callum house

Tag: writing

  • Funko Popstar

    I, for one, welcome pop-sensation Taylor Swift back into the culture. After a gruelling 18 months without our gracious all-American patriot, she’s returning to your phone, your office, your car, your dinner table and your bed – at long last. We can only hope, with the help of AI tech, we can start to see Taylor in our dreams soon.

    2025 has been an uneventful year, other than 60,000 dead Palestinians, human rights injustices in Sudan, the never-ending woke Ukraine war, record-breaking temperatures, the rise of fascism in the West, the leader of the free world on the brink of declaring martial law in the United States of America to distract from allegations of rampant paedophilia within all facets of the elite and the general decline in quality of life across the board, the 25th year of this century is proving to be one that we’re all bound to forget come Christmas. How grateful we are to Taylor, for putting 2025 on the map with her new album ‘Life of a Showgirl’.

    This is her 12th studio album (discounting the 187 versions of her other studio works), and by the sounds of it, it may the least mediocre yet, with early reviews asking, ‘Has she dropped the Bon Iver bit yet?’. How excited we all are!

    In classic Swift fashion, she turned her fans into rabid Q-Anon moms, with teasers, clues and hints at what’s to come. In a genius PR move, Eagle-eyed ‘Swifties’ saw references to the number ‘12’ as early as last year, seeing that Taylor used 12,000 tonnes of carbon emissions in 2024, in what can only be described as an epic marketing stunt.

    Taylor is announcing ‘Life of a Showgirl’ on the New Heights podcast – a show run by two disabled brothers, both victims of CTE, who play or played sports in America. To think that people complain about her political in-action, when the biggest announcement of her career is being made on a show run by the mentally disadvantaged – her contemporaries stunned into silence.*

    Now, Taylor is by no means perfect. Who is? Take for instance, her terrible music.

    The humanity she demonstrates in her lyricism some are calling ‘bad’ or ‘lazy’. The worms saying this have clearly never been so depressed that they slept in and showed up late to their high school English class one time.

    Her wit that so-called ‘people’ call cringe or off-putting have never walked in the shoes of a well-off Aryan teenager in Pennsylvania.

    The apathy she demonstrates to political injustice, with the exception of faux girl-power she cynically built her career off. Oh, how quickly we forget her endorsement of a little lady called Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hang on, did I say cynically? I meant to say expertly. That’s my fault, I never learned how to use the backspace key so that’s going to have to stay. Sorry.

    In conclusion, Taylor is only human, like Stalin or Jesus. Sure, a gulag here, a plague there. But have you considered the literacy rates?

    *Editor’s note: I just discovered that Taylor is also dating one of these, for want of a better and less offensive term ‘retards’. Good for her!

  • Thoughts around the Holidays

    8 December 2022

    It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve been snowed under with various ad-ridden mobile app games, listening to music I should’ve grown out of by now and trying to sort my life out.

    Speaking of snow, it’s December, the month in which both Christmas and my birthday fall.

    I turn 24 years old in two days. The same age Lee Harvey Oswald was when he shot and killed Kennedy. A bizarre age. Your brain starts making sense of the world. I’ve started to feel a bit more comfortable in my own body and mind, less inclined to passively kill myself, a general sense of socks needing to be pulled up and shit needing to be sorted. I wonder if this is how Oswald felt.

    I started therapy, with a genuine interest in making myself feel better rather than to appease those close to me, or LARPing as Tony Soprano, and I feel like things are on the up. This is usually mania driven, and I do think I have a twinge of that (I cannot write without it) but less than is customary on my good days. A quotidian amount of mania for the days I don’t think about walking into traffic.

    Talking is a complete bore though. I feel like a complete bromide paying some poor woman to listen to the same life story I used to drunkenly regale to whichever sorry cunt was stood next to me in a smoking area. However, it does help, I feel validated when people recognise the outré situation I was born into. It’s nice.

    I’ve put my Christmas tree up and wrapped most of my presents. I’ve designed, printed, and written my annual Christmas cards, they sit in my drawer waiting to be posted since the festive season* doesn’t officially begin until after my birthday.

    I’m somewhat excited for Christmas, it’s just a bit fucking tiring isn’t it. It comes around so quickly every year; I feel like I only watched Home Alone a couple of months ago. Apparently, every year gets older as you age, which doesn’t make sense to me as old people are so slow all the time. You’d think they’d hurry the fuck up. There are stockings to be filled and wines to be mulled. What is eggnog, by the way? Can you get that in England? It looks disconcertingly semeny.

    Anyway, thinking about Christmas Day exhausts me. There’s so much going on, but it somehow feels never-ending. It causes the same feeling that walking through museums or galleries gives me. You know that weird fatigue; your legs feel like jelly and you’re always slightly too hot? It’s alright though, decent day. It’s no Halloween or Birthday.

