Musings of a Nobody

Happy

2012-01-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

Hello, and welcome once again to the blog I like to call MoaN (although that didn't occur to me when I named it; pure serendipity, or my sub-conscious at work? You decide.

The reason I'm pointing out the unintentional but nevertheless accurate double-barrel title in this particular post is, somewhat illogically, and therefore faux-intellectually, because I'm NOT going to be having a moan this week. No, this week I'm happy.

This post is also NOT about my childhood. Now normally, I only break away from the miserable memoirs when I have an equally or more miserable rant to offer about my life in the present, but not this time. This time, I'm happy.

Have I got a new job? Nope, still unemployed. And barring the standing 'we'll probably have you back March/April if you find nothing else' from my previous place, there's nothing on the horizon either. This state of affairs should probably depress me, but... I'm happy.

I'm still living, somewhat embarrassingly, at my Sister's place. A state of affairs which, for a man in his 30's, may seem slightly pathetic, but I don't care... because I'm happy.

In fact, there's not a great deal of difference between my life now, and my life a week, month or year ago. To the casual observer, I should be as miserable as ever. But I'm happy.

I know why I'm happy. It's something new; it's something I didn't see coming and it's something that could fall apart at any moment, though I really hope it doesn't. It's also something I'm not telling you lot about. But I am happy.

Just thought I'd let you know.

Mr V.

2012-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

I talk a lot on this blog about adults who let me down, during my childhood; people who should have, and in an ideal world would have, supported me and nurtured me and looked to my best interests when I couldn't myself. I talk of my parents; the alcoholic bully of a mother and the absentee father; or the Granddad who beat us, or the dickhead pseudo-stepdad who shot me in the head.

There were others though, short in supply though they may have been, who did attempt, in their own small way, to put me on the right track. One such person was my teacher, in my final year of Junior School; 4th year we called it, but I suppose now I must refer to it as Year 6. His name will go unrecorded here, although he has the honour of being one of the few teachers whose names I remember. We shall simply call him, Mr V.

The thing about Mr V. was that everyone joined his class with a certain trepidation in their hearts.
I remember saying to my mate Chris, on the first day of our year in his class, "I say old chap," I said, "I'm feeling a good bit of trepidation about this whole affair, and I don't mind saying so, what!"
"Bally good call, old man, I was saying much the same to Mother, just last evening" he replied.
As you do. Anyway, the reason for everyone's trepidation upon entering his class; aside from the inherent pressure you felt knowing that this was the last year of junior school before BIG SCHOOL came calling; was that the man had a rep. A rep for strictness, short temperedness, over familiarity, and alcoholism. A terrifying combination.

Now, lets be honest here. As adults, it's plain to see that while, yes, he may have been strict and quite possibly short tempered; these are not unfamiliar traits in teachers. However, if he was 'over familiar' (read: a homosexual predator), or indeed an alcoholic; and to such an extent that the children in his class were actively discussing it and warning younger kids about it; you'd think that word would probably have reached someone in a position of authority, wouldn't you? Of course it would; the stories were nonsense. Logic isn't really a factor though, when you're 10. At that age you believe what you're told, and the kids in his class; the top class, the big lads; well, their words were gospel! So in we toddled, found some seats, and settled in to meet the ogre.

At this point, I'd like to explain a little about the rumours. Namely, the homosexual predator one. Now, I like to think that I'm a fairly right-minded, liberal person; I don't have much in the way of prejudices (although I do come over 'very' right wing on one particular issue, which we shan't go into here) but I come from a long line of people who do. Be it race, disability, or sexual orientation, the people in my family, and indeed the people in my immediate social circle, were not exactly known for their inclusiveness. People like the Scottish/Pakistani family who lived near us where constantly referred to as 'dirty bastards' and I was expressly forbidden from having anything to do with one of the lads in my class because he was black, while 'bummer', 'faggot', 'retard' and 'spaz' were everyday words. Such was my upbringing; so the thought of being taught by a gay teacher did, at that time, fill me with a degree of dread. I'm not proud.

The seats that we found, my bezzie and me, were against a wall, and behind our seats, near the skirting board, there was a hole in the floorboard. We discussed it between ourselves, and we decided that this must be where Mr V. would hide the alcohol. We never did look down the hole, to see if we were correct; we said because we 'didn't dare', but I suspect it was more that we just didn't want to be found wrong. The chance to add our own little bit to the Mr V. legend was too strong. Sure enough, by the end of the 1st week it was accepted as fact amongst all the kids of the school, that Mr V. kept bottles of booze under the floor in his classroom. Again, I'm not proud.

He was a great guy though, was Mr V. He had this amazing ability to have one conversation with a kid, and make them feel like they'd known him all their life, and that he understood them. He also had enough sense to acknowledge when people would not benefit from the prescribed curriculum; I participated in one group reading session, before being banished to a corner with a novel, and he never asked to hear me read again. It was this last that made him such an important figure in my life.

You see, I'm a reader. I'd always been a reader. I started school at 4 already able to read, which saw my mother getting told off by the teachers, because I was throwing off the level of the class. From that point on, not one single teacher had the initiative to say, 'you know what, he's beyond this, let's give him something more challenging.' The curriculum said that someone of my age should read at a certain level, that's the level they made me read at. Made for some pretty depressing and demoralising lessons, I can tell you. With Mr V. though, things were different.

He would ask me, have you read this book, have you read that book, and I'd say no, because I'd spent the last few years reading about pixies and unicorns. He introduced me to Jack London and Charles Dickens and Tolkien. He taught me that it was OK to read for pleasure, rather than just for school; a lesson I'd once known, but which had been beaten out of me by his predecessors (not literally, you understand; even then, that kind of thing was frowned upon. They thought it far more sporting to let the parents do it), and he entered one of my short stories into a competition, marking the 1st time anyone had ever considered anything I'd written as being worthy of comment. I didn't win; didn't even place; but he'd entered it. That meant something.

So, after all of that, you'd think I'd have a bit of respect for the man, wouldn't you? That I'd defend him from the slurs and the rumours and the accusations. Yeah, no. I respected him inside of course; worshiped the man, if truth be known, but on the surface, well, what can I say? He was a teacher and I was a pupil; there was no way in Hell I could ever take his side. So I joined in the jokes and I told my stories of his secret Vodka stash and I made sure that all the kids in the 3rd year were suitably warned of the predatory beast they were soon to encounter. Say it with me; I'm not proud.

I'm sure Mr V. knew what we said about him. I'm sure it grieved him. I just hope that my own, personal, involvement, after all he'd done for me, didn't cut too deeply.

The Jigsaw Lady

2012-01-10T07:46:00.000-08:00

As utterly fantastic and chock full of joy as most of my childhood was, (What?), there is one day that sticks in the memory as being a particularly happy one, above and beyond the others. I speak of my meeting, one fine summer's day, with Jigsaw Lady. Yes, that was her name. It was!

It was near the beginning of the summer hols. Ian was staying at Bob's and as was traditional I had gone up at about 9:30 to bang him out of bed; yes, back then I would actually get out of bed before noon when I didn't have to; it was a different world, to be sure. Anyway, I roused him from his pit, and we departed, eager to discover whatever wonders and delights the world had in store for us; we were young, and carefree and the world was our oyster; anything was possible.

20 Minutes Later. We are bored. All those who say that kids today are spoiled by games consoles and smartphones and whatnot; and that back in the day we had to make our own entertainment and were the happier for it; are, not to put too fine a point on it, talking bobbins. I'd have killed for a playstation that morning, I can tell you; if I'd known what one was, or they had actually been invented. Whatever.

We could have gone to mine, but I was in the bad books because of something or other and I wanted to keep my first shoe to the head for after lunch (I'm all about the delayed gratification), and we could have gone back to Bob's but, as was his way. he was spending the day in the betting shop. Our answer? Well, we decided that the only thing for it was to trudge around the streets randomly until we got tired and then lounge against a garden wall looking all cool, like. It was the only logical thing to do, really.

We ended up, by a very roundabout route, in the next street over from Bob's. Remember that; the next street over; it may be important later. There we were, doing our best ice cool loitering and feeling very proud of ourselves, when from out of nowhere comes "What are you boys doing there? What's going on? Who are you?" Panic Stations!

You see, so conditioned were we to always being moved on by adults; almost as if they had something against scruffy urchins trespassing on their property and hurling sarcastic abuse at them; our instinctual reaction was always to run. Which is precisely what we would have done here, if not for one small, but pivotal, point; my foot was caught in the railings of the gate and I fell over. Smooth.

Luckily for us, the words which we in our pre-conditioned states had assumed to be harsh had actually been intended as a friendly overture by the speaker, who turned out to be a lady of indeterminate, but most definitely advanced, years. She cooed over me a little as I picked myself up, unhurt but mortified, from the floor, and then said the one thing guaranteed to make us friends for life; "do you boys want some pop and biscuits?"

Now, I know what you're thinking here, and you're right. But I mean, come on, POP! And BISCUITS! I never said we were geniuses. I'd like to tell you that we ate the biscuits and drank the pop on the doorstep. I'd like to tell you that, but I can't.

Once inside the house, the old crone drugged us with spiked lemonade, stripped us of our clothes and hogtied us under the stairs while the oven pre-heated. Only by the judicial use of Ian's long fingernails (I used to bite mine, NO LONGER!) and a loose nail were we able to escape our bonds and flee, naked and sobbing into the street. No, hang on, we played Scrabble, yeah, that's right.

Now, it may surprise you to learn this, but my Mother and Maurice the dickhead pseudo-stepdad were not amongst the worlds great thinkers; we owned a scrabble bard, and occasionally actually played it, too; but we didn't own a dictionary and to argue with their spellin was tantamount to shitting on the couch, so games could be a frustrating experience. This woman had a dictionary, played by the rules and actually seemed to be enjoying herself, rather than wishing for it to be over so she could watch some soaps. All in all, it was a new experience.

After the scrabble marathon; several games, of which I won but one; we retired, as is customary (?) to the kitchen, where I was greeted by a sight to blow my tiny mind. A jigsaw; but not just any jigsaw; a bloody huuuuge jigsaw, that took up the entirety of her kitchen table. (It was probably just a 1000piece one, to be honest, but it seemed huge at the time and 20piece Thomas The Tank Engine ones were about our limit at home).

As it turns out, jigsaws were this woman's life. She had, no lie, dozens of them piled up under the table, and those were just the ones she hadn't done yet; she said she had hundreds upstairs. She toddled off and came back with an armful of boxes that she said we could take with us when we left and then we sat around eating and drinking her kitchen clean while we all pitched in and worked on the puzzle. It sounds daft, but I think I had more fun in that one afternoon than any other day that holiday.

When the clock started to tick around to tea time (going home for lunch wasn't the 'done' thing, although on this day we were well fed anyway) we made our excuses and left, laden down with jigsaw puzzles and promising to go back to see her again soon. Promises that we fully intended to keep. But didn't.

It's fairly obvious now that she was lonely. Maybe her kids/grandkids never visited, or maybe she just didn't have any; whatever the reason, she latched onto us that day and didn't want to let go. So I'm kind of feeling like a shit that we never went back. Mainly because, the reason we never went back, was all down to me. Ian wanted to go back the next day, but I talked him out of it. He wanted to go the day after that, but I made excuses. And after the 3rd day, he stopped bringing it up.

You see, me being me, the 'little voices' kicked in. They convinced me that, contrary to everything she'd said, and everything she'd done, she had just been being polite, and any further visits from us would be unwelcome. It's the same thing that stopped me from sitting at the same table as my best friend at school, unless we arrived together; if he was already seated, and talking to someone, I was convinced I'd be intruding and would sit elsewhere. Such were the insecurities of my youth (and to a fair degree, my adulthood), and I'm genuinely sorry that they stopped me from bringing a little companionship into a lonely old woman's life.

The only other (semi)encounter we had with Jigsaw Lady was a couple of years later, and is the part of this tale that relied on her house being in the next street to Bob's (remember I said that might be important, ooh yes, you know I'm a proper writerer-person, with subtle foreshadowing skills like that). The old saying though, about the best state to leave your audience and containing the words 'more' and 'wanting', means I must withhold that particular tale for another day. Don't blame me; blame whoever came up with that saying (Google tells me it was Steve Lombardi, but I'm not convinced).

Join me next time. I have no idea why you would, but, you know...

Meeeee!

2012-01-08T18:23:00.000-08:00

So, yes, I've done this.

Basically, it's me talking about nothing for 2minutes. I'm on my side, and in shadow, because I'm rubbish and don't know how to operate a camera. I'll try to do better next time.

Feel free to point and laugh.

Birthday Tunes

2012-01-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

Not a proper post, as such, but there'll be one winging your way on Monday - prepare to meet The Jigsaw Lady - but what we have here is my entry in the 'What was number one in the charts when you were born' challenge.

If you want to find out yours, you can do here, assuming you're in the UK.

So without further ado, here it is (I'm quite pleased with it actually), Harry W himself, with 'We Don't Talk Anymore'.

Absent Fathers

2011-12-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

A happy one, after a fashion. Just for a change.

I've spoken before about how, following the split between my parents, my Father was somewhat conspicuous by his absence and that was true, up to a point. I did however go to stay with him on all of two occasions, and this is the first of them.

I was once told that the following day I was off to stay with my Dad for a week. The. Following. Day.. So, you know, lots of planning had gone into that. If I'm honest, I was a bit put out by the whole affair, seeing as how I had no great desire to see my Dad let alone spend a whole week with the bloke; not to mention that this was slap in the middle of the six weeks holidays, which was prime Spectrum staff harassment time for me and my mates; so I was probably being a bit surly and uncooperative. Nonetheless, on the bus I got and as I was tramping my way up the aisle to nab the still vacant back seat (loads of other seats were taken; did these people not see the spaces at the back? The poor blind fools!), I heard my mam ask for 'a half to Durham please.' A half? What the deuce?

"Get off at the bus station!" she yells up the aisle after me. "Just sit down when you get there, you're Dad'll find you." For Gods sake woman, I'm 9! I mean, far be it from me to question the parenting skills of someone that thinks the correct response to any disobedience is a shoe to the head from ten paces, but would it not be wise to accompany me on this journey? Or at the very least co-ordinate it so I'd be met at the other end, rather than having to sit and wait to be found? Of course, I only thought this; I didn't actually say it. Partly because a shoe to the head in public could be embarrassing, but mainly because she was gone from the bus before I got the chance. Didn't wave either; she was across the road and halfway home before the bus pulled away. The Waltons, we weren't.

Anyway, I arrived at Durham, bustling metropolis that it is (at least to the eyes of a small boy who's there on his own for the first time), and there's no sign of Daddy Dearest. So, I nip into the newsagents, buy myself a bag of crisps and can of pop (thus exhausting the spending money I had been given for the week) and sat down to wait. For over an hour. Then I hear a voice, calling me. I look up and down the station but there's no sign, until eventually I see him; my Dad, standing in the doorway of a bus, yelling at me to hurry up and get on. (It was the bus that he'd arrived on and which would now go back the way it came, so why get off?; no wasted effort, my Dad.) Our week together had begun.

Inauspicious beginnings aside, it wasn't a terrible time, once I got over my sulk at actually being there in the first place. He was living in a one room bedsit in a house with a communal bathroom and kitchen, so the whole thing was a little bit like a return to my much loved (but seriously deprived in hindsight) time in the flat, before the split. Some of his housemates were friendlier than others of course*, but I was still young enough and cutesy enough that I was a bit of a novelty and kind of taken under everyone's wings. The best part of the whole thing, though, was my Dads girlfriend.

Yes, my Dad, by some herculean feat of hypnotic suggestion, had managed to convince another woman that he was something other than a dead loss. I'd assumed with my mother that it had been a combination of her youth, naivete and low intelligence that had allowed him to cast his spell but since this new woman had none of that going on, I'm forced to accept that he must have had something going for him. Shows what I know.

Anyway, she was great. I can't remember her name, but I can remember really liking her. I mean, really liking her. You know how puppies can 'imprint' on the first thing to offer affection? That was our relationship; I knew her 2 days and I loved her to bits; by the end of the week I knew I never wanted to leave. Not only that, but she had a daughter, whose name I can remember; Alexandria, or Alex for short; and she was the cutest little thing you've ever seen in your life. I genuinely wanted them to be my Mam/Sister.

Then there was her house. She had a huge house, and a correspondingly huge garden; lots of time was spent there, working in that garden. And I mean working; she grew stuff and worked hard at it, it wasn't a lawn and a couple of borders job. We would all have to pitch in, and I loved it; didn't begrudge a second of it; although I did manage to break the watch that I had just received for my birthday (which fell while I was there; making my Mams attitude at the start of this little tale even colder, now I think of it). All told, I think that the time I spent at that house, with that family, was some of the happiest memories I have that involve my Dad. Shame it didn't last between them, really.

Another aspect of the trip to my Dad which brings a smile to my face, is Skippy. I met Skippy on the second day, and we were soon firm friends, in that way that kids have of instantly connecting with each other when they're too young to have learned yet that most people are knobheads. Skippy had earned his name by, and you'll never guess, skipping a lot; he couldn't walk for more than 20 seconds without involuntarily breaking into a weird skipping gait. This had, because kids are cruel, been the focus of much bullying and scorn, from the local kids. To his credit though, he actually embraced the name, and it's how he introduced himself to me when we first met. He still hated the taunting though; he wasn't that cool with it.

When I stayed with my Dad for the second (and last) time a couple of years later, I was really looking forward to re-connecting with Skippy (although I'm sure he hadn't given me a second thought in the intervening time) but it was not to be. I saw him only once, and he had... grown up, is the only way I can think of to describe it. We were the same age as each other and yet he seemed somehow older; there was a hardness to him that I felt unable to break through. In truth, he intimidated me. I heard from my Dad that there was talk of drink, of drugs, and of violence. Whatever the truth of that; how much of it was fact and how much the sadly all too common disdain that adults show for less privileged children; chavs, pikeys, delinquents; I'll never know but I knew that he had grown beyond my reach and age aside we had nothing in common any more. That fact still saddens me to this day, but in the selfish way that we all (or most of us) seem to have, I choose mostly to remember the good times, on that first trip, and smile.

*One particular member of the household, whose name is lost to the mists of time, was particularly nice to me. Had I been female, he might have been even nicer, but that is a story for another time (or perhaps not, given that it's more my sisters cross to bear than mine).

The Long Walk

2011-12-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

You aren't getting a proper post today, because, well, look, I've got my reasons OK? However, as a special little treat, and because I felt inspired to actually figure out how to put videos on here, you are going to be, er, subjected is probably the right word, to my walk home from school with the Goblin. Er, nephew. Yeah.

If you make it through both videos, you win.

The First 5 Minutes

Still here? Right then...

The Next 5 Minutes

There you are then, the walk home from school with the Goblin. Or as I like to call it, my punishment for whatever crimes I committed in the last life.

See you next week, when I'll have an actual post, with actual content, about my actual Dad.

Back on the dole again

2011-12-04T07:05:00.000-08:00

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Paul Whinges About His Life. No walk down memory lane this week, as I thought I'd waffle some nonsense about the latest big development in my current, what I laughably call 'adult' life.

Last week I became unemployed. It wasn't a bolt from the blue, like the 1st time it happened; I was on a temporary contract and was well aware that it was not going to be extended any further (having been extended once already) so I was able to prepare myself. It wasn't even a particularly worrying development; while of course far from ideal, I am assured that once the dead period is over (around March or April), my position should become available again if I'm still out of work; and the pay structure being a month in arrears means I'll be due a full paypacket just before Christmas. What this means is that I can, (cue dole-scum layabout comments), treat it in many ways like an extended holiday; a break from the liberty taking superiors and the unpleasant politics and deeply offensive sense of humour of my colleagues. Or can I?

You see, as much as I hate the attitudes of my colleagues and the atmosphere that can develop due to my inability to bite my tongue whenever they say something I disagree with (oh, the arguments we had about the death penalty, and don't get me started about the London Riots); despite all of that, and despite my moaning about the long hours, insufficient breaks and poor pay; I loved that job.

It's the only job I've ever done and it's the only job I know how to do. Luckily then, I'm pretty bloody good at it. I say this not to brag, or to seem big headed, but simply to state a fact. I spent years getting as good as I could possibly be; I took pride in the fact that I was good at what I did. It's not a particularly glamorous job, nor a particularly intellectually demanding one, so I'm perhaps damning myself with faint praise here, but fuck it, I'm proud of my work.

So yes, I'll miss the work itself, if not the majority of the people I had to tolerate to do it. Sad? Maybe, but it's the truth. There is, however, another factor that makes the losing of my job, even if temporarily, a blow to me. That is, motivation. In that, I don't have any. If I don't have a job to go to, I do nothing else. I sleep really anti-social hours, I rarely leave the house and I can go days without speaking to another human being. As I type this, it's 3pm on a Sunday afternoon and the last person I spoke to was my nephew, when I dropped him at school on Friday morning. For adult conversation I have to go back to Thursday night. Yes, I only left my job on Wednesday and it's that bad already.

At least this time around I have my beloved twitter to keep me company, so even if I'm not actually 'speaking' to anyone, I'm not completely cut off. The first time I lost my job I didn't even have that and I would routinely lose track of what day of the week it was. Dark days my friends, dark days. I started my twitter account about a year into that period of unemployment and it was a Godsend. Fuck the Government, or the tabloids, or anyone else who says that unemployed people 'twittering' is a sign of laziness; no mate, it's a sign of trying to stay sane.

Anyway, my old mate Genghis would have us believe that "Pessimism is Realism, Optimism is Insanity." I choose not to subscribe to this theory, even if do incur his wrath for daring to disagree, so I'm going to try to come up with some good points about my current situation. Just give me a moment...

Little Big Man

2011-11-20T05:41:00.000-08:00

Having spent the last two entries on here whining about my inadequacies as a person, I thought it wise to perhaps lighten the mood somewhat with this one. So on went the old thinking cap ( it was a tight fit; I'd not worn it for a while and it's shocking how big your head can get when you don't stop to think*) and I came up with a story that, while it does contain me being daft, does so in a somewhat humorous manner. It's a funny story, anyway; I'm not saying it'll be funny once I've drained it of all life with my deathly prose.

The story is one that took place, in the timeline of my life, a couple of years before the point the blog is currently at. To be honest, I forgot about it; something that will probably happen quite a bit, but what the Hell. So, if you'd like to reacquaint yourself with what my life was like at the time this story takes place, or if you're new to the blog and haven't read the archives (and if not, why not? Get on it!), then it's roughly contemporaneous with this post.

Back? Right, then we'll begin.

My Grandmother, saintly paragon of virtue that she is, does have one vice; namely, she loves a bit of bingo. (I know, Granny playing bingo, what a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason, brother!) Eyes down, dibby dabby marker pen thing furiously stabbing at her eight different cards all strewn out before her in her lucky pattern, she was like a woman possessed when she got going. Which was every Tuesday and Thursday in the old Junior School assembly hall.

At this time it was considered perfectly OK to take kids along to these nights, sit them down with a glass of pop and a card, and let them join in the 'fun'. (I'm assuming it's a bit more strict these days; most things are, but I've not been to a bingo game in years so I don't know). Anyway, many was the evening I'd spend down there during the period I was staying with her and my Granda. I guess it was cheaper than a babysitter. (My Granda himself would have been at some pub or other, 'cos whether it be darts, snooker, dominoes, pool or, I don't know, tiddly-winks, he was on a team/team running committee. Dude never slept.)

