Tag: A guide

The Beginner’s A-Z of D.I.Y Subversion (Emergency to Eyesore)

EMERGENCY      A sudden, urgent and unexpected occurrence requiring immediate action.  Usually the result of a late-night kebab from a take-away that you wouldn’t have gone within thirty feet of without a flame-thrower and an economy-sized spray of industrial-strength DDT when sober. 

ENCUMBER        To load with debt, to impede, to embarrass.  Obviously it is the embarrass bit that is relevant here – particularly if you thought this was a green, phallic salad fruit. 

EQUIPMENT       Anything kept or provided for a specific purpose.  Machine guns, ground-to-air missiles, fast cars, Swiss Army knives etc. may all prove to be beyond your means.  Don’t Panic!  Equipment does not need to be expensive to be effective.  A loaded pea-shooter in the ear can be very disconcerting, particularly in the dark.  A tumbler applied to a joining wall can be just as effective as expensive electronic bugs – and you can’t drink out of a bug when you get bored of waiting for something to happen.  A certain amount of creativity will be required when gleaning information in this manner, as the conversation you hear will unfailingly be muffled, repetitive and exceedingly boring to all but Alan Bennett.  The juice of an onion (readily available at Waitrose I believe) makes perfect invisible ink (although it does make all your correspondence smell of onion) and a house brick is the ideal substitute for expensive skeleton keys.

ESCAPE              To get away from confinement or restraint.  Technical word for what we practiced subversives call ‘running away’.  Escape is the only logical response to all types of danger.  Much is made of the Fight or Flight effect of adrenaline, produced by the body’s adrenal glands in response to danger.  I suggest you strive to develop a Flight or Fight effect.  Learn to respond instantly to your initial instinct.  Run.  Run every time.  That way, if for some unfathomable reason you should decide that you do not want to be seen as a pathetic little coward and you take the decision to fight, you will already be too far away to do anything about it.

ESPERANTO       A language invented by Dr Zamenhof (c. 1887) to enable people of all nations to converse together. – Also known as ‘shouting’ in English.

EXCREMENT       Ordure, dung.  Try not to be around when this stuff flies, sticks or hits the fan.  Can be used in a number of subversive ways – none of them terribly pleasant – and none of them I can list here on grounds of taste, decency and the fact that if you subsequently go out and try to execute such an action, I may find myself hauled up before the beak for ‘Putting ideas into the heads of the mentally challenged’ or similar.  Remember, if you get caught in the act of using ordure in the course of subversive activities¹, you may well find yourself right up to the neck in it.

  1. Being caught in somebody else’s garden, whilst in possession of poo is something that you are unlikely to be able to pass off as a harmless hobby.

EXPLOSIVE         Anything likely to explode eg gunpowder.  Let’s face it, as an amateur, you are extremely unlikely to come up against anything more explosive than a prawn vindaloo – actually, I’m not certain that there is anything more explosive than a prawn vindaloo.  You could try to feed it to your enemies, but honestly, it’s not the sort of thing you can slip into their muesli without them noticing.  A bit like an atomic bomb – it’s the fall-out that causes the real trouble.

EYESORE            Something ugly to look at.  The world is full of such things, every single one of them man-made.  Turning beautiful things into eyesores is an inexpensive and effective subversive ploy: try sticking an imitation wart onto the face of the Mona Lisa¹; build a dirty-great coal-fired power station in the middle of our green and pleasant land; attend an EDL meeting.  Please remember that an ‘eyesore’ is not the same as a ‘sore eye’, which is what you will get if you forget yourself at the EDL meeting and reprimand the speaker for using racist language.

  1. I say ‘try’ as the French security guards are unlikely to take kindly to it and you might find yourself nose-down on the floor with a knee in the back of your neck quicker than you can say ‘Zut alors!’  Ultimately, you may wind up in a French prison where you will be forced to share a cell with a large number of blue-chinned men wearing striped pullovers and neckerchiefs, all of them missing wives and girlfriends (plurals are intentional – they are French after all.)

EXERCISE.
Translate your subversive Manifesto into Esperanto and see whether anybody either notices or cares.

© Colin McQueen 2024

The Beginner’s A-Z of D.I.Y Subversion (Emasculate)

EMASCULATE    a) To castrate b) to deprive of strength or vigour; weaken.   Well, it would, wouldn’t it?  Emasculation is of limited use as a weapon for the DIY subversive, particularly the males, who are unlikely to have the stomach for it.  I am sure that most of us could make up a very long list of those who should have been emasculated – fathers mostly – before the damage was done.  If you truly believe that the man next door is about to spawn the devil’s child (although exactly how that might be possible, I’m not entirely certain) or a future politician, you may consider this a justifiable course of action.  I would urge you to consider the following: is defeating the anti-Christ really the role of a subversive?  Wouldn’t it be better left to someone with religious convictions¹?  Why not contact the local vicar and inform him / her of your suspicions?  It will certainly provide relief from the usual diet of ox-coveting and offer a subject for a sermon that almost certainly has not been covered by that other lot up the road.  If you are fortunate enough to have one of the keener vicars, they may even consider blessing the Stanley knife for you, although it is most unlikely that they will carry out the act themselves. 

You may be able to ‘accidentally’ disclose your suspicions to members of the WI in an ‘unguarded moment’, adding that the person you suspect is also single, has six children by six separate married women and almost certainly votes Labour – that should do it.  Never leave your address.

Unless heavily sedated, the victim is almost certain to put up significant resistance².  Even those rendered insensible by alcohol or drugs are likely to kick up a bit of a fuss when they realise what you are about to do with the knife, the bowl and the Marigolds.  Do you have sufficient equipment to restrain a desperate man?  Gaffer tape does not come cheap, and you can’t really trust the stuff you usually buy from Poundland, when it’s not even strong enough to hold the broken zip together on your trousers. 

Are you yourself strong enough to control a violent victim³?

Are you planning a single-hack emasculation or a total removal?  If you’re planning a full castration, you will probably need a really big box of plasters.

What will you do with the victim once the appendage has been removed?  You’ve watched a great many films – alone, of course – and you know all about staunching bleeding with the application of hot tar or by setting fire to gunpowder, but you can’t expect your victim just to shake your hand and wander off to pursue his hormone-lite life without a by-your-leave.  You could perhaps leave him in the care of an isolated order of Dominican monks – the kind that would kill him if he tried to escape or, failing that, you could remove his tongue.  He may even prefer that to the emasculation itself.  You are nothing if not compassionate – why not give him the choice?  

What will you do with the appendage once removed?  Do you have a cat?  Is he / she a fussy eater?  If your cat is likely to turn its nose up at this additional source of protein, try next door’s dog – anything that will eat three week-old fox poop is almost certain to relish a freshly severed member.  If you have gone for a total castration, you could leave it to dry for a few days before selling it to the hippy couple down the street as some kind of traditional African maraca.

  1. Not, incidentally, convictions for holding religious convictions, which are all too easy to get in some of the world’s most ‘enlightened’ nations and may, indeed, lead to emasculation – probably with something blunt and rusty.
  2. It may be wise to reconsider if he does not.
  3. This is a rhetorical question and, as such, does not require an answer.  If you are the kind of pedant who, none-the-less, requires one, it is ‘No’.

© Colin McQueen 2024