A Christmas Gaylord

A tale from St. James family legend to warm the cockles of your cholesterol-clogged heart this Christmas.


Ebenezer Gaylord was widely acknowledged as the biggest shit in Victorian London: his favourite way to relax at Christmas time was to gather together all the homeless children in the city, bind them together with manacles, and then pitch them headfirst into the foggy Thames. As their screams for mercy petered out into the gargled pleas of infantile death he would guffaw himself so hoarse that his urine-sodden breeches would simply dissolve, revealing his awful genitalia and causing women in big hats to faint. He really was a turd.

But one particularly genocidal Christmas Eve, so the story goes, he was lounging in his whore-lined mansion when a strange visitation literally came upon him. He immediately wondered if he had become the unwilling centrepiece of history’s first bukkake, but his visitor turned out to be another type of ectoplasm altogether – the Ghost of Christmas Past. Terrified - yet another pair of breeches were, by this point, beyond hope – Ebenezer sat in rigid fear as a series of scenes from his boyhood swam before him: a damagingly tight handjob from his mentally ill nursemaid...the sight of his kindly schoolmaster’s impressive anus...his aunt calmly locking the door one Easter and hacking everyone to death with a spoon. As quick as these visitations had appeared, however, they vanished again, leaving Ebenezer alone in a cold room with just his thoughts and a pair of breeches that were quite honestly past a joke. His ordeal wasn’t over, though, because over the next hour two more apparitions of the spirit world visited him – the Ghost of Christmas Present (which was, inexplicably, the Victorian version of X Factor playing on and on and on and on into an unbearable eternity) and the Ghost of Christmas Future, where Ebenezer learned that by continuing down his current route of cruelty and heartlessness he would one day become head of the European Central Bank and his great-great-great grandson would be the leading portrayer of psychologically-unstable fathers in late-70s Hollywood. Once the ghosts had gone, Ebenezer vowed never to turn from his current path and, if anything, to actually become more despicable. With great self-satisfaction and not a little relief, he changed out of his breeches and retired to his bedchamber.

History does not record what happened next, but rumours suggest he eventually became Jack the Ripper. Every year my family gather together on Christmas Eve and regale friends with this old, proud tale of our ancestor Ebenezer Gaylord, after which we sit in cold, empty silence and secretly wish each other dead. It is our favourite tradition.

Merry Christmas.

Land of the Rising Gaylord

As you must have realised by now, the only thing more important to me than my (permanently estranged) children is my dignity. Over the years I’ve acted like an absolute Prince despite the almost constant torrent of sexual and scatological public catastrophe. You probably won’t be surprised to learn, however, that recent events have forced me to completely abandon these guiding principles and crash headlong into the murky depths of global humiliation.

One afternoon a couple of weeks ago, as I was taking my usual bath in the garden, the phone rang. I picked it up and stammered my name. The voice on the other end was eerily robotic, sounded very distant, and was sometimes drowned out by a noise in the background that sounded a lot like horses being murdered, but even this tenuous human contact was enough to reduce me to tears. Between gulps and blubbering I got the gist that the caller was from Japan, and that I had been selected by their leading TV network to take part in a hugely popular celebrity gameshow. All I had to do was get myself to Tokyo and I could collect 5,000 yen – a day! I figured that 5,000 of anything can only ever be good – except maybe 5,000 charges of sexual assault – so I heartily agreed to take part.

Arriving in Tokyo two days later, I was struck by how much the city resembled all the documentaries I’d watched: everywhere I looked all I could see was neon gibberish, tittering schoolgirls, and plates of rancid fish.. Before I could even buy any used panties from a vending machine, however, I was greeted by a runner from the network who kindly, if a little forcefully, led me away.

Arriving at the studio the next day, I noticed that I was in truly excellent company. The brightest lights of British TV had been handpicked to take part. Richard Bacon had already married a small woman in a kimono, and I was delighted to see my old chums Jeremy Kyle and John Leslie (John pretended not to recognise me, but I could tell by the way he slapped me hard in the mouth that he knew exactly who I was). Even Anne Widdecombe was there - to give proceedings an air of political gravitas, I assumed.

It was at this point that things began to unravel alarmingly. I’d barely had time to snatch my fee from the tiny hands of the producer when I was ushered into a locker room and forced to undress. Completely naked, I was led through a shallow trough of sheep dip and onto the dazzling, noisy studio floor.

The sight that greeted me resembled a perverted panorama of man’s most unspeakable fantasies. In the centre of what I can only describe as a masturbatory circus was Anne Widdecombe, naked as the day she was born, spinning around at an alarming speed on a demented merry-go-round of lust. A frantic Richard Madeley, his face gaunt with horror and tears, grabbed me and told me that he’d been there for weeks. Struggling to comprehend what was happening, I looked above me and the true nature of the gameshow become sickeningly apparent: there, in 10ft high lettering, were the words ‘Super Britain Onanistic Celebrity Ejaculation Fame Pageant’. The Japanese had clearly gone absolutely mad.

