7 Reasons

Tag: ever

  • 7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Present Ever

    7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Present Ever

    Okay, 7 Reasons readers.  It’s September, so there’s only one thing we can possibly write about today.  That’s right, Christmas.  Because – strange as it may seem – there are people out there that are actually planning their Christmas and buying presents right now.  I, of course, will be leaving my shopping until the last possible moment, as usual, but I feel I should issue a cautionary tale to those of you that may be contemplating buying presents.  For, if it prevents anyone else having an experience quite like this one, I feel I will have done the world a great service.  This may make me appear to be an ungrateful man and a bad brother but that’s okay, because I’m an ungrateful man and a bad brother.  So, present-buyers: Don’t buy this!  Here are seven reasons that it’s the worst present ever.  I have obscured the name of the sender to protect her identity.

    This is not the actual gift. This is a far more tastefully coloured version of it.

    1.  It Created Expectation.  It was Christmas morning.  My wife and I had finished the croissants and were sipping our second glasses of bucks fizz while, in the background, Frank Sinatra gently exhorted us to have ourselves a merry little Christmas.  It was time to open the presents.  My wife pulled the many gifts out from under the tree and divided them into four piles: presents for her; presents for me; presents for us and presents for the cat (the largest pile).  We took it in turns to unwrap them (and to help the cat) and fairly soon the floor was a gaudy collage of discarded paper.  Then it was my turn again.  It was a small, rectangular present.  It was tastefully wrapped and surprisingly weighty.  A glance at the tag revealed that it was a gift from my s*ster.  “Who’s it from?” my wife asked.  “It’s from my only s*ster.”  I replied.  Expectantly, I tore the paper away, to reveal a narrow blue gift box about six inches long.  Wow!  This looks great, I thought as I unwrapped the box.  Then I opened it.

    2.  My Eyes!  My life prior to opening the box had been a poor preparation for that moment.  My life had been one of carefully and tastefully matched colours and textures.  Of aesthetical sobriety and decorousness.  I was fundamentally ill-equipped for the spectre that cruelly and aggressively assaulted my retinas.  What greeted me was the sight of a glass object consisting of a conical frosted glass stem tapering up toward a rounded top that was made up of most of the colours in the world – minus all of the nice ones and the ones that go together – encased in glass that was partially frosted and liberally spattered with gold leaf.  It was the single most hideous thing that I have ever seen.  And I’ve seen the Lidl in Scunthorpe.

    3.  It Caused Bafflement.  What is it?  What is this glassy-horror?  Why has my s*ster sent me this?  Why is it covered in gold leaf?  Is the glass frosted to obscure the thing, like a toilet window?  Why does it have a stem? Why does it have a bulb?  Why does it have a rim?  What the buggery-bollocks is this thing?!  “What is it, darling?” My wife enquired.

    4.  It Caused Speculation.  Putting all aesthetic squeamishness aside, I coolly regarded the gaudy object in as objective a manner as I could.  It had a tapering stem.  It had a bulb at the end.  It was simultaneously shiny and frosted.  It was a myriad of lurid colours and was festooned with gold leaf.  “It’s…it’s…(got it!)…Liberace’s butt-plug!”

    5.  It Caused…The Pause.  “Don’t be silly,” my wife said, snatching Liberace’s butt-plug from me to regard it more closely.  “It’s…(there then followed a long pause.  A pregnant pause so long it seemed that an elephant could have been brought from conception to gestation during it.  In fact, it was merely a pause of several minutes)…a wine-stopper!”  “A what?” I enquired.  “It’s a wine-stopper.  It stops wine.”

    6.  It Caused Incredulity.  It does what?!  Of all the things one could conceivably want to stop why in the hell would anyone pick wine?!  I like wine.  Why not send a gift that stops something more objectionable, like fascism or tennis?  Wine is fun!  Sending something that stops it is like giving the gift of abstinence.  For Christmas!

    7.  It Caused Me To Lie On The Telephone.  “Thanks for the…um…thing.”

    “We got it in South Africa.”

    “It’s…come a long way.”

    “It took us ages to choose that one.”

    “Really?”

    “Yes.  There were so many different coloured ones.  Have you used it yet?”

    “No, but I will.”

    And that was a lie.  Until now!  Because now – five years later – I’ve finally found a use for it, even if it is as a cautionary tale.  A gentle reminder for 7 Reasons readers to choose their Christmas presents carefully.  And, even if you don’t, you could at least get it in a colour that matches the recipient’s loft because that’s where it is.  Or rather, where it was, because earlier today when I went up there to relive the horror and to photograph it in all its sickening hideousness for you, the reader, I discovered that it had disappeared.  My investigations have revealed that it may have been placed in a charity bag by my w*fe during some sort of cull-of-the-horrid.  With some irony, it may well have been a bag from the RNIB.  I can only offer our apologies to them.

    *For fans of gifts like this, this is the place to find them.

  • 7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Song Ever

    7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Song Ever

    Incredible news, 7 Reasons readers:  I’ve discovered the worst song of all time.  Surprisingly it’s not Mull of Kintyre, We Didn’t Start The Fire or that turgid Whitney Houston one that I first heard in 1993 and for all I know is still playing in the room I ran screaming from.  It’s a song called Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore that was made famous by Lily Morris in the 1920s.  I didn’t mean to discover it.  It snuck up and pounced on me while I was watching a documentary about Pathe News.  It’s embedded below.  I recommend that you don’t listen to it.  Here are seven reasons that it’s the worst song ever.

