WERRRLD CUP

England have actually managed to score a goal. It’s all the city needs in order to poison itself further than it needs to, and every street corner is being propped up by a bleary eyed disheveled football fan pissing on his own shoes.

A weak retaliation to World Cup events features the involvement of taping bin bags to windows like a teen goth blotting out the World, and projecting a movie onto a white sheet in the office until all the unpleasantness outside dies down.

Which is doesn’t. Obviously. It’s England, for fuck sake, and as thus everyone decided to skive off work early, get on the bevvies mid afternoon and watch some overpaid ignoramus’ boot a ball around a bit of grass in a bleak fit of faux-patriot flag waving.

We’re in a noodle bar. 10pm. A pissed up scouse couple bounds in addressing each other with slurs and the kind of volleying pent up insults which must develop months into a relationship with a person who thinks a noodle ‘is like spaghetti but with, like, chinese stuff on it’. Christ.

The waiter approaches them, he talks in broken English - as do they - but for very different reasons.

The only comprehensible part of the exchange is that they want two beers.

No beer. Ran out. Have tea. Water.

YER’VE RAN OUT OF BEER?

Yes. All gone. Sorry.

YER SERIOUS?

Yis.

ALRIGHT THEN. FUCKIN’ELL. WE’LL HAVE TWO...WHAT DID YOU SAY YOU HAD? FANTAS? WE’LL HAVE THEM.

He brings over two generous glasses of tap water, and returns to the counter with a look of worry on his face.

Eh love, what the fucksthis?

FANTA. ALL THEY HAD.

Why’s it see through, like?

MAYBE ITS ‘OW THEY MAKE IT OVER THERE.

Over where?

YOU KNOW. CHINA LIKE...

The waiter is passed a tray from the kitchen. I busy myself with a mountain of noodles, pretending to have some control over chop sticks, but two pints in and I’m inexplicably bloody drunk. There’s soy sauce everywhere. I want to turn around to watch, but fear getting a glass of ‘china-fanta’ thrown over me head.

I hear him put the tray down.

WHATS THIS LOVE?

Starter. Sea-weed.

OH RIGHT. YER. TAAA....

They dig into it with cluttering, clattering, cutlery which sounds like it’s being used by a donkey wearing boxing gloves.

The waiter hasn’t even got back to the counter when...

WHAT THE FUCKS THIS? EH! WAITERRR!

His shoulders drop and he returns to the table. The noodle bar is silent.

THIS SPINACH IS DEAAD SALTY, LAD.

Seaweed. Dish are seaweed, not spinach.

YER WHA?? SEA WHAT? IT’S FUCKING SALTY.

It normal. Seaweed salty.

IT’S FUCKING DISGUSTIN’ MATE. TAKE IT AWAY, THAT IS FUCKIN - UUURGGH - VILE, THAT.

He returns it to the counter. There’s a hubbub about in the kitchen. Someone is shouting.

Back at the table, the couple are fighting again.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR FUCKIN FACE?

My face? What’s wrong with your fuckin face? Pyaar sour mug on you, gerrl.

FUCK OFF. IM TEXTING SOMEONE.

Who? Who yer fucking texting at this hour?

NONE OF YER BUSINESS, IS IT? GET YER GRID OUT OF ME FUCKIN FACE.

Shut the fuck up. Yer doing me head in tonight.

I’M DOIN YOUR FUCKIN HEAD IN? YOU’RE THE ONE THAT PISSED ON YOUR FUCKING SHOES EARLIER, YER GOBSHITE.

The waiter returns, sheepishly.

You leave now, sorry.

YER WHA?

You leave. No charge. Just go, please.

YOU ARE NOT FUCKIN KICKING US OUT!?

Please, no swear. Go now.

He opens the door. The girl stumbles up, sways for a while, swallows a small bit of vomit by the looks of it and looks at her boyfriend who’s attempting to tie his laces for the journey outside.

