Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Flan

People often say: 'We've read your blog. We know your shtick. We're familiar with your so-called 'jokes'. We've seen you making unpleasant stuff up about people - people who aren't able to defend themselves due to their being dead or you blog not being famous enough to garner any notoriety newsworthy enough for them to hear about your tawdry lies. We know all about that. But,' they say, 'what about you? What about the real Richard Vivmeister, or whatever the hell your name is?'

Well, folks, in response I say this: 'Pipe that stupid racket down, because I now present to you some snapshots of my life. These pictures come to you, treasured reader, exclusively from the central photographic section of my forthcoming autobiography - "I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car Of My Life" - in the hope that it might shed some light onto the fascinating, unyielding tangle of enigma that is... ME.'

My grandfather, Ebeneezer Vivmeister, made his fortune during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as many others did, in the world of street urchins. At its peak, his factory employed three thousand urchins. He hit on the novel idea that the bodies of those urchins in his keep who died - either of typhoid, overexhaustion or one of the dozens of severe thrashings they received daily - could be used as a source of nourishment for those urchins who had the reserves of strength and stoicism to remain alive. Thus his factory system - a staff of urchins whose sole occupation was using giant pieces of machinery to churn up their recently deceased brothers and sisters into a servicably nutritious paté on which they would later feed - was a unique, self-fuelling empire. That was until 1904, when an epidemic of 'mad urchin disease' broke out. Within a year urchins were extinct.


I was small as a boy. So small, in fact, that I was regularly goaded into having my photograph taken whilst holding everyday items for scale comparison. Here I am holding a button and a daisy.


The Vivmeister family. That's me on the right. Alongside me are my three brothers: (l-r) Gimpflake, Dotor Spunkfluffer and Pooing Goose. Also, in the centre, is my sister Diane. Or, as was known before she had her name legally changed, Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits Tits. Some say our unusual names were down to the off-kilter sense of humour of our father, also in this picture. But look at his face! He was nothing more than a twisted, sadistic midget whose idea of entertainment was to staple dogs and cats together and fling them over the walls of a nearby nunnery - just to hear their screams!


Ah, here's Sylvie, my first wife. We really did love one another, but the fact that she was conjoined at the arm to a small dog was too much for us to get used to. Seriously, all that yapping and scratching; the endless weeing; and have you ever tried to make love to a beautiful woman whilst a confused, writhing dog pants his meaty Winalot breath into your face and constantly soils himself? Probably not. Well I have - it's no picnic, let me tell you.


Here's me with my second wife, Anita. This marriage was even more short-lived than its predecessor. - in fact we broke up immediately after this photograph was taken. As it perhaps indicates, her obsession with all things Victoriana was simply too much for me to handle. After three marital months of avoiding eye-contact, singing evangelical anti-masturbation anthems every sundown and pretending that the concept of God was entirely feasible, the act of sitting completely still for six hours in a starched wool suit waiting for the Daguerreotype camera to burn this image into its development plate was the final proverbial straw. Reader, I booted her down the stairs! Proverbially speaking, of course.


This is Whazzo, my estranged elder brother. Despite excelling at calculus, Latin and brain-surgery at school, his bizarre facial lesions meant a glamorous career in the circus awaited. Ironically, he's now dead.


This is one of the few surviving publicity shots from 'The Popefuherphile', a short-lived sitcom which dared to imagine a world in which the endemic culture of pederastic sexual-abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is coquettishly sent up when none other than Adolf Hitler, played by myself, is accidentally appointed Pope. Of all the episodes we shot, my own personal favourite was 'A Visit From Adolf's Identical Twin Brother'. In this episode the Popefuhrerphile's brother comes to visit. But wait - there's more! The brother is Hitler's identical twin, and a hilariously hopeless human-wreckage of a drunk to boot! The twin brother was also played by me, a feat which required both the full range of my dramatic acumen and some fiendishly clever camera trickery when it came to the shower-room spit-roasting scenes. Inexplicably, the show was never given a second series.


During my middle to later years I suffered numerous intense religious visions, mostly of Christ. Despite being initially thrilled to get to meet one of the most iconoclastic celebrities in the world, my excitement swiftly dissipated when I discovered that, as you can probably see from this picture, Jesus turned out to be a bit boring a bit creepy. Rather than telling my what God's like or what kind of drinks they serve heaven or even if Hitler really did have one knacker, he just banged on and on: 'don't do this'; 'do do this'; 'people are sort of like lilies in a way, aren't they?'; 'the world will be engulfed by Satan's tormenting hellscapes at some date or other'. What a gas-sack! And his breath - yeesh! I eventually convinced him to leave me alone.


