Christmas

My girls have been put to bed and the house is silent, warm and peaceful. So this feels like a good time to resume my blog and finish off the BNJ before the Christmas whisky buy-in. I’m reduced to a couple of half bottles and a few dregs that demand consumption before I restock my whisky larder for the big day.
This year will be a milestone Christmas because for the first time in my life I won’t be spending it around my mums. They’ll be an empty chair in the house I grew up in and I’ll be running around my own, cooking Christmas dinner. I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to Christmas morning around the tree with the Girlf and the kids, watching them open their presents. I’m looking forward to their excitement. Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas without kids. For the last few years I’ve opened my gifts after finishing work. I’ve ripped open my meager presents at five in the morning before heading home to sleep off the nights stresses.
This year I’ll be woken up by children, probably far too early, rather than falling out of bed in my own time to head into town for lunch. This year I’ll be dad. I’ll be carving.
This particular Noel will be celebratory. The Girlf is finally a published author. The Christmas Fae has made it into a romantic festive anthology and at last she’ll be getting paid for her art. She’s beside herself with glee. Like a child she has spent the last few days skipping around the house in haze of joyful smugness. I take a little credit for this myself as I was the one who persuaded her to give romantic fiction a go. The young adult stuff was going nowhere and if she's honest she’d admit her self she never built up much momentum on any of her projects.
The banister outside the upstairs bathroom is waist high with Mills and Boons. She devours them in one sitting so my man logic surmised that maybe this was her true calling. She relented and now she is published… in e book format. I’m very happy for her but regretfully I’m unlikely to see a percentage. She’ll just support me when she’s a zillionaire.

The tree is supported by a healthy pile of presents. I’m very impressed by how quickly I’ve done all my shopping! God bless Amazon. Seriously though, aside for a few bits and bobs I’m done. Here we are in the first week of December and I’ve only got a couple of things left to buy. Being in a relationship feminizes you. You get all your Christmas shopping done early, you cook more, you wash up more often and you sleep in a very gay bed. Every night I crawl under a flowery duvet.
The mighty do indeed eventually fall. You start out full of testosterone answering to no one, you are master of your own destiny. Then before you know it you’re falling asleep in front of property shows in your dad chair next to a pink wall. You start to get that resigned look in your eyes, broken, guilted into being reasonable and bearing other peoples feelings in mind. The inner caveman growls his indignation.

However I’m still master of my own house. After all, if it weren’t for me they’d starve to death. How many months of crisps and pot noodles could they live on before all their teeth fell out and lethargy prevented them from even getting out of bed? Not many I think. In this house the kitchen is a man’s domain. Meals are cooked from scratch and scoffed down thankfully. Hot and tasty meals cooked properly. The Girlf observes this alchemy with a jealous eye. I conjure magic she can only dream of wielding. My bolognaise is a steaming cauldron of flavors who’s origins she can’t fathom. They’re called herbs sweetheart.
And after they have eaten their fill of my creations they have to sit down with me and watch the football. Yes, we have Sky Sports and how she regrets getting it now. Tottenham are making head way in the champions’ league and there’s nothing she can do about it. O, what’s that you say? Knock out stages, top of our group? That’ll be another couple of Tuesdays booked then. Make yourselves comfortable girls, there’s a match on.

Life is indeed good. I have my girls, I have my whisky, I have the football and if it all gets too much, if the estrogen levels rise intolerably, then I have my gym to retreat to, a sparse man-room of cast iron and bare walls. Junk piled in every corner and coated in a fine layer of dust. It has all the charm of a garage and still possesses that tell tale echo that defines a room that could never be described as cozy.

Man-room.