FUCK OFF. WHATS A FUCKIN NOODLE ANYWAY? WOULDN’T WANT TO EAT ‘ERE. CMON BABES, LET’S FUCKIN GO.

She slides out of the place in a diagonal motion - her head closer to the floor than her fucking shoulders.

Her boyfriend finally staggers up. He shakes the waiters hand and pats him on the back.

Alright lerd, alright. Going now.

A fork falls out of his pocket.

Shit.

Him and the waiter stare it at for a good five seconds, then stare at each other, and then back to the fork, all in complete silence. The man surveys the rest of the gawping customers in the restaurant and then stares back at the fork. He picks it up and puts it back in his pocket as though no-one can see him.

I’ll just take me fork, and leave, lad.

The door slams after him like a forced applause following a bad joke.

The waiter does a small victory dance behind the counter and smiles at everyone.

Fuck England.

Stig Noise MMX & Barberos split EP launch @ Wolstenholme Creative Space

Oh, Wolsteholme Creative Space. You beautifully grotty little wonder. It’s perhaps one of the few spaces in Liverpool which manages to be colder indoors than outdoors in Winter, and blisteringly, brutally hot in the questionable British Summertime.

A lasciviously open and blank canvas of a space, it holds the kinds of performances which leave you staggering out of the place at God knows what time in the fucking morning trying desperately to cram receipts of brain matter back into your skull which have been badgered and blown out by a treatise of bands hours previous.

Tonight is one of those sublime brain-matter-scatter-nights. A total treat. And despite a sardine-crammed line up of excellence (including Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, Spirit Animals, Pariah Qarey...), we somehow only manage to properly catch two of the fervent applause anticipant bands on offer.

Fuck. Blame it on alcohol urgencies, rum brain deliriums and the fact that the place is packed out with every favourite person you owe a high five and a sequence of cackle wielding banter to.

Shit happens when you wander off for a quick piss only to discover a half hour queue and an upstairs room full of people too caught in the cross fires of conversation to make it back downstairs to the actual gig.

Still, Stig Noise MMX and Barberos are divine treats enough.

Stig, as ever, are their usual onslaught of brass, gut pounding drums, distortion, and pseudo-psycho-composures of riffs. Guttural grind ramblings of vocals and whimsical, diametric melodies wound up into tight, bold statements of shredding, bombastic scores are as ever, irresistible, and a mainstay of their prowess.

The crowd’s an odd mixture, mind. Seems we’re not the only ones with a rum swamp for a think tank, but at least the majority of us can handle our ale. For those that can’t, staggering, knee hitching dance moves, attempts to sweep whoever, wherever, off their feet where they stand and general flailing about at horizontal angles seems to be the only way some of the crowd feel able to interpret Stig Noise’s own personal riot.

There’s men in suits reeling off archaic chat up lines to many a poor broad mid set, who look as though they got a bit lost on their way to The Pleasure Rooms.

But fuck it, by the time Hearts Of Gold/ Gobs Of Shite plays out to tie a tidy, lovesome bow to the end of Stig’s gutter-waltz set you couldn’t give a shit that some gobshite in a John Lewis ‘original’ is butting into your side like a rhino trying to escape a fucking zoo.

A good hour and a half bridges the gap between these fine fellows and Barberos, in which the seemingly multiplying crowd crams into a back room to catch a glimpse of Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. Theres people gawping through windows, stood on chairs, tables and people, leering through gaps wherever they can find them.

But booze, piss and smoke missions hinder what was obviously, at least in some part, a must see performance. I’m a dickhead for not paying enough attention. Let’s just leave it at that and move on...

Barberos then. Four fine young men with a fetish for full body silver spandex (who doesn’t share that fetish? Come on), cacophony and beating drums hard enough for BDSM enthusiasts to lip bitingly be urged to scream out their ‘safe’ word, take to the stage before a hungry, tanked up, piled in crowd.