    Birthdays are the best. Not even a contest. Everyone must do what you want, and no one can tell you off if you drink or smoke too much. Did I mention it’s my birthday in two days? I am going to assassinate the President of the United States of America.

    *“Festive season”, listen to me, what’s next? Merry Wintermas? You can’t say anything these days. The New World Order is trying to erase the Christian identity of our proud nation, while they laugh under their kippahs. It has nothing to do with faux-inclusively in modern marketing or a run-of-the-mill capitalist greed.

  • Is it Finally Brown Boy Summer?

    21 July 2022

    It felt like white boy summer would never end. Jack Harlow polluted the charts, Chet Hanks was all over your FYP and Boris Johnson was swagged up in No. 10. Now that the blonde era of Western politics is coming to an end, it feels like the long night is over and the brown sun finally rises.

    Kamala Harris is VP, everyone’s third favourite cop (1st being Paul Blart, 2nd being Joe from Family Guy) and guess what, racists? Notice anything different about her? Yes, she’s black. But black has been cool for a while now, I mean, just check your Instagram feed. Kim K has been trying to be black for a while and so has every other white woman you went to school with.

    You know what isn’t, and has never been cool? Being brown.

    I’m speaking from experience here, as a brown person. In school, I was never brown enough to fit in with the second-generation brown kids, but not white enough to be cool, unfortunately. It didn’t help I was a Jehovah’s Witness and shit at football but being brown certainly wasn’t the helping hand those two attributes needed.

    I mean, just check any sit-com ever. The sexless Indian has always been a trope. The long-running CBS abortion; The Big Bang Theory, featured an Indian character that physically couldn’t speak to women. Parks and Recreation had Aziz (yes, I’ll get there) playing a guy who thought he was cool, the joke being that he wasn’t, because imagine that! Unlike that guy from The Big Bang Theory, he actually thought he had a shot with white women, much to the bemusement of his co-workers.

    Hell, this isn’t even about being cool for the most part, it’s more about being hated. In England the South Asian communities are viscerally hated. My mum lived on a council estate as a kid and had dog shit posted through her door simply because she and her mum were brown.

    I think the stereotypes have gotten worse in the digital age. People now associate Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis with Facebook harassers and call centre workers, rather than corner shop owners and takeaway ambassadors. With the help from popular sitcoms and the like, the sexless Indian is very much an enforced stereotype.

    Our knight in shining armour, Aziz Ansari, just had to go and fuck it up didn’t he. Master of None was my show. I loved it more than anything I had seen at the time, simply because it broke away from this stereotype. I didn’t understand the importance of representation in media before that show. There was so little self-deprecating humour that some minorities like to perpetrate to appease the masses, it was a fantastically written show with Aziz just playing a guy. Sure, his heritage and looks played into the plot sometimes, but never in a way that put him or his community down. I loved Aziz, I had his books, I watched all his stand-up specials and interviews, he was a real inspiration for me. And then he had to go do that thing didn’t he? Thanks Aziz.

    Anyway, now with all the boring shit out of the way, let’s get down to the future. Brown boy summer.

    With Aziz uncancelled, a so-called Indian summer and Johnson no longer PM, and a man of Indian descent front runner for the top spot, are we finally entering a new age of brown excellence? Should I expect to be beating the white women off with a stick? The smell of curry to fill the air? Women ditching their Skims and cladding themselves in sarees? Bollywood movies to fill the multi-plex cinemas across the country? The Spotify charts just filled wall to wall with Punjabi sounds? Imagine that.

    Or, of course, the other outcome is that Sunak enacts harsh Thatcherite policies, we enter austerity, people die, and he does more damage to the brown communities than Aziz Ansari’s wandering hands. Who knows? We’ll wait and see.

  • Americans

    20 July 2022

    I spent my weekend in Paris at a musical festival.

    As a Brit, I know to keep my voice down, speak French wherever possible and generally stay out of the way of the French. I, like many Brits before me, am in a country that isn’t mine. Unlike Brits of the past, I’m not looting it for all its worth, I’m just here to see Megan Thee Stallion.

    The French are relatively loud and obnoxious. Famously rude and to the point, they have no qualms about cutting lines, pushing through a crowd, or voting for a Nazi. However, I must reiterate; I’m in their country, so I suck it up and repeat “c’est okay” as they shove past me to get a better view. Don’t get me wrong, it fucks me off, but I’m a passive aggressive, socially awkward, beta male with terrible French, so what am I going to do about it?

    There’s one nation, however, who simply don’t care about all this socially constructed nonsense: the Americans.

    There are groups of them dotted around the festival, and you can see them coming from a mile away. They’re social tornados that rip through crowds of unsuspecting Europeans. The vibe changes when you’re next to a group of Americans. No one is louder or less polite.