X Factor

When you type Cher into predictive text your phone gives you the word AIDS. I type in the name of an anorexic, slightly talented, faux gangster, badly dressed, teenage X factor finalist and I get an acronym for a virulent, deadly, immune system destroying virus. Is this just a spooky coincidence or does it run deeper?
After all, both Cher and AIDS are known for fucking over Africans. Things like this give me pause to ponder, as does X factor as a phenomenon.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve said a lot of nasty things about Cher, uncalled for and cruel things. However, if I’m honest Cher and I have a lot in common. Every Sunday she’s as shocked as me that she’s still in the competition.
I don’t know what it is about her that I hate the most. It could be the stupid clothes, the ludicrous eyebrows or just the fact that she only has a mediocre voice yet wants to be a grimy gangsta rapper when actually she still lives at home with her mum and dad and isn’t even badass enough to finish her dinner. It could one or all of these things but what really winds me up is her ‘attitude’.
Cheryl sees attitude, I see a surly teenager who would probably throw you the same pout if you told her to tidy her room. What really irks is this girl personifies the X factor ‘dream’, the dream of fame and riches and adulation that would be all the more attainable if she could sing better.
All of this year’s finalists are afflicted with the same starry eyed malaise. When they were kids, and they all pretty much said this word for word on Saturday, they wanted to be the centre of attention and subsequently found, when they sang, they were the centre of attention.
Few of them have made the leap, that there is a world of difference between a five year old being applauded by friends and family for singing along badly to a CD and a professional performer earning a living off the patronage of total strangers. Yes, they may indeed have a dream, yet whether or not this dream can be realised in the cold, cut throat world of the music industry is another matter completely.
Diana Vickers is finding this out now as she’s being taken to court by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers having plagiarised one of their best known songs.
Storm Lee is the latest to have his dream ripped out from under him. Here we have a thirty eight year old man with no talent of which to speak of, who has devoted his whole life to music and gotten nowhere. He changed his name to Storm, that didn’t work. He dyed his hair bright red for the show but for some unfathomable reason this didn’t save him. Despite all these effort he was ultimately undermined by his lack of talent. But surely as a man in his late thirties, having sung all his life, surely he must have heard a recording of his own voice. Surely a friend, a mate, would have taken him aside and told him that wasn’t really that good. No doubt this has probably happened in Storms ‘career’ and no doubt he ignored it because it clashed with the dream.
Diva Fever were equally delusional. They put their exit down to a poor choice of song. Not to their inability to sing it. Jimi Hendrix took the Star Spangled Banner and, at six o’clock on a Woodstock morning, he wrangled it into America’s musical and cultural history. With the crowbar of talent and inspiration, in front of a few thousand fucked up and sleep deprived hippies he took a dry, patriotic, ‘square’ piece of music and spun it on its head. So much so the event is still remembered and talked about today. FORTY ONE YEARS LATER.
By comparison we have already forgotten FYD. Our discretion said no.
X factor is generally a girl thing. Women are gentler and considerably more compassionate than men so therefore a little more inclined to indulge someone’s poor career choice for fear of upsetting them. But time and time again I can see that X factor is warping their minds. The Girlf, who is normally quite down to earth and straight forward, sat me down today and explained to me it was irrelevant that One Direction couldn’t harmonise because little girls like little boys and were voting for them in droves. My response was men like tits so if grown men were ringing and voting for the girls purely on the size of their breasts would that be equally valid. I got told to shut up.
My point was that a lot of support for the acts is based on their fuckabilty. Aiden seems to be the shows heartthrob even though when he sings he looks like a psycho horse with Jedward's hair. For some reason when someone appears on telly people find them more attractive than they actually are. Aiden looks like a horse, Katie looks like a man, and Matt looks like a painter and decorator, which is fine because he is a painter and decorator. Cher looks a startled Punch and Judy puppet.
One Direction look like they shouldn’t be out so late yet I’ve heard women comment on how cute they are. They are children and grown women are counting the days until they look like less of a freak when the say they fancy them.

The depressing and inevitable fact is one of these young, talent free fucks, will win it. Rebecca’s good but it’ll depend on how much of a fan base she can build up. Black singers don’t normally do too well. John’s alright but Paije is a one trick pony.
The real star, the real talent is Mary whose voice is outstanding, but Mary is fifty and fat. I would love it but I’d be surprised if she got into the finally three.
What would be great, just for my amusement, would be Wagner going all the way. He can’t sing to save his life but he’s clearly insane. He’s a fifty six year old, former lion tamer, who swears at the crew in Portuguese when they try and tell him anything.

What isn’t there to love?