There were times though; I guess when she just needed a night to herself; when my Grandmother would take a huge leap of faith and leave me at home with my Uncle Darren. The fool! It was on one such night that our story takes place. (I know right? Finally!) I should say at this point that these nights were probably far more fun for me than they were for Darren. He was, after all, a teenage boy, and I doubt that being left alone with a daft little pipsqueak who followed him around like a wee puppy dog was how he liked to spend his evenings. I loved it though; I idolised the guy, and I used to look forward to these nights like no other.

One one such occasion, we had been on our own for maybe an hour, watching TV with me pretending to like the stuff he was watching but not really understanding it, when a knock at the door broke his torture. It was a mate of his, asking could he do him a favour? He had just nicked a load of drink from his neighbours garage and could he stash it here for a bit? (Note to new readers, many of my family were minor villains, or friends with minor villains. They've 'mostly' reformed now). Anyway, the booze; six carrier bags full; was duly carted into the living room, the shady friend disappeared into the night and the TV was returned to.

Can you see where this is going?

Darren announced, after a little while, that he was going in the bath. I was to sit and watch TV until he got out, at which point it would be time for me to go to bed. I was gutted, and decided that I was going to prove to him that I was grown up enough to stay up with him. How on Earth was I to do this though? If only there were some 'grown up' activity that I could indulge in, to show him what I was capable of. Wait, what's that you say, voices in my head? Bags of alcohol? Ahhh.

Have you ever seen a 6 year old after a can? How about after 3 cans? Trust me, a 6 year old after 5 cans and 2 bottles is something even William Friedkin would think twice about putting on screen. I will say, in my defence, that I managed to stand up, the first few times I fell over, and even after I stayed down I never cried. I didn't quite have the energy to remove myself from the rapidly expanding pools of sick I was rolling in, but I had enough self awareness to know that crying wouldn't be cool. As it turns out though, I needn't have worried; it seems that I was fated not to impress Darren at all that night.

He returned from the bathroom and went, to be blunt, absolutely mental. The first time, and the only time that I can recall, that he would ever truly lose his temper with me. Even when I almost killed him he never got properly mad but this... I felt like shit. And not just for the obvious reason.

After he'd finished ranting at me he got me changed, stuck me over the toilet, and set about trying to clean the place up before his Mother got home. I can't imagine he had much luck. I say I can't imagine because I don't know for certain. The last thing I remember of that night is of depositing a bowlful into the toilet. I was told later that he'd found me asleep over the bowl and carried me to bed.

Awww!

*eh? eh? Bit of clever clever commentary for you there. Someone give me a Phd.

My Brief Career As A Bully

2011-11-14T12:11:00.000-08:00

Normally, I don't pay much attention to those accepted theories that attempt to explain the behaviour patterns in people. I always feel that, however much credence popular opinion gives them, they are always far too keen to generalise; to put people into groups. Not to mention, their tendency to overthink things. I mean, sometimes people do bad things because they're unpleasant people who like doing bad things; there's no deeper explanation than that.

I will concede, however, that in some cases, the theories can be correct. Take 'bullying is a cycle', for instance. Whilst I am convinced that many people terrorise those weaker than themselves purely because they can, there are instances of it happening as a means of 'paying on' the pain and suffering; like my brief and somewhat anti-climactic career as a bully.

As a child I was beaten often by my parents and by other children. I could live with it, for the most part, and indeed the occurrences would be forgotten almost as soon as they were over. They were just one of those things; a part of life. On one occasion though, and I don't know why it happened, I decided that I was going to beat up someone else. It wasn't an emotional response; I wasn't overly upset or not thinking straight. I simply decided, on a whim, that I was going to find someone I was confident I could take, and I was going to beat them up.

Of course, being me, I enlisted help. My cousin was to be my wingman, as it were, and we would beat up our unfortunate victim together. This served 2 purposes; the first was that it meant I was less exposed should my victim fight back, and secondly I was convinced that this would make me seem cooler than I really was in the eyes of my cousin. The sad part was, I was right; he got very excited at the prospect.

We chose our victim and set about luring him to a place where we could beat him up in private. It was all very businesslike on our part; not in any way a damaged person lashing out in a rage, but rather a totally cold, pre-meditated assault. Quite scary to look back at, to be honest. Anyway, we chose a young lad who was maybe a year younger than us, who had been an occasional hanger on to our little group but not by any stretch one of our 'friends'. He was quite a shy lad, very nervous, (a lot like myself, had I been honest, though I was better at hiding it than he was, at least back then) and we knew he would probably go along with whatever we said. And we were right.

Here's the thing though. We forgot. We forgot why we lured him to the secluded spot in the woods. We forgot why we had brought only him and none of the rest of the group. We forgot, because we had fun. We messed around, we played games, we had a laugh; what started as us luring him into a sense of security turned into us all having a bloody good afternoon. Then, when it started getting dark, we headed home.

It was when we left the woods and got back out onto the streets that the thought popped into my head... "If you don't kick his head in now, you've missed your chance". Just like that, and despite the pleasantness of the afternoon up until that point, a switch went in my head; I nudged my cousin and pointed at the kid. He nodded and, completely without hesitation, smacked him in the face, then I ran at him and kicked him in the back. We both laughed and the kid started crying. Then he said...

"Why are you doing this? I thought we you were my friends."

Totally guileless, totally without any attempt to look cool or save face; he just looked at us like a kicked puppy, heart on his sleeve. Something inside me shriveled up right in that moment. I'd like to say we stopped at that point. I'd like to say we realised we were in the wrong, apologised and backed off. I can't though, because we didn't. My cousin went back in for another go and, while I didn't lay any more blows I kept hurling abuse, telling him how much we hated him and we had never been his friends; all the while hating myself, but not being able to stop for fear of losing face in front of my cousin.

When he got tired of hitting the kid, we watched him run off up the street, sobbing, and I could have cried myself; until my cousin started on about how cool that had been and I felt a swelling of pride. Yes, all it took was a brief moment of someone saying I was cool and my conscience retreated back into it's shell. I didn't spare that poor kid another thought for the rest of the day. That night was another matter entirely though. The tossing, the turning, the inability to sleep for hours and then the nightmares when I did; it was clear that as cold and uncaring as I was capable of being in the moment, my conscience was never going to let me get away with that kind of behaviour. Some part of me knew how wrong my actions had been, and was damn sure going to drive the point home.

I never did apologise to that kid. Not because I didn't want to, but because he would never come near me again. He'd cross the road to avoid me, and I'd see that look of fear in his eyes that I'm sure was in mine whenever I saw one of my tormentors coming. Truth be told, I didn't deserve anything else.

Mathew

2011-10-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

A while ago, the BBC broadcast a documentary made by Sir Terry Pratchett, about euthanasia. I intended to watch but, having forgotten it was on, managed to see only the last 20 minutes or so. Even this much proved too much for me to handle (as I should probably have predicted it would, given my much documented 'problems' dealing with mortality) and I sank into something of a depression. One symptom of this mood was a rather long and rambling stream of tweets on twitter, in which I spoke of a cousin who had lost his life to cancer many years ago. One follower opined that while what I was saying was interesting, it was hard to keep up on twitter and I should maybe write a blog about it.

My desire to keep these reminiscences in roughly chronological order (although that hasn't worked out exactly), coupled with the fact that once my mood lightened I didn't really want to throw myself back into the Dark Place straight away, has meant a bit of a wait, but now, here we are. Or at least, here we are at the beginning of the tale. There will be more.

Mathew was my cousin/uncle. He was born to my Uncle Eric and his first wife, but when that marriage fell apart and his mother (I can't remember her name, but then I think I only ever met her once) disappeared from the scene and wanted nothing to do with him, Eric decided that he couldn't handle raising a child alone and Mathew found himself being raised by my Grandparents. Hence his insistence on us calling him Uncle, which was nothing if not really fucking annoying.

And there's the rub. Mathew, or the memory of Mathew, is something of a sacred cow in my family. He died young, and not in a very pleasant manner, so of course he must always be spoken of kindly. So I don't speak of him. You see, I only knew him as a child, have only my childs-eye opinion of him to go on, and consequently have very little in the way of nice things to say about him.

The first time he came to stay with us, it was in the very early stages of his illness. We all knew he had been poorly, but we didn't know with what, or how serious it was. He himself gave no indication that he was anything less than 100%. We were told though, that we had to be nice to him, that we had to include him in our activities, and that we had to 'take care of him'. This last directed at me of course, as the oldest. It was easier said than done.

Everyone hated him. Seriously, everyone. He stayed with us for a week and day by day our group got smaller and smaller as one person or another decided they didn't want anything to do with him. He was arrogant, he expected everyone to do whatever he wanted to do at all times, and he spoke to people like they were shit on his shoe; I wanted to punch him on may occasions and am genuinely surprised that certain of my friends didn't do just that; thy weren't a bunch that were shy with their fists.

Now, I know what you're thinking; he was ill and we should have cut him some slack. Well, as I say, we didn't know he was ill. We knew he had been ill, but we had no reason to think he still was. Even he himself didn't know. He was, so far as we could tell, just a spoiled brat. Maybe he was spoiled because the adults knew the extent of what lay in store for him, I don't know, but that didn't change how the situation appeared to us. All we knew was that this kid was behaving in ways that would have seen us get the hiding of a lifetime, and getting away with it, while at the same time doing nothing at all to endear himself to us. We couldn't wait for him to leave.

Do I regret, now, that we didn't treat him with more kindness? Do I wish we had known what was down the road for him, so we could have made more effort to enjoy the time we had. I'd like to say yes, but if I'm honest, I don't think it would have changed anything. Regardless of what we knew or didn't know; regardless of how long or how short his remaining life would be; the truth remains the same. He wasn't a very nice person. At the most, we might have made more of an effort to pretend to like him, because that's what you do, right? Our true feelings would have remained the same though.

I often think back to those days and wonder what it says about me. Am I a bad person because I didn't like him? I don't think so; he gave ample reason. A better question perhaps, is am I a bad person for not feeling worse about it now?

Maybe the answer to that one is yes, I don't know. Maybe by writing this post, and putting these thoughts out there for the world to see, I am exacerbating my guilt; they say, after all, that you should never speak ill of the dead. No story of my life would be complete without him, however, so I must write about him, and I'm afraid to do so in any other manner would be to be a hypocrite.

So there you are. I am a heartless bastard. Who knew? Oh, yeah, everyone who reads this blog knew, that's right. I'll leave it there and I'll be back next week with another memory of my terrible youth. I'm a twat in that one too.

Childline

2011-10-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

So, today you were going to get the mirth filled tale of how my psycho neighbour killed my pet rabbit (and not in a good way, I didn't even get any freaky sex out of the deal) and the separate, but related, incident in which said psycho neighbour egged her children on to physically attack me. However, and that's a very big however, I couldn't manage to fit the tales into a respectable wordcount nor, and this is the big problem, make them readable at *any* length.

So I quit. I'll no doubt come back to those tales at some point, either together or, more likely, stretched out to fill two posts instead of one, like the relevant bits of a weekends X-Factor. In truth, I realised as I writing it that I'd actually jumped ahead a bit in the old life story anyway, so I can justify postponing them as a narrative preserving act, rather than the 'I'm too lazy to do another re-write' act that it so obviously is. Win!

What's that I don't hear you cry? What will he replace it with at such short notice? Well I'll tell you. Childline.

A grand idea in principal, Childline was the freephone number for children to get advice about their problems. (They're still around, but online now.) But to me, Childline was first port of call for your more imaginative prank caller.

Yes, I did indeed use Childline as a source of great amusement. You see, as I've noted before, I didn't, for the most part, consider myself to be all that badly done by. Certainly I knew that I was somewhat neglected by my Mother and her waster boyfriend; certainly I knew that technically speaking the beatings I regularly received from them were not strictly legal; and certainly I knew that some would consider the daily torment, both mental and physical that I endured at the hands of schoolyard bullies was less than ideal. Just as certainly though, I knew that I had good mates, that I was a bright student and that I had everything I needed to have a grand old time. Life was pretty good.

So it never occurred to me to actually use Childline for it's intended purpose; that being, to talk to someone about my problems. Instead I used it to talk about fake problems, to invent stories of such deprivations and indignities as would make Dickens himself think "nah, mebbe not, bit far-fetched there Charlie lad".Did I feel bad, as they poured sympathy and concern down the phone? Nope, twas hilarious.

At one point, I made mention of the fact that I had been on the phone to Childline, while in the same room as my mother and Maurice the dickhead pseudo step-dad. I genuinely hadn't thought it through, as to how they might react, having only mentioned it because I thought my tale of woe that I'd spun the volunteer might make them laugh. The looks of panic on their faces were priceless. So good in fact that I didn't finish my story and just let them sweat.

Looking back, with the growed up eyes of a jaded mandult, I see how reprehensible my behaviour was. Childline was a charity, running on fumes and staffed by volunteers who gave up their time because they genuinely cared and probably felt like shit after listening to the horrible stuff that *genuinely* traumatised kids must have been telling them. I wasted their time and probably caused them more distress.I was, in short, a little shit.

So there you have it. A post in which I was to be portrayed as a victim has been replaced by a post in which I am the villain. We were overdue for one of those anyway.

You Can't Put That Many In, The Suspension Won't Take It.

2011-10-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

Last week MoaN once again did what it seems to do a lot lately and failed to update. Why did it fail to update? Well, because I hadn't actually gotten around to writing anything, that's why. Still, the legion of loyal readers who just can't get enough of my childhood trauma can at least console themselves that MoaN manages to update a hell of a lot more regularly than my TV blog or my book blog have managed recently.

The reasons for my not writing as much as I did haven't really changed since the last time I posted one of these 'I haven't posted much recently' messages. Or rather, the surface causes may have changed, but the root issue remains the same; namely my utter dissatisfaction with my life as it is right now. Where previously this had led me to not blog because I either couldn't be bothered or my mood was already so low that I didn't want to dredge up yet more misery from my past. Now however, it has led to new blog-blocking issues.

Yes, the self improvement drive that I recently announced I was about to embark on is in full flow. Very much early days still, of course, but with my history of procrastination and, let's face it, just plain not doing what I say I will, I choose to feel proud of myself that I actually made an appointment and signed an enrollment document. Of course, now that I have I have no choice but to see it through, given that the 'free' course is only free if you complete it; walk away mid-way through and they hit you with the bill, which would be disastrous, since my long term employment is still up in the air and I'm trying to save up for a trip to Scotland next year.

So, with my free time now taken up with listening to women with bizarrely good enunciation explain simple mathematical theories in as confusing a manner as possible and massively over excited men yell "Well Done! You Got Them All Right" whenever I answer a bunch of questions my 6 yr old nephew wouldn't struggle with, the time available to post up on here is limited.It's not all bad though. I can amuse myself by mocking the ridiculous 'problems' I find myself faced with in this bizarro world they seem to think we live in.

Take grout for instance. If I was ever going to buy grout (unlikely in the extremis) I would probably just read the label on the tub to know how much was in it. Not an option, apparently; you have to work out the volume of the tub using a mathematical formula. Now, I work in a builders merchants and we sell grout. I have never, in all my years there, ever seen one of our customers working out the volume of a tub of anything. In fact the only time pi crosses their minds is when we have a promotional breakfast morning on.

Or there's the time I had to work out how many paving stones would fit in the back of a van. Apparently you do this by working out the volume of the van. Well, here's a little tip for you, from me; if you work out the volume of your van, and then purchase enough paving stones to fill it to capacity, Congratulations, you've just killed your van. Little bit of wisdom there, that I've picked up over the years.

Anyway, the maths is over soon, and then it's on to the English course. I'm hoping for less blatant nonsense there. Although, given my complete and utter inability to remember the definitions of 'noun', 'verb', 'adverb' etc., I possibly shouldn't look forward to that one too much either.

That's enough pointless waffling I think. I will endeavour, next week, to do another trip down memory lane; I know you are all missing your vicarious wallowing.

Scruff.

2011-09-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

For any of you who may be wondering, I am over my little funk of last post. I'm pretty convinced that my worries weren't paranoia and the problem really did exist but I'm equally certain that a)it's all blown over and b) I'm not going to dwell on it regardless.

So this week I drag the blog back on track and head once more down memory lane; to a boy named Scruff and one of my most terrifying experiences.

I spent a goodly portion of my childhood living in constant fear of Scruff, who lived just a couple of streets from me and was, during our time at Primary School, in my class. Luckily, come Comprehensive his, shall we say lack of academic aptitude, meant that we saw little overlap in our classes so I only had to worry about him after hours. At the time of this weeks tale however, we were still entrenched in the Primary years, so his presence was constant.

Now, before we go any further I should like to point out that I was not the one to coin the name 'Scruff' for him. Far from the most well dressed person in my social circle I was all to aware of the negative affect being mocked for your appearance can have on a person. He seemed perfectly happy with the name though, to the extent that I genuinely can't remember what his actual name was. I'm sure he had one; God, how awful would it be to have been christened Scruff? You'd have no chance, would you?; but to this day he is indelibly etched into my memory as simply Scruff.

Scruff and I didn't get off on the wrong foot. Quite the opposite in fact. One of my first memories of him is from, oh, it must have been a week or so after I started at that school. We were selected by random drawing to stay in at playtime and clear up the art supplies and he was pretty upset about it. Personally I wasn't that fussed, everyone got picked eventually, it was just our time, (although I was pretty unlucky to have been picked so soon) but he was really stropping. I ended up telling him to just sit down and I'd do it myself. That was it, friend for life. Or friend for a month or so anyway. Pretty much everyone tried to warn me, after that first playtime bonding session, that I should stay well clear but I liked the lad, he was a good laugh, and I didn't listen.

Until he headbutted me for tackling him in PE.

You see, Scruff was a psycho, or at least that was our expert opinion when we were kids. Truth is, looking back, he was obviously deeply troubled and his home life, from what I saw of it was about as far from perfect as you could get. And I say this a someone whose own childhood, as you'll know if you read this blog regularly, was far from rosy. These days he'd get counseling, maybe moved to a separate school where children with his issues were better catered for. Not back then though; to the teachers he was a troublemaker and to us kids he was a psycho. A psycho with a temper.

I very quickly, being the terrible physical coward that I am, began to live in fear of Scruffs mood swings, which ironically enough meant that I actually ended up spending a lot more time with him than most. You see, while others were happy to ignore him or, the brave ones, tell him to f*ck off, I was always trying to appease him. I figured if he thought of me as a proper friend (and one who posed no threat) I'd be less likely to feel his wrath. Shoddy thinking, I now know.

Anyway, I had two major run ins with Scruff that stay with me to this day. The first was one of the proudest moments of my life. The second was the moment that I realised the first had been a massive mistake.They say, don't they, that you should stand up to bullies and they'll back down. Sound advice, if you're living in Ramsay Street or going to school at Waterloo Road but here in the real world it doesn't always work that way. Or rather, in my experience, it never works that way.

It was a pretty normal day like any other and we were all quite happily sitting in class doing whatever it was we were doing. The sun was shining through the windows, people were laughing, it was pretty idyllic. Then my mate Chris and I went to get something from the side cupboard. Scruff arrived right behind us, he wanted what we had, we offered half, he wanted it all, we said no, he said he would kick our heads in. So far, still normal, if not quite so idyllic.

Then I screamed "Fuck Off" and punched him. I have no idea what the hell I was thinking but he was snarling threats at us and I was terrified so I lashed out and punched him in the stomach. Shocked myself to be honest. He doubled over and stayed doubled over, my hand still in his stomach because I was in to much shock to pull away. Everyone who saw it started laughing and cheering, Chris tried to drag me away, Scruff was puffing and wheezing, everything was in slow motion.

So teacher arrives on scene, we're both sent on our merry way to the Headmasters office, get a bit of a bollocking, apologise, are sent straight back to class. The whole way there, and the whole way back, Scruff doesn't say a word to me, just shuffling along with his hands in his pockets and staring at the floor. For my part, I was terrified; I was convinced he was going to turn and beat the crap out of me, right there in the corridor.

He did no such thing, and he did nothing at break or Lunch either. Hometime came and he went straight home, no sign of hanging around to 'get' me. It seemed that I had gotten away with it. I became something of a minor celebrity in class for all of about 3 days, and then it all blew over.

Until a few weeks later. I'm in a shop, Scruff walks in with a couple of mates, heads straight over to me and starts yelling in my face. The shopowner kicks us all out; I guess the terror in my eyes wasn't good enough for him, he just lumped us all in together as noisy kids and out we went. We were outside scant seconds when the first punch connected to the side of my head. I staggered, a couple more blows were struck and then interference from a passer-by was enough of a diversion for me to do one.

Now, I'm no athlete, but when I think there's a chance of a kicking I'm like a whippet, so it wasn't long before I was at the end of the street and round the corner. Had I kept on I would have most likely gotten home before Scruff and co could have caught me but instead, in another case of me trying to be too clever for my own good, I nipped up the back of the main street, intending to hide in one of the yards. This I do, and am soon happily ensconced in a nice little alcove, out of sight and sitting pretty.

Except, I'd failed to take into account that while Scruff had many flaws, being an idiot wasn't one of them. He must have realised that I hadn't had time to get out of sight on the main road, and that having come up the back street I wouldn't have had time to reach the end; hence, I was hiding up the back street somewhere. I was cornered within moments and bracing myself for the kicking I was sure was coming.

He pulled a knife.

I can honestly say, hand on heart and without fear of contradiction, that I was legitimately more scared in that moment than I had ever been before and I'd be hard pushed to think of many times since that matched it. I can clearly remember thinking that Scruffs friends looked nearly as terrified as I did; I don't think they were expecting that! And do you know what I did? What my big, brave, plan of action was? I cried. I cried, and I begged for him not to hurt me and then I launched into a wild attack that I'm sure had little effect other than to shock him (still crying all the time) and then I ran like fuck and didn't stop until I got home; where I cried some more, got wrong because I wouldn't say why I was crying and then went to bed and had nightmares. So, you know, a great plan all round. And Scruff...

Scruff showed up at school next day like nothing had happened and was laughing and joking with me in the playground. Best friends...until the next time.

Twitter People, And An Apology

2011-09-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

So, this is not the post I set out to write this week. I had planned an account of my torment at the hands of a schoolyard bully and how the old adage, 'stand up to a bully and he'll run away', isn't always the best advice, but that will have to wait for something has come up which I need to address. Something which has been playing on my mind for a couple of days.

Now it's entirely possible that there isn't a problem and I'm just being paranoid. This has certainly been known to happen in my long and torturous history of 'trying to interact with other people like a normal human' but if it is all in my head, then all that's going to happen is I'm making a fool of myself, which is kind of what this blog is all about. If I'm not paranoid though, and there really is a problem, then I hope that this post will go some way to putting it right.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter; a time sucking indulgence which has become akin to an addiction for me, and I don't use the word lightly. You see I joined twitter, as I do so many internet do-hickeys, with the intention of extracting the michael out of all the saddos but unlike the various forums I've joined and never posted on, or the MySpace and later, facebook pages I set up, I have stuck with Twitter and now wouldn't be without it. Why? The people.

In a course of events that I didn't foresee and would never have thought possible, I began to engage. It took me a while but I began to consider these 'tweeters', these people I've never actually met and possibly (probably) never will, as friends. Is that 'sad'? Is that 'abnormal'? If it is, I don't care.