Despite my distinguished career in mucky films, I am a little camera shy these days and found it impossible to rise to the occasion. For what seemed like days, one hideous English celebrity monster after another was paraded in front of us: Ruth Badger, Kerry Katona, Judy Finnegan (Madeley seemed to crack under the weight of sheer humiliation at this point and had to be tasered to calm him down), Susan Boyle, even Sister Wendy. Not once could I muster the necessary performance.

In the end the whole the cast was rescued by a human rights group and the production crew was sent to prison. My 50,000 Yen compensation from the Japanese government seemed like a magnificent windfall that more than made up for what had happened, until I realised it was barely £400, which in Tokyo doesn’t cover the taxi to the airport. Another chapter in my soon-to-be-banned autobiography was complete.

'The Wank Gland' by G. St. James

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Bastards out of my dead glands, mixing
Self-loathing and inappropriate desire, stirring
Dull balls with lusty pain.
Cointreau kept us warm, covering
My crimes in forgetful snow, feeding
An enormous wife with Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My ejaculation surprised her, coming over her duvet,
With a shower of sin: we stopped in the Asda,
And went to the beer aisle, to get some Hofmeister,
And drank Tia Maria, and vomited for an hour.
Mein Schwanz ist klein, ich hasse das deutsche Volk,
And when I was a child, staying at my randy Uncle’s,
My cousin, he took me out to the shed,
And I was frightened. He said, Gaylord,
Gaylord, hold this tight. And down he went.
In the garden shed, there he felt me up.
I read jazz mags, much of the night, and go mental in the winter.

Unreal shitty,
Under the brown fog of a massive shite,
A turd floated under London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought my guts had produced so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each big crap sloshed onto my feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Sister Mary kept the turds,
With her dead soul on the final stroke of cock.
There I saw Wes Craven, and stopped him crying: ‘Wes!
‘You must remember me, surely, for fuck’s sake!
‘That corpse we buried in your garden
‘Has it been found by the police yet? Will it result in another spell in bugger prison?
‘Or has the shite been cleaned out of my bed?
‘Oh not the Dog’s shit, that’s just normal,
‘Or he’ll dig the corpse up again!
‘You! hypocritical letch – I detest the French too! – I’ve shat myself again!’

Gaylord Into the Future

Question: what do Nostradamus, Gypsy Rose Lee, Mystic Meg and Russell Grant all have in common? Answer: they have all had quadruple heart bypass surgery. (Except the first three, who haven’t). What they also share is an uncanny ability to see into the future. With this chilling thought in mind, I wanted to offer the world my own predictions for the coming year and finally secure my rightful place in the pantheon of prophets. I guarantee that the following things will happen during the next 12 months:

1. Nick Clegg will open a new Daily Mail-sponsored detention centre on the Kent coast, but a documentary presented by Fern Britton exposes that rather than being a holding pen for immigrants being returned to Europe it is in fact a death camp where Vince Cable is overseeing the systematic extermination of all non-British people.

2. IKEA will open a shop the size of Bedford, in Bedford.

3. One of those African countries will simply cease to exist.

4. North Korea will come out of the closet and be declared the first homosexual nation state, or ‘homocracy’. The world rejoices, except for Iran who hates gays so much they nuke North Korea off the map.

5. A particularly withering put-down from Simon Cowell proves to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for Louis Walsh, who has a full-blown nervous breakdown live on The X Factor. Tipping the desk over and ripping off his piss-soaked trousers, he punches Danni Minogue so hard in the face that the bone in her nose shoots up into her brain, killing her instantly.

6. Barack Obama, in a desperate attempt to appeal to Southern voters, will personally secede from the Union and then declare war on himself.

7. Trevor McDonald will demonstrate how he can fist himself on a 'Tonight with Trevor McDonald' special.

8. On the day of the Royal wedding, the Sun will publish its first male page 3, featuring the gayest man they could find in Brighton dressed as Prince William with a caption that makes some weak pun on the 'Queen'. The fallout from this will include a mass walkout of mechanics and builders, and the whole of Essex will simply grind to a halt.

9. My old friend Michael Barrymore will triumphantly return to our screens after being publicly pardoned by the Queen for buggering a man to death in a swimming pool.

10. China will go absolutely mental.

11. I will experience a meteoric rise to fame, swiftly followed by a catastrophic and shameful fall from grace, a series of misunderstandings and misfortunes inevitably combining to drag me back into the blackness of relative anonymity.

12. Ant and Dec will divorce. It will be hard on all of us.