Here I am meeting the Queen. She was lovely. The more keen-eyed amongst you will no doubt have noticed that I'm disguised as a nice-looking young lady. A hilarious jape! Or so I thought - those with eyes which are keener still will note that the Her Majesty herself also looks like a bit of a wrong 'un. Is she in disguise too? No she is not! She sent a lookalike. That's some capital japery, ma'am! She continued to do the same for three dozen subsequent re-scheduled meetings. As did I. In fact, although we never did meet, our two lookalikes eventually found love with one another. A romantic ending to a tale which was given a somewhat sinister epilogue some months late when it emerged they were mother and daughter.

Shortly after meeting the lovely Queen, I died. This is where I'm currently buried. There was a gravestone - a massive, impressive-looking one, carved to look like an inconsolable angel - but, due to a paperwork mix-up, it got cremated and scattered at sea. I've no idea where this field is, but it's fine: I like it here.

In Cinemas Now

Elliott Bullard: A Life In Seven Chips

Gambling: the dizzying high of being ‘on a role’; the success-drawn floozies; the booze; the soul-harrowing misery that is crawling about on your hands and knees for 2ps to put into one of the 2p pusher-machines; the booze; the feeling that this time you really will 'turn over a new leaf' as you leave yet another dead hooker in a bin round the back of a motel. It’s undoubtedly a world of glamour.

And now is your chance to own a part of that glamour. Among historians of financial ruin, the name 'Elliott Bullard' is legendary. He is nothing less than Orson Welles of scraping together cash. Among his myriad anti-achievements he:

- Once sold a job-lot of ‘invisible bedsheets’ to a local orphanage.
- Once disguised himself as a ball in a roulette wheel and attempted to land on the number he’d placed a bet on.
- Once disguised himself as a racehorse, entered a race after betting on himself (slowed by chronic asthma and arteriosclerosis brought on by diabetes, he came in last).
- Twice succeeded in convincing provincial mobster One-Eyed Tony that a bucket filled with pebbles was a collection of ancient, priceless glass-eyes that once belonged to Atlantis's emperor One-Eye Caesar.
- Invented Scientology.
- cut off his own hand and sold it as a novelty ‘enchanted paw’ remote-control holder.
- Stole a packet of cocktail sausages and sold them to schoolchildren as ‘enchanted monkey thumbs’.
- Sold his own poo at a ‘celebrity poo auction’ as the poo of Jayne Mansfield
- Pretended to be an accomplished street-caricaturist whilst covertly taking a sneaky Polaroid of his subject which he’d then sell as a sketch.
- Had his name legally changed by deed pole to Peter Sutcliffe and his facial features altered to look like the 1970s strangulation-fan, so he could sue various national newspapers (all court proceedings were thrown out, one judge famously labelling Bullard 'the most pathetic being imaginable').
- Spent a full year travelling door to door claiming to be Roger Lloyd Pack - AKA ‘Trigger’ from the popular sitcom Only Fools and Horses - thrusting old receipts and bus-tickets with 'autographs' on them into the hands of whoever opened the door and demanding payment.
- Spent a full year hiring himself out as a ‘professional ghostbuster’ for Catholic exorcisms, which involved little more than dressing in a mismatched tracksuit, with a leaf blower strapped to his back and crying whilst begging for pennies.
- Tried to sell a tub of candy bracelets on eBay as ‘the Crown Jewels jr.’
- Attempted to pass off a tape recording of a malfunctioning fax machine with himself sneezing over the top as a bootlegged copy of an unreleased Karlheinz Stockhausen recording.
- Shaved a bear’s face and tried to pass it off to the British Zoological Council as a rare new breed of monkey.
- Took an Ikea wardrobe apart and attempted to sell it to the British Museum as original wooden fixtures salvaged from the Titanic, along with a pair of large cracked plant pots which he marketed as the 'the Titanic's cannons'.
- Did many, many more things.

We now present you with a unique opportunity to own a small part of this rich, miserable tale: seven betting chips, paid for by one of Bullard's unique, wretched moneymaking brainwaves and lost to a number of Las Vegas's casinos, each lovingly mounted onto a board of commemorative felt to pay tribute to one of the great innovators of failing at existence.