Bolognaise and jelly

There isn’t any milk. There never is unless I buy it so I’m reduced to supping black Nescafe. Nescafe is bad enough as it is, black it is liquidated sludge. However, it’s still coffee.
Despite this I am chilling snugly in the robe the Girlf bought me last week. Apparently it makes me look like a roman emperor. It should be an imperial purple but alas it is only a navy blue. You can’t have it all.
The recycling is sorted for tomorrow’s collection. I now recycle everything. I’m not sure they want everything I put out but that’s at their look-out. I’m new to this and the more I can keep out of the actual dustbin the better. We’ve already missed two collections and it’s mounting up. Pretty much everything that can go into the recycling does, it saves a lot of bin space.
I intend to have the laziest of days today. The plan, after a quick sojourn into town, was to have the Girlf cook for me. I was looking forward to basking in her derision while I ate because this is Tuesday and I always cook on Tuesday. Some how she’s managed to wiggle out of it. Passing the shop and paying a visit on my mum, she’s managed to acquire some bolognaise. That’s now three times this week my mum has fed us. Everyone in the house tells me, repeatedly, that mum is a far superior cook to me. Mum knows this and rings us almost daily to offer food. The Girlf rarely refuses.
Her super fast metabolism requires fuelling regularly so where as I can last out until late afternoon before I start eating the Girlf has to be replenished at short intervals. This she puts down to her super massive, calorie hungry, brain. To this end she’s been cooking cupcakes all weekend. Work is hard at the moment and she needs them to keep her cognitive powers firing on all cylinders. I suspect Einstein ran on icing sugar as well.
I can wait it out until this evening. The sludgy coffee will tie me over; I have deliveries to make in town. Mother expects another consignment of cake and Bone has been promised some for his birthday. It’s his thirty ninth so I feel this will be a quiet one. I’m pretty sure he’s ignoring it as much as he can.
I’d wanted to take him out for jelly wrestling tonight but he’s declined. I don’t think it’s his scene, but to be fair I’m quite certain it isn’t anyone’s scene. I can’t remember once thinking what Weston really needs is a good jelly wrestling night. Rumour has it that tonight they’re experimenting with spaghetti but this would probably be a mistake. You don’t want to mess with a classic formula. I’m told the last one was won by a butch, rugby playing, lesbian. It’s not known whether-or-not she’ll be defending her title.

Theatre

I haven’t set foot in a theatre for eight years. It’s been a decade since I’ve entered the Blakehay. It’s different, everything looks freshly painted, walls are missing and there are smart new toilets that look like the cellophane has just been removed.
The auditorium hasn’t changed. It is still a modern amphitheatre. A sweep of curved seating steeply arcing up from the small, rubber laid, stage. I’m amazed how natural this feels. How natural it is for me to enter this space. Once, this was my life. All encompassing, all consuming, yet it’s been a very long time since I’ve been in such places and honestly speaking, I never thought I’d ever return.
I am introduced warmly, Babs exaggerates my accomplishments and I smile bashfully. The lights are appropriately dim for tonight’s rehearsal. Actors, amateur and professional, like to hide in the shadows before the work is complete. To much light will destroy the magic. The illuminated stage is a safe cocoon in which to create, but here I am, an interloper. They eye me up suspiciously.
Non-professional theatre is a strange beast. It is the best and the worst of the art. The amateur is free from all the constraints of the professional. They soldier through confidently when nerves would destroy those being paid for their work. The bar is safely low therefore they can soar high above it. Mistakes are tolerated allowing then to explore unchartered territory.
Tonight the talent on show is generally good. They can act which normally is a good start. I remind myself that I am a guest. I am not here to judge or even get involved. I am merely here to observe, to get a feel for the lay of the land should I get a chance to join the group.
I curie a little favour by helping to move some props. I have been invited into this secret little group so the least I can do is flex some muscles and show some willing, at the very least this gives me a chance to say hello to a few of the cast.
They go on stage in two weeks, I can sense the nervous tension, scripts are still held tightly for security. They are behind schedule. They are cutting it fine. I would want them off the book by now. I would want them throwing the words at each other with abandon, finding the rhythm, not delivering their performances into their laps.
Despite this there are flashes of quality. They have ability but are hampered by their lack of discipline. Every time they look at their words they lose a bit of energy. The scene drags and meaning is lost from poor sight reading.
At its core all acting is is conversation. Crack that and you are eighty percent there. If the audience believes you are talking to each other all that is left is garnish and flourish. When the lines are learnt and the conversation flows everything else, character, pace, the rhythm, all these things fall into place.
But this is amateur theatre and on stage they are trying to run before they can walk. The directors are too concerned with blocking. Worrying where the actors have to stand, premature indeed when they still have scripts in their hands. I, myself, am sat on mine. I bite my lip. At this stage they should be still playing with the words, tasting them in their mouths rather than thinking