    1.  It’s…Aarrgghhhh!  Okay, you may have ignored my recommendation and if you did, that’s probably something approximating the noise you made on listening to it.  I know that my initial reaction to hearing the jaunty and rather creaking string introduction followed by the first few bars of Lily Morris warbling about Mrs Moore was to shriek obstreperously and try to jam a dining table, a map of Scotland and half finished packet of Foxes Glacier Fruits into my ears.  Sadly, they did not completely muffle the ear-grating, fingernails-down-a-blackboard, mating-sounds-of-a-half-strangled-cat-in-a-biscuit-tin, out-of-tune-soprano-with-her-on-fire-hair-caught-in-a-blender sheer unremitting screeching bloody cacophony that is this song.  Listening to it is the aural equivalent of putting your penis on a desk and having it repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes; something that every right-minded person would choose to spend an entire Saturday doing when given the choice between that or hearing a fraction of a nanosecond of a bar of this song again.  It may well have been the first recorded instance of a father waking his baby up by screaming in the middle of the night.  It is popularly said of ugly celebrities that, “…he/she has a face for radio”.  Similarly, Lily Morris has a voice for cinema.  Silent cinema.  A silent cinema buried deep under the ground.  Under Peru.  In fact, under a very noisy thing in Peru.  Under a man having his penis repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes in Peru.  Between the airport and the pneumatic drill testing centre.

    2.  It Fails The Test Of Time.  Cole Porter; George and Ira Gershwin; Ivor Novello; Hoagy Carmichael; Kurt Weil; Irving Berlin:  Just a few of the talented songwriters working in the 1920s that had absolutely cock-all to do with this song.  Sadly, while their work has aged well, this song has not.  It is the Mickey Rourke of popular song.  It clearly had some sort of popular appeal in its day because Lily Morris sang it many times and I can find no written accounts of pandemonium as masses of horrified music-lovers stampeded from music-halls.   But there’s another possible explanation.  Perhaps those that witnessed this horror were simply too traumatised to write about it;  I wish I was.  Perhaps people back then – who were able to vividly recount the sheer bloody horror of mechanised war and mass genocide – were far too disturbed by the ordeal of hearkening to this interminable and harrowing din to leave their descendants a warning from history.  That seems eminently possible.

    3.  It’s Strange.  In the song, Lily Morris is singing as a character, rather than as herself, addressing Mrs Moore.  Not content with singing in her own character’s voice (and who would be content with that) for the whole of the song, Lily Morris inexplicably sings a verse of it as a Dutch vicar.  From Namibia.  I have no idea why she sings it as a Dutch vicar from Namibia, but I suppose if you’re going to pretend to be a vicar, you have to come from somewhere, even if it is Namibia.  And you are Dutch.

    4.  It’s Ironic.  The central theme of the song is a woman using drunkenness as a euphemism for wantonness or wantonness as a euphemism for drunkenness (I thought of checking, but I decided I’d rather have rusty razor blades stapled to my forehead instead) and cautioning another woman (Mrs Moore) against one or the other (or both).  The irony is, however, that this is a song that positively no one could ever bear sober.  This is a song that no sane person could experience (even partially) without having imbibed so much strong alcohol in one sitting that their liver would have a half-life of several millennia and would smell pungently of juniper berries for at least four and a half eternities.*  The only way that anyone could possibly listen to this song without alcohol is if they were dead, and even then they would have to have been dead for at least a century and would need to have their wrists bound and the remains of their chest pinned to the floor by an anvil with Eamonn Holmes and the cast of Gandhi seated upon it, to ensure that they did not rise up and scamper from the room squealing in terror and urinating uncontrollably on the carpet.

    5.  It’s Historic.  The discovery of this song has created a wholly astonishing and  unforeseen development of historical proportions.  A transpiration so unexpected that no one will ever have conceived of reading the words I’m about to write together in the same sentence.  So momentous is this situation that, if I were to tell Nostradamus, Zephania, Philip the Evangelist and Derren Brown what I’m about to tell you, their reaction would be “Blimey!  I didn’t see that one coming”.  This song would be improved if covered by Jedward.

    6.  It’s Immortal.  Once heard, this song cannot be killed.  It’s an ear-worm that refuses to leave.  Once it gets into your head (even if you only hear it once) this song becomes that bloody glittery vampire – the one that all sane people wish would just go away and die – that never goes away and dies.  Of all the songs that you could ever get stuck in your head, this is the stickiest and most recalcitrant.  It literally seems to bond itself to the inside of your brain somewhere between thoughts about tiramisu and thoughts about ducks.  It is said that men think about sex every seven seconds.  That is not true of men that have heard this song.  Men that have heard this song think of this song every seven seconds (even when they’re asleep or flying an aeroplane).  This song is no mere musical entertainment, it is a frightening disease of the mind.

    7.  It’s…Aaaaaarrrrrgghhh!!!  Don’t Read This Reason!   If you think about this song long enough – every seven seconds since last Friday night, for example – it spawns the song of Satan.  Because sooner or later (in a variant of infinite monkey theorem known as infinite poor suffering bastard that heard Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore once and is now hearing it internally and infinitely for infinity theorem) the song will mutate.  As you think of – or hear – another song this song will begin to segue into it.  And then, with a creeping sense of trepidation and mounting dread, you will one day hear something so abominable and ghastly that it might well prove to be one of the signs of the apocalypse.  You will hear the chorus of this song segue into that of another.  You will hear:

    Don’t have any more Mrs Moore      

    When there’s room on my horse for two

    And with that perfectly seamless transition you’ll discover that you have, in your head, a mutant Lily Morris/Rolf Harris hybrid creature (Rily Marris?) singing a mash-up of Don’t Have Any Moore Mrs Moore and Two Little Boys at you every seven seconds for the rest of time.  See, I told you not to read it.

    *And why the hell does the word eternity have a plural?!