Fish Tank is really good, isn’t it? Except watching it I couldn’t help feel it was basically composed of several other films. Notably Pavee Lackeen ( from which it borrows much of its liminal space, roadside/constant traffic stuff, and troubled central girl ) Bullet Boy in its gazing off the balconies/ framing of the estates spaces and the blocks of flats, (maybe even Nick Love’s positively tropical vision of estate life Goodbye Charlie Bright ) and Morvern Callar in its visual tone and it’s emphasis on the sense of touch. Not that I want to negate some really superb moments of course, but in the end it’s a bit, don’t-worry-she–gets-out, as is Charlie Bright, as is Shifty. And the final shot of the heart-shaped helium-filled silver balloon cutting across the Estatescape provoked a certain amount of meh-ness in me I have to say.

I was just asking myself which album I’d listened to most over the past twenty years, and which therefore it would probably be fair to say was my favourite record of all time.

I was surprised to realise it’s this.

He had a good innings and he made the most of it. RIP!

A quick Google of the phrase "from Casual to Chav" produced this.

Is “shitcunt” the greatest expletive ever?


I should add a quick proviso of course: really I’m only talking about the English language.

Russian, for example, seems to have several thousand variations on the word “pizda”, including one which memorably appears to mean “small, bald pussy”. "Like a….child’s…… pussy?” I somewhat gingerly asked the fifteen year old Ukranian boy who was enumerating said variations to me one warm Summer day several years ago instead of learning English. “No, no, it is an adult pussy but without this hair”, he explained. I doubted such a word existed. He obligingly opened the window and beckoned over a couple of Russian girls who were standing on the steps outside the school. It seemed that but a single word issued forth, of which “pizda” was undoubtedly the root, followed by a flurry of slapping hands that he immediately slammed the window down on before sombrely turning back to me and shrugging, resembling in his heavy set, stoical, jocularly disappointed way nothing so much as a pubescent Leonid Brezhnev, “So you see, it is a really quite BAD word…."

Certainly his translation could have been suspect but I prefer to think that such a word exists, just as I choose to believe that the correct translation of the Korean “Jo to she pal seccy” or some variation thereon is the breathtakingly comedic combination of the graphic and the coy “peeled-cock sex-man”. And let’s not forget the ubiquity of “chingada”, raped female slave, in Mexican Spanish.


But still I think in any international competition, our own, home-grown “shitcunt” could more than hold its own. And after all, why can’t we nurture British talent a bit more, let’s be proud of our own heritage etc.


So, in what does “shitcunt’s” excellence reside? Why, to appropriate a term from lunatic, bird-faced, Child-of-God-molester Richard Dawkins has it become a “meme”, providing fast’n’unfreindly expletive solutions to an increasingly vast swathe of London’s underclass? Why has it beaten off other seemingly superior compounds: to wit “Fuckcunt”, “Cuntfuck”?

It has, I think, two main advantages over its nearest potential rivals.

First up, “Shitcunt” is mouth friendly in a way “Fuckcunt” just isn’t. Too much fiddly voiceless plosion in the middle, and while the final /k/ is often de-voiced in British English it can’t be here without loosing sense (fucunt), the transition in “uckcu” is too demanding on any speaker, let alone one who has just had two ribs broken by the heavily lumped-up bouncers of “Razumutaz” nightclub, Woolwich. “Cuntfuck” is easier, but still, nothing slides off the tongue like a “shitcunt”. The sibilant first phoneme allows for a long run up, picking up pace through the vowel and gently hurdling the glottalized /t/, arriving fully primed for the plosion of the /k/ and the long descent through the second vowel before the tongue comes deservedly to rest on the alveolar ridge with the /n/. Try it out at home now, sitting in front of your P.C., perhaps gazing at the faint image of your own face caught in the dusty, bevelled glass of the monitor! It almost seems to say itself. Indeed after a few cans of DachauBrew (12.5%, 8 cans for £5) from your local KostMasher UltraMiniexpressomart, you may find it hard to stop saying, so deliciously addictive is it.

Imagistically too, I think it would be fair to say, “shitcunt” has the upper hand. What is a fuckcunt? Too abstract for the mind’s eye to give shape to! Whereas “shitcunt” has an immediate moist and steamy materiality. Note that “shitcunt” is not of course “shitty-Cunt”, a faecally befouled, be-spattered/smeared/smirched but otherwise recognisably roseate and fleshily fulsome Fanny. No: this cunt is constituted entirely from cack, a great, dripping brown bowel of a bifta, a maculate and micturating minge of merde, whose prospective ripe, high fetor, whose distressing, gummy tactility to fingers or tongue, dizzies the mind.

You can keep your Young British Artists with their oh-so-obvious attempts at shock: have the Chapman brothers managed to come up with a single piece that worries away at the mind, yet produces such a delighted recognition of some essential kernel of Britishness, as the term “shitcunt”. You don’t need to go to any poncey galleries to witness this excremental efflorescence of the national psyche, it’s a piece of public art, just hang around any south London bus stop for long enough and it will be offered up to you, such is the largesse of the habitual Tenant’s Super drinker!

Young British Artists, anyway. I ask you. What a pack of mongrel shitcunts.

The younger woman.

We went for lunch at her mother’s one Sunday afternoon. I was in a bad mood, the kids were playing up, Andrea was touchy and tense. No-one wanted to go and see her, the grandmother, the mother-in-law, mum. No-one liked her.