    As I was waiting to see Megan Thee Stallion, I was stood next to a group of 19 year old girls from the USA. They were, and this isn’t malapropism, literally yelling at each other as everyone in a 10 metre radius looked on, bewildered.

    How on earth these people don’t pick up on social cues I don’t know. But yelling at each other, vocal fry and all, about which drugs they’ve done, people they know from home and where they want to visit. One of them mentioned going to the Alps later in the year, I feel like I should alert the Swiss government for fear of avalanches. It was like listening to Red Scare through one of Godspeed You! Black Emperors amplifiers. It triggered my fucking fight or flight – I hate them.

    My dad always used to say, “hate is a strong word”, but it is far from strong enough to express my feelings towards these people.

    Another older American man found his way over to them, like a fly to shit, and started hitting on them. Lapping it up, they start a conversation and, almost thankfully, at this point I go into sensory overload. The the sun is beaming down on me, I’m thirsty, I’m sweating like Patrick Bateman over Paul Allen’s business card as I try and roll a cigarette. My brain checks back in to hear the man ask what drugs they’ve done.

    “Never take molly unless it’s pink” he says. Okay, I guess that advice is okay, I’m not an active user to MDMA so I know very little about that shit. He’s just looking out for her probably. “Never touch heroin”. No shit, mate. I doubt these 19-year-old kids were about to go and inject skag in the porta-loos but go off. He went on to say that cocaine was fine, but crack wasn’t. What do you think crack is?

    As an adult, should you be recommending this to a bunch of first-time festival going kids who have never touched coke? No. I’d vouch for no.

    Do I really give a shit about all this? No of course not. I couldn’t care less. Drug chats wind me up, yes but it was more down to the fact that it was coming out of the mouths of the most irritating, loud, vexatious Americans. Am I xenophobic? Probably.

    David Bowie was afraid of Americans. He also consumed nothing but peppers and milk for a year so I’m not sure he was a model judge of character.

  • Ramsgate, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

    20 May 2022

    Escaping your hometown is, I feel, an integral step in growing up. We all know those who stuck around, either at their parents or down the road, eventually to settle down with a likeminded resident, who never fully left the nest, start a family, and eventually have affairs or lose their minds. They’re lovely people, just easy targets.

    Ramsgate is a coastal town of just over 40,000 of these types. Ramsgate is the end of the line, literally. You can’t really get further southeast on this god-forsaken lump of land. The trains from London all terminate at Ramsgate rail station – so you do have a few London commuters settle in Ramsgate (those who don’t have the means to live in Whitstable, Margate, Broadstairs or Faversham). But most of the Ramsgate’s population live and die in Ramsgate.

    An oddball of a town; Margate’s slow cousin. It tried its best to hop on board the Shoreditch-on-Sea, avocado-on-sourdough, totebag-and-anorak gentrification train (calling at £6 Pint Way and AirBnB Boulevard) and it’s a textbook victim of the death of the British High Street. It’s a ghost town with a Royal Harbour and the country’s largest Wetherspoon’s.

    A working-class Conservative stronghold, full to the brim of the disenfranchised and bitter. The population is overwhelmingly white, with a handful of those from Asian backgrounds. A nasty atmosphere hangs over the seaside town, but it was never as bad as it was during the Brexit referendum, since it belongs to the infamous South Thanet Parliamentary Constituency. Yes, that one. The one that where Nigel Farage ran in 2015 (losing out to the only man somehow worse than Nige; Conservative party clown – Craig ‘Whack It on the Expenses, why the fuck not’ Mackinlay) and the one that where The Brexit Party got 46% of the vote share in the European elections of 2019. So, as you can imagine, it wasn’t a great place to be in 2016.

    I grew up and lived in Ramsgate until I was 14, before my dad lost his job and we couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore. My friends all lived there, as well as a large majority of my extended family, I went to secondary school in Ramsgate, we had Ramsgate beach, King George VI Park, the Granville cinema – there were never much of a reason for me to leave. I also belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness congregation of ‘Ramsgate East’ so not only went to bi-weekly services at Ramsgate’s Kingdom Hall but spent every Saturday morning dragging my feet across its pavements, having doors slammed in my face after asking strangers if they wanted to hear the good news. I knew the streets better than most.

    After moving away, I would return every day for school, but that was about it. I got a new group of friends who I would get the train to school with, so I left a lot of Ramsgate friends behind. After I left school and left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had no intentions of setting foot in the town again. It was riddled with bad memories and childhood trauma; I projected all those feelings on to the town itself.

    The first time I remember properly going back to Ramsgate was after a guy I went to school with (and occasionally talked to about The Smiths in ICT) invited me to a record fair at Ramsgate Music Hall, to which I attended and bonded over vinyl with said ex-school friend (who went on to become my best friend and one of my life’s few loves). But alas, he lived in fucking Ramsgate.