My whole life I've struggled with the social niceties, with the societal pressure to 'do this', 'think this', 'feel this'. I've had few friends, I've become estranged from the bulk of my family, I consider those I work for and with as nothing more than interchangeable/replaceable colleagues. When people are particularly happy or miserable; when babies are born or engagements announced; when people are ill or die, I feel nothing. I put on a show of camaraderie in the good times and feign empathy in the bad but it's seldom genuine and if it is, it's fleeting. I had begun to think myself broken. Until Twitter. I don't know how they did it but they brought me out of my shell, they made me laugh genuine laughter, engage in genuine banter that I wasn't forcing to fit in, care about what they were doing in their lives and want to share what I was doing in mine. So yes, I think of them as friends.

And, as I'm told is common in real life, by the tellybods and the bookwriter people, some are better friends than others; some are more important to me than others.(You can see their names over to the right there). I care, not just about their opinion of me, but about them in general. How they feel, whether they're happy. So when I think that I could have done something, however unintentional, to make one of these people unhappy, it pains me. It pains me a great deal and I want to put it right.

ON SATURDAY I posted a comment on twitter about Person A. It was a joke; a comment posted in response to something Person A had posted earlier that day, which had in turn been posted in response to something I had said the previous night. You know, like a conversation, but with reaallly long timedelay. Shortly after I posted this comment, someone we shall call Person B seemed to get very upset. They posted some things that, while not addressed to me personally, could have been written in direct response to my post. The timing and their content certainly indicated that they were. I pretended not to notice. I hoped very strongly that what I thought had happened, had not happened. I'm now convinced that it had.

You see, taken in context, I like to think that my comment was mildly amusing. Taken out of context (and let's face it, what's the likelihood that anyone would have just happened to see the previous 2 messages in the sea of thousands over the 24 hour+ hours that the conversation took?), the comment took on a whole other meaning. And it was a meaning that Person B would have had every right to get upset about.

I hold my hands up here. It was a stupid thing to do, especially since I knew that Person B was online at the time. I just didn't think; I had an idea for a funny thing to do and I did it, without a thought for how Person B would take it. I apologise; all I can do is apologise, but I want that person to understand something.

It was never my intention to hurt your feelings or upset you. I was an idiot and I've felt like shit about it since it happened. I hope you understand that you are genuinely one of my favourite people to talk to online and a big part of what makes Twitter so positive an influence in my life. The thought that I played any part in making you unhappy kills me. I hope you understand, it was a joke.

As I say, it's possible that I'm overreacting; that the whole thing was in my head, I'm the only one worrying and the above post is just a big load of 'Paul Being An Idiot'. If that's the case, nothing would make me happier and you should all feel free to mock me mercilessly. But if not, then I hope that Person B understands how sorry I am.

And also, I suppose, that all of Twitter doesn't now disown me for being the freakazoid needy loser that I have just ousted myself as. Slipped up there.

Touch My Tiddler, I Dare You.

2011-08-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

Hello there and welcome to another edition of Musings of a Nobody, the blog in which a nobody, that's me, muses on things; things that have happened to me in my life, for the most part.

It's been a little while since this blog updated actually and that's entirely down to me and my horrible mood swings that really aren't conducive to writing calmly about unpleasant memories. Hint: I tend to throw things. I'm hoping (and I'm aware that I've said this before without following through) that this will be the first of many and I can get back to a semi-regular schedule on here.

So, you remember Wayne and Lisa right? Sure you do, Wayne and Lisa. Yeah, them. Well, they had tents. Nothing unusual in that you might think. Lots of kids have tents. Some might say that sleeping outside sans parents for the very first time is something of a rite of passage. Not me, obviously, I likes me the creature comforts, but some might. Anyway, Wayne and Lisa had tents and come the summer months these tents would be erected in their back garden, where they would become the focal point of all the activity of the local kids. Boys in Wayne's tent, girls in Lisa's. (They were massive tents by the way, in case you were wondering. No uncomfortable squeezing necessary thank you very much. Never confused.)

Now, one fine summer morn we boys were sat in Wayne's tent, playing snap with a pack of those cards all our Dads/Dickhead Pseudo Stepdads seemed to acquire from nowhere (you know the ones, you know you do) and planning how we were going to invade the Girls Tent and mess up whatever they were doing. It was a favourite pastime of ours to plan these little assaults, although we rarely if ever went through with them; I don't think people do, really, outside of 1980's screwball coming-of-age comedies.

This time was no exception, and after about an hour we drifted over to see what they were up to and ended up joining in a game of Snakes & Ladders. Oh, the hedonism! Wayne went in and asked his Mam if we could all have some pop, which she supplied, and we settled in for the day, it being very hot out and the tent being nice shade. A connect four set was produced and later a cluedo board and we all had, as the yank youth might put it, hella fun. Until the fun ended.

Yes, it was all looking a bit charming and Enid Blytony there wasn't it? Can't have that on this here fountain of misery. No Sirree!

After a few hours, the tent was ripped open and Wayne and Lisa's Mam was standing there. I can't speak for anyone else in the tent at the time but my first thought, in the few scant moments before shit met fan, were that she had come to ask if we wanted more pop. Or possibly biscuits. Biscuits would be nice, I was thinking.

I didn't get any biscuits.

"Get out, now!" came the shrill scream. "All of you, get out of there."

This was interesting, I thought. Well used to my own mothers hysterical mood swings and violent temper I had not, up to this point, experienced it with this particular family. Now that the ice was broken, so to speak, I would witness many more such outbursts, but at this point, new experience.

"Get out and get in the house. You lot go home, your Mams waiting for you. Go on, move it." This last to me and mine, of course, and we wandered, blinking, into the blazing sun, confusion etched into our cute little puppy-fat-chubby faces. Ever the voice of reason, or 'cocky little bastard' as I've also heard it referred to, I tried to calm her down and get to the bottom of her hysterics. This did not go down well. Much swearing ensued, of so vile a nature I'll not repeat it on here because frankly I can't be bothered with the hassle of having one of those 'adult content' blocks on this thing; I get few enough views as it is.

Wayne and Lisa trudged into the house, looking bemused right up to the moment they got the smack from their Dad at the door; then they just looked in pain. For our part, myself and my sis and bro headed off up the street to ours, completely in the dark about what exactly we were supposed to have done wrong but wary, after what we'd seen happen to the others, about what kind of reception awaited us at home. We didn't hurry. Sure enough, as promised, our loving Mam was waiting at the door to greet us.

My brother walked in first. *Smack* across the back of the head. "Get upstairs, right now!"

Then my sister. *Smack* "Get upstairs..."

Then it was my turn. *Smack* across the back of the head and then "Get in the f*ck*ng living room, right now!". Not upstairs with the others then? This boded in the realms of the not well. Very much so in fact. In I trudged.

"What the bloody hell do you think you're playing at?" came the question. Followed by an open palmed slap to the face that, I'm not ashamed to say, hurt like pissing buggery. Now, I wasn't standing for that! I was used to being smacked around but at least I usually knew why it was happening, even if the reasons were often a little, shall we say, arbitrary; this seemed to be coming from out of nowhere. Unless some new law I wasn't aware of had come into effect banning board games, I was stumped.

"You're only kids. You never do that kind of thing. Never."

I was still none the wiser. I won't give you the whole conversation, or an accurate count of how many blows were struck, because the former would bore you and the latter might shock you, but suffice to say it went on for a very long time and it hurt. A lot. In the end though, I got to the bottom of what we had 'done wrong'.

It seems that we had been showing each other our privates and daring each other to touch them. This came as news to me, but apparently Wayne's mother had come out to offer us some pop and biscuits - so close - and had heard us doing it. At which point she had rushed in and stopped it. Except no, she'd come up to my house, told my Mam and then gone back to her own house and stopped it. Rather undermines the level of righteous outrage she was affecting right? I didn't think of that at the time though, which was probably just as well because I really didn't need another smack in the teeth. I denied everything, because it was a crock of bullshit, but the old 'why would she make something like that up?' was my Mums answer. Bloody good question, if you ask me.

I was grounded for a week (no big deal, I read a bunch of books, it flew by) and banned from hanging around with Wayne and Lisa when I was let back out. As if that was going to stick. It all blew over in a couple of weeks and by the last fortnight of the summer hols we were back to business as usual. Except the tents never went back up.

So, why did they make that up? I assumed at the time that they must have gotten the wrong end of the stick with something they'd heard but really, what kind of boardgame chatter can even roughly equate to "touch my tiddler, I dare you"? That and the fact that, as I say, she wandered up to warn my Mother before she confronted us, which I doubt she'd have done were she properly upset, makes me think on looking back at it, that she absolutely must have made it up.

Was she as doolally-tap as my Mam was? Or did she just want an excuse to stop all the local kids from hanging around in her garden? Although to fair, if that's your aim and the first thing you come up with is accusing them of sexual shenanigans, then that doesn't really rule out the mad as a box of.. argument either. I guess I'll never know the truth and it's just one more childhood experience I'll have to file away in the old 'parents are nutjobs'drawer.

Cup-A-Soup

2011-08-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

What's the worst thing you've ever eaten? I'm talking about something that made you absolutely retch your insides up, something so vile that it changed your diet forever.

For me, it was a cup-a-soup. Or rather, it wasn't.

Cup-a-soups were a staple of my diet when I was a child. Whenever my Mam was too 'busy' to cook for us, she would demand that we make ourselves a cup-a-soup and have some bread to dip in it. There were more than a few times that I went a week or more with bread as the only solid food I ate at home. Thank God for free school meals that's all I can say.

Anyway, there was a plastic tub in the cupboard in the kitchen - I think it had started out as an ice cream tub - that was always well stocked with sachets of soup. So one Saturday night, I come home from a long hard day of interfering with bowls scoreboards and pressing emergency stop buttons on ski slope rope pulleys, to find that I have to make my own meal. To the tub, grab the first packet to hand and we're away.

So I pour the contents into my mug. Then I boil the kettle. Then I pour the water into the cup. (And that's how you make cup-a-soups. It's like one level of difficulty up from Pot Noodles in that you have to transfer the contents from one container to another before pouring water on them. The hardship!)

The powder won't dissolve. The lumps aren't going away. There are floaters galore on the surface, and I can feel a claggy lump in the bottom of the cup with my spoon. Also, the stench is awful. What could have gone wrong? Well, I hadn't made a cup-a-soup for one.

It seems that the ice cream tub was now also home to some sachets of casserole mix stuff. In grabbing the first packet I came across I'd grabbed the wrong stuff and now I was trying to make, in a cup, something that was designed to form the basis of a casserole for a whole family. Wasn't going to happen.

Now, under normal circumstances, you'd tip it out and start again, wouldn't you? Except that would mean having used two things and money didn't bloody well grow on trees; or that was my Mams view of the matter. I knew better than to argue because when she was screaming directly into my face it was usually a pretty good sign that her mind was made up. Nor was it acceptable to throw it out, not make a replacement and just do without. Apparently that would be a waste, and we couldn't have that; I was to eat it, simple as that.

I tried, but... I mean, every time I raised it to my lips the stench itself was enough to trigger my gag reflex. Anyway, long story short (I know, I know) I drank a little bit, under the threat of a beating, then ran to the loo under the stairs and threw up. Then I went back to find she was still standing there, waiting to watch me drink the rest. 4 times I vomited, and 4 times she berated me, 'It's your own fucking fault, you should watch what you're fucking doing'.

I never did finish the whole thing, if only because she got bored. By this point my trips to the toilet were dry heave only and my tears were probably losing their novelty value so she wandered off and I threw the rest of the stuff away. And went to bed hungry.

Here's the thing though; for many years, I was never able to eat anything with a heavy meat smell, (I'm a vegetarian, and although this incident didn't prompt the switch, it certainly made it easier to stick to), or eat anything that I'd seen (or knew was) prepared from powder mixes; the thought would come rushing back of those claggy lumps and the gagging would start up straight away. I'm pretty much over it now, but...

So there you are, another pleasant stroll down memory lane. It's been a while I realise, but I'm trying to get the blog schedule back on track and hope to be here next week, though I make no promises. Until whenever, then...

Dangerous Games

2011-08-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of the bigger problems you can have, as the oldest of a gang of kids, and therefore their de facto leader, is the pressure on you to always be the best at stuff. How embarrassing would it be, for example, to announce that you were all going to have a game of something, and then get your arse handed to you by a five year old? Exactly.

I had a massive problem then, in that when it came to sports of any shape, size or description, I was essentially, and I use the technical term here (I looked it up), absolutely f'ing useless. Ever the resourceful chap though, I soon came up with ways that I could capitalise on my inherent strengths and hide my weaknesses. Namely, by inventing games so that I could tailor the rules to suit myself.

I have a very high pain threshold. I say this not to brag, or to out myself as a masochist, but merely to state a fact. (I could get into why I had an abnormally high pain threshold for a little child but if you've read this blog before, or intend to again, it'll be pretty self-explanatory.)

This high pain threshold meant that if I invented games that gave the advantage to people who didn't fear pain, or could persevere through pain, I would be able to kick some toddler butt, no problem. So that's exactly what I did. It would come back to bite me.

Now, when I say that I invented these games, what I actually mean is that of course I didn't invent these games. At the time though, in the arrogance of youth, I thought I did. In truth, they were pretty basic variations of old staples.

BANKS

Like the one where you had to race to the bottom of a bank and then back to the top. Except in our version we found the steepest slopes we could (some were practically vertical) so getting down was a virtual freefall and getting back up was like climbing Everest. Add in the fact that interfering with other participants was positively encouraged, in as violent a way as you liked, and it's a miracle no-one died.

TORTURE

Or the one were you split into two teams and one team had a codeword, with each member being responsible for one letter. The other team had to capture you to get your letter. We'd done this at school, in PE, but there it was a basic 'tag and you're out' deal. In our version they had to physically restrain you and you could refuse to talk, which meant they had to torture your letter out of you. I actually nearly died once, playing this game late at night, on unfamiliar terrain. I was staying at my cousin Ian's house for a couple of nights and we introduced his friends to this game. I was being pursued down a back alley in the pitch black, completely unaware that it was used by residents to hang clotheslines. One was hanging low, I ran into it at neck height and...well, you can guess. Good times.

HUNTERS

Ah, the Daddy. In which we would all congregate in the big clearing at the centre of the woods and split into two teams, with one team having a headstart to scatter into the woods and the other team hunting them down to either capture or 'kill' them. What made this game such great fun was that we played it with guns. Actual guns, that actually shot you, with actual bullets.

Well, I say guns... What we used were air rifles and pistols that fired little lead pellets. They rarely broke the skin (only once on me, and that wasn't even while playing Hunters; it was a doped up neighbour firing blind across the back gardens) but they stung like mad if they caught you just right. Until you got used to them of course; once you'd been shot a few times you stopped feeling it so much and could often mask you're reaction and claim not to have been shot. Cheating, yes, but victory was everything, don'tcha know.

Most people wanted to be Hunters, because having the guns made them feel cool but I wanted to win and knew my strengths, so Hunted it was. I threw myself out of trees, down banks, over fences and through hedges...I came over all Rambo, with not a thought for how my body was going to recover. It's partly because of this that I'm so decrepit before my time now. Never mind though, I had a meaningless victory to last for an hour, that was the important thing.

My Mother knew about this game, as did most of our parents, and none of them tried to stop us for the longest time. Which, to put it mildly, was f*cking madness, now that I think back. Not the maddest thing about the whole affair though; no, that would be the fact that Maurice, responsible adult and de-facto Step Father, actually joined in! He regularly came down into the woods and took great pleasure (far more than the rest of us) in getting a hit on one of the kids. He even once tied me to a tree and fired over my head into the trunk; I'll freely admit, my bravado slipped that day.

We were finally forced to stop playing Hunters as a result of something Maurice did, actually. You see, as crazy as we were, in hindsight, to be doing what we were doing, we were actually careful. We shot at arms and legs (fleshy bits) and always aimed carefully. We were daft kids, but we were friends, and there was no way we were gonna risk hurting each other seriously. Maurice, it seems, had no such compunctions. During one particular game, I was being chased by him and after fording the stream and scrabbling up the far bank I hid behind a large bush. He knew I was there, but couldn't see me. Do you know what he did?

He fired blind, into the bush. Hitting me in the right temple. I'm not sure, but it's entirely possible that Maurice was an idiot.

I don't mind telling you, I screamed. I screamed louder than I'd ever screamed before or ever have again. Not even a drunken beating from my Mother at her most frenzied ever felt that bad. My vision was swimming, bolts of lightning were shooting through my head and I genuinely thought I was going to die.

We were never allowed to play Hunters again.

Life Changing Decision. So Long As I Don't Wimp Out.

2011-07-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

I've not posted on here for a couple of weeks, and it's been even longer on my TV and book blogs. I wish I could say that some big, exciting development in my life has seen me unable to devote the time but in truth the reason behind my absence has been almost the exact opposite.

On Monday the 25th August 2011, I shall have a birthday. It shall be my 32nd. Now, 32 isn't 16, 18, 21 or even 30; it's not a milestone on anyones calender really. Yet for some reason, as the day approaches, I find myself getting restless; taking stock of my life and not liking what I'm seeing.

In 1985, when I was 6 years old, I announced that I was going to be a teacher. Unlike a lot of people, I never grew out of that first statement. My entire childhood was spent in the sure and certain belief that I would, one day, be a teacher. I am not a teacher.

Starting when I was 15 I began to get seriously disillusioned with school. I hadn't become disillusioned with wanting to be a teacher, nor with learning, but rather with the culture of state education, the attitudes of several teachers and the unnecessariness of so much of what we were being told to do. (The fact that we were always told, never asked, was one of the things I was getting increasingly annoyed about.) I persevered though and I got through my GCSE's with half way decent results, although nowhere near what my teachers had predicted. So off to A-Levels we go.

I lasted a year. I had hoped that this would be the point where all my frustrations would disapear; where the education system would start to treat those it was supposed to be educating with a bit of respect and not like second class citizens; where some kind of acknowledgment, slender though it might be, would be forthcoming of the fact that we were there to learn, of our own free will. Not so. By the end of the first 6 months I was tearing my hair out and getting properly stressed. It wasn't the subject matter, which I enjoyed and was eager to learn about, but rather the people (a holdover from the Brancepeth Boys problem) and the methods of teaching. On top of that I was getting zero support from my family, who saw education as a waste of time and couldn't understand why I hadn't walked away at 16.

So I did walk away. At the end of year 12 I left, never to look back. It was a stupid decision, and one I regret, but it wasn't a knee-jerk one. I had tried, really I had, but just the thought of another year of that, with a bunch of stressful exams at the end of it, was enough to have me suicidal (maybe an exaggeration but only a slight one; I once punched a brick wall outside the school out of sheer frustration, that's how bad I was).

So, my long held ambition was scrapped. What to do? Well, I descended into a depressed funk. I'd sit up all night watching rubbish telly and then sleep all day. I could go weeks without seeing daylight. This couldn't go on of course, and in a rare moment of maternal concern (either that or she realised that she wasn't going to be able to claim benefits for me once the new school year started and I wasn't enrolled ) my mother forced me out of my insular pit and into the workplace. Off I toddled to what was then the junior version of the careers service (not sure about now), Connections. Although, and this may be my mind playing tricks on me, I'm pretty sure it was called (shudder) Connexions.

Credit where it's due, they were pretty good with me. Took them a couple of months but they got me an interview at a local builders merchants for an admin apprenticeship. Or at least, they thought they did; when I arrived for the interview it turns out that the admin apprenticeship had been filled a couple of months previously and the position I was up for was a 'warehousing&distribution' apprenticeship. Whatever; I was just saying yes to whatever anyone said to me at that point, since I was fairly well convinced that my life was over.

I got the position, despite my lack of enthusiasm, and started the following week. At the interview they gave me a brief test to ascertain my basic maths and English skills. They told me later that I got the best scores they'd ever had. No wonder I got the job in that case, I despair what other numpty's had been applying; the tests were nothing you'd expect to see any higher than Junior school.

Anyway, I loved the job. It took me a while, but I started to realise that once I got over the thing of assuming I'd be shit at it, I was actually good at it; really good. That's not me bragging, God forbid (general rule : if I'm being self aggrandising I'm joking, self deprecating I'm telling the truth), but I actually seemed to have found something where I didn't have to feel like shit every morning. Another plus point was that the people I worked with had a very rough and ready approach to everything and I pretty much was forced to come out of my shyness shell, by the pure power of their personalities.

The 3rd plus point of course was that the admin trainee, who had got the job I'd thought I was going for, was absolutely the most beautiful creature I'd ever laid eyes on in my life. Lust at first, as time went on I fell massively in love with her; sadly it was completely unrequited and though we remained friends for years (and didn't that eat at my guts) nothing else ever happened between us.

After 12 years, 5 managers and a complete change in ownership, the branch was closed down. Within a week I was back to sleeping all day and watching telly all night. For about a year and a half that was my life until the branch re-opened, back under the original ownership and I managed, through something called an IAP, to get my foot back in the door. 3 Months of working there for nothing (you get your benefits and traveling expenses from the government but the employer doesn't have to pay you anything) allowed me to show that I would make a good fit and when the IAP was up they invited me back full time. I jumped at the chance.

Except, it's not the job it was. Don't get me wrong; it's a job and I'm grateful to have it but I don't have that feeling each day of being raring to go. I get there and my first thought is 'show me the coffee' not 'what's the first job on the agenda'. It's run differently than before, with several departments that were separate originally now being run as one so I'm having to start from scratch learning all the stuff that other departments would have handled before and the office/sales team have managed to shock me by being even more superior with even less cause, than their predecessors. Whereas before, my job was my life, now my job is just my job. I don't like it.

So I've been looking at my life. Last time I was starting out at this place it would last 12 years and when it was over I had zero transferable skills. The thought of being in the same position 12 years from now, rather than filling me with pride as it would have done before (at being good enough to be kept around) just makes me depressed. I wanted so much more out of my life.I have long had the problem of 'if you aren't enjoying something, you shouldn't be doing it'. Dropping out of 6th form was the first but not the only example (I was moved out of warehousing and into sales at one point in my last stint at the branch. It lasted a year, I was reaching the 'punching the walls and crying myself to sleep' stage and threatened to put my notice in if I wasn't put back where I belonged.) and I'm scared that if I allow this attitude to take root I'll end up screwing the pooch, as it were, with this job.

That worry and depression at work has seeped into my life outside work as well. I come home, sit down and all I can think of doing is sleeping. Except I can't sleep, because my subconscious has decided that now is the perfect time to hit me with a bout of crippling insomnia. So I've been surviving on an average of 3hrs a night, with the occasional 24hr crash.

So why haven't I been blogging? With all that extra time on my hands, what's stopping me? Motivation; I haven't got any. I blog about books, but without the inclination to read any... I blog abut TV, but without the inclination to watch... And I blog about my life, which, as anyone who actually reads this thing on a regular basis will know, is hardly conducive to cheering myself up. So I just sit and stare at the laptop.

I've stopped visiting the 2000AD forum for the most part and although I've maintained my presence on twitter my heart isn't really in that as much as it used to be.

I've made a decision though, and it's one I think will help me a great deal, emotionally. I'm going to start looking into night or correspondence classes to, at the very least, get those A levels I walked out on. Maybe I'll go further than that, who knows? I'm not saying I'm going to be teaching your kids anytime soon, but hopefully I'll not be doing what I'm doing now forever and feeling like I wasted
my life.