Fuck. Me. It’s. Good. A dystopian noise scramble of brain digging which ventures between malevolent sound scores of the satisfyingly viscous and toe curling sublime, all framed by back screen visuals of discordance and facial squirm play.

They’re the noise of nights bled hedonistically into early mornings, of searing sunrise in wrung out pupils, of a brain squirming inside the skull perilously drying itself foul of chemicals, rapid and inane thought processes and spirit soaked alarm bells.

A barrage of manipulated doom siren synth, and dual drummers in place of vocal and word heavy vocalists, the narrative of the set is hell bent on staggering, insufferable rhythm, the lost laconic, the fevered, the unrelenting.

The crowd is understandably sick for it. A bleating united urge of beat grabbing mass who holler throughout, pounding palm to palm excitably, and refuse to surrender at the will of each songs end.

Fucking hell, the drums are ridiculous. Ferociously charged, they’re succinct to the beatings of unimaginable pace. Are feral and incessant - the heaviest, most beautifully aggressive poundings which go off on unreal tangents which seem to have a dialect and vocabulary of a language you only wish your lover’s tongue could learn.

So good it’s almost exhausting. But who wants to sleep after that? Fuck. That.

We cheekily procured a copy of the Stig Noise MMX vs Barberos split EP on vinyl, and strongly urge you all to get yer grubby mitts on a copy.

You’ll wanna experience em both live, but as a 4AM backing soundtrack of discord to discord (if that’s what you’re into, like...), this is the best you’re gonna get without attempting to smuggle them into your living room after a few too many rounds of escapist snacks.

True Story. Get onto it.

Buy said amazing EP here...

Stig Noise MMX: http://www.myspace.com/stignoise

Barberos: http://www.myspace.com/barberosmusic

Trash

It was one stain on the floor.

One crimson blush.

It wouldn’t budge.

She’d used every commercially celebrated cleaning apparatus on the market - if the kitchen had been a body, it would have been scrubbed and exfoliated in such harsh detail as to draw it down to the bone.

She could see her reflection in every veneer.

Except for the crimson blush on the fucking floor.

He was out in the shed. His fingers had fallen off by now. His toes gnawed by fuck knows what, probably rats, possibly decay. His face was gone. His mouth hung off. It had been raining a lot. Who knew what the fuck went on when you were buried in a place like that.

He’d crept in through the window a month ago. She knew him. A little. Enough to share a moment of questionable merit between the both of them when he’d woken her up, blind drunk on whatever, tripping over the mantle.

Initially, she felt humiliated. It was a ridiculous impulse, she knew. Of all the things she could have been scared of or worried about in that moment, it was the state of her bedroom, the underwear she was sleeping in, the dried up make up on the pillow - which bothered her the most.

She hadn’t cleaned for months. There was a breadcrumb path leading up to the bed of old, crusty underwear torn off in the midst of misjudged dalliances, used johnnies, shredded stockings.

There were books left open at pages which declared boldly her mindset, her gnawing ache.

There were half eaten sandwiches, abandoned mid bite.

There was a belt still buckled to the steel headboard where her wrists, neck, and ankles had been shackled and snagged. She always picked the men who would willingly abandon her. And like Houdini, she’d wriggle free, course with the stench of a used companion, and sit on her bed contemplating what to do now she was free.

And now he was in her room. And he was standing there. He saw everything. And she was humiliated.

He was rotten from rain. Decayed, like a soiled notebook.

It was a challenge, like the moment an opponent pulls out the first fist, and you have a split second to choose whether to dive out the fucking way or duke it out.

She did nothing.

It was the most romantic thing she could have imagined.

He merely walked over. His stench infusing into every one of her senses, even her fucking sight was watered by it, her hearing dulled by the pounding of her sickened heart.

He dragged his nose across her thighs. Her stomach. Her tits. Her ribs. Her neck. Her ears. He settled between the frozen applause of her snatch, sniffing like a dog finding a discarded crumb of a dinner round the back of the bins.