The afternoon was a drag, the kids were fidgety and rude, the exchanges between Andrea and her mother politely recriminatory, the Sunday roast overcooked, tough meat , mushy veg. I remained quiet and neutral throughout, washing up, busy in the background, keen to get away.

After lunch the photos came out, the kids sat on either side of Granny exchanging secret glances and giggling, pretending to show an interest in the family’s past. I made tea for everyone, telling myself, well, we only had to do it twice a year or so, I could stand another hour.

Coming back in and setting the teapot down on the table beside the settee I glanced at the photos and was immediately struck by a picture of an intensely beautiful young woman that was unmistakably Andrea.

It occurred to me that I had never really seen any photographs of Andrea that were more than a few years old. We had met when she was in her early forties and I was in my mid-thirties. She had two children by her first marriage that I was now step-father to. I would have described Andrea as averagely-attractive for her age, a little bit on the heavy side, bright. We had a drink after work one day, she came on to me, we ended up in bed then somehow within a year we were married. We had a good relationship. We were sensitive to each other’s need for space of our own, determined to focus on the positive things, not to make the same mistakes again. It was rational and constructive, we communicated. An adult relationship.

Our sex life was never characterised by great ease or enthusiasm. After the first year it dwindled and might even have withered away all together if not for our determination to make an effort. Passion does not last forever, you have to work at it.

I set down the tea cups, gave the kids their juice and took up a photo album from the pile. There she was on every page, an extravagant beauty. It was definitely her. You were very pretty when you were younger, I said. I was naïve, she responded. You WERE really pretty, mummy, Rosie chimed in. Mummy shrugged and sipped at her tea.

I was conscious that I was grinning and that my heart was beating faster. I turned over a few more leaves in the album, Christmas 1987. A series of banal superlatives went thumping hotly through my brain. Incredible, amazing, unbelievable. The quality of her skin, her hair, the fullness of her lips, the deep, burning lustre of her eyes, those cheekbones, that smile. I kept looking up from the album to Andrea tensely staring into her teacup. An enormous pang of lust whetted by envy went through me. If only I had known her at that age. But would she have wanted me then?

I glanced through some other albums until I found one entitled Summer Holiday 1984. She would have been seventeen at the time. I paused, then set it back in the pile, went upstairs to the toilet and found I had an erection. I sat down on the edge of the bath, chuckling to myself. Well, well, well, I said to myself over and over without really knowing what I meant.

That night in bed and for the next week or so I was drunk with lust. With my eyes closed I summoned up the images I had seen in the album that day, for this was the same women even if the years had been mysteriously unkind. I felt a strange tension, as though I were digging under the surface of her skin, through the slack flesh and flab to get to the girl she had been, who stood off to one side, impossibly remote, in all her intoxicating mockery. Andrea was alarmed by the sudden and dramatic resurgence in my sexual interest in her, by its ferocity. I was a man at war with an invisible adversary and the battle ground was Andrea herself.

A couple of weeks later I suggested that perhaps we should go to visit her mother again. Andrea was bemused.

Y’know, she’s lonely, I said.

Fine, she said, turning back to the T.V. with her eyebrows raised, YOU go then.

I did. I took the kids, who sulked all the way there even though I promised them chicken Mc Nuggets on the way back, to make it seem less weird. When they were all out in the garden I stole the Summer 1984 album. Back at the house I quickly secreted it among boxes of old files in the spare room upstairs. For the rest of the evening I was in a giddy mood. Andrea watched me suspiciously. Later when she was taking them up to bed I heard her asking the kids if Daddy had been with them the whole time at grandma’s house and they told her, yes. Do we have to go and see Granny every week they asked and Andrea clucked soothingly that no they certainly did not.

I allowed Andrea to go to bed earlier than me that evening and then snuck into the spare room to look at the album. My hands were shaking slightly as I opened it, my lips pressed tightly together, eyes narrowed, as though I were expecting to receive a blow. What I was doing was clearly wrong. She was just seventeen in these photographs. After two pages of mid-summer landscapes somewhere in Portugal that I dutifully browsed through as though someone were watching over my shoulder, there was a photograph of her in a blue bikini striking a coquettish pose by the Hotel swimming pool. The sharpness and solidity of that newly bloomed flesh, all arrested and sculpted upward surge.

My heart was up in my throat. Andrea was almost certainly asleep by now. I flicked through the rest of the album, there were many such images. I felt that I should be careful, parcel them out. I had brought some kitchen roll upstairs, just in case, and it seemed to me that it would be necessary for me to use it if I had any hope of getting to sleep tonight. After about ten minutes I went downstairs to get some more.

A week or so later Andrea confronted me directly. Are you having an affair, she asked. An affair? I’m never out of the house. When could I possibly have been having an affair? Why are you in such a good mood all the time? Why the high spirits, why all the sex?

Because you turn me on, I said, moving closer.

She took a step back.

Are you in love with someone else? You’re acting like a man in love with someone.

Only you.

She turned and looked over her shoulder now as though the answer to this particular enigma might be found there. I don’t believe you, she said.

I saw then that things would go wrong. Perhaps I should tell her, I thought, but how will she react? She’ll be horrified, won’t she? She’ll say there’s something wrong with me. I’ll be something like a criminal to her.

I paused. What to say? Well, I’ve become obsessed with the beauty of a much younger women, but don’t worry, it’s you. How will she react to that?

Well, how would you?