Hardened Criminal

2011-07-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

So I've put it off long enough. The time has come for me to tell the tale of my first ever run-in with the local constabulary. Truth be told, it's the only run-in I've ever had with them that involved me on the side of the accused and I was actually innocent of any (well, almost any, and certainly innocent of what the police accused me of) wrongdoing. Which is not to say that there weren't other occasions when I was not quite so innocent that they just never cottoned on to; but what are you going to do when you come from a family of rogues? Anyway, it started with a visit to the home of Philip...

It's a peculiarity of the psychology of children I think, that no matter what the evidence presented to them in their own homes and families they always assume that other adults are all somehow intelligent, respectable, trust-worthy and above all honest.; be they teachers, shop keepers, random neighbours, or our friends parents. Those last perhaps most of all; you just never think that they could ever be like your own parents, or even worse...

I knew Philip primarily as one of the Brancepeth Boysbut he was also an occasional member of our merry little troupe at weekends. On this particular day he invited me and my brother back to his house to play on his computer. We had, in our house, a Commodore 64 and as with everything in life the grass always seemed greener on the other side so his ZX Spectrum was the highest of novelties to us* and off we trot. It was to prove a mistake.

Long story short, because I never do that on here and I fancy a change, is that while we were there Philip asked if he could keep hold of something of mine and I agreed. Then I saw something of his that I thought I'd quite like to borrow in exchange but after a long drawn out conversation with the paranoid voices in my head, wherein they convinced me that he didn't like me enough to lend me anything, I decided just to pocket it. As you do.

The next day, I showed what I had taken to Wayne, (I wasn't yet the fully fledged evil genius/criminal mastermind that I would become) and he, having promptly recognised it from his visit to Philips house and being far more honest than I, told Philip when next he saw him. Deep shit, was I in.The police were called in by Philips parents. Little bit of overkill, possibly, given that what I had taken was worth about 50p but fair play to them, they were playing the long game.

The police took me to the police station, did the whole 'scare the little bleeder' thing with the cells and stuff and then took me into an interview room with the whole tape recorder thing going on. Intimidation, thy name is local bobby. Now, I'd seen The Bill, I knew the score, and I felt confident that I could bluff my way through this. You see, I'd formulated a plan that would 'get me off' (and yes, I was thinking in those terms; to me this was Great Train Robber stuff) and what's more, would make me seem like somewhat of a victim in the whole affair. I was going to blame Philip. Genius.

The idea was that I would tell a sob story about how Philip had invited us up to his room and then once we were there he had demanded that I hand over my stuff (the stuff he had politely asked to borrow) and had threatened to hit me if I hadn't. I figured if they checked up, they'd find my stuff in his room and hey presto, they'd believe me. (See, I was at least on my way to criminal genius.) Then, I'd say, I decided to take the stuff of his to get back at him. I'd say sorry, that I knew it was wrong, and maybe throw in a few tears. No way could I be in trouble after that.

Wrong!

The police didn't care about the toy. That's not what they were interested in at all. They were interested in the money that had gone missing from the living room of Philips house. Say Whaaat? Oh yes, it seems that while I was there stealing toys from Philips bedroom a bunch of notes had disappeared from the jar in their living room. It couldn't be a coincidence could it? It had to have been me. Well, it wasn't me, and I'd be damned if I was going to sit there and let them say it was.

My indignation kicked in. The same hatred of undeserved authority being bandied about that had seen me locking my Dad in an outside toilet for several hours and would later see me get on the wrong side of many a teacher, and then bosses, led me to get very serious and determined in the face of this false accusation; I was having none of it.

The guy doing the questioning obviously figured he had me bang to rights. I'd admitted stealing one thing, so I must have stolen the other. Sherlock Holmes he wasn't. I explained to him that I had never actually been in the living room while I was at the house; that in fact I had never gotten farther than the kitchen on the ground floor. (The back door opened onto the stairs and you turned right into the kitchen. You had to pass through the kitchen to get into the living room if you entered through the rear) I said that I had gone straight upstairs upon arrival and that when we were leaving Philip had gone into the living room for something but the rest of us hadn't.

At this point he tried to trip me up. "Did Philip take any money while he was in the living room?" says the copper. "Not that I saw, no." replies myself. "Aha!", cries the copper, "I have cunningly led you into my trap. How could you know what he did if you weren't in the living room?"

Whoops, had I slipped up? Had I revealed a flaw in my intricate web of lies? Was I dealing with a Sherlockian mastermind? No. "I know because I was watching him from the doorway" I answered. This threw him for a moment but he soon rallied.
"Which doorway?"
"The doorway to the living room"
"But you said you didn't get further than the kitchen"
"I didn't"
"So how could you be in the doorway to the living room if you didn't get further than the kitchen?"
"Have you been in their house?"

The doorway to the living room was in the kitchen. The rooms were directly linked. Had he been in the house he'd have known that. So either he did know and had just assumed he could make me flustered (because I was just a daft kid after all) or he didn't, in which case why was he the one doing the interview? Anyway, I refused to back down and at one point told him that he should go and look at the house before he called me a liar, which made my mother shout at me for being cheeky, which made the copper tell her off for shouting at me. It was all very tense.In the end the police took my fingerprints and sent me on my way. Nothing ever came of it after that, presumably because they didn't find my fingerprints anywhere in their living room and so knew I was telling the truth.

I've often wondered who did take the money, or even whether any money was ever really taken at all. I thought at the time that it must have been Philip, using my real actions as a cover but I reckon now that that was just my blindness to the faults of adults coming in to play. I'll be honest, I don't think Philip was bright enough to think of something like that, but maybe his parents were; maybe one or the other of them took the money and blamed me to the other one, or maybe there never was any money and they were just trying to get my mother to cough something up to keep me out of trouble. Who knows, really, and at the end of the day it doesn't really matter; all was well that ended well, as they say.

The one lasting impact that incident had on me; the one way in which it changed the direction of my life completely, was that it badly eroded my respect for the police. In their dealings with me they were one of two things; either they were incompetent, or they were bullies and neither one of those things inspired me with confidence. It would be a long time before my disdain for them subsided.

*Younger readers may be confused by the terms Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. This is because you are all spoiled rotten by the wondrous technology of today. They were the absolute cream of the crop of home computers back in my day and would take anywhere up to half an hour to load a game. Good times.

Shit Be About To Get Real, Yo!

2011-06-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I promised you that with the arrival of my cousin Ian, 'shit be about to get real'. If we leave aside the fact that the phrase 'shit be about to get real' is not something I can get away with saying, ever, I was telling you the Gods honest. A lot of people came and went from our little group but none made quite the impact that Ian did.

Ians Mam was Sharon, another of my Mams many siblings. Together with her husband John she had three children; Ian, Neil and Wayne. Only Ian would really have that much of an effect on us because we rarely saw the others. You see, a few years before we moved to the village of Willington, Sharon and her family had lived there. They had moved out of the village a while previously but at weekends and on school holidays Ian, their eldest, would be brought down to stay at the home of their old neighbour, just a few streets away from us - literally a couple of minutes on foot or 30 seconds on your bike.

Bob was an elderly bloke that had formed a bit of an attachment to the family, having no close relatives of his own, and had been a regular babysitter for Ian and his brothers. After they moved away they kept bringing Ian back to stay with Bob so he wouldn't be too lonely. Looking back with todays more cynical eyes, some might think the situation a trifle dodgy looking. An old bloke, lives alone, has a young boy that's not related to him over to stay in his one bedroom home; oo-er Missus and all that. But phooey to the lot of you.

So anyway, Ian would stay at Bobs whenever we weren't at school and so was perfectly placed to join our little gang. I often wonder what he used to do with his time at Bobs before we moved in; certainly he gave no indication that he already knew any of our group and he didn't bring any other friends with him; close as they may have been I don't think it could have been much fun if it was just the two of them. Oh well.

Ian was almost the same age as me; I think there was about 5 or 6 months in it; and so we took on a kind of joint leadership role. I'll admit, he was much cooler than I was so we got a lot more active after he showed up than when I was calling the shots alone. What can I say; I'm a born loner, I wasn't cut out to be a leader. The others were tactful enough not to say anything - either that or they hadn't noticed anything and it was my paranoia convincing me that they liked him more - but I was always a little bit conscious at the start of every day of this lingering sense of being a hanger on to his gang. The feeling would fade of course, as each day wore on, but it always took me a little while in the mornings to properly loosen up and stop trying so hard. However, cousins or no, same age or no, I don't think I'd have been the one who, if asked, Ian would have described as his best friend in the group. That honour went to Wayne. The two of them became pretty much inseparable after a while. Of course, it didn't happen overnight. No, they had to scare the crap out of us all first.

I'm not the most empathetic person in the world (I remember the first time I heard a description of sociopathy and thought 'hmmm, that sounds familiar'; scary thought) so it took me a while to cotton on but there was apparently a lot of tension between Ian and Wayne from day one. Of course, it pretty soon escalated to the point where I couldn't possibly miss it; those two seemed to loathe each other with an absolute passion. I never learned the root of their antipathy but I was certainly present the day they got it out of their systems; the stains never did come out of my underkeks.

One Saturday morning we were all hanging around at the Speccy.

Spectrum Leisure Complex 'The Speccy'We were around the back of the main building, at the top of the huge grass slope that dropped down to the bottom of the ski slope.There was much laughing and joking and threatening to push the littler ones down the bank, when suddenly, from out of nowhere, BANG, Wayne had punched Ian in the face. Ian swiftly retaliated, a good hard kick to the back of Waynes leg to bring him down and then a punch to the side of the head. This wasn't wrestling around, this wasn't play-fighting; this was a proper full on fight. I was terrified; I'd never seen a proper fight before and these two looked like they were going to kill each other; at one point Wayne was smashing Ians head into the side of the building, lips were bleeding, clothes were torn; it was like something out of a Philoe Bedoe movie. Then it got really serious.

From out of nowhere, Ian pulled a pair of scissors. I genuinely thought he was going to kill Wayne. Luckily, the life or death-ness of the scene didn't last long. They wrestled for a bit, Ian dropped the scissors and they fell down the slope, punching and clawing at each other the whole way down. Then they stopped. Just like that, it was over. They both trudged back up the slope, Wayne left one way and Ian left the other and the rest of us were stood looking dumbfounded, before, as kids do, we got distracted by something else (there was a bowling match happening on the green and we ended up watching that).

We forgot about it fairly quickly, I have to say, but the that's what kids do isn't it? Looking back though, how close did I come to seeing one of my friends die? If Wayne hadn't wrestled the scissors away, would Ian have used them, and why the Hell was he carrying scissors around with him in the first place? Seems obvious that he came out spoiling for a fight, doesn't it? It's scary to think about.

As I say though, Ian and Wayne seemed to have gotten it out of their systems a bit with that fight. We were all one big group together but those two seemed to have a bond that none of the rest of us could quite get in on. I haven't seen either of them for years but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they were still best mates today. So, you know, all's well that...

Next : My first ever run in with the police. I was innocent. Well, kind of.

Dreams of death

2011-06-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

I talked here about the weird nightmares I had as a very young child. I don't think there was anything particularly special about about a young boy dreaming of being scared of snakes, although I flatter myself that the 'Big Woman' stuff was all me. After those instances faded it would be a while before I was troubled by bad dreams again, but when they came, they were doozies.

They weren't really nightmares. I think that's the strange thing that makes me remember them so vividly after all these years. I mean, snakes coming out of walls and evil women wanting to grab you off the street, those are nightmares, but this new batch were just, well, exciting dreams. Dreams about things that would have absolutely terrified me in real life, but which I wasn't scared about in the dreams. Except that when I woke up, the bed would be drenched in sweat and I'd be shaking like a leaf. So was I scared or not? My body was scared but my mind wasn't? Does that happen?

The dreams would start with me walking around the little village I lived in. Then a bunch of people would appear with knives and guns. I would run and they would chase me. It was as simple as that really, except I knew with absolute crystal clarity that these people would kill me if they caught me. I would run for miles, up and down back alleys and side streets, through the woods, along the streams, even into shops and through to escape through the back door.(Shops I'd never been through the back of in my life so I was inventing all those back rooms in my head). I would never get tired even though I would keep going for what seemed in the dreams to be hours and even days. The dreams were never the same twice, in that I would run a different route and bump into different people each time but they always ended the same.

I would reach my house. For some reason I would decide that if I crouched down behind the little wall down the side of my house I'd be safe. Then a shadow would loom over me, I'd look up and there would be one of my tormentors, pointing a massive gun at me. I would smile, look down at the floor and say "Go on then".

And he would shoot me. At which point I would, presumably, die in the dream but it was of course at that moment that I would wake up. Now here is the thing. I have a crippling fear of death; that world changing fear that eats your insides when, as a child, you first discover your mortality has never left me. It's why I try to avoid thinking about it, and is probably one of the causes of my borderline sociopathic inability to grieve when others die, in as much that allowing myself to think about their deaths can only remind me of the inevitability of my own.

Yet, in this dream, I was never, at any point, afraid. I knew they were going to kill me but it didn't bother me. Even right at the end, when the moment came, I was all stoic and accepting of my fate. Now, you're probably thinking it was a dream, it doesn't have to make sense; or it was a dream, you were making yourself braver than you really are. If those theories are true though, and maybe it really is as simple as that, then it doesn't explain every other nightmare I've ever had. Because in those, I've been absolutely bloody terrified.

So there you have it. A child dreaming about being murdered by strangers every night for weeks. Pleasant reading, I'm sure you'll agree. Next : You've met my bro and sis, you've met Wayne and Lisa, now it's time to bring in the big guns. My cousin, Ian. Shit be about to get real, yo. (I'm so very sorry)

Animal Cruelty

2011-06-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

Right, a short one this week, because frankly the subject matter makes me sick when I think of it. No, no, come back, it's nothing like that.

Depending on who you are, and what kind of person you are, the story I'm about to tell might possibly not seem all that bad but to me, it's a moment in my life that I feel utter shame for. I can't remember ever feeling worse than in the moments right afterward and even now, literally decades later, I sometimes dream about it and wake up feeling like, well, like shit.

It was shortly after we'd moved into the new house. We had pretty quickly gotten to know all the neighbours, because this was, after all, the worlds friendliest street, and the man up from us (technically the first house in the next street but he was an honorary member) had the cutest little puppy you've ever seen in your life. I don't remember the breed - I'm hopeless with this stuff, if it's a dog it's a dog, I can never remember the different types - but it was quite small and very excitable. All of us kids loved that dog with a passion, mainly because none of us were allowed one and it was the only one in the street.

So, the geography; we were the last house at the top of our street. His was the first house in the street that went up at a right angle from ours. On the corner where the two met was a quite large - to a childs eye - patch of grass. This grass had a couple of trees at one end that were perfectly spaced for goalposts and would one day save my best friends life, but that's another story.

We would play on this grass often, and if the weather was nice my Mam would bring out a chair and sit at the front door watching us. Our neighbour would also often sit outside his door, and allow his puppy to run around with us. (Not to mention crap all over the place. I can't remember if their were laws about dog waste back then but if there were they weren't as stringently enforced.) On this one particular day, a crowd of us were kicking a ball around on the grass, with this little dog running between our feet and chasing the ball. All good fun. At one point, because it really was a warm day and I didn't handle heat any better then than I do now - slightest hike above sub-arctic temps and I'm sweating like a missionary in a crock pot - I headed inside for a drink. AND INTO HELL!

Sidenote - We had a Pop-Man. Did anyone else have one of those? Do they still exist today? He came around once a week on a milk float type thing filled with crateloads of cheap pop. Big chunky glass bottles they were, and you got a discount if you returned the bottles. (I know shops gave pennies for empties but this man came to your door) We'd never had a pop-man at our previous homes, and never had another one after we moved. I miss having a pop-man.

Ahem, well. So I was on my way back out with my glass of generic cheapy lemonade when I heard my Mam moaning from her little stool at the front door. As was her wont - she was always a miserable cow, even before she hit the deepest depths of her drinking - she was moaning about something; but what? Yes, it was the dog. She was getting all worked up - under her breath, never one for confrontation when sober - about how the dog wouldn't leave us alone and 'the little bastard better not fucking bite any of them' and, well, you get the idea. The fact that the dog was having the time of it's life, so were us kids, and the thing had never shown the slightest inclination towards violence never entered into the equation; she wasn't happy.

Shall I tell you what I did? I put down my glass, pushed past my Mam, ran onto the grass and... kicked the dog as hard as I could in the belly while screaming at it to "get back you little bastard." The squeal it made broke my heart, I swear to God. It's owner went ballistic - and can you blame him? -, my Mam went apeshit, screaming at me to get inside and all my friends were just shouting at me, "what'd you do that for?", "pack it in dickhead" and "behave, you fucking nutter".

I just looked at the dog, curled up at his owners feet, giving out little yelps. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I felt, in all honesty, like scum. Because let's face it, that's exactly what I was.

That's the end of the story. I could make a bunch of excuses about how I was young and impressionable and was just following my Mams lead but, well, that's no excuse is it? I've done a lot of pretty reprehensible things in my life, but none, when I look back, make me feel as bad as this one does. The dog was soon frolicking at my feet again having, as dogs do, forgiven me. I'm not sure the owner ever did.

Wayne and Lisa

2011-05-29T15:17:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I remember about the new place at Appleton Crescent was meeting Wayne and Lisa, who lived down the street from us. Wayne was around the same age as Suzanne and Lisa was about the same age as Andrew so of course, once we all started 'knocking about' (do people still use that phrase, I don't think I've heard it in a while?) with each other there was much joking amongst the adults about them pairing off and being boyfriend and girlfriend. Oh the hilarity.

In fact, it was a joke that very nearly backfired on them when one fine morning my mam went out into the back garden to find Andrew and Lisa, who were about 4 at the time, cuddled up on the bench together and talking about 'sexing'. Much panic ensued.

I met Wayne and Lisa on the Sunday of our first week in the new house. We'd been at school all week and had to 'help' unpack on the Saturday - a process which involved wandering around aimlessly while my Mother shouted at us - so Sunday was our first chance to really explore our new surroundings. Having gotten up early, as was my wont in those days - young me was weird, we all know it's not natural to be awake before noon on Sundays - and after eating my hot weetabix paste and watching a few cartoons I was on the starters block ready for 9am, which was the earliest time that we were allowed to leave the house on weekends because, well, I don't actually know why but that was the rule.

Our first port of call was the Spectrum Leisure Centre, or 'Speccy' as pretty much everyone called it. The Speccy was comprised of a sports hall, adventure playground, weightroom, snooker/pool room, dry ski slope, bowling green, tennis courts and a mythical function room that we kids never, ever saw in all the time we lived there. In all, a pretty impressive facility to have on your doorstep when you are a small child. It has to be said though that the biggest attraction very quickly became the woods that the centre was set into, which very quickly became a home away from home for us. It became our 'home turf' if you like, as my uncle Darren would find out to his cost later on. (Check out my last post for the thrilling details of that little adventure)

Anyway, we head on over to the speccy on that fine and lovely Sunday morning and we find, swinging about on the playground apparatus, Wayne and Lisa. Suzanne and Wayne already knew each other, being in the same class at school, and Andrew and Lisa, in that way that the smallest kids have, accepted each other instantly and were playing like they'd known each other their whole lives within minutes.

At first I hung right back. My 'little voices', while not yet the socially crippling nightmare they would one day become, were by no means absent at that point in my life and they were making their presence known here in a big way. The others had paired off so quickly, and so naturally, that anything I said and did would, I was convinced, be an unwelcome interruption. I was an outsider; a distraction. What I had failed to take into account was the fact that I was the oldest one there and at the ages we're talking about, 2 years is a big deal. To the others, I was cool, purely by dint of the fact that I was older. Looking back, it's obvious that while I was terrified that this little group of kids would never want to play with me, they were constantly showing off to try and impress me and earn my approval. Poor bastards; when I'm the coolest role model in your life, you're really in trouble, let me tell you.

Wayne became my best 'home' friend for a long while, purely because he lived closer to me than any other boys I knew. We didn't socialise at school of course, because the rules were different there. You socialised with your own age at school; the younger kids weren't cool enough and the older kids, well, they thought the younger kids weren't cool enough.

Others would come and go from our little group. My cousin Ian, who had a very tumultuous relationship with Wayne, as I'll go into at a later date; Philip, who tried (or his parents did) to get me in trouble with the police for theft; the twin girls whose name I can't remember for the life of me (despite one of them being my first post-Anne puppy love); Aisha and Lee (she was gorgeous and he was the coolest person I'd ever met, and gave me my first ever proper nickname); the twin boys, Mathew and Richard, one of whom was borderline psychotic and would scare the life out of us on his 'bad' days, and numerous others. Until the day we moved out of that street though, myself, Suzanne, Andrew, Wayne and Lisa were the core; we never fought - well, there was that one time - and we never drifted apart. It was us against the world and we loved every second of it.

So far as I know, Wayne never 'sexed' Suzanne, nor Andrew Lisa. Although years later I met Lisa again and I have to say, I don't think either one of us would have turned down the chance then. She grew up absolutely beautiful. Sadly by that point any lingering hero worship had long since worn off. Never mind.

Hot Pursuit

2011-05-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

My heart trying it's hardest to beat it's way out of my chest and rivers of sweat coursing down my face I force myself to keep going, knowing that if I slow down now, even for a second, he'll be on me.

I pound across the car park and down the alley at the side of the centre. Risking a glance behind to make sure he hasn't turned the corner yet I leap up onto the wall, scrabble up the grass verge and reach the hedge. There's a patch, I know from past experience, where the base of the hedge is thinning. It's not really visible, certainly not to a casual glance, but if you know where it is you can slide through quite easily, no worse off than a couple of scuffed knees and a few scratches on your arms; a small price to pay in the current situation. In seconds I'm through, and off.

It's not match day, thank God, so I'm able to cut across the bowling green without upsetting too many people. The couple of old blokes in the far corner aren't happy (what's their problem, I've not gone near their balls?), and their yells follow me as I reach the end of the green and pause for breath. I know thy won't chase me, they're too old for that, but their cries will alert my pursuer, putting him back on my trail much faster than I'd hoped. This breather would have to be a short one.

I see him coming round the corner. There's nothing for it, I make to cut through the ski lodge. He doesn't know the terrain, he'll try to follow me, not realising that he could easily cut me off if he circled behind the building. That's the plan anyway. I make my move, pushing into the building past the two members of centre staff on their way out to investigate the commotion. Good; I'm past them before they can react but maybe they'll slow him down.

I pelt full speed through the lobby to the doors at the far side - earning myself a lot of disapproving glances from the stern looking customers, balls to them, this is an emergency - and straight out to the slope area. I briefly consider making a run straight across the slope but I know from bitter experience how treacherous a dry slope can be; one foot in one of the divets and your ankle's a goner. So it's down to the bottom and around past the crash barriers or up to the top and around that way. It's quicker going up, but it means braving yet more centre staff when I get to the rope pulley machine. No, down it is. I again hope that going the long way will confuse him.

The steps down are out of the question, you can't pick up a decent head of steam, so headlong plunge down the embankment it is then. Flailing my arms wildly for balance, I'm off. I've done this a hundred times before, I know what I'm doing; angle yourself just right and you can hit the crash barrier at the bottom of the slope. Don't, and you're over the drop, into the beck, and sporting wet trouser legs all the way home. Something else that will hopefully slow him down. I reach the bottom, hit the barrier - Bullseye - and skirt around it to the far side of the slope.