    So, when we started hanging out it more and more, the more time I spent in Ramsgate. Crashing at this house, getting drunk in Margate and taxiing back in the wee hours, going to various café’s either hungover or still drunk. It was never the place to drink, but it was the place to be hungover. The streets sympathised with you, it seemed like they shared your headache and dry mouth. Plus, like I said before, it’s a ghost town so it was always quiet and easy to find places to get a fry-up or a pack of B&H and a full fat Coke.

    Ramsgate had it’s hold on me again. I’d go out Friday night, and either crash on my friend’s sofa or wait until the 6am train back to mine. Sometimes if he fell asleep early, I’d go out at 4am and take a long walk around the town before going to the train station.

    I’d visit these places that are a part of me whether I liked it or not. The Kingdom Hall, my school, the house my dad grew up in, the park next door to that house where I played in with my aunts. Every time I did this, I would sit for around an hour at 5am on the memorial bench for my aunt that is in that park. She died of cancer at 23 when I was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12, so I have fond memories of her, she was more of a sister figure than an aunt. Sitting there I would think about Ramsgate. My town. It will always be mine. From the station to the park, it is all mine. And I never wanted something to be mine less.

    Nostalgia is a powerful and painful feeling. I think I hate it.

    Ramsgate is the siren, nostalgia for youth its song. The sharp rocks that beckon your ship is a defeatist acceptance that we are the place where we grew up. We do live and die in these towns; we just must try and avoid them at every step in between.

  • I Haven’t Got a Stitch to Wear

    May 2022

    I’m wearing a Radiohead  t-shirt today.

    I’ve had it for about 5 years, worn it to see them live, worn it to impress strangers, worn it to bed as the cotton is nice and soft.

    I thought that maybe I should stop wearing it after the band made a stand and broke the cultural apartheid in Occupied Palestine, because it went against my staunch political beliefs I hold to feel morally superior to the plebeians. But I still wear it. I like the band. In Rainbows and Ok Computer had more influence on my life than most pieces of art, why shouldn’t I wear my shirt?

    If I pin my ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ badge, (that I got after donating to the man running the Socialist Appeal stand in the High Street; aren’t I good?), to the shirt, does it cancel out the bad? Or is that just licking your finger and wiping the scratch left from an Arab child’s pebble on your American-made tank? I think a fresh paint job may be in order.

    However, in this hyper-reactionary, overly-sensitive, snowflake-offended, daily-mandatory-pronoun-inspection world there’s one band t-shirt like no other. A shirt that strikes the fear of God into the hearts of, not only, the metropolitan liberal elite, the ‘le bacon is epic’ Redditors, the old school 80s homophobes, but above all of these, the fan itself.

    The Smiths: Meat is Murder.

    Morrissey was my hero. In Year 8 I had to write a piece for a competition on who I thought was the most important person in history. I picked Morrissey (I was beaten by a girl who wrote about Emily Davison. Morrissey could jump in front of a horse, but I struggle to imagine Davison making an album as good as Viva Hate). I cared for that man, like countless Smiths fanatics. And then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like the Chinese are a “sub-species”.

    Now, it’s impossible to see a piece of Smiths iconography without seeing the fat, racist, xenophobic demon that lives inside the body of our once true King. At least when it comes to wearing a Radiohead t-shirt people just think you’re a virgin, and not a racist virgin.

    Remember that elevator scene from (500) Days of Summer? That one you fawned over during your Tumblr phase, cringed at during your Twitter days, but feel somewhat indifferent towards now that you’re a twenty-something alcoholic? That scene simply could not happen today.

    Conventionally attractive white girl gets into an elevator and hears conventionally attractive white boy listening to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and strikes up a conversation saying she likes The Smiths. I take issue with this scene in a few ways.

    1. Had the writer of this film ever seen a Smiths fan in real life? They’re either ugly, smelly, bearded mansplainers in their 40s, overweight white rockabilly women, or oddly toned Mexican men.
    2. Why was he listening to There Is A Light…, when he could be listening to Rubber Ring?
    3. The most important of all: why on earth would you admit to liking The Smiths?

    When I wear my Smiths t-shirt, I genuinely hope those around me think I’m a poser who has no idea that the design is even an album cover. I’d rather be Kendall Jenner in Slayer merch than David Duke in a hood. All I can hope is that the Pakistani sweat shop worker became curious stitching the tee and listened to Meat is Murder. I imagine they appreciated the production value compared to their earlier output, it’s hard not to.

    So why do I insist on still wearing my Smiths t-shirt? Well, I still love the music, I still love Marr and I, sort of, still love Morrissey. Only slightly less than I used to, my love.