity matrix of his current Ambassadors. Vango Vengalis has a six-monther on his chest: a bold rainbow, emblazoned with the words "Kipper’s keeps you clean", bridging his pool-proud nipples as he tries to hide the pecuniary nature of his predicament. A few more clicks down the list, we have Sherine Basingcourt, freshly marked with a nine month number from a rival interest group: “Use your loaf” tattooed in bubble writing behind her right ear, cresting a flat phrenological schematic of a head shaped as a slice of toast. (The contract stipulates a clean-shaven arc of at least 3 cm from the ear’s connecting tissue for the duration. Earmuffs are strictly forbidden, the detection of which will automatically forfeit the courtesy toaster, leased for the three weekly loaves she’s allotted until the tattoo fades and the canvas of her skin kneads its way back to market.) Brandon, meanwhile, has been SedaFaxed back to head office and wheeled into the lift. A cigar has been plugged between the drugged pink slugs nestling under his nose, as he’s happy-slapped back to consciousness by a PR Priestess. The darkness becomes a blur, and the blur becomes Head office, where he can smell the yeasty braying of shareholders in the boardroom ... and yet, presently the value of his stock has dramatically slumped to the tune of a second hand Brompton pilfered from a soused pimple-snook under barley-moon. In a deft move, he snatches a full jug of water from the refreshments trolley, douses his chaperones in a gushing pirouette and vaults back to the lift. “Where to now?” asks Bobby Kipper glitching on the 16K Hyper-D screens, his comical shrug narrowing as the lift doors close. “To the lobby” Brandon spits. “And call the Tank. Bread’s too volatile – I’m going into Slops.” ---------------- …a wretchedly rubbish sitcom, incidentally, but in the manner of television babbles, I find myself shifting from treacle to slop as if the spinners were slopping treacle onto slop. And who exactly decided that the children would enjoy the balmy summer evenings that ensue once there are no comedians around anymore? Turbulence over, the days are getting colder. A couple of weeks back, I caught up with some treacle puddings made by Sandie Stinchfield of Guernsey fame. I won’t attempt to explain how the gloss, the very gloss, went to ruin in the experience of trying to eat the damn things. Bursting with treacle-inducing splendour, and with that mad slobbering lunge that mesmerises children, the pot began to glaze and crack. My only recourse was to slouch myself into a low spin. In hindsight, the high gloss that covered the outside of the pot looked suspiciously treacle-dusted as well. I am impressed by the spinners’ reputation for completing their cycles without any breaks. The treacle is thin and brittle. A treacle wheel is spinning over the wings of the treacle babble as if on a treacle sloosh. When the babble comes over the treacle, it sounds like a crowd of maddening babblers trying to slobber down treacle all in a row. The sloping arches of the babble close inwards as they spin. The revolving doors have all closed so tightly that they are hovering in thin air. Babble makes it spin. But really, there is just too much slop to read about today. The latest sally from the royal babblers tells us that Princess Michael has talked about being on the front line of the Bosnian war as a teenager. This is a lie. Like so many royal hush-hush details from the royal past, it is a spin that will prevent a whole wing of our building opposite Buckingham Palace from getting a good wash. Since he was born in Germany, I am willing to bet that he never was there. Nor was he part of the landing team that landed in Malta to hold up the Italians and storm the defences of Tripoli in the Eighties. But spinners are spinners, and at least one will try to spin her tale and spin it relentlessly into the slop-encrusted treacle that we will all gobble up. Most of the wobbleheads in our media are spinning rather too much today, as if they were stuck in a spinners’ spinny-holery loop. The slop is wobbling down all over my treacle. Or rather, slopping. It was obvious from the beginning that the thing to do was to go to the palace to discuss what a miserable failure he was and explain to him how he was doing a terrible disservice to the nation. In particular, he was doing a terrible disservice to the tourism industry and would definitely get the shutters down in Tower Hamlets because of his absence. On top of everything else, the revolving door hunchback is hunched over at 45 degrees. Maybe he would have liked to take advantage of his final week to escape to Italy and escape his monstrous slouch. But no. He’s back there sloping along the pavement, straightening his hat, slouching to 45 degrees, spinning his babble and slathering the spinners with treacle and slop. I have no idea where the babble is now, but I think it might be biting my hand, dragging it from the plate and bringing it down to where the treacle is, slopping in treacle and slobbering all over it. That would explain why I don’t want to have anything to do with that tiny handful of spinners today. Every day, there are more dishes of treacle on the tables of BBC Breakfast, where I was last seen scraping up a slodge of treacle and dumping it into my tea. If it was in slop, then it was in slop. That’s a joke for you. The cook in the kitchen told me that the treacle came out of the slop tank from the barbecue. There are two types: cream-coloured and white. The cream-coloured is the stuff you get if you close the lids on the barbecue and the slop goes in. You might like to try that one. On Saturdays, they are banging on the front door of the studio with treacle. They do it every Saturday. The BBC has made such a mess of things that it can’t even hire a chef who can turn on their oven, let alone manage their kitchen. The spin is spinning too fast, slop is slopping on the hob. Babble is bubbling…