From here the plan is to follow the beck all the way. But which way? Downstream is back the way I came but it's fed here by two upstream flows. Which do I follow? Both lead to a similar hazard, which is the easiest to pass? I risk a look back, and up, and see him at the top of the embankment, looking down at me. He can see, but obviously isn't keen to follow me down. Have I lucked out? He's shouting something I can't quite make out - "Come back"?, "It's alright"? - but I'm not risking it. Decision made, I choose my path and am off.

I've got my breath back now - that little pause has helped - so I can pick up the pace a little. I make pretty good time along the beck bank, slowing only slightly as it starts it's pretty steep rise and then I've reached the tunnel that allows the beck to run uninterrupted under the centres top car park. There isn't much in the way of water coming through - never more than a trickle in this warm weather - but it's the height that's the difficulty; or not, if you've done it as many times as I have. I swing in, keeping a firm hold on the roots I know to be sturdiest, hang for a second, and then my feet find their accustomed perches. The brick and blockwork around the tunnel is old - there are more than enough foot and handholds if you know where to look and remember not to think about the brief moments that you're hanging over nothing - and it's not long before I'm in the mouth of the tunnel. I crouch, far enough back that I'm half couched in shadow,and wait.

Has he followed me? Or did he give up at the top of the bank. He's out of shape, put on some weight recently, maybe it seemed too much like hard work. I relax a little, allow myself to settle. I sit down - there's plenty of room, the flow is about 2" wide in the centre of the tunnel - and, thinking of the madness of the last few minutes, I start to chuckle.

Then his foot appears in the opening and I can hear swearing as he fumbles his way down to me. Shit, one of the skiers must have pointed him in the right direction. He's not as surefooted as my experience allowed me to be but he's not being overly cautious either so he'll be on me in no time. Rising to my feet with a resigned sigh, but remaining hunched,I head deeper into the tunnel. It doesn't take long before I am in complete darkness. I don't panic, I know that it won't last for long; the tunnel is straight as they come and doesn't cover a particularly large distance. The other end will be visible before I know it. As soon as the far opening becomes visible and I have enough light to see my feet - blurrily though it may be - I pick up my pace and it's not long before I'm almost out. Then I hear it.

"Bastard!", closely followed by "Fuck, Jesus!" I smile, exit the tunnel into the farmers field at the other side of the carpark, make my way up the grass to the stone wall, clamber over it and head home at a pleasant saunter.

Know your terrain, that's the key. When you've been in that tunnel as often as I have, you know that a few seconds after you hit total darkness, the roof drops by the height of a couple of bricks. Why? Who knows. Perhaps that was the original opening years ago, before the carpark was built, and the extension didn't match up exactly. Or perhaps repairs over the years have been less than uniform - I mean, who's going to see it, right - but for whatever reason, you are really going to want to crouch that little bit more when you hit that spot. I hadn't even though about it, it was just instinct now. He wasn't so lucky.

I arrive home, bruised, slightly bloodied, and with the bottom of my trousers a trifle wet, but exuberant nonetheless. He hadn't caught me. As cocky and arrogant as he had been, I'd beaten him.

He arrives home drenched in sweat, barechested because he is clutching his T-shirt to his forehead to staunch the bleeding, and with a massive grin on his face. "Alright, clever shit, but I'll get you next time."

My Uncle Darren, everyone. Cool, even when concussed.

Happiness, thy name is Appleton

2011-04-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

And so we reach that point in my childhood where the memories become much more vivid, and indeed more numerous. Also, in what I'm sure will come as a surprise to anyone who's read more than a couple of my entries on here, much happier.

That's not to say that the misery is over, of course. My Mother was still on the slippery slope to alcoholism, my Father was still conspicuous by his absence, Maurice and his punch happy ways was a regular presence, money was extremely tight (although never so tight as to preclude the purchasing of copious amounts of alcohol and cigarettes) and one of the darker moments in my Sisters life wasn't far away. (I may or may not discuss that one at a later date. No problem airing my own stuff but that one, for all that it affected us all, was mainly her problem to deal with.)

For all of that though, the next few years were going to be the happiest of my young life. You see, for all the bad shit that was going on, it was balanced by the good. And a lot of that good was entirely down to moving into that new house.

It was a council house like any other. It was small and not particularly grand and it was slap in the middle of a grotty estate filled with yobs and druggies. It was also in one of the friendliest streets I've ever lived on.

The street in question was called Appleton Crescent. I'll never forget it. It was a dead end, which meant that if you didn't live in it, you had no reason to enter it. This, coupled with the fact that some divine intervention meant that this street, and this street alone, wasn't used as a dumping ground for the worst of the worst by the Council(my family, arguably, being the exception), meant that it became it's own little world, cut off from the rest of the Estate. Friendly people, who all got along, not troubled by anything beyond their own little bubble. You remember the old titles on Neighbours, where all of the residents descended on the street and had a massive game of cricket? That was us. A truer sense of community I've never known.

I made proper hardcore friends, had an awesome leisure centre on the doorstep (we could never afford to actually go in but it had a play area and was set into a wood, which provided hours of - quite dangerous - fun) and best of all, there was the wasteground. A massive great chunk of land that had once housed ,well, houses. A little terrace of three still stood, slap in the middle of it, we could never figure out why they were allowed to stand when all around them had been pulled down, but other than those a huge swathe had been cut by the Council, seemingly to no end because we were told it had stood empty for years and it would stand empty for several more before anything was done (and didn't it break our hearts when that day came, though we made them work for it).

So, if anyone is still reading this blog, you can rest assured that it won't all be unremitting misery any longer. I have happy stories too. Although come to think of it, a lot of my happy memories also contain random acts of violence and copious amounts of petty crime, so don't be expecting Little House On The Prairie.

A new start with shaky foundations

2011-04-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

So where was I before I got sidetracked by the BNP wannabes? Ah yes, my Mam the homewrecker.

Now, I was quite naive back then in a lot of ways. Certainly I wasn't seeing the full picture as regards Mickey and Maurices relationship. I was soon to learn that Maurice, far from the kindly Uncle I'd had him pegged as was, and as far as I know still is, a nasty piece of work - a violent bully who loved to lord it over women and children. In the grand scheme of things Mickey was probably better off without him. Not that that justifies my Mother stealing him away from her own sister mind you. And I'm still not sure what it says about her intelligence that she would want to, given what she knew about him (his treatment of Mickey, which they'd managed up to then to keep secret from us kids, apparently being common knowledge in the family). Still, love conquers all eh?

We stayed at their house for a relatively short time. The overcrowding our presence caused meant we were pretty quickly given a place of our own by the council. Nevertheless, there was still a very uncomfortable period between the declaration of 'love' and us actually leaving, when we all had to live together under the same roof, desperately trying to pretend that there was nothing wrong and everyone was happy. What kind of hell must that have been for Mickey?

Anyway, eventually the time came for us to move out. Which, is the point that things became really uncomfortable. Maurice was coming with us, that much was set, but it became increasingly clear that Mickey was still hoping he'd change his mind and stay with her. God knows why she would want him to, but whatever.

The new house being only about 10 minutes walk away (itself not an ideal situation), we would transfer our stuff in a number of journeys on foot, rather than springing for the cost of transport. It was on the last such trip that I would personally witness, for the first but by no means last time, Maurices temper.

We had left the house with the last of our belongings and were making our way across the grass in front of the house. Mickey came out about a minute after us and started shouting at Maurice. At first she was begging him not to go, then she started hurling abuse at him, slagging off both him and my mother. I was a little embarrassed but kept on walking,and made sure my sister did the same. Not Maurice though. He turned round, sprinted across to her, punched her in the face and then crouched over her on the ground, screaming into her face as he held her down by the throat. He threatened, top of his lungs, that he would kill her if she didn't go back inside. Then he just got up and walked back to us, leaving her lying on the grass sobbing.

All told, not one of the most pleasant things I'd ever witnessed.

Maurice moved in with us in our new house and would be a pivotal figure in my childhood for the next few years. Not always a live-in figure, mind you, that was very off and on, but never far away. Some of those times were actually fun. Some though, not so much.

Casual Racism

2011-04-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

No memory lane again this week because I'm having a bit of a rant.

So I'm walking down the street and I'm accosted by someone on the sell. It's some kind of joke book (actually more of a pamphlet) and he's wanting £3 for it.

I have some experience of being homeless and have a degree of sympathy for those who find themselves in that situation so I figured I'd do my bit. The thing is, though, that £3 is quite a hefty sum. Last I bought the Big Issue it was £1, I don't know if it still is, and that is a proper magazine with a decent page count and some halfway interesting features. This joke thing was about 10 pages if that. Nevertheless, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a handful of change. There wasn't £3 there. The man in question simply grabbed it (literally - it was quite disconcerting) and said "Give me that, we'll call it quits". If it had been my bus fare home I'd have been stuffed.

Then he said something else. Something which, had I not been so flustered by his forwardness, would have prompted me to take my money back, if not actually complain to whatever organisation/charity he was operating for. He said "cheers mate, you're a good 'un. And at least I'm English eh?"

Is our society so institutionally racist that people collecting for charity now see it as a selling point that they aren't of foreign descent? Actually, as I'm writing this, it occurs to me that the woman I occasionally buy the Big Issue from, who hangs around outside my local WH Smiths, is of some kind of Eastern descent. I must be a bad Englishman, mustn't I? Buying from a filthy foreigner. Shocking.

Let me tell you a joke. You will likely have heard it, or one very like it. They seem to be all the rage lately.

A man walks into the Job Centre. He approaches the woman and tells her that he would like to make a claim on behalf of his dog. When the woman explains that dogs are not allowed to claim benefits the man is indignant.

"What do you mean he can't claim? He's black, he stinks and he's never worked a day in his life."

"Why didn't you say so", says the woman, "the money'll be with you by Monday."

Have you heard it before? If so, did you laugh? And was the laughter embarrassed, polite laughter or was it genuinely amused laughter. If it was the latter, I don't think we are going to be friends.

I heard that joke during one of my interminable IAP sessions. It was told by someone who, up until that moment, had seemed like a perfectly reasonable chap, to a bunch of people whom I had been conversing quite happily with, and they all laughed. Every single one of them. Not little chuckles, or wry half smiles. They bellowed. And I'm sat there thinking, does this mean I'm the abnormal one? Is it wrong of me to not find that funny? The thing that really wound me up was that one of the staff at the centre, one of the people running this Government mandated session, was laughing along with everyone else. What chance do we have?

I'm starting to notice it more and more now. Someone who I worked with for many years, before I lost my job, and whom I am now back working with on my 'work experience' days, has some very, shall we say robust, views on certain things which I had never noticed first time around but which are really stickin out like a sore thumb this time. Immigrants eh?

I seem to be surrounded by a kind of low level background bigotry. This is not the country I thought I lived in. It's certainly not the country I want to live in.

The soap opera begins.

2011-03-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

Apologies to anyone who may have read my self pitying whinge that I posted in the wee small hours a couple of days ago. Don't know what came over me. For anyone who is interested my Grandfather is, at time of posting, still alive. Fingers crossed.

Normal service is resumed now with the latest thrilling chapter in the roller coaster story of my formative years. Enjoy.

You know what's embarrassing? You know what's guaranteed to make you squirm for years afterward just at the merest hint of a fraction of a glimpse at the memory? I'll tell you, shall I?

Imagine you are lying in bed of an evening, not quite fully asleep but at the same time not fully aware of what's going on around you, not sure in your own mind whether you are awake or dreaming. You hear the door to your room open and a looming figure makes it's way towards you. It plonks itself down on the side of your bed, reaches over to shake you awake and slurs the words " I love him, I just love him, do you understand, I love him" over and over again. By this point you are praying that it's a dream.

It's not. It's your Mam, your recently separated from your Dad Mam, drunkenly begging you to tell her it's alright that she is having an affair with the boyfriend and (to co-opt a phrase a middle aged white man should never use) baby-daddy, of her sister. The same sister whose house we were living in since the aforementioned separation. Which was mere weeks past.

You are 9 years old.

Think about that. What, exactly, do you do in that situation? I mean, do you A)tell her what you know, even at your tender age, to be the truth? That what she is doing is wrong, and monstrous, and she should be ashamed of herself? Or B) take into account her fragile emotional state and try to calm her down, gently, whilst treading the fine line of not actually condoning her actions? Or do you, C) being completely out of your depth, panic.

How many of you thought 'C' was the answer. Well, maybe a fully functioning human child would have plumped for 'C' but I was made of sterner stuff. I told her it was a great idea and I was happy for her and she should go to him right now. Then I rolled over and went to sleep.

For a while there I wondered, would a different response from me have changed the course of events that followed. Of course I know now that she was gonna do what she was gonna do regardless of what I said and in all likelihood didn't even remember the conversation, given how drunk she seemed. (And wasn't that a taste of things to come) At the time though I genuinely felt like maybe I'd contributed to the break up of Micky and Maurices years long relationship. Didn't feel guilty, mind you, just sort of thought about it a bit then moved on.

Guilt is uncomfortably close to genuine emotion you see, too much like an admission of caring. Couldn't have that; not then, not now.

The beginnings of my mothers relationship with Maurice marked the crest of a very high, very slippery slope which my mother was about to plunge headfirst down, taking us kids with her. Some of us have managed to find some purchase and get ourselves on an even footing (to various degrees),whereas she's still falling. It's doubtful she'll ever stop.

2011-03-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

My Grandfather is dying. Regular readers of this blog will know that my paternal Grandfather died many years ago when I was a small child. He was no great loss to the world. Now though, my other Grandfather is dying. And he will be.

In fact, he's been ill for a while with numerous ailments, some exacerbated by the meds needed for others in a vicious and undeserved circle of pain that might make a less sanguine man than myself very fucking angry at the world.

As I type these words, the prevailing opinion, which I just learned from my sister this evening, seems to be that this particular visit to the hospital - the most recent of many - will be the one he doesn't come home from.

I saw my Grandfather once, a few months ago, when he seemed a little 'out there', in a vaguely comical way (I know, I know) but before that it had been years, and then years again before that. Twice in something like 15 years. Life just got in the way and I never had the time.

Bullshit. I had the time, I just didn't take the time. And now, as the end comes closer, everyone in my family (many of whom have had less contact with him than I have, though I'm not using that to justify my own actions) is flocking to his bedside, showing their concern and acting all , well, family like.

I want to go and see him. Or rather, I want to want to go and see him. Honestly though, I really don't. He is, by all acounts, totally out of it. He wouldn't even know I was there. Apparantly my Mother (spit), who is one of those who has seen him less than me, and ripped him off for a substantial sum the last time she did, visited him yesterday and he didn't know who she was. That being the case, if he is getting nothing out of it, I would be doing nothing more than making a token appearance for the sake of, well, appearances. Seems hypocritical to me.

My biggest worry though is that I'm not entirely sure how to behave around my Grandmother. I'm not particularly upset, you see. I don't 'do' grief or sorrow or any of those emotions you are supposed to feel at a time like this. Believe me, I now how cold that makes me sound. I want to feel something, I just can't. I don't have it in me. So do I show up and stand around awkwardly,looking like I don't give a shit, purely to salve a guilty conscience I think I should have? How does that help her? Or him? Or anyone?

I love the guy, I really do. So far as I am capable. He's one of the very few people in this world, family or no, for whom I have any genuine affection at all. And yet...

You know the worst part? The part that I feel so shit about? The bit that honestly, truly, makes me hate myself just a little bit? It's that I know full well that my life won't change a bit when he does die. I won't cry, I won't break down, I won't grieve. I'll go on as before. I'll be watching my shows and reading my comics and going about my business 5 minutes after I get the news. I don't want to say I won't care, because I don't want to believe it of myself but in truth...

If nothing else, he has had one effect on me. For years I have gone through life, happy in my own little world, able to pretend that I'm normal. Able to forget, or at least intellectualise and accept, the coldness inside me. He is making me confront the truth about myself full on. And I don't think I like me very much.

Hell, my Grandad is dying and I've just written 600 words. About me.

First day at a new school.

2011-03-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

While moving away from the village I'd lived in all my life and the separation of my parents meant that things were a little bit up in the air I was coping pretty well, thanks to my sociopathic inability to give a toss about anything. Which was just as well, because things would get a whole lot more messed up before much longer. Indeed, from this point on, my life and the lives of my family would come to resemble more and more a bizarre soap opera, thanks in large part to my Mothers love life. In fact, scrap that; her sex life.

That was all still to come though. (Something for you to look forward to.) In the meantime, first order of business in our new environment, was to get us signed up in a new school.

Now, you know how, in todays modern urban sprawl lots of little villages are kind of melding together thanks to new estates being tacked onto the boundaries so the gap between gets smaller and smaller until eventually they meet in the middle and no-one really knows where one ends and the other begins anymore? Well, that was the case with the little village we'd moved to. Sunnybrow, it was called, and it had about 9 streets to it's name. It was conjoined (I've never used that word in any other context than bad taste jokes about genetic deformities. This felt like the time.) with a slightly larger but still pretty insignificant village called Willington. I say was; it still is. Probably more so now than then. The fact that I haven't been there in years doesn't mean it's ceased to exist. Unless the voices are telling the truth and the world really is all about me. That seems unlikely though, so I'll go with the theory that it's still there.

Anyway, Sunnybrow and Willington. There was much talk between my Mother and the dynamic duo of Mickie and Maurice as to where the best school was. It was decided that we (me and my Sis) would be sent to Sunnybrow Primary. Makes sense right? So the new week rolled around and Monday morning dawned and off we went. Along the old train track past the woods, over the road and hey presto, school.

Not Sunnybrow Primary though. Once again the random whims of my Mother would trip me up because after the hours of debate that led to the decision, she had apparently changed her mind and enrolled us in Chapel Street Primary, situated in Willington. Without telling us.

Chapel Steet. Seats are after my time.

So on my first day I get into a very embarrassing argument wherein I adamantly insist that we were in Sunnybrow, to the mockery of all the other kids who knew they were in Willington. Teacher interference was required before I'd accept defeat.

But that's not the story I planned to tell today. Just as well really because it was bloody dull, wasn't it? The point of this post is how the smallest of decisions can shape and/or change your life. You see, Chapel Street, like my previous school, Hogwarts and a good proportion of other schools in Britain, had a House system. They assigned all pupils to a House at the start of their Junior school careers but as a latecomer I got to choose my own. Such an honour. Of course, having been put on the spot I just blurted out that I'd be in 'Brancepeth' because that was the one I'd been in at my last school. (The Houses were all named after local-ish Castles. Brancepeth and Durham were common choices for schools in my area. I think Raby was another one. Drawing a blank on the 4th.)

What I had not been told however, probably because the teachers weren't supposed to do it and certainly wouldn't tell the kids even if they were, was that at this particular school, Brancepeth was used as the - I don't want to say dumping ground but you get the idea - for all the kids who had failed to impress in the Infant school. The thickos, if you will.*

Now, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I'm not. A thicko that is. Or at least, I can do a passable enough imitation of someone with half a brain that I excelled at school, at least when I wanted to and could be bothered. How much I retained is up for debate and 'real world' or 'street' smarts have never been my strong suit but on the day I could answer most questions and pass any test. Proper little swot I was. All of which made me a bit of a novelty (and a bit of a mascot I suppose) in good old Brancepeth House.

So I was placed in a group of under achievers. Houses did everything together. Sport and academic competitions alike were decided by House. You couldn't escape them and you didn't want to. That first day I formed friendships in minutes that would endure for years. They were my mates. End of.

Brancepeth Castle. Arbitrary symbol of my youthful loyalty.

It wasn't until years later, during the GCSE / A Level period of my life, that I realised what that decision had really meant. My friends, the people I'd grown up with, the only people I was truly comfortable around, were never going to be a part of school life. They weren't going to be in top tier classes and planning University careers. If I was to follow my ambitions and achieve my dreams I would have to separate from them even more than Secondary education had already mandated. I would have to leave them behind.

In the end, I couldn't do it. I couldn't function amongst academics and 'swots'. They weren't my people. I was lost in that world. So I left it and never looked back. Until now.

I didn't know any of that though, on that first day at my new school. I may not have known what town I was in, but I knew what House. It was the House with my friends.

* I have no proof of this assertion. There was never any controversy; no big expose in the local rag or anything like that. It just seems like one hell of a big coincidence to me that all of the pupils who might conceivably have been labeled as troublemakers or under-achievers would all end up in the same House. Unless there was 2 or 3 and the rest all synchronised like a bunch of women in an office. Yeah, could have been that I suppose.

Saying Goodbye. Or rather, not.

2011-03-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,
today my teacher confiscated my space invaders game that I just got and also my packet of crisps. I got very upset but he said I could have it back at the end of the week. Maths was hard and at reading time I got through two chapters of my book about the Faraway Tree.

Oh, and Mam said we don't live with Dad anymore.

Yes, I have come to the end of my memories of what I consider the first of 3 major stages in my childhood, although I'm sure loads more will come back to me now I'm moving on. It's surprised me a little, to be honest, how few memories I've been able to dredge up from that time and how many of those have fallen apart when examined, given the strength of feeling I've always had about that period of my life and about living in that place. The smallest things really can make the biggest impact on people I suppose.

So yeah, we came home from school and my Mother was there, along with one of my Uncles, packing our belongings into his car. We were leaving, right then, before my Dad came in from work. The plan was to go and stay at good old Auntie Mickies house until we got sorted with somewhere else more permanent. (I did get a trifle excited about the possibility of seeing a little more of the 'annoying' Anne,although I'd never have admitted it of course) We were bundled into the car and out of there within 10 minutes of getting home. Didn't even take our coats off.

It could have been a very traumatic time for a young lad. Being separated from his Father, without even being given a chance to say goodbye, not having any idea as to why it was happening; it could scar a boy for life. So, naturally, I didn't care. My relationship with my Dad had never been the best and the thought of no longer living with him didn't really bother me in the slightest.

I never did find out what caused the separation. I certainly don't remember any arguing or things being particularly tense between them, and given the shoebox we were living in I'd imagine it would have been pretty hard to hide, even if they'd cared enough about us kids to try. Maybe it was simply a whim on my Mams part, who knows? She certainly isn't known for her good decision making when it comes to men. Or, you know, anything else.

And so in the space of about 20minutes we left behind everything we'd ever known. The flat, which despite the deprivations I had thoroughly enjoyed living in. The sheds with the lethal swings. The school, with it's defunct sports program. The fields out the back with the killer horses. The cricket ground and the free cakes on match day so long as you didn't let on just how dull you thought cricket actually was. The Grandparents and Uncles who seemed to live pretty much everywhere you turned in that village and meant you were never far from a welcoming door. Most importantly though, we left behind my brand new space invaders game, which was still sitting in my teachers drawer. I was gutted about all of those things; just not about my Dad.

I could say that my Dad maybe got dealt something of a rough hand in this whole affair. I'm not going to though. You see, after the separation, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we had contact. A lot of promises were made and a lot of promises were broken. My own attitude shielded me from any major disappointment but I watched a lot of tears fall from my sister and brother so I think I'll save my sympathies for them.

Orson Welles and Leonard Nimoy but all I can remember is the food after?

2011-01-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back. Didn't post anything in the week between Christmas and New Years because, frankly, who can be bothered right? I should have made the effort though, on here especially, because even after missing just one week it's really hard to summon the enthusiasm to start up again. As I type these words, I have no idea what the bulk of this post is going to be about - I'm hoping inspiration will strike any second now - but I can pretty much guarantee it'll not be a particularly epic one. (Because my previous posts have been positively Homeresque, right?)