Don't miss out! Phone 0800 55 333 55 with your credit card details now!

Only £29.99!

You might want to click on this to see it better. Or you might not.

Proceeds go towards the Elliott Bullard Foundation whose main aim is to provide the remains of the late Mr Bullard with a servicable gravestone, although the Foundation's chairman is a strict Catholic so most of the money actually goes towards convincing Africans that condoms give them AIDS. Still, buy one. Go on. Please.

Appendix: Further Lies About George Crumb

Hello, blog. In a previous post, I drew attention to 'Stop The Drabblington-On-Sea Flyover', a blog maintained by David Jessop in an attempt, as its name suggests, to prevent a flyover from being constructed in his home town but which had sadly degenerated into a series of brief and patently untrue allegations directed at Gordon Crumb, the Councillor overseeing the construction project. Since that post, I have noticed that Mr Jessop has signed up for an account on the microblogging site Twitter, which he plans to use as, in his own words: 'a platform to tell the world THE TRUTH about George Crumb, the pen-pushing pederast.'

Here are some of those 'TRUTHS':

George Crumb rounds up orphans, crucifies them in his back garden and then pelts them with crisps and pick ‘n’ mix.

George Crumb has a series of ties he wears on a rotational basis to show what objects he’s concealing in his anus for his erotic amusement: yellow means he carries a carrot; red means a small, silenced mobile phone he occasionally sends obscene, nonsensical text messages to; and blue means a beloved, rusting pizza cutter from his childhood.

George Crumb has built himself a hollowed-out snowman near St Arnold’s Primary School. This is so he can watch the children playing and tinker with himself whilst safely concealed within.

George Crumb’s garden also contains a large military cannon and a series of large mousetraps. He uses the traps to capture woodland creatures which he then loads into the cannon and fires point blank into a wall of his house.

At Christmas, instead of giving gifts George Crumb goes on a spree of stealing presents, food and clothing from local children.

At Christmas, instead of decorating a tree, George Crumb decorates a giant steel phallus.

At Christmas, instead of singing festive carols George Crumb wanks to dog-snuff.

A video clip for George Crumb’s local election campaign on YouTube shows him laughing as he vomits into a baby’s mouth.

George Crumb sleeps in a large, mattress-less bed alongside the stolen remains of Buster Merryfield.

George Crumb recently held a Council tea-party to raise funds for Barnardos at which he was photographed there offering round a selection of biscuits on a plate to those gathered. Look closely at the picture however, and it becomes clear he was, in fact, secretly dipping his cock into their scorching-hot tea.

Also, whilst relaxing at home, George Crumb wears a turd-monocle. Yes! A turd-monocle!

The lying paedophile Gordon Crumb

Pistol Face!

Acceptance Speech

Hello there, reader. As you may or may not be aware, this blog you're currently goggling at was recently shortlisted for the Manchester Blog Awards. Exciting, isn't it? I didn't win, obviously. Still, in the event of there being some kind of administrative error which resulted in my being declared the winner, I wrote an acceptance speech. This was read in my gibbering voice to room full of strangers at the award ceremony in a slightly truncated form. Here it is.

Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. I don’t know what to say. It gives me great pleasure to accept this award for having the best blog on the internet. Of all the people on the shortlist, I was definitely the one who I wanted to win the most. However, I feel I should take this opportunity to give some of the other nominated blogs - the ones which didn’t win - the kind of recognition they deserve.

One of my favourite blogs is Jane Rumbelow’s ‘Trick Or Tito’. In an online world awash with blogs written by new or expectant mothers documenting their child’s every gurgle, coo and successful bowel motion, ‘Trick Or Tito’ stands out: the mother in question firmly believes her child isn’t merely a baby with rudimentary motor skills and an as-yet undeveloped grasp of the concept of language as a means of communication, but, in fact, the reincarnation of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s post-war communist head of state. Her blog-posts lay out her reasons for suspecting this, giving numerous real-life examples as proof. Is the author’s young child really possessed by the spirit of a figure of middling importance in the history of communism? Or is the author merely suffering from a series of linked hallucinations brought on by chronic exhaustion? Who knows. Here are some of my favourite excerpts:

March 10th

‘Last night Charles cried throughout the night, like he has every other night for the past three weeks. Again I tried to ignore him. He’s old enough now, I thought, to learn that I can’t be constantly at his beck and call. By 2am I was crying, my head ploughed beneath my pillow, my mad fingernails clawing away at my mad face in a rage of madness. By 3am, I felt I’d reached a pitch of madness. I could get no madder. I listened to Toby crying. Was I beginning to pick out a pattern in his endless, mind-bending squeals: a few repeated sounds and here and there, like a language? Was this the Yugoslavian language? Do Yugoslavians communicate by means of screaming their language at one another? I don’t know - I’ve never been to Yugoslavia and cannot speak Yugoslavian. By 4am, I’d started to notice that there were subtle yet undeniable modulations in the tone and pitch of his screams as if to allude to some subtle additional meaning to what he was saying. Piece by piece, I felt I was beginning to get the gist of what he was shrieking about. By 5:30 I was proficiently fluent enough in Yugoslavian to follow what he was saying and sat, oddly calm, listening to him list his recommendations for an aggressive economic growth policy within the military. He softened his stance after I’d got up, bathed him and fed him.’


August 11th

‘Another sleepless night. I sat on the living room rug with Toby playing with some building blocks - the sort with coloured letters on them - and showed him how to spell ‘mum’. He tried to do as I showed him but, somehow, managed to instead spell out “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” despite there being neither enough floor-space to legibly replicate such a quotation, and there only being five letter-blocks.’

September 26th

‘Another sleepless night. In the afternoon I left Toby in the living room playing with his toys whilst I made a sandwich in the kitchen. When I returned he had set up what looked like a recreation of the Organ Zaštite Naroda trial of various former members of the collaborationist Ustasa administration, with Skunky the Skunk as Yugslav Catholic figurehead Aloysius Stepinac and Alf the duck as collaborationist statesman Draza Mihailovic. In a break from the accepted historical account they were each handed a crayon and sentenced to fight one another to the death .’

A brief mention must go to 'The Guarded Bard', a blog maintained by millionaire property tycoon Daniel Mayer who was taken prisoner by local gangsters earlier this year. As he waits for his wife to pay the ransom money, Mayer uses an iPhone he’s managed to keep hidden on his person not to alert the authorities to his location, but instead to post brief, evocative poems documenting his hostage experiences onto his blog. Poems such as ‘Death Awaits?’:

I’m handcuffed to a radiator,
So I’ll see you later.
Or will I?

Another genre of blog which is popular these days is the so-called ‘bad science’ variety. These are blogs which are dedicated to unmasking alternative medicine gurus, fraudulent medical quacks, anti-science holistic therapists and the like. One of the best examples of this type is a blog titled ‘Smash The Crystals! Smash Them! Go On! Do It!’ For this blog, maverick doctor and sceptical rationalist Professor Winston Sykes has assembled a team of junior medical researchers, dressed and made them up to look exactly like a horde of zombies and led them in an all-out horror-movie style assault on the home of Dr Angela Ford, a crystal healer, alternative nutritionalist and Professor Sykes’s unwitting arch-nemesis . Here are some samples of the progress report posts from his blog:

March 10th

‘Today we commenced the attack on Dr Ford’s house and, simultaneously, the attack on the unreason, irrationality and quackery which has encroached into the world of professional medical science. Whilst I crept round the back of her house and cut her phone and electricity cables, my team kicked her door down, waggling their painted-green arms about and noisily groaning the word ‘brains’. At the time she was busy cooking in the kitchen. She grabbed a large knife and immediately started slashing away wildly at the army of the undead. The fool! So immediately did she believe that a zombie apocalypse - a possibility so utterly implausible it literally makes me laugh: ha! - was underway, that I felt victory in the air. Sadly, Edgar, one of my students, got stabbed in the arm, severing a major artery. At the time of writing it remains unclear whether or not he’ll be able to use the arm ever again. However, this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of this experiment when I say it’s the most important experiment anyone’s ever done. Humanity hangs in the balance.’

March 16th

‘Success! My team of zombie-doctors have seen Dr Ford after nearly a full week of only hearing the sounds of her pitiful weeping and pleas for mercy from behind her barricaded-shut kitchen door. She emerged early this morning, again in tears, holding a handful of crystals in one of her shaky hands, a dreamweaver in the other and chanting ‘I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. Return to your earthy, soily graves’. Obviously, this mumbo-jumbo had no effect on my “zombies” and she fled up the stairs, locked herself in the bedroom and dragged all her furniture against the door. But not before kicking Kathy, another one of my assistants, down the stairs. She’s sustained spinal injuries preventing her both from continuing with my research and from communicating verbally ever again, but if she could I’m sure she’d say ‘You’re doing sterling work, Professor Sykes. I love you.’’