She stroked his scalp, sticky and wet, she found his face, half torn and flaking, his vacant eye socket. She shoved a finger inside and he purred with approval.

She was bleeding herself, and he began lapping it up.

She pulled her foot under his t-shirt and found a gash by his ribs, and probed her foot the whole way through. She found his still heart. His weeping chamber of what used to be.

She knew him. He lived in the house at the back of hers, and at night he’d sit by the back window and stare out.

She never closed the blinds.

He never closed the blinds.

Every act in that room of hers was a performance, and he saw every movement.

But she was still ashamed to have him here, like a fan stepping foot on the set of the movie they knew every mechanic of, she knew the illusion would be shattered. The fantasy over. It was all lighting and scripted and propped and caricatured to fucking perfection.

She couldn’t judge him in his current state. We all went this way eventually, she realised, and at least he’d managed to crawl back through death and offer himself to her, finally.

She wished she had a cock to shoot herself up into him with - to solder his insides with every volume of her lust.

He was fascinated by the beat of her body. The orchestral thrum. She was a funeral march.

She pulled at his skin. She sucked at his fingers, until his index dropped out in her mouth like a refrigerated pacifier. She peeled the flesh from his shoulders and carved her name into the bone.

She gave head to his hollow eye socket, and nibbled at his lips - spitting out fragments of pout and blush.

He made love to her the only way he knew how - by inhaling every inch of her that he could, by digesting every fluid, by petting everything which strutted out the life which he’d now lost.

But everything has it’s expiry.

His was long before now, but theirs was this instant, in a bouquet of projectile, gory crimson, like a bride tossing the flowers out at the next in line for matrimony.

He convulsed and withered. He stopped.

She dragged his body downstairs like a bag of trash. A trail of innards and flesh and blood and loss, curdling against linoleum.

Exhausted, she left him on the kitchen floor and sat up on the counter top. She found cigarettes. She lit a few. Smoked a few. She stared at the body. She stared at the blood on her foot. She could still taste him.

She missed the fuck out of him.

She fell asleep on his caving chest - his decaying steeple of ribs pillowing her fractured rest, before throwing him in the shed amongst the rest of the junk she’d accumulated over the years and never looked back at.

No-one could ever know.

It was fucking romance, and it was gone.

Friday Night On The 82 Bus Home

Piss-ant stumbles aboard. Can smell his cider potency from the middle row of seats I've stumbled myself on.

The man in front of me keeps sneezing and wiping his germs on the back of the seat in front of him. I keep my hands to myself. I levitate off the seat, just in case I catch anything. I'll levitate the fuck off the bus later, too, just to be fucking sure. The 82 is riddled like an auld rat.

Piss-ant sits in the disabled seat, facing the rest of the bus, like a burnt out performer taking to the stage and re-living his glory years of packed out dive bars and high fives and cheers.

EH, DRIVEERRR! CAN YER GIVE US A SHOUT WHEN WE'RE NEAR THE 24 HOUR OFFY, LAD?

The driver slows down the bus. What was that lad? 24 hour? Yer mean on Park Road, yeah?

YEEAAH, SOMEWHERE.

He scans the faces in front of him, realising everyone's clocked him in his scruffiest hour. His binge peak.

'OOO WANTS A DRINK? COME'EAD.

He pulls out a Tesco bag with a bottle of wine inside and takes a big gulp.

The germ fest in front of me, shakes his head in dismay, and pissed out of his skull himself slurs: Aaah, lad, put it away lad. Don't be doing that to yourself. Don't be...err...put it away.

He punctuates with belches. The piss-ant gawps at him and spits some wine out all over himself like a try hard punk arriving in London twenty years too fucking late. Get off the fucking stage, lad.

PUT IT AWAY?? NARR LAD. DYER WANT SOME YERSELF, DO YER? he starts punching his own head WELL THEN CRACK ME OPEN. IT'S ALL LIQUID IN 'ERE. he continues bashing his head in AAAALLL LIQUID!! He screams, laughing.