Still no inspiration, I'll be back in a bit...

Right then, I'm back.

In my 31 years of life I have been to the cinema exactly one time. I was a wee child and I was taken by my father to see, wait for it, Transformers the Movie.

I remember the day, if not the movie, well. Robins Cinema* it was, in Durham, which sadly no longer exists. The cinema, not Durham, which I'm fairly certain is still there. Last I looked the building was an Australian theme pub that delighted in getting that dude from Neighbours to sing there whenever he was in the country, but I've not been past in a while, so it could be anything now.

Although Robins did manage to survive a good few years after my one and only visit it was a bit rundown and dilapidated even then. I must confess that despite being very young and therefore easily impressed, on this occasion I was anything but. Still, I'm assuming that I enjoyed the movie. Assuming is all I can do, because despite having seen it numerous times since and loving it, (and I'd still take it over anything with the words Fox, Michael, Meaghan or Bay anywhere near the top of the titles), I don't have any specific memories of watching it at the time. It's just as likely that I fell asleep.

No, my main memories of that day come from after the movie. There are two of them and they're both as dull as each other, so quite why they have stuck with me for so long is a mystery.

Okay, first memory, brace yourself for the excitement now. After leaving the cinema we went to a wallpaper shop across the road from it and I thought I was going to die. Going from the darkened cinema to a huge shop with white walls, full of white paper and bathed in bright fluorescent light had my head screaming and spots dancing in front of my eyes. My Dad thought I was being overdramatic and told me to go and wait outside and stop embarrassing him. In hindsight, having such an extreme reaction was probably an early indication of problems with my eyes (I've worn glasses since not long after this and am pretty much blind without them) but at the time I just felt like an idiot. My sister didn't have any problem.

See, seat edge straddling stuff wasn't it? The next one's even better.

Memory #2. Hold on tight. After the whirlwind of emotions that was the wallpaper shop we headed to the cafe where my Mother had the occasional shift behind the counter. She was working that day and therefore we'd be able to get a few extras and whatnot. There wasn't a staff discount, friends and families type of thing officially in place, but the owner didn't mind the occasional freebie here and there. And of course we shamelessly played up the 'look at us, aren't we cute little tykes' angle, that all kids learn at a very early age to employ when around adults that aren't their parents.

So we're sitting in an alcove, waiting for our food to be ready and my sister and I get into an argument. Over, wait for it, the proper pronunciation of food. Oh yes. You see, she had decided that she was going to pronounce it fud. Now, pronouncing it that way may be a regional thing or whatever and I can get behind that, no problem, but it's not a regional thing in our region and it sounds bloody stupid. I can only suppose she must have heard it on the telly and thought, in the way that little kids do, "I'll say that and sound really clever because it must be clever if it's on the telly and anyway it'll make me sound different and people will listen to me and oh look an advert for My Little Pony I wonder if I can get some".

I had never heard it before and told her she was wrong. (Which she was) She argued back. I shouted at her, she shouted at me, our Dad shouted at both of us. In the end I was told to shut up and let her say Fud if she wanted to because it "makes no bloody difference". Which I suppose was a fair point. She continued to say it wrong, to my disgust, for a few weeks and then she forgot. So I won in the end, ha.

At least until the Co-op hired that bloke to do the "good, with fud" adverts.

*While looking for a picture of Robins Cinema online I came across an article that cast considerable doubt on my memories. Apparently, the cinema in question only became known as Robins when it re-opened in 1991, after closing down the previous year, having operated as the Cannon since 1979 and various other names before that. By this token, it would have been the Cannon when I saw Transformers. I have no memory of it being anything other than Robins, so I suppose I must have projected that assumed knowledge to fill a gap in my memory. Funny how the mind works. Makes me wonder what other little details I've always assumed to be true are actually just subconscious guesswork.

Air Hockey, Caravan Avoidance and Anne

2010-12-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

Right, 'tis Christmas week. Since my TV blog and my book blog are both going to be (ever so slightly) themed around the season I figured, why not go for a clean sweep and have everything I post this week be Christmas based?

I quickly ran into a problem. That being, try as I might, I can't remember any Christmases from my early childhood. Not any particularly memorable gifts, not any specific family get-togethers, nor any major Christmastime fallings out for that matter. Seriously, I'm sitting here racking (wracking?) my brains but it's like Christmas never happened when I was a kid. Now I know I've made things sound pretty bleak on here in the past but I'm fairly certain things never got so bad that we canceled Christmas. Maybe I'm repressing, I don't know.

So I'm going to tell a story about my birthday instead. It falls in August, which is nearly Christmas, right? And it has presents too, so it's practically the same thing. Also, it's pretty much lacking in misery, depression and domestic violence. I don't have many of those in my arsenal so the festive season seemed like the time to bust one out.

On this particular year, my birthday fell during the fortnight that my father had booked a caravan at the coast. This would be the first year ever that the family would have an actual holiday ( i.e, going away from home) during the school summer holidays. As it turns out it would also be the last. Anyway, I wasn't going with the. I'd like to say that this was yet another example of those terrible parents, grr, excluding and neglecting me, but in truth (at least as far as I remember) it was my idea that I not join them.

I was to stay with my Aunt Michelle, known to one and all as Micky, and her boyfriend Maurice. The idea of staying with them was a novelty that I got very excited about. After all, seaside or not, I would be with the same people I saw every day if I went with my parents. At least this way I was getting to spend time with someone different.

The night before we were due to depart I was allowed to open a birthday gift, so that I could have at least part of the birthday experience with my parents present. I have no memory of what the gift was but the rest were all packed into my uncles car to be opened on the day and the next morning I (and my gifts) headed off in one direction and my family headed off in another.

Nothing particularly special happened during those two weeks. I'd get up, tun to the shop for a pint of milk, have breakfast, go to the park which was right outside their front door for a couple of hours and -whenever possible - sneak down into the woods that bordered the park. In the afternoons we'd watch TV, I'd read a little (yes, I was already a swotty little bookworm who *gasp* read for pleasure) and then we would receive the Royal Guest. Anne, Maurices niece.

Anne was the same age as me and, well, she was really loud and annoying and an attention whore. And pretty. In short, all the things that little boys profess to hate in little girls but actually wouldn't be without. Anne was my first love, no doubt about it. I never told anyone - though the adults made constant jokes about it, much to my embarrassment, I always denied - and I certainly didn't act like it towards her, but I'm man enough to admit it now.

We made the most of the time though. In between bouts of arguing and announcing that we hated each other we spent many long hours climbing the Everest like slide at the park. Remember them? Massive things they were. You'd get to the top and you could see over houses. You could have used them for Para training. Gone the way of the Viking Ship see-saw and the Witches Hat roundabout/climbing frame. And swings that you can actually get a bit of momentum on. Anyway, we'd take turns trying to impress each other by climbing the steps without holding on, or coming down backwards or whatever. How do pre-pubescent kids show off to their crushes these days? Get to 8 years old and you're taller than most of the stuff on a modern playground. Anyway...

Half way through the fortnight my birthday came and amongst other gifts that I can't remember I got one of those miniature air hockey table things that were all the rage before Jim Nintendo invented the Master System. Maurice would kick my arse at it, because letting a kid win on his birthday would have just been silly, wouldn't it? Then I'd play Anne, and kick her arse at it, because letting her win would have been nice, and I couldn't do that. Happy times.

The fortnight ended and I had to go home. Anne came to say goodbye, which was nice of her and in my head meant that she loved me as much as I loved her. Never mind that she came every day anyway, this time she'd come for me, dammit. Waving goodbye to her broke my ickle heart. But wave goodbye I did,and left, never to return.

For a while anyway. In truth, Mickey, Maurice and that house, park and wood (though sadly not Anne) would come to feature very heavily in my future. Then though, the novelty would wear off and the experience would be slightly less exciting. And a lot less pleasant.

Nightmares

2010-12-11T13:20:00.000-08:00

Check them out.

Beautiful creatures aren't they?

I never used to think so, mind you. When I was very young I went through a phase, which seemed to last forever but which in reality was probably only a couple of weeks, where I dreamed every night about snakes coming out of the wall above my bed and dropping on to me. It got to the point where I didn't even have to be asleep; as soon as I closed my eyes I'd see them. I was, not to be coarse, absolutely fucking terrified. The trek up to my room at night was torture and there wasn't a lot in the way of sympathy from my parents.

Then the snakes went away. It's not like I confronted my fears and drove away my subconscious demons or anything. I just went to bed one night and didn't dream about snakes. A few months later, I would have given anything to have those snakes back.

You see, they were replaced by the Big Woman. Essentially, a woman. A tall woman, but still, just a woman. Now, I know that you can't dream about something or someone whom you have never seen, so presumably I must have encountered her at some point but I have no idea where and I have no idea who she was. She just showed up in my dreams one night and wouldn't leave again.

It's not as if she did anything particularly nasty or anything, when I dreamed about her. In fact, she never did anything at all. A typical scenario would be me walking along the street with my mother, I'd see the Big Woman and start to panic. I'd be gripped with a paralysing fear and wouldn't be able to go any further. I'd beg with my mother to turn around and go back the way we'd come but she would laugh and say I was being silly and start to drag me closer to the Big Woman. The nearer we'd get I'd start to cry and scream and it would usually end with me peeing myself (literally, the sheets were always wet when I woke up) and collapsing to the floor, limp. Then I would watch as the Big Woman came closer and closer and when she got right up close to us she would... say Hello to my mother. And then I'd wake up.

What the hell was that about eh?

These dreams, unlike the snakes, which only seemed to go on for ages, actually did. 3 years or so in fact. Maybe the only reason they eventually stopped was because I got so used to them that the novelty wore off and I wasn't afraid any more. Whatever the reason they stopped, they did, without me ever discovering who the Big Woman was or why I was so scared of her.

Sadly, the bedwetting didn't stop with the nightmares. Apparently there was a physical reason for that; my bladder wasn't developing properly and I had the bladder strength of a 3yr old until well into my teens, which meant wet sheets and school accidents for almost as long. But that's another, even more embarrassing than being scared of a random woman, story. And one that will no doubt crop up again at some point.

So there's something for you to look forwards to eh?

Sweeties and the price we pay for them.

2010-12-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

The beating my Dad gave me after I locked him in the toilet because he wouldn't let me go and steal cake from cricketers was the worst I'd ever experienced at that point in my life. It was not, however, going to hold on to that record for long.

My mother had a job at the local Co-op. This often meant working nights. My father also had a job that involved a lot of night shifts. Often, the two would clash. At times like these my parents would do the only thing they could do in that situation. They both went to work and left me in charge. Now, yes, I was far too young and they were terrible parents for doing it and yadayadayada but at the time it was a huge thrill. I didn't feel deprived or neglected or any of that good stuff; I felt grown up, trusted, and cocky.

One night, I had been left in charge; of myself basically because my sister and little bruv were both asleep. However, a coughing fit in her sleep by my sister woke my brother, who started crying, which woke my sister, who started to shout at him, and pretty soon, in an effort to calm them both down I had allowed them out of bed and was putting on a puppet show for them in the living room, using cuddly bears and plastic soldiers. As you do.

Now, I'm quite proud (maybe too proud) of my ability to spout improvised bullshit at the drop of a hat, but back then I was still just beginning to hone this most noble of arts and after an hour or so my puppet show was beginning to flag somewhat.

The well was running dry and I needed something else to keep them entertained. It was then that I spotted a little pile of change on the sideboard. Aha, I thought, this is it. I took 30p from the pile (10p each), wrapped my Sister and Brother in their dressing gowns and slippers and off we headed to the shop. The shop beneath the flat that is, we weren't off on a mile long trek or anything.

And so it came to pass that we all came home with 10p mix-ups each.

What luxury. You have to remember that this was in the days when 10p would get you 10 sweets. Penny chews were not yet trading under false pretenses. So we scoffed down our sweets, I sent the pair of them back to bed, which they resisted until their heads hit the pillows, at which point they were out like lights, and I returned to the living room to read a bit. It was here that my Mother found me when she came home. And then all Hell broke loose.

Actually, it didn't. She came home, I went to bed, we all got up in the morning and went to school, everything was hunky dory. Then we came home. And that's when all Hell broke loose. My mother had been to the shop during the day, gotten into a discussion with the owner and he had mentioned our having been in the night before. Busted!

We stole 30p. This I'm not denying. I'm not so old though that I grew up in a time when 30p was any massive amount of money. I honestly thought, when she confronted me about going to the shop, that the big no-no that she was upset about was the fact that we had gone out alone, however short a distance, in the middle of the night, in our pyjamas. Not so. This bothered her not a jot. But the money! Oh, she was very upset about the money.

My little sis and bro were not punished, and nor should they have been. It was my decision to do what we did. Not that it would have mattered anyway, the oldest is responsible, even when they're not. That's the rule. She didn't hit me often, my Mam, in those days (she made up for it later though), but when she did she hit hard. So hard that she didn't have to hit you many times; just 2 or 3 precise, clinical, cold blows that pretty much wiped you out. I didn't do PE the next day at school.

Why is this a worse beating than the one that my Dad gave me earlier? The coldness. His was a wild, angry affair, with lots of shouting and many blows. He was mad and I knew about it. My mother didn't shout, or even speak beyond the initial confrontation. She just hit me. Then she hit me again. Then she hit me again. Then she told me, very calmly, to go to bed. Which I did, doubled over from being winded, unable even to cry properly because I couldn't get the breath to sob.

In the years that followed that coldness went away from my mam. She became much more violent towards us kids, but it was violence like my Dads was. Loud and wild and uncontrolled. As bad as those times were, I was glad of them, in a way. When we got wild Mam, we didn't get cold Mam, and that was a blessing.

So there you have it. Another story from my early years. Cheery little tale wasn't it? It's no wonder I can't get anyone to read this bloody thing, with downers like this every week. Anyway, until next time, when The Big Woman I promised you will finally make her appearance.

A horse, a horse, my school run has a horse

2010-11-27T18:14:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of a horse:

This is a picture of a small boy:

What would happen, do you think, if that horse kicked that small boy in the chest, with all of it's might? Yeah man, he'd be proper dead, innit.*

Not I though. Oh no, for I was Invinca-boy. Fleet of foot and with pecs of steel. Kicked with all the ferocity the beast could muster, I shrugged off the blow with a hearty guffaw and was away about my business.

The incident took place while we (my little sis and I) were taking our usual shortcut up through the fields to school. The horse, or rather the horses, were a regular fixture, and we'd had no fear, with that recklessness of youth, of walking amongst them and scratching and petting them and feeding them clumps of grass. You know, as kids do. For some reason though, (I probably just approached from the wrong angle and spooked it) on this particular day one horse took exception and booted me full force with it's hind legs. In all honesty, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that it did indeed hurt, not a little but a very very lot.

My reaction was to fall to the floor, stare at the sky and think I was dying.

My sisters reaction was to laugh, then when I didn't get up, cry, then run off to school and leave me lying there.

The horses reaction was to eat a bit more grass.

Now the truth is, I was kicked in the belly, not the chest and the horse, far from looking like that magnificent beast above, was more along these lines :

It was young, anyway.

Still, I was in pain and (likely) shock and I stayed on the ground for what was a very long time. A very confused phone conversation had apparently been had by my teacher and my mother, and when the story was wheedled out of my sister (who had said nothing to anybody on arrival at school) they both set out to look for me and met in the middle, so to speak, when they found me lying on the ground.

In my defence though, once I was back on my feet and had calmed down, I turned down the chance to go home and headed off to school with my teacher. What a man, eh?

This was not the last time I would be convinced I was going to die (or that my sister would abandon me to it for that matter) but those stories are for another day.

Next : The Big Woman oo-er

*After attempting a sports metaphor recently, which failed miserably, I am now attempting to get 'down wit da kids'. I'm not convinced it's a good idea.

Dad in a box.

2010-11-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

"I'm going over to the cricket ground to help your Grandma with the teas, are you coming?"

"No, we're watching this on the telly"

An innocent exchange between my mother and myself one sunny Saturday morning. Who would have thought that it would lead to the false imprisonment of my father and myself receiving what was, at that time, the worst beating of my young life? Not me.

The close proximity of the flat to the cricket ground meant that my mother would often be roped in help out and it also meant that we would often go over and help ourselves to a few cakes and whatnot from the refreshment table. It meant feigning interest in cricket, of course, which was never easy, but we made it work. On this particular Saturday though, we were watching something, I forget what, and so we declined, reasoning that if we changed our minds we could just go over later.

Later came. Whatever it was we had been watching was finished, we were bored, and we decided that a trip over to the ground was just what the Doctor ordered.

Except that Daddy dearest decided that we weren't allowed. We weren't being punished for anything, we weren't in the bad books at all, he just decided, for whatever reason, that he wouldn't let us go. We had had our chance earlier in the day and said no, and he wasn't pissing about taking us over there now, he said. It was our own fault apparently.

Now, the thing is, he didn't need to take us anywhere. We lived, quite literally, 10 seconds walk from the ground. It was directly opposite us. Step out of our front door, cross the road, step through the gate and you're there. His not wanting to go was not a factor. I truly believe that it was sheer pettiness on his part; an attempt to show a couple of little kids that he was Boss. He was like that, my Dad. You know, a knobhead.

Anyway, after arguing the point for 5mins we were told to play in the bedroom or the yard, but either way to leave him alone. So we did. Now, I've mentioned before the outside toilet facilities. Well, long story short, we were playing outside, my Dad came down to use the loo, we locked him in and pissed off to the cricket ground.

Now, I'm not particularly proud of this. Not because of the inherent wrongness of locking your Dad in a filthy outdoor loo, but rather because, when you think about it, there was no way I wasn't going to get caught. I don't know what the Hell I was thinking, to be honest. Anyone with half a brain would have thought, "he's using the loo, once he's finished he's not likely to need it again soon, we can go to the ground and he'll never know we're gone". Simple. Not me though, oh no, genius over here had to lock him in. I didn't give him a second thought either, the whole time we were gone, even though as far as I knew he was still locked in. (He wasn't, one of the shop staff came in to the yard, heard him shouting and let him out.)

We returned home to a somewhat angry Dad who did what all angry Dads in his situation would have done. He blamed the oldest, which was me,(fair play though, it was my idea) and he beat seven shades of shite out of me.

This chain of events, and others very similar, are par for the course with me. It comes down to the old saying "respect your elders and betters" and the fact that I think it's total bollocks. If I think someone is talking out of their arse, or is doing something out of pettiness, or spite or just because they can, I'll do something about it, no matter how much older they are than me or how much authority they think they have over me. As a child it got me into trouble an awful lot with my parents and teachers and as an adult it has caused a fair few ructions in my work life. It's just the kind of person I am though. If you're wrong you're wrong and I'm going to tell you. At least I'll do it to your face though, so we all know were we stand.

Next : The time I was almost killed by a Horse. Good times.

Bereavement

2010-11-11T18:10:00.000-08:00

Shall I tell you something? It's something I've only recently realised, on account of writing this blog really. I don't know my grandmothers name. The grandmother on my Fathers side of the family that is.

In my defence, she died when I was very young, at an age where I probably thought her name was Grandma and I've had no contact with that side of the family since not long after her death. I only know My grandfathers name on that side because it's my brothers middle name. (My brother is called Andrew. As is my maternal grandfather. My parents claimed that they hadn't realised the connection, since my grandfather always went by Andy, rather than Andrew. When they cottoned on, they figured they had to name him for both, so as not to show favouritism.) Anyway, I don't know her name.

It saddens me a little - real human emotion, whoda thunk it - that this tiny, timid little woman who had such a crappy life, caring for a disabled child and violent husband, should be so easily forgotten. It feels like she deserves better than that. Sadly, it's not to be.

I take a little solace in the fact that the last few months of her life were made slightly better by the fact that my grandfather died first. She didn't survive him by long but she had at least a short little bit of freedom.

I remember the morning that I found out he had died. We hadn't been living in the flat long when it happened - had he died just a little bit sooner the rest of my family would have still been living with him. My sister possibly had a lucky escape there. Imagine if she had been the one to find him, at 5 years old. (He got up in the night for the lav, collapsed and ended up at the bottom of the stairs.) Could have scarred her for life. Anyway, I got out of bed, made my way out to the living room and found my Dad looking very upset. He and my Mam sat me down and told me that Granda was dead.

They were very solemn and trying really hard to be sensitive and gentle but they needn't have bothered. The truth is, while this was the first real bereavement I'd ever suffered, never even having had a pet, I understood what Death was and what it meant. I understood that he was gone forever and I was never going to see him again. I remember, very clearly, thinking "I should probably be sad". Sadness never came, no tears fell, I just sat there, feeling really uncomfortable because I could tell that my parents were upset and they were expecting a reaction from me that just wasn't coming. In the end I said that I would go and wake up my sister and tell her what had happened, just as an excuse to get out of there.

Why did they let me do it? I was about 7. Should I have been allowed, at that age, to assume the burden of telling a 5yr old that her grandfather was dead? At a guess, thinking about it now, I think that either my lack of a reaction had made my parents as uncomfortable as it had me and they were as glad of the excuse as I was, or they had perhaps thought that my lack of reaction had been down to shock and were hoping that talking to my sister would bring me out of it a little. Either way, I had the dubious honour of informing my sister, who was bouncing quite happily up and down on her bed and giggling, about what had happened, and then giving her a cuddle when it finally sank in. Unlike me, she did have tears for the old man.

It turned out that the fall down the stairs hadn't killed him. He had in fact been dead before he fell, because something had burst in his brain. Very quick, apparently, over before he knew anything about it. I'm tempted to say it was too quick, given the way he lived his life, but as the old saying goes, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead. I mention the cause of his death because several months later, when my grandmother passed away, she did so from exactly the same thing. I've often joked (yes, I know) about the coincidence, saying that it's odd because they were a married couple, not blood relatives, "Unless there was something they weren't telling us, ha ha"

The added tragedy of my grandmothers death, apart from the fact that she finally seemed happy out of his shadow, was that it happened whilst she was pushing my aunt, in her wheelchair, up the access ramp outside their home. She fell to one side, leaving my aunt to roll back to the foot of the ramp, where she had to sit and look at her dead mother until help came. Given her mental state normally, and the fact that she still wasn't fully over the death of her father, it must have been torture for her. Which makes my joking about the whole thing all the more reprehensible really.

I didn't cry for my grandmother either. I could, if I were looking to make excuses for myself, blame his years of bullying and abuse as the reason I didn't mourn for him, but her...? She was more his victim than I ever was and she always treated me with kindness. So why couldn't I cry for her? I didn't know then, and I don't know now. Nor why I have never, in my 31 years of life, felt any depth of emotion for the passing of any human being. (Real human beings that is. I will weep like a baby at TV shows, movies, books and comics. Oh, and animals. I lose it completely at the thought of an animals pain or death.)

I do know why I joke though. I know exactly why I make fun of their deaths, and insinuate things about the coincidence. And it's not a reason that reflects well on me. You see, death terrifies me. That all consuming fear of ceasing to exist that takes hold of you as a child, but which you somehow come to terms with, or at the very least repress, as you get older, has never seen fit to leave me. So the coincidence of their deaths terrifies me. The idea that I am 50% genetically predisposed to die at a relatively young age, from something that kills you from out of nowhere, would pretty much drive me insane if I let it. Essentially, I mock the deaths of my family members because I am a quivering wreck of a coward.

I may not be a very nice man.

