A great wind has risen from the South, tearing a breach between the worlds and carrying in its wake BoulderGirl and her Companions and her spinning Wibbles. See her come leaping over the Mountains of Madness, to bring us the merry dance of chakra scrubbing (whatever a chakra may be when it’s at home), for to rid our poor souls of Crapitalist Crud and other Chicagoesque miasmas. Watch her Wibbles wobble and whirl and swirl and fade in and out of several dimensions all at once. You have never seen Wibbles like this in all your travelling days, for these be not only self-aware Wibbles but self-determining to boot. They know neither god nor master, like BoulderGirl herself doesn’t either. They travel and minuet with her only because it pleases them to do so. Even the Webby ProtoShoggoth is impressed; he thinks that were he the marrying kind he would very much like to marry the unruly lot of them and to hell with the quiet life he always claimed was his fondest heart’s desire. The Flying Bijou Elephantine Entity, ancestress of all things pachydermic, is simply trunk-smacked with delight. Come, get up from your spuddy couches and out of your petty shell-worlds and join us in a spot of carousing and ecstatic boogie-woogie. What do you think you have got to loose, other than a few preconceptions? Look, even the delectable Kokopelli has come out to play us a tune or two! Allons enfants, Avanti, o popolo, life is effing short and true pleasure even shorter, not to say more infrequent than a Tory with a brain. And who knows that all that dancing-dancing might not open a proper sipapu in the fabric of our crummy old self-inflicted reality and then…Fifth World is our oyster!

Here’s wishing you all a happy Serpentine’s Day, this year’s groovy alternative to that other Mawk-Fest, Valentine’s Day, aka Consume, Consume You Mad Fools II. Observed and celebrated by aether drifting Serpents, insurgent Shoggoths, absconded Lloigor, defecting Larvae of the Final Void, educated Snails, stroppy Gorgons, sundry Monsters and other such like truly chic Entities, on February 13th. Or thereabouts, we’re not particular. On this date we exchange unusual gifts, Chinese takeaways, Jolly Rogers, cuddles, fiery rants, crappy jokes and imaginative, colourful insults provided they are dispensed in a non-threatening, recreational sort of way. They who can also exchange portraits of famous free radicals*, rogue subatomic particles and pussycats rescued from Schrí¶dinger’s infamous box. Them so inclined renew their vows of love, comradeship, mutual cooperation, reciprocal back-scratching and highly profitable communal dodgydealery. Flash dancing in the streets, impromptu morality plays, kamikaze happenings, garden parties (see pic), riotous shindigs, concerts and improving lectures will take place all over East London as from today. All events are free and accessible to everybody but they are advertised only through telepathic hallucinations; so, if you wish to attend keep your inner ears sharply open. Else, you can ask Rosie, who this year has volunteered to act as Chaos coordinator.
*Likenesses of The Two Davids, Rosa Luxemburg, Buenaventura Durruti and the Cthulhu Brothers remain great favourites. In fact, this year we ran out of “I Love Rosa” T-shirts by mid-January.

What with Serpentine’s Day drawing in on us all, the Uncertain Zones are beginning to stir and bubble like a clutch of baby snakes. Taking advantage of a briefly operational tunnel between their worlds, the Free-Floating SpiderThing and her Shadow have popped in to visit their friends the Rugose Vermicelli and to bring them the traditional seasonal gifts. The SpiderThing has brought them a new ornament; she is adamant that no creature can ever have enough ornaments. “Por mucho pan nunca mal año” is her favourite motto. The Shadow bears the Holy Carrot of Eternal Chumminess, a sprig of Oakish Stuff, for strength and endurance, and a nice raceme of stardust, always so useful, don’t you know.

PS. On the said principle of “Por mucho pan…”, I’ve done a grey version as well.  Vote if you can be arsed.

Perhaps I ought to dedicate this to the memory of Amada Lear. But perhaps I won’t. The Uppity Ante’s name is Mary Lou. May her tribe live long and prosper and give all the pretentious  prats in the universe what for! The little fellow with the rope around his neck is Freddy, the hardy perennial survivor of several attempted lynchings by various autocratic factions. He wears the rope as a sign of defiance. He is one of my  representatives of all the other unsung, and clearly undeserving, victims of all the other numerous holocausts, past and current, wot are never remembered, let alone celebrated or assigned paper poppies and things. And if anybody still thinks this pic is about Versace or  Jimmy Choos, please think again.

Watching an old episode of New Tricks the other evening, I came across a name I could not resist. Almost at the same time I remembered that I’ve had had the perfect likeness to go with it in my hard drive for nearly two years. So, here is Lenny “the Lump”, the South London golem. Famous for his poetry reading soirees and his award-winning window boxes, he’s also a dab hand at scaring the local bullies, as he is 1) bigger than any of them and 2) almost completely intolerant of this particular breed. (I wonder if he could be persuaded to “have a little chat” with David Cameron…). Here we can see him hanging around Bermondsey Sq. with two of his bosom pals, Gary the Trouble Teddy and Betty “Hopping Mad” McCann, the two-legged berserker of Peckham Rye, of whom, rumor has it, even “Mad. Frankie Fraser used to be scared of. And this one makes four golems so far; three boys and one girl: Lenny, Jake, the lapsed East End golem, Blott, the Badlands golem and young Sarita. We could start a pop group and call it Perishable Clay, couldn’t we? Or proclaim a brand new tribe: the Golemim. Rabbi Loew, eat your heart out, mate!