A woman with a Marks&Spencer bag at the front of the bus gets up and moves to sit at the very back. Must think she's the fucking queen.

The piss-ant curls up into the corner of his seat and starts singing to himself. His words stagger listless points of thought which sound like they're rumbling round his liquidated brain like a pinball with no-one pushing the flipper.

THERE MIGHT BE A KEBAB SHOP OPEN. YER. KEBAB. BIT GREASY THOUGH. BOSS THOUGH. FIVER THAT. CHICKEN KEBAB! YIIIRRRSE. GET A CHICKEN KEBAB. he laughs to himself CH-CH-CH-CHICKEN, CHICKEN-LICKEN. LITTLE CHICKEEEE. IN ME BELLIEEE.

Germ fest in front of me staggers up for his stop. He shakes the hand of Piss-ant as he's leaving.

Y'alright lad. You take it easy, yerr? Have a safe one.

YOU TOO LAD. YOU TOO.

He get's off the bus and cracks open a can of Super Tenants. Fuckin hell, everyones on it. This is how the World ends. Friday night on the fucking 82 bus.

Eee'yarr lad. The offy's coming up.

MEGGAAA! TA DRIVER.

Piss-ant quivers up from his seat - a walking turd - and stands by the door. He spots the offy - it's nearly midnight and it's got a bigger queue than was spotted on the same street not too long ago for voting.

THERE IT IS! OFFY!!

The bus drives a little while further to get to the bus stop, piss-ant panics.

WHERE YER FUCKIN GOIN, LAD? LET ME OUT!! YER GOIN MIIIILLES OFF! FUCKSAKES.

The driver stops and piss-ant jumps off and starts running like a kid spotting an ice cream van after school.

The bus is silent and still, and all I can smell is the booze on my own breath.

The Temps @ Liverpool O2 Academy July 3

Photos by Matt Thomas: http:mattthomas.co.uk

Fuck knows when it happened, but somewhere between Korova opening and Korova burning down (farewell dear scumfest) people forgot how to have actual fucking FUN at gigs.

No-one thrashes around anymore, punches don't get thrown, spit is no longer exchanged between audience and band, limbs don't get broken half as much as they used to be, stages remain in tact, and I can't even remember the last time I left a gig with spatters of someone else's vomit sprayed on the front of my shoes / t-shirt/ dress/ jeans.

Audience interaction lately seems to amount to only so much as a delicate arse wiggle, foot shuffle, a determined stiffly enforced pout of the lips and a nod of the head. Fuckin'ell.

So it was with warm, elated, heart charged delight that thrashing, stage destruction, vomit, and - 'someone outta get the emergency services on call just in case , shit is gonna go down'- plain recklessness was witnessed at the O2 Academy courtesy of The Temps.

Rampant with the kind of energy, brute force and power which could probably peel the stubborn leathery hide off Iggy Pop's insurance salesman withering bones, The Temps are the fuck off boot that this city / country has been in desperate need of for quite some time now. Experiencing them live is like being kicked brutally awake, and realising you've slept through the past six years or so of weak attempts at live shows.

Guitars and bass are brutal and fluid, every note sounds charged, every riff so sharp you can practically feel em breaking the skin and dancing through every one of your nerves - drums are magnetic and forceful, a skin bash self-applause of what are without a doubt some scarringly catchy tunes (look out for The Lesson, Electrolytes and Who Are They (To Say) ).

The audience is ape-shit. It's the way audiences used to be before someone decided it was anti-etiquette to stop caring if you elbow someone in the face behind you whilst you lose your fucking cool, mind and body to a band. There are pits of lads at the front of the stage going f-u-c-k-i-n-g-m-e-n-t-a-l.

IS RIGHT. About time, like.