Practically cave dwellers

2010-11-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, so, depending on the timeline, which I remain fuzzy about, either we moved out of my uncle Paul s house and into our new flat or we moved out of the respective Grandparents and into our new flat. It was the dawning of a new day for our, for want of a better word, family.

The flat was above a shop. I'm gonna try to describe the set-up as best I can but I warn you, it won't be pretty. First of all, imagine a shop on a front street. To the right of the shop is a large wooden gate, wide and tall enough that when opened a small lorry could enter. (I say tall as well as wide because it was built into a brick wall above) Anyway, this gate was there to allow deliveries to the shop. Built into the large gate was a smaller one, person sized, that allowed people to enter the yard without having to open the whole thing. This was our front door. Going through that, you were in a kind of tunnel that lead to the little yard but to your left were 2 doors. The first of these opened onto a staircase. The other opened onto something else, which I'll get to later.

So, you open a door and you are at the foot of a flight of stairs. You go up these stairs and you reach another door. Go through that one and you have entered The Flat. Now, I'm not entirely convinced, now, that it was ever designed as a flat. Or a living place of any description. It was a storage/work area basically, that the shop owner had decided to make a bit of cash on the side from. You had two rooms, with no door on the gap between them. Off one room, you had a 'kitchen'. This was an alcove, containing a sink and enough floor space for one person to stand in front of it. That was it. There was no bathroom, nor any toilet facilities at all. The full extent of the plumbing was a cold water tap and a wall mounted heater situated above the sink which took an age to heat water and gave it out in a fine spray. How did we 'go potty' you might ask. Well, we went outside, to the second door in the tunnel.

This door was not a door you'd find on a house. It was a rotten wooden shed type of door, with rusted hinges that were hanging loose and a sliding bolt to keep out intruders. Which it would have taken a braver kid than me to use, seeing as how it had no electricity in there, so no light. Even with the door open it was dingy, natural light struggling to reach that far into the tunnel. There I was, all of about 7 yrs old, and my choice was sit in the pitch blackness while I took a dump (pardon the crudeness) or sit with the door open to the elements (not to mention the shop staff and delivery people) while I sat there with my trousers round my ankles. Oh the luxury.

We bathed once a week in a tin bath, filled by boiling the kettle lots of times, which would be situated in the middle of the living room. It was in and out as quick as you could because the whole family had to have a turn and it didn't stay hot for long.

The second room was designated the bedroom. A couple of wardrobes were placed across the centre of the room with a little gap between them. One side was for the kids, the other for the adults. The kids got the side with the window, so as to allow us a little natural light, while the parents had the side with the door(or hole in the wall rather) and light switch, so they could control access.

Near the gap between wardrobes, on the parents side because there was not enough floor space on the kids side (you literally had a foot wide walkway between each bed, with none at the foot, which were flush with the wardrobe), was a bucket. The bucket was for liquid waste of a night. If you wanted to pass solids, you went outside. Believe me when I tell you, we soon got into the habit of clearing our bowels before going to bed.

I loved that flat. The bedroom was so small it was practically a cocoon and was therefore very cosy. The outside toilet, for all that it was obviously a great deprivation, actually felt like a bit of a novelty. During the day anyway. And the fact that we kind of took it upon ourselves to have free run of the yard meant that we were constantly mixing with (and being accepted by) the staff and delivery personnell of the shop. We were like little mascots or something. And there was nothing cooler than coming home to that great big gate that we had walked past and wondered about for years and actually having the key. It was like being able to raise the drawbridge of a castle. What?, I was a kid.

The shop was not as large a concern as it had once been and so only one of the sheds out in the yard was in use. The other was empty. It made an awesome playroom/camp and we had a ball customising it to our needs. We even built swings from the rafters out of some old cord we found in there. These swings were deadly, as we didn't know how to attach the cord to boards in order to make seats so we simply had a big loop of thin whatever-it-was that would slice into our backsides when we sat on it. They became a competition of endurance, with no-one willing to admit that they were in agony because it would mean giving up the swing to the next person. We really were that competitive.

That flat was the last place that the Finch family all lived in the same place. Afterwards, following the separation, my Mother would revert to her maiden name and there would be various men in her life, some lasting longer than others, with the three of us kids being joined by three more over the years, but it never really felt like a proper family again. Maybe that accounts for some of the affection I have for that time. I've spoken before about never feeling particularly close to my family as a child but who knows, perhaps my sub-conscious craves the family unit more than I realised. Although,I know that if money and employment factors would allow it, I'd move back to that village tomorrow. Make of that what you will. Perhaps it's the place rather than the people that induces the nostalgia.

Repressed memories

2010-10-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

So I was chatting to a vague acquaintance the other day about their kid having been ill, as you do, you know. From out of nowhere I had this really vivid memory of being extremely ill as a child. I mean really ill, with projectile vomiting and coughing fits that damn near brought up a lung. Not a pleasant memory, you might think. But you'd be wrong. You see, this memory brought back a whole lot of others from the same time. A whole lot of very pleasant memories that I had somehow completely repressed.

I'd like to put them down on here, because I really do think they may be some of the happiest of my childhood, projectile vomiting notwithstanding.

We were staying with my Uncle Paul, the man for whom I was named. Every morning when I got up, I'd eat my breakfast and then sit with Paul, filling in his wordsearch puzzles. Or at least, after my own fashion. I always went to the answer section you see, and drew around the little dotted bubbles in the completed puzzles. I don't think I ever once did an actual puzzle. Paul would sit and laugh and congratulate me when I finished one and never once made me feel daft for taking so much pleasure in what was essentially the worlds easiest dot-to-dot puzzle.

Paul was the first person ever to ask me if I wanted to play 52 card pick-up.

Despite the anger of my parents and Pauls wife, who to my shame I can't remember the name of, Paul never once raised his voice about the vomit on his nice new hardwood floor in the dining room. (Incidentally, the only time I've ever lived in a house with a dedicated dining room. Such luxury.) I know it's odd to have fondness for a man simply because he didn't scold you for being ill but that was the culture in my family.

The school I attended while we stayed there had a completely different way of doing lots of little things. For example during P.E. they had a time out corner. I was sent there once and, not understanding the rules of the whole exercise, came back into play when the teacher waved. He was of course only waving for the person who had been sent there before me. My time wasn't up and I was punished again for 'being cheeky'.

The class I was in had a little toy shopfront thing made of plastic that you could sit behind and play at being shopkeepers. The teacher had hit upon the idea that this thing could be used essentially as a bribe. The best two in the class got to sit behind there all day every day for a week instead of at a desk and do their work on the little built in countertop thing. It was cramped and too close to a radiator and you had to move all your stuff at 'play' when the rest of the class were allowed to use it but it was a novelty and hotly contested. I once spent a week in there with a girl. Don't remember her name, don't remember what she looked like, don't remember anything much at all about the whole thing except that I was in a small, cramped, warm space with a girl for a week. And you bonded when you were in there, you had to, being separated from everyone else. Who knows, if I'd stayed at that school a little longer I could be married to her now. Whatever her name was.

I saw my very first, that I can remember, science fiction show on television. If you read my Impossible Quest blog you'll know how big a part of my life science fiction television is and this, I now realise, was the birth of it. It had a floppy haired man in a jumpsuit and a shiny silver robot with a flashing light for eyes. They were enemies stranded together who became friends and eventually the 'bad' robot helped the man evade death at the hands of some other robots. It was of course 'The Return Of Starbuck' . Pure gold, with a lot to answer for in my life.

There you go. Happy childhood memories of watching TV, being sick and having some very confusing feelings about a girl that I never quite got to grips with. The thing is though, is that until this recent reawakening I had absolutely forgotten all of it. To the extent that I now can't place it in the timeline of my life. Should it have come between moving out of the house and staying with my Grandparents? Or did we go to Pauls after leaving my Grandparents and before moving into the flat we'd end up in. I have no idea. If you'd asked me a week ago I'd have said that it went House-Grandparents-Flat, followed by bitter divorce and moving away from the area. This whole batch of memories just does not compute.

God, I hope I haven't imagined them. What kind of sad case would I be if I had to hallucinate some happy memories? And then made myself violently ill in one of them?

Birth of paranoia

2010-10-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

So far, since I found a new groove with this blog, most of what I've posted has been fairly unthreatening stuff. Or at least, unthreatening to me anyway. I've slated my Grandfather as a violent bully, my Father and Uncles as cowards and my other Grandfather as, at the very least, a bit of a numpty. I've also mentioned that when I was forced to live apart from the rest of my family for a while, my parents made little effort to keep me in their lives. This last one is the only time I've come close to criticising myself, in admitting that their absence didn't really bother me.

Anyone can tell stories that paint others in an unflattering light, that's easy. The point of this thing was to be honest about myself. There will be a lot of unflattering stuff about me in future posts, most definitely, as I get into my life as a slightly older, and so slightly more independent child. But even at a very young age I was far from perfect. Time to talk about that.

The very first lie I can remember telling occurred during the 'staying with Grandparents' phase. It's something I've not had to dredge my memory for because I've thought of the situation often since then, in moments of self reflection and/or self recrimination. It wasn't a particularly big lie. I mean, how big a lie is a 6ish year old capable of telling? The reason I've never forgotten it, though I suspect every other person involved has, is because it was a pointless lie. It achieved nothing, and actually made me seem a bit silly. Not to mention a really bad liar.

I had been to school that day. A message had come around telling everyone that the school was putting together a football team and that anyone who was interested should go to a certain classroom at lunchtime. My best friend and I decided we'd go along. Now, I was very young at the time and the inherent stupidity in participating in sports, and especially in voluntarily participating in sports, had not yet occurred to me. Anyway, lunchtime came and after we'd eaten our fill we trudged off to the classroom in question, signed up and got given the practise times and whatnot. (There was no try-out or selection process or anything. If you turned up you were in, competition not being all that fierce amongst 6year olds.)

I can't pinpoint a specific moment in my childhood when I suddenly decided that I hated sport. I would imagine that it came early in my Secondary education, since that's when my perfectly logical reasons for disliking sporting activities - I'm no good at them and see no reason to waste time and effort on something at which I'm unskilled, risking ridicule in the process - would have presented themselves to me for the first time. Before Secondary school football and other sports were just a bit of fun, not to be taken seriously. You didn't need to be good. You didn't even need to know all the rules necessarily.

Anyway, at 6 I was definitely pre-hatred and was actually genuinely excited about being on the school football team. It was a new thing in my life, a fun new thing, and I was bouncing about it for the rest of the day. For all that I had done nothing to deserve or earn it I felt special. Then my Uncle came to collect me from school. Now, seeing as that drop off and pick up was one of the few times I saw my Mother you'd think that I'd be disappointed by her absence but no, I was happy to see my Uncle. It didn't matter that I would have seen him anyway once I got home - he was still young enough to be living at home with his parents - this was my cool Uncle and he was picking me up from school. He would be the first to hear my great news.

Except here comes the lie. I told him about the football team, but as I was talking I started to tell him that I hadn't wanted to join the team but had done so by accident. I explained that Peter (my best friend) and I had gotten into trouble at morning break and so had been told that we weren't allowed outside at lunchtime. We had been ordered to sit out the period in a classroom but the teacher doing the punishing hadn't known about the football meeting in the same room and we had been caught up in it. Being too shy to tell the football teacher (he being quite intimidating) that we were there for being naughty, we signed up for the team.

It was complete and utter nonsense. I know why I said it, I can remember the thought processes even now. As soon as I told my Uncle about being on the team a little voice in the back of my head said "he doesn't care", closely followed by "he won't think you're cool if you're excited". At that time he was probably the person in my family that I looked up to and admired the most. He was my hero, despite being little more than a kid himself and probably just wishing I'd bugger off and leave him alone with his porn mags and illicit VHS copies of gory horror movies. (I didn't realise that last part at the time though.) The thought of him thinking I was uncool was soul destroying. I had to think fast and the story I told was my way to seem indifferent to the team and also a little 'cool' for being in trouble.

Why did I assume that he wouldn't be interested? Where did that little voice come from? Thinking abut it now, it's tempting to think that the need for his approval was me compensating for the fact that I didn't seem to have any from my parents. Maybe, despite not seeming to care about that, I did, in my subconscious, crave adult attention. The problem with that is, I have no recollection of ever getting upset about the separation. If I can remember this tiny little white lie about a football team wouldn't I remember a traumatic separation? Even if I buried it, wouldn't it have manifested at least once, at the beginning? I don't know, I'm no psychologist. What I do know is that the story wasn't over and I was about to look even more foolish.

I had to go and tell my Mam about the football team. She would need to buy me some boots of course, and there was also the matter of Saturday practise sessions at the school, which I would need taking to and picking up from. So I headed off, after my tea, to see her. As I've said, the house they were staying in wasn't massively far awayand it took all of about a minute for me to get there. More than enough time for the little voice to raise it's head again. "She'll be angry" was the basic theme. "She won't want to pay for the boots". "She doesn't care enough to to deal with the practises". "She'll laugh and say you aren't good enough". And so on.

I knew I had to tell her about the team, there was no way out of that. But I found myself so convinced that I would be in trouble about it that I just knew I had to make up a reason why it wasn't my fault. And it couldn't be the one I told my Uncle, since that one involved me already being in trouble. What to do? Well, I blamed it all on Peter. I'd gone along because he wanted to sign up. He put my name down without telling me and now I couldn't get out of it. Oh, the creative juices were pumping that day, I can tell you.

Can you see the problems here? I'd told my Mother one thing, my Uncle another, not really thinking through the fact that since they were brother and sister there was an ever so slight possibility that they would, you know, talk to each other at some point. Then there was the chance that, by saying I didn't want to do it, I might make my Mother try to get me out of it. My Mother was friends with Peters Mam as well, so would likely talk to her at some point. And if my involvement in the team went ahead, members of my family would come into contact with the teacher whom I had been so enthusiastic with originally. In short, there was no way in Hell I was coming out of this looking anything other than a total prat.

Which is exactly what happened. The thing is though, there was very little comeback. I was a little kid after all, and tradition in my family was that you didn't take little kids particularly seriously. None of that heart to heart, "tell me what made you do this", 'special chat' bullshit that you see in soap operas. No, what I got was a half-hearted bit of a telling off that lasted for all of 30 seconds and then a week or so of being mocked and made fun of by everyone I knew. It was fucking horrible. I was too embarrassed to talk to my cool uncle. My Mam, when I saw her, never shut up about it and when I told her something she'd say "Is that right? Or should I ask you uncle Darren?". I was mortified about the whole thing and they just thought it was a joke.

I ended up playing on the team for the rest of that term and then the team was scrapped because too many kids dropped out once the novelty wore off and we didn't have enough to make up a squad. Truth be told, I wasn't particularly bothered, since the whole thing had become a bit of a chore for me as well and I was glad of the excuse to be rid of it. I can't remember the name of the teacher, or any of the other kids on the team apart from Peter and the whole experience was one big damp squib.

But I'll never forget that first day and the way I turned what should have been a little bit of fun into a huge big deal and drove myself to panic attacks. It was the first time I can remember those little paranoid 'voices' wreaking their havoc on my life but they didn't stop there. As I grew older they would strike more and more often and were largely responsible for the crippling social shyness that gripped me throughout my teens and led to my being mercilessly bullied. But that's a story (or 10) for another day.

Nothing of consequence. Move along there.

2010-10-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

Got no internet at home, yet again, so I'm sitting here in the library trying to think of something I can slap on here as a placeholder entry, seeing as how the entry I was going to post is saved on my laptop.

So I thought of something, typed it up, just a load of random stream of consciousness waffle really, and then I tried to post it. Only to find that the library restricts the amount of time on blogger, I'd exceeded the time limit and it hadn't seen fit to tell me until I tried to move further into the posting process.

I started another session, only to find that everything I'd typed was gone, due to my not having saved it. So instead you are just getting this daft bit of a moan because I don't have time for anything else and I'm determined to post something every week.

So, as the heading says, nothing of consequence, move along there.

A little amputation never hurt anyone

2010-10-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

Random coincidence time. The big stories that we were always told in our family, when we were kids, were about getting fingers chopped off. That's stories, plural. Both of my Grandfathers had been involved in accidents involving fingers getting cut off.

Granda Andy (Mams Dad, aka The Nice One) was a builder. Not a massive builder, he didn't actually build houses or anything but he would knock up an extension, or a replacement roof, or a partitioning wall or whatever. Had a nice sideline in fitting bathrooms as well, but that's by the by. Anyway, he had a shed in the garden at home and in this shed he had a circular saw built into a workbench. You see where this is going right?

So anyway, long story short, yes, he cut off his finger. Now, having been in the building trade all of his adult life (and in the days before Health & Safety became the ridiculous Big Brotheresque monsters that they are today), he had seen his fair share of accidents of this type. He knew what to do. Packing his finger in ice from the freezer and staunching the flow of blood from the stump,he made his way to the Hospital. This being in the times when Hospitals with Emergency facilities where the norm rather than the exception, he didn't have far to drive. Yes, he did drive himself.

Once arriving at the Hospital, he was sorted out by a Doctor, or rather, I'm assuming, a Doctor and a couple of Nurses (credit where they it's due) and his finger was reattached. It was bound up and he was sent home. (The Doctor insisted that a couple of my Uncles go and pick him up, they weren't letting him drive home) Arriving back at home he promptly went back into the shed and started cutting up wood again. Decreased use of his hand because of the earlier wound and massive dressing, coupled with being on pain medication meant that, well, again, it doesn't take a genius. The same finger. He was too embarrassed to go back to the Hospital so he sewed it back on over the bathroom sink. It hasn't worked since.

Now, I would assume, looking back, that the second part of that story was an exaggeration. A little gruesome aftershock to properly gross out the kiddies. I certainly wouldn't bet money on it being true, I mean, who tries to sew on their own finger? Is it even possible? How do you hold it in place if the other hand has the needle? As a little kid though, we hung on every word. He did like to make us squirm. His finger is useless mind, so make of that what you will.

Family lore at the other end of the street, at chez violent bully, was similarly bloodthirsty. Most Council or Housing Association owned homes at that time were furnished with a wood/coal burning fireplace. My Grandfather, like most people, would begrudge the purchasing of too much coal, or, for that matter, pre-cut logs. Instead, he would saw and chop whatever odds and ends of scrap wood he would get his hands on. Quite where this endless supply of wood came from I never did find out, especially puzzling since pretty much everyone we knew had the same habit. A small forest probably gave it's life to the hearths of that street, just in the time we lived there.

One of my Aunts, whilst a child, had been holding some wood steady. My Grandfather (the implication, never explicitly stated, was that he was the worse for drink at the time) got a little too energetic with the saw and swoosh, one thrust later, bye bye fingers. All four fingers on one hand were gone from the middle knuckle. Unlike in the first story, there is no slightly humorous end to the tale. She was taken to Hospital by my Grandmother, (not, you'll note, the culprit himself) where they sorted things out as best they could, but since no-one had thought to take the fingers along she ended up going through life with no fingers on one of her hands.

This story I don't doubt at all. I saw her hand for one thing and for another, my Grandfather, ever the gent, would make great sport of tormenting us with the tale while we were holding wood for him to cut and then laughing at us when we got nervous. The one time anyone refused to help him because of this story he went into a mad rant, followed by a spanking session that ended in a fair few tears. (It wasn't me by the way, I was always far too much of a coward to stand up to him.)

Separation (non)Anxiety

2010-10-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

So, we've moved out of our house, for reasons that are never made clear and into the home of my Dads parents.

Only one problem, they didn't have room for all of us. One of the kids had to live elsewhere, with the other set of Grandparents. As the eldest I was chosen, presumably on the basis that because I was the eldest I would handle separation from my parents better. Either that or it was just a cunning ploy to get rid of me.

To be fair, the two houses were in the same street, 8 houses apart, which meant I wasn't exactly on the other side of the world. Fact was though, other than walking to school and back I never saw my Mother, and I could go days without seeing my Dad at all. Weekends, unless I made the effort to walk up the street I never saw them either because they never came to me. And do you know what, I wasn't the least bit bothered. Does that sound odd? I don't claim to be an expert on child psychology or anything, but shouldn't a child who still counts his age in single figures be at least a little upset at being separated from his parents?

Not me. To be honest, I loved it. It felt like freedom. I had my own room (which had a huge bookshelf full of my Grandas old paperbacks and served as my first real introduction to proper novels), I didn't have to play with my frankly annoying younger siblings and best of all, so long as I didn't burn the house down or anything similarly drastic, my Grandparents and Uncle pretty much left me to my own devices. The arrangement also had the added benefit that I wasn't under the same roof as the other Granda, although I won't lie, I don't remember that ever being a part of my thinking. I suppose even then I was a little conditioned to not see violence in the home as being particularly noteworthy.

I doubt I gave my parents a second thought the whole time I was there.The way my life is now, with me being estranged from almost my entire family and frankly, being better off because of it, it's easy to think that maybe the young me knew something that adult me should have remembered. When you don't care, abandonment and betrayal lose their sting.

My Daddies Daddy

2010-09-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

Between moving out of the house and moving into our new place there was a bit of a gap. Which meant a little stopover with some Grandparents.

Little bit abrupt that ending wasn't it? Would it have read better if it ended ... I think it probably would have. I'll remember that.

**********************************************************
So anyway, my Grandparents. Like most people I started off with four and the number got lower over time. I've now got two. I don't know what the statistics are on Grandparent retention; am I doing well or badly to have two left at the age of 31?

If I seem unduly flippant on here about the death of 'loved ones' it's because, by and large, they weren't. Loved ones, I mean. They were people in my life. People I spent time with and people who gave me presents and people whose mockery I had to endure in good humour, yes. Not people I loved though.

My paternal Grandfather (it's both of my paternal Grandparents that are dead, my maternals are still alive and kicking, if a little the worse for wear), was a keen collector of comics. Name a British weekly adventure comic of the 70's and 80's and he read it, religiously. Warlord, Victor, Battle, he had them all, and he was always willing to let you dig into them whenever you visited. We learned never to remove them from the premises though, that was absolutely forbidden.He also liked taking his Grand kids on days out during school holidays and every few weekends.On the face of it, he was pretty much everything you wanted in a Grandfather.

There was a problem though.A problem which was, to my young eyes, a pretty bloody big problem, thank you very much, even if the adults in the family didn't seem overly bothered by it. The man was a bully. He was a bully to his wife, he was a bully to his own kids and he was a bully to us little ones. He wasn't a big man, physically, but my Grandma was a borderline midget (not really, but she was very small) and he dwarfed her. Most of his own kids had outgrown him but I suppose years of conditioning had left them thinking his behaviour normal so they never stood up to it. As for us kids, well, what could we do?

I once sat in their living room with my parents, my Uncle and his wife who were visiting at the same time and my Aunt. My Aunt was only in her teens, and so still lived at home but she wouldn't have been able to leave had she wanted to due to severe physical and mental disabilities that left her confined to a wheelchair with the mind of a small child and very little use of her hands. (She could feed herself but it would leave a hell of a mess and her beloved crayons never stayed inside the lines)

The adults were sitting around gossiping about whatever it is people sit around talking about for hours at a time (I'm not the most sociable person so I don't know) and I was working with my Aunt on a model kit I'd received as a present. It was lots of bits of card with pictures of roof tiles and shopfronts and brickwork and such that you had to colour in and then they folded together to make a model High Street.

(It may give you a little idea of the level of compassion in my family when I tell you that I received a real bollocking from my parents when we went home for letting my Aunt help with it, because she would obviously just mess it up. Even as a little kid I thought that the fact she had a whale of a time and was dead proud of herself was more important than whether my model looked as good as the one on the box but I couldn't argue the point. Parents know best don't they?)