Arrested Development. Meet Adelita, a young mother of the Bufo Truncatus, or Truncated Toad species, a variety of alien mutant amphibian that never develops beyond the last tadpole stage. The babies grow a pair of arms early in the life cycle although they remain, for many-many-many moons, very small -but by no means fragile, highly dependent on the mother, fiercely competitive for her attentions and ergo exceedingly quarrelsome. The females of this genus tend to avoid breeding like the plague and have emphatically and unequivocally declared that they intend to stick to that policy until the males of the species start taking on some of the burdens of parenthood. Quite. They also think that motherhood, irritating though it may be, at least they generally produce no more than half a dozen offspring at a time. Whereas the poor old Shub-Niggurath bread only once but got instantly stuck with a thousand Young. The abridged toadettes think that they have it comparatively easy, really. As they do, indeed

Text says: The Shoggoths and the Club Unpresentables propose. Infallible formula to cleanse the political scene in Catalunya: Decisiveness and De-Mas-ification.
This is for my darling sister Teya and my delicious bro-in-law Joan. Both still grieving and heartbroken and furious at Mr Mas’ shenanigans. It’s all very well for me to take the piss of the man, but they have to live with his folly, and the evil the ghastly clown has already wreaked all over the poor land. Here’s also a wee bit of a poem by perhaps the best poet Catalunya has ever produced. I can’t be bothered to translate, sorry.

Ja no volta l’ós.
He llegit el llibre
del Predicador.
Deso a poc a poc
dintre de la capsa
tots els meus ninots.
Ara he de callar,
que no tinc prou força
contra tant de mal.
D’un mal tan antic
aquesta veu feble
no et sabrí  guarir

Salvador Espriu. Perquí¨ un dia torni la cançó a Sinera.

It’s Roll up! Roll up! and Gather ’round time once more. Come see the latest in Outlandish Funfairs. Opening its Gates next week, three miles due east of Devil Reef and under the very noses of the Pentarchy of the Church of Father Dagon (Innsmouth, Mass.). Try your luck at the wondrous Heisenbergian Wheel of Uncertainty, several notches up from the old mundane Wheel of Fortune, and bet your life on the companion circle of the Fuzzy Pentacles of Fluke. (Health & Safety compliant.) Scrumptious fairground fare catering for all tastes, even vegetarians and vegans. Goody-bags like you’ve never seen before freely dispensed by the Perennially Dazed Glowworms: Sassy Mocking Maracas to aggravate David Cameron! Infuriating alien Espantasuegras -hand crafted by genuine lunatics in Leuret, Aragon, to drive Hilary Clinton ’round the bend! Cornucopias of Bliss and Ice Cream for the Soul to provoke the ire of the ghost of Milton Friedman! And more, much more. Admission is free, naturally, as are the various other events taking place in the fringes of the fairground, but booking is recommended owing to the massive popularity of this kind of shindigs amongst astute and discriminating folks. Gaudeamus organized by Rosie, BoomBoom and Bubbles (Shoggoths) and sponsored by the Mi-Go and the Rosa Luxemburg International Charitable Foundation, following the enormous success of Leo “BigNose” McGurk’s Polydimensional Flying Circus. We think a new trend is on the make. Hope also floats…

So the year is new, but how “new” will it be…ah, there’s the rub. Never mind. Have a happy one if you can possibly manage it. Be it only to be defiant.

And to celebrate the New Year (for what it’s likely to be worth…) we have all chipped in to give the Shub-Niggurath a break from constant child care & rearing & watching and we have volunteered to babysit her 1,000 Young for a few days. So she has taken herself to the eternally peaceful shores of Lake Hali to meditate on singlehood and brood about whether her bum looks increasingly bigger. And does it suit her? And does she give a toss if it doesn’t? Happy break girlie!

It’s coming up to the third anniversary of the darling Bacterium’s departure. So here’s this year’s memorial. It’s all about funky visitations, you know. I’ve just received a report from my contacts in the peripheral grid, the Rough&Ready Entities, about an enigmatic object that materialized there a few days ago out of a random hole in the fabric. Thus far, it just bobs up and down in the thin air, glowing bright red, and if you listen carefully you can hear a muted but steady flow of miraculously rude epithets aimed at sundry notorious pillars of our communities, interspersed with fiery appeals to “wake up and smell the shit, you bloody peons!”. The grid dwellers are mighty puzzled and can’t make any sense of the happening, nor have they the foggiest as to the nature of the item. I’ve got a strong feeling that this is an early warning sign that the Ash boson is about to be discovered. Or conjectured, at the very least.

Update 18.12.15 Solstice time again. Here comes the ineffable BoomBoom, get up to look like the Swamp Thing as a modest tribute to a chap who knows a thing or two about sequences and cycles, bringing you the yearly seasonal tidings.
Bid farewell to the darkness and thank her, for she has brought pause and rest and done her bit. And greet the return of the light that will do my spirits and my complexion no end of good. Have the best Solstice you can possibly get, people.