Frontman Joey is perilously engaging - if he were to jump off a fucking cliff, you would follow. If he were to stick his hand in the fire, you'd willingly join him in searing the flesh off your own paw. Darting around the stage, he climbs the barriers, climbs the walls, thrashes himself about the place, fucks the scene up, vomits everywhere at one point and spits beer out all over proceedings when he realises he's taken a swig of the fit-juice right before a crucial riff - and boys gotsta dance, even he does receive a minor electric shock from the act.

He keeps up a strong dialogue with the audience - his thick accent framing a number of self-deprecating and t-shirt worthy statements, including inciting the whole audience to chant 'F-T-T' at him for a whole minute, before joining in himself - 'Fuck-The-Temps-Fuck-The-Temps---'

They're hard to keep tabs on - and it's hard to know who to keep your eye on, or what'll happen next. Songs play with structure - jolting silence into the middle of songs before blasting out a second half, performing with all their heart ruthless, raw slabs of the sort of angry, dark garage-punk which is as close to perfection as it may ever get.

You'd be a fucking idiot to miss any of their live shows. Seriously.

Destined. For. Greatness.

The Temps Myspace: http://myspace.com/thetempsliv

Ladykiller

I'm a murderer. Proper bad one, me. Destroyed a whole family once. Didn't even have to try - I did it in one quick, sharp, move, so skilled and secretive and laissez faire that not a single person in that packed out cafe managed to witness it.

Fuck knows how old I was, but it was the Summer right before puberty hit. Right before I ballooned up like the prize heifer at a pig farm, right before hormones restricted all the oxygen to my brain and made me stupid enough to think particular boys had any interest in me, right before heartbreak, right before responsibility, right before Nickelodeon and MTV started their downward descent to shitsville, right before the awful, stinking, bleeding and the once budding, then blossomed tits which outcasted me from all my male friends.

Puberty, I'd worked out, was a vile, horrific penance for a vile, horrific act I'd recently committed.

We were in Blackpool on holiday - the working class' Paris, tower and all - and sat in a greasy spoon by the beach. That Summer what could only be described as a plague of Ladybirds had swamped the town like an outbreak of acne over every building, window, grain of sand, paving stone, fairground ride and tram. They were everywhere.

At any one time you would find at least four of the insects crawling about on your tee.

We'd just eaten and I was sipping on a coke, my brother playing on a Game Boy beside me, my parents opposite, when I leaned myself on the windowsill behind me and felt a damp, minor crunch beneath my elbow.

I froze. I tried to imagine every vile, frightening scenario as to what the squidgy crunch could have been - a shrunken head, a mouth full of teeth left abandoned on the side with gums like off fruit, a tiny egg of a miniature being, a bubble full of blood and the contorted legs of daddy long legs, and then I turned around and saw it. THE MASSACRE.

There, bleeding out on the windowsill like a smashed grape, was the ladybird I'd just savagely destroyed. It was practically broken in half - it's innards pooling about it, sticky like a candy gone bad in the sun.

I felt pretty shitty about that, in itself.

I grabbed a napkin, and stared at my parents - they hadn't witnessed the tragedy - I checked the rest of the cafe - they hadn't witnessed it either, I was safe.

I wiped the death from my elbow.

I sat shifting about uncomfortably. I waited for my parents to suddenly become aware of the situation, to get manic, angry, sickened.

YOU KILLED SOMETHING!! They'd say - YOU KILLED A LIVING THING!! WE DON'T WANT YOU ANYMORE. Stay here in Blackpool when we leave. You're no daughter of ours.

But they hadn't noticed.

Thing was, I'd killed loads of ants and spiders in my time, but this was different. Ladybirds weren't evil. Killing one was like taking a hammer to the sun.

I turned back around, and noticed at the other end of the windowsill which stretched out past about five other tables, two other ladybirds approaching, practically holding hands.

One was tiny - a baby, the other was around the same size as the one I'd just killed, and it was obvious to my child brain that it was the mother. They quickened pace when they saw the murder scene behind me.

The mother approached the corpse whilst the baby, obviously in a large amount of trauma stared frozen at who was probably the ladybird baby's papa.