Anyway, the adults are sitting around, I'm working on the model, and suddenly my Grandfather, kindly old soul that he is, decides that he is not happy with the cup of tea he is drinking and my Grandmother should go and make him a fresh one. Seconds later, because she hasn't jumped to attention quick enough, he is out of his chair, grabbing her by the throat, pinning her to the door and screaming point blank into her face that she is a useless c*nt and if she didn't want 'knocking into next week' she had better hurry up with his tea. Not a single one of the adults intervened. I mean, come on, my father and uncle watched their mother being assaulted and verbally abused and did nothing. Whats worse is that my Aunt barely reacted. Given her mental and emotional condition, how many times must she have witnessed that, or something similar, in order for it not to affect her?

Another incident that immediately springs to mind about him, even after all these years, is when he took me and my sister to the seaside. South Shields, the standard destination for daytrippers in my part of the country. We piled on to the bus, first thing in the morning, each clutching our little plastic money bag full of coins we had collected in the days prior (we didn't get regular pocket money allowances, just when there was a specific reason, like this), all excited about going in the water and building sandcastles. That excitement is the only good memory I have of that day. I'm sure we must have had some fun but all I can recall is the public beating I received for leaving my money on a bench and us having to go back for it. Or the screaming my sister endured when it was discovered that her money bag had torn and she had lost most of her coins. He didn't give her any to replace it, in case you're wondering. He just made her do without.

So yes, he let me read his comics. Not really enough to qualify for 'loved one' is it?

My First Memory

2010-09-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

What's the first proper memory you have? Mine is of climbing over the big pile of rubble that used to be my house.

I don't actually have any memory of living there, just of climbing on the rubble after it, and the rest of the estate, was demolished. I do remember the house we (Dad, Mam, Me, Little Sister) had been rehoused in by whoever it was that's responsible for rehousing 1000's of people when a developer offers a backhander for a plot of land. (May not be true. I honestly don't know the politics/economics of what happened, I was about 4!) The new house was about 5mins walk from the demolition site and we had to pass the heaps on the way to the park. At first their were fences up and barriers and stuff and the parents all made sure to issue strict warnings about the dangers of getting in amongst but that soon went by the wayside and all of us local kids would be swarming all over it like flies on... Huge mounds of bricks, shattered glass, rotten timbers full of rusted nails, it was heaven for an adventurous young lad like myself. Loads more fun than the park we were supposed to be going to.

Looking back, it's odd that the rubble mounds stayed where they were for as long as they did. You'd think that if the estate had been cleared for redevelopment the crap would have been shifted straight away. Unless a deal fell through or the money ran out I suppose. Even then, fear of public injury and the dreaded compensation claim would never allow it these days. As a child though, you don't think like that do you? We had our very own adventure playground, with added puncture wounds. No-one ever got really badly hurt though, at least that I can recall and lets be honest, gushing leg wounds and gouged out eyeballs make an impression don't they?

We (now with added Baby Brother) moved out of there when I was about 7 or 8. We still lived in the same little village but I don't recall ever going back to that demolition site (or the park) after the move. Maybe it was because I was lazy and the extra 10 minute walk put me off, I don't know. Perhaps we'd moved far enough that we'd crossed that magical invisible line that parents have that dictate which places are "too far for you to go on your own." A statement that never seemed to be followed by "I'll get my coat and take you" Funny how that works.

Between moving out of the house and moving into our new place there was a bit of a gap. Which meant a little stopover with some Grandparents.

Honesty in the face of ridicule

2010-09-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately (and will be reading a lot more in the near future thanks to a thread on the 2000adonline forum). Blogs by writers, Blogs by artists, Blogs by people critiquing various aspects of popular culture and most relevantly, Blogs in which ordinary people talk about their lives. These in particular fascinate me. The concept is nothing new of course, it's little more than keeping a diary and people have been doing that for centuries. The thing that makes it noteworthy, and yet never seems to be commented on (or perhaps it was commented on, when the practice first became common), is that they are writing these diaries, traditionally very private things, and publishing them where the whole world can read them. Anytime it wants. This seems quite brave to me but maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Anyway, my own feeble excuse for a blog - this one here, that you're reading now - has been a bit neglected because to be honest I've never really felt like I have that much to say. I can waffle on quite happily for hours at a time about the telly - and do, over at The Impossible Quest - but when it comes to actually talking about myself, well, what is there, really?

Then inspiration hit. There is a girl on twitter. I can't remember why or when I started following her but she seems to have been a staple of my timeline for as long as I can remember. (This happens quite a lot. Mainly when I trace someone back from a celebs profile page to see what they said to prompt a particular response, find them quite interesting, decide to follow for a couple of days to see how it goes and then forget about them and they just become fixtures. I'm sure this is how a lot of people decide who to follow.) Anyway, this girl is in her teens, not sure exactly how old but she seems to be doing some kind of exams so...

At first, not being particularly au fait with the rules of netiquette, I felt a bit off, 'following' a teenage girl online. I kept getting paranoid about accusations of stalking, for reasons that will become clear in the next paragraph. The thing is though, and I make no apologies for this, she has become one of my favourite follows. For the simple reason that she is one of the most charming and entertaining bloggers I've come across so far. She'll talk about anything, trivial one day, earth shattering the next, with the same disarming honesty. It's not that she doesn't get embarrassed, she is quite open abut how embarrassed she does get, but it never stops her from putting it all out there. Also, somewhat sickeningly, she's a much better writer as a child than I can even dream of being as an adult.

I got to thinking, could I be that honest? One of my 'issues' is fear of ridicule. Or rather, fear of ridicule behind my back. It's a facet of my personality, one of many in fact, that I have never really been able to understand. In person I am quite a jovial, happy-go-lucky, wacky sort of chap, who doesn't care a jot what people think of him and will quite happily make a total fool of himself in aid of a cheap laugh. You know, the kind of twat you kinda like for 5minutes then just want to slap. On the phone though, or over the internet, I am constantly censoring myself, trying to anticipate what those at the other end of the line will think of any given remark, cheeks flushing with embarrassment every time I think I've said anything even slightly foolish. (In my last post on this blog I talked about visiting a prostitute to lose my virginity. I am not remotely ashamed of this and in 'real' life most everyone I know has heard the tale but it was pure physical torture typing those words. Even now, just thinking about it, my guts are churning. I claimed not be embarrassed, who was I kidding?) So, could I reconcile this fear of long distance ridicule with my desire to write something halfway honest on this blog. I was resolved to try.

The thing is though, as bad as my life is right now, it's not bad in any particularly interesting ways. Jobless, Penniless,Womanless, on the verge of Homeless. These things are not exactly news these days are they? Why would anyone care? I suspect quite strongly that they wouldn't. Then I had the idea that maybe I should do what this girl whose writing I so admire is doing. She chronicles her adolescence. Why don't I? Certainly, had the technology existed to have a blog when I was a young 'un I would most definitely have had one. Maybe had I had the outlet it might even have cured me of my paranoia in my formative years rather than have it dig in and establish itself. But the technology didn't exist, for I am not a young man and t'internet, sadly, came after my time. Looking back with todays eyes, I can't help feeling I've missed out on something.

So I've decided to write on here about my life. A look back at my formative years, all the crap I went through, all the indignities I suffered without even realising. Because we don't do we? We don't sit around as kids, bemoaning our lot and woe is me'ing till the cows come home. We get on with it and have the times of our lives. I look back now and I know, with my sensible adult eyes, that my childhood was somewhat lacking but when I was actually living it...

This blog has long needed a purpose and I think this is it. I just hope the paranoia doesn't kick in and shut me down

Common Decency. Or a lack thereof.

2010-09-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

I am once again inspired by current events to put finger to key and spout some ill thought out knee jerk drivel for the edification of probably nobody. This time by the use of the phrase 'Dumb Cunt' to describe the wife of a philanderer. Seriously, Dumb Cunt.

I have to tell you, for someone who has my utter disdain for all things football related, it does seem to have the ability to get under my skin more than anything else. After the last time I was compelled to blog on here, bemoaning the World Cup nonsense that was going on at the time, I've managed to avoid the whole shebang pretty thoroughly but alas, it has caught up with me again. In the form of a certain aesthetically challenged England player and his alleged dalliance with a lady of the night.

Now, I have no problem at all with people who spend their cash paying for sex. While it may well be illegal I see no reason to consider it immoral and have said as much many times in the past, often leading to quite heated arguments. In fact, I shall go on record, here and now, and say that I myself have partaken of the services of such a woman, just the once, when I decided that the age I had reached was just a little too old to still be a virgin. I figured that this was my best way of 'getting the first one out of the way' without worrying about the reaction of the woman to my inexperience. She was, after all, being paid to flatter me. The fact that I can type this, and post it on the internet for the world to see, without embarrassment, should tell you what my philosophies are about prostitution.

That aside, I do have a problem with men who cheat on their wives. Were the man in question single I would care not a jot about this story. To be honest, even now I don't care about the prostitution angle, which I see as secondary to the fact that he slept with a woman other than his wife. The fact that he paid for the privilege is beside the point. What I do care about is the attitude that has been thrown around, by people I would ordinarily like and respect, regarding the wife in the equation.

The prevailing attitude seems to be one of mockery. That she is a gold-digger who has no right to be upset because she's little better than a prostitute herself and she will obviously stick with him for his money so she deserves what she gets. My question is, when did our society become so fucking heartless? Assume for the moment that the allegations are true and she wasn't aware. She has just found out that the man she's been with her entire adult life has cheated on her. That doesn't engender just a little bit of sympathy?

Now, I may be wrong here, because as I've said I have very little interest in football and as a rule I have even less interest in the private lives of those who play it, but I seem to have the impression that these two have been together since they were like 17 or something. Is that right? I've definitely got that idea from somewhere. So as a kid she started going out with another kid who was a bit good at kicking a ball around. That makes her a gold-digger how exactly? Does she have The Sight, able to tell from watching a couple of school games and some 5-a-side at the local rec that this lad she kinda fancied was gonna one day earn millions on the international stage? Could it not be even remotely possible that she quite fancied him, went out with him for a while, fell in love and subsequently supported him in his attempt to build a professional career?

Does it make her a gold-digger that she stayed with her partner, who was not rich when she met him, after he made some money? Should she have left him? Would that make her more acceptable to the public at large?

Something else that has become more and more apparent over the last couple of days is that the people who seem to have the strongest reactions to this kind of story are those who spend the most amount of time bemoaning how celebrities have overtaken popular culture. The kind of people who will tell anyone who will listen, and a lot of people who'd rather not, that these celebrities are worthless and full of shit and a blight on our world and they couldn't care less about what they are up to and who they are up to it with. Then they leap on a story like this with all the ferocity of a starving fox in a battery hen shed. It seems that they view this evidence of celebrities being flawed as validation of all the abuse they have so delighted in heaping on them over the years, whereas I would be more inclined to see it as evidence that they are ordinary people who make mistakes and maybe we should leave them alone to sort it out in private.

At this point it is traditional for someone to pipe in with the age old arguments of "They're not shy of publicity when it suits them" and "They shove themselves down our throats and then complain about invasion of privacy". To these arguments I say "Bullshit". Football players play football. If you want to go and shout at them at the ground, be my guest. If they sell the photo rights to their wedding, feel free to mock their tasteless excesses. If they show up at a red carpet wearing a ridiculous outfit, tell a few jokes about it by all means. Then stop. Recognise the line. They do these things because it is a part of how they make their living. They would not do these things if they did not think that a market existed for it. That they do does not give you, me, or anyone else the right to pry into the deepest recesses of their private lives. It is voyeurism, pure and simple and frankly, I despair at the thought that I live in a society where this is not only commonplace (rape, murder and robbery are commonplace) but also considered acceptable.

He was in the wrong, she is a victim. Lets not lose sight of that. But also, lets not lose sight of the fact that there is a marriage on the line here. They are a young couple , not long married, who have nevertheless been together for a long time. Perhaps some would say that they settled on each other too young, I don't know. Regardless, many marriages survive this kind of mistake. I would hope that this one could as well. Why can't we leave them alone to sort out their problems. I would consider it a shame if a salvageable relationship faltered because of public indulgence in schadenfreude.

Oh, and if they do stay together after all this, can we please refrain from assuming that the 'Dumb Cunt' only stayed for the money and is as good as a prostitute herself. Cheers.

Poor deprived football fans

2010-06-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, Football. More specifically, the World Cup. Everyone's talking about it. So what is there left to be said by someone such as myself, who has absolutely no interest in the game whatsoever. Well, nothing, as it turns out, and I wouldn't be bothering if it weren't for a man by the name of Charlie Brooker.

Now Charlie, as we all know, writes a bit of a column in some newspaper or other, I forget which one, in which he talks about whatever rubbish he feels like talking about. Which is fair do's, he's a funny guy, people like to read his thoughts, everyones a winner. Anyway, he wrote one about the World Cup. Or rather, he wrote one about his lack of interest in the World Cup, the oversaturation of advertising themed around the World Cup ,and the nauseating faux-patriotism that is the inevitable by-product of the World Cup.

In this column he said everything I think about the bloody World Cup, and did it much more elegantly, succinctly and above all amusingly, than I could ever dream to do. So if you want to know my views on the World Cup (unlikely I know, cos why would you want to know my views on anything?), then track down his views and pretend I wrote them.

Which leads to the question, why am I bothering to type any of this. Well you see, I was inspired by his column, or more accurately the reader comments that followed his column on the interweb site of the newspaper in question. Several people agreed with his point of view, which tells me that they are right thinking individuals who have managed, against all the odds, to retain a modicum of the taste and common sense they were born with. Well done them. Others however, disagreed. Vehemently and with nobs on. It is these people that have got me typing.

You see, they have taken offense at the article. They have not all taken offense at the same portion of the article but there are 3 main, bones of contention, shall we say. I should point out that I am not writing this in defence of Charlie Brooker. On the one hand I doubt very much that he cares what people think about his views and on the other hand, he's more than capable of defending himself if he is. No, this is me defending MY views.

Anyway. One of the problems people had with the article was that Brooker finished it with a reference to the fact that he would be out of the country for the duration and therefore would not have to endure to much of it. This got certain people hot under the collar because he was rubbing it in their noses that he could afford to go on holiday while they couldn't. He's a snob, in other words. I know what I think about this complaint but won't say, because this is about defending me, not Brooker, and I most certainly can't afford to leave the country for the duration of the Cup. But Fuck off, seriously, if that is how you took that comment, you humorless little shits.

Point 2 is back to something I can relate to. The faux-patriotism. Now, leaving aside the imbecile who insisted that our armed forces were fighting and dying for our right to participate in a football tournament, the main problem people had was that the patriotism, in their minds, is not false. No, they hang flags from their bedroom windows, stick them on their cars and temp-tattoo (I hope) them on their kids 365 days a year. Proper flags too of course, not those cheap rip offs that don't even have ENGLAND written across the middle. English until I die, opined one. Excellent mate, well done.

Except it's not that way is it? No, for the most part, we whinge and we moan and can't be arsed to vote (I know more people turned out this year but it was hardly a huge majority of the populace was it). We complain about our public services and then we complain about our taxes. We are, lets face it here, a nation of people who, if we are honest with ourselves, are incredibly unpatriotic. In as lazy a way as possible. We don't firebomb the Houses of Parliament and chop off her Maj's head or anything.

The final point is the one that realy made me laugh. I simply could not believe that anyone could say this with a straight face. Maybe, just maybe, the first person to post it was being ironic. Possibly. Didn't stop a shedload of people from agreeing though. The complaint was essentially "Why do people who don't enjoy football feel the need to shove it down our throats? Just don't watch it if you don't like it. It's once every four years, just let us have our time."

I say once again, Fuck Off. Seriously, people who don't like Football shove the fact down peoples throats? Really? We live in a country where you are, especially if you're male, considered somehow sub-normal if you don't like Football. When I was a trainee at my old place of work I was ordered to fake an interest in Football because neither the staff nor the regular customers would accept me if I didn't. I didn't and they did. After about 5 years. And it never went away, but rather became a running joke among them.

I would never dream of walking up to a stranger and announcing that "I did not watch the game last night because all fotball is shit". Care to hazard a guess how many times strangers have come up to me and started talking about a match? How often do you think the phrase "I don't really follow it mate", a phrase that hardly shoves my loathing of the game in their faces, has been enough to end the conversation?Never. Because people simply can't accept the fact that you aren't interested in watching a bunch of blokes you don't know kick a pigs bladder around a patch of grass for 90mins.

And, "let us have our time". Jesus. Because of course, outside the 4 yearly World Cup the poor deprived footy fans have absolutely nothing to watch have they? No, they are sitting in a dark cloud of depression, shaking with the agony of withdrawal as they stare at the calender, willing the endless days to pass so that they might once again eat their fill of footbally goodness in 4 years time. I mean, it's not as if there is an annual League tournament, FA Cup, European Cup and various International friendlies. Or even various foriegn League tournaments that are covered across Lord knows how many channels. Oh, whats that you say?

On second thoughts...

2010-05-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

I've decided that all that telly stuff I talked about last night deserves a dedicated home, rather than being lumped in here with my self pitying rubbish. So was born The Impossible Quest.

This place will be reserved for my occasional whinges.

So check out the other one. Or don't. It's up to you.

A POINT AT LAST

2010-05-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I decided that this blog needed a point. I weighed up the many and varied subjects upon which I am a noted authority. I came up blank.

Cut to now, many moons later and a decision has been reached.I have for quite some many years been engaged in a pointless, doomed to failure quest. One which has seen me endure countless hours of mind numbing tedium and toe curling embarrassment, but also many moments of teary eyed emotion, floor rolling laughter, and edge of seat tension. Yes, I have vowed to watch every episode ever made, of every television show ever made, in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres.

It's hard, especially since the miracle that is Sky+ has been stripped away from me for quite some time now and there is no telling when I shall have it back, but I have persevered.

Don't get me wrong. The sci-fi genre is not my only TV love. I also have a similar completist mentality in regards to American Prime Time Soaps, Cop/Doc Shows, and Sitcoms. Sci-fi comes first though, and if it comes down to a choice it will always come out on top.

So I shall post on here, at no particular time, on no particular day, about whatever random progress I've made on the quest. Some of the shows will be current household names, others will be more obscure but hopefully I can be half way interesting about nearly all of them. Even the shit ones.

Of course, there will also still be occasional posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with TV, and are just me whining about something no-one cares about.

A warning. There will be no screen grabs on this blog. There will be no embedded video clips. There will be no bright shiny colours at all. There will simply be big reams of text. Sorry, but there is a very big, very important technical reason for this. I haven't the foggiest clue how to do any of that stuff. At some point down the line, that may change but knowing my technical capabilities the way I do I wouldn't hold my breath.

Inane Witterings of the Rich and Famous

2010-04-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I have succumbed once more to the lure of the fad. To add to the myspace page I haven't been on since the night I set it up, the facebook page I've been on once since I set it up and this blog which I've posted on all of half a dozen times since I set it up, I now have Twitter.

Yay.

Am actually using it though, at least so far. Fun to point and laugh at the inane witterings of the celebrities I'm following. Picked a few at random and my God do they lead dull lives. Almost as dull as mine. Either that or they're messing with us plebs for their own amusement and are 'tweeting' (can't believe I actually typed that word, ugh) about parking tickets and hair dressing appointments while they're actually wrapped around each other in wild drug fueled orgies.

Yeah, thats probably it.

Whats this blog about?

2009-09-12T18:18:00.001-07:00

So I've decided this blog needs some kind of theme. Coming on here every few weeks to type some variation of "nowts happened, my lifes boring" is getting, well, boring.
I toyed with the idea of some kind of review system whereby I'd give my views on tv shows or comics or books or whatever but I thought "nah" cos everyone and his dog does that.
So I'm not sure what it's gonna be. I've got a few ideas and I'm not posting again until I've picked one.
Well, thats it for tonight. So long for however long.

Dull Dull Dull

2009-09-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a month since my last post and still my life has not gotten any less dull. So I'm sitting here thinking random thoughts about semi naked celebrities and pizza (don't ask) when I'm hit with it. It's my own fault. "Fucking do something with your life and stop moaning about it you loser."

This lasts all of about 20 seconds until I realise that someones posted on the forum I'm constantly logged on to. Oooh, must see.

God my life is dull.

Near Death Experience

2009-08-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

So I'm thinking to myself "You've started the Bloody thing, you've gotta put something on there, it looks pathetic" but having no clue what cos I lead such a fucking dull life, when it occurs to me that I could talk about my near death experience of a few days ago.

I'm walking home from the shop right, with a carrier bag in one hand and a pizza in the other when I come to the junction of death. This junctio, Christ, you've seen nowt like it.How it's never been on BRITAINS DEADLIEST ROADS or some other pile of shite of that ilk that ITV pass off as television these days I'll never know. It kind of tapers to a point where two roads converge but it's fed by 2 other side roads and the footpath kind of narrows down to nothing 10ft before the corner so you're essentially forced to walk across 4 lanes with cars coming from all sides.

Anyway, I'm lucky enough to get there at the same time time as a couple of cars that actualy treat it like a junction and not some training course for their F1 dreams and so they actually slow to a stop. The second car is actually driven by the girl who served me in the pizza shop 5 mins previously. A smile and a nod and a wave and she's gesturing me across in front of her. Now what happened next was totally my own fault. I was so engrossed in giving her a nod of thanks and moving quickly to get out of her way sooner that I never thought to check for traffic coming the other way. Schoolboy error, totally my fault, no-one to blame but myself. Came within inches of being splatted. Only a very graceful (though I say so myself) little hop and spin saved me from oblivion. And kept my pizza level as well, for good measure.

Now the guy in the car had stopped and he had his windows down so I thought fairs fair I'll apologise. Wish I'd not bothered now. Hand gestures and cursing and snarled threats of violence were the response to my " sorry mate, my fault".

Now, as I say,I was in the wrong. I apologised. I thought that would be the end of it. When it wasn't I saw a little red. and gave as good as I got in the old cursing stakes. Normally I'm a craven fucking coward so I suppose the adrenaline must have kicked in. Never acted with a spine before, hope it doesn't become a habit.

So there you have it. My NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE in which I almost talked myself into being kicked to Death by a road rage psycho.

Pizza tasted lovely when I got home.

What the hell do you put in these things?

2009-08-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

So, it's the middle of the night, I'm bored, and I spot a link on a website I frequent that apparently takes you to a place to set up a blog. It's free and it's easy. The "free" appeals to the newly unemployed dole scrounger in me and the "easy" appeals to the barely computer literate part of me that isn't even entirely sure that it knows what a blog is, exactly. What the hell, I think, it'll kill 5 minutes.

After a partcularly tricky patch were the password I use for everything can't be used for this and then another tense moment of introspection when I actually have to name the bloody thing, I'm in. I have a blog.

Which brings me back to my initial problem of not knowing precisely what a blog is. What do I do now? There's a big white square, waiting for me to fill it with something. Anything. And I've got nothing to say. The few blogs I've looked at in the past have had a point, a theme, a reason to exist. They've been by artists and writers and people critiquing artists and writers. I'm none of those things (except in my wildest fantasies where I'm an award winning tv/comic scriptwriter) so what do I type?

Waffle, as it turns out.

Well, there you have it. My very first post on my very own blog. Whoda thunk it? Might be back tomorrow, might not. See ya