April 27th

‘Last night Dr Ford destroyed her staircase, filled her bath with tap water and is no doubt awaiting death. Despite this I still sometimes hear her reciting incantations, smell incense being burned, and listen to her thump about above me as she performs yoga poses. All my assistants have now either been hospitalised for indefinite periods or have abandoned me. Susan, the last remaining assistant, left yesterday. She called me ‘a drunken misogynist’. And so it falls to I alone to take this experiment to its conclusion. Hunched at the bottom of a staircase decimated by a woman whose mind I’m tinkering with, moaning occasionally, and touching up my child’s Halloween face-paint, I will prove she is mad.’

Another worth mentioning is local activism blog, ‘Stop The Drabblington-on-Sea Flyover’. Although this blog, maintained by amateur journalist David Jessop, used to be a shining example of an everyday citizens using online media for direct action in local politics - in this case to oppose the projected construction of a new flyover championed by local Councillor Gordon Crumb - recently it has dissolved from a series of posts outlaying complex and passionate arguments against the construction of the flyover to a seemingly unending string of bizarre and briefly worded outright lies about Councillor Crumb himself. Recent lies have included:

October 15th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small hole be built into one of the supporting pillars of the flyover so he can have sex with the brickwork whenever he likes.

October 16th: Gordon Crumb worships a bag of wool he once found which he calls ‘Satan’.

October 17th: Gordon Crumb runs a casino where kidnapped children are accepted as betting currency.

October 18th: Gordon Crumb has a small black patch tattooed onto his penis which spells out ‘Kill All Chinese People’ when he gets an erection.

October 19th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small underground room be built beneath the flyover in which he plans to keep a tramp as his unwilling pet locked in a box full of sick.

October 20th: Gordon Crumb spends his Saturdays collecting the turds of strangers in a small, rusty pot.

October 21st:Gordon Crumb spends his Sundays crouched in a ditch, poking strangers’ turds up his bottom.

A few brief mentions should also go to the following:
'Liver Lover’s Blog' - the online diary recording one man’s quest to eat the liver of every living creature on the earth, which was described by the Guardian’s media supplement as being ‘truly monstrous’.
'Diary of a Call Goat'
'Bites For Whites' - A racist cookery blog

And a final mention must go to the blog on the shortlist which I like the least.

'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Bitingly Satirical Spoof Blog' - the “comedy blog” which, rather than making any kind of attempt at wit or insight within its content, relies instead on meaningless surrealism, pseudo-intellectual references and needless scatological descriptions. Worse still, this is the sort of blog which attempts to excuse itself from its own overwhelming brain-numbing idiocy by repeatedly making references to itself in a pathetic bid to suggest a self-aware gloss of irony which is altogether lacking from the content itself. It also strives, wherever possible, to reference the fact that it references itself, as if this somehow elevates it above what is ultimately infantile repetition. If the author of such a blog were here, in front of you all, reading this, I’m sure he’d attempt to make a further reference - to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he had just referenced himself. And then, no doubt, there’d have to be yet another reference - this time to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced himself. You see? It’s passive aggressive, shit and childish. I’m glad it didn’t win.

Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. Thank you.

Baby Toby at 6 months

Coming Soon... Spooky Soup

Spooky Soup
A Word Soup Halloween Special
The Continental, Preston
October 20th - 8:00pm

Oh, hello there. I trust you are well. Are you doing anything on the evening of October 20th? Is it important? I thought not. Instead, why not come to Preston's Continental and watch me 'read' at Spooky Soup, a special Halloween-themed edition of Word Soup? I'll be 'performing' something called 'Zombie, He Wrote', the title of which I owe to almost-complete-stranger Alexander Green and which I'm modestly referring to as 'a white-knuckle multimedia assault on your senses'. Also on the bill will be Big Finish Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman and horror-writing actual national treasure Ramsey Campbell.


As a way of saying sorry for having to those of you who attend for having to pay (£3) to sit through the experience of witnessing my hunched and puke-inducingly hideous form shake its way through a croaky-voiced reading of puerile jokes and a lot of awkward moments of silence whilst waiting for laughs that won't come, there will also be free - yes, free! - bookmarks. Each one individually handmade by me. Also, there may - may - be badges. No, I don't love you. It's all part of my community service. If you don't come, I'll come into your home and kill you.