The mother was crawling all over the corpse, frantically. Then the baby joined and both of them looked as though they were screaming, standing on their hind legs and thrashing about.

I wanted to apologise. I wanted to scream, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!, but they wouldn't have cared. No-one cares that anything's an accident, you only care that something bad has happened and it can't be undone.

Then they picked up what was left of the corpse and carried it away with them. I shit you not. They left a couple of legs behind, and part of what I guess was a piece of ladybird skull.

I stared at my parents. They smiled at me. I imagined what would happen if something bigger than us just clumsily whammed it's elbow down on my father in the same way. He'd be gone. And we'd need to carry his body out. As much of it as we could find anyway. And then I wouldn't have a dad.

I started to panic. The World seemed so unsafe, suddenly. Anything was possible.

I burst into tears, my parents came over to comfort me, console me, they couldn't get any explanation out of me apart from deep, sorrowful gasps which resembled vowels and sharp letters.

We went to the Pleasure Beach fairground that same day and went on the ride with the swings that fly out in a circle. We got engulfed by ladybirds - hundreds of them, everywhere. They got in our ears, up our noses, down our t-shirts, they got caught in our hair, and eyelashes.

They knew who I was, I thought, and they were getting their revenge.

Life Lesson 2: Everything is a dirty stinking lie.

Suffice to say, I've always been under the impression that a period is a happy, high fiving, gory salute to the fact that there is categorically, under no possible circumstances a baby inside you.

A total lack of fanny-weepage, on the other hand, was a threatening commiserating signal that slut karma had decided it's big pay off moment was this, and took the opportunity to knock you the fuck up.

Turns out that all of this is one big, awful, stinking lie. All of it.

I heard a horror story about a year ago from a close friend of mine who described how her boyfriend had become extra paranoid about sex.

He'd just returned from visiting friends - two of which, a couple - we're now suddenly in possession of a little newborn baby.

He didn't even know she was pregnant, he said. But as it turned out, neither did they.

For nine months she got her period. For nine months she showed no other symptoms of breeding - no stomach, no weight gain, no mad cravings, no morning sickness. Nada, nothing, zilch.

She just woke up one morning, felt ill, experienced the worst stomach pain of her life, and popped out a kid. Just like that.

Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror.

A close pal of mine, Pearl, has somehow managed to recently become a doctor.

We got totally fucked up the other night and I told him about this story - he's a doctor of vaginas, or whatever you call it - and asked him if any of it was at all plausible. I begged him to tell me it was all bullshit. An urban myth. He shook his head.

Happens more often than you think. All of it's plausible.

ALL OF IT???!

All of it. You could be pregnant right now.

I gasped. Threw a hand over my mouth. I felt vomit lurch up through my throat.

Why would you say such a thing...??

Sorry.

It is true though. Had a woman in just the other month. She was athletic - had a stomach like Jet from Gladiators.

Oh, I loved Jet.

Oh my God, I know, right? Killer. Anyway - she comes in complaining of extreme stomach pains. We all shit ourselves thinking it's appendicitis - this bitch is going to die, right? WRONG. I get a finger up there...

He gestures his two finger vag-wiggle technique at me, making a face like he's trawling through sewage.

...and that's when I feel the baby's head.

NOOO....

Oh yeah - she gives birth to a baby girl. Nine months of bleeding - worthless.

Shit.

I feel swathes of paranoia wash over me. I, like most women, get paranoid about pregnancy whether or not I've even had sex that month - and now this?? Fuck.

The next day I browse the pregnancy tests in Boots. They all cost over £8, which is nearly a quarter of my weekly budget. I decide I'm going to shoplift one. Maybe two - just to make sure.

But then I notice that all of them are security tagged up to high fucking hell. I try Superdrug - the same. I try St Johns market - SHOCKINGLY the same, even though security tags probably cost more than the walls in that place.

I've no solution to this, other than to live in abject fear for the rest of my still fertile life. Thanks a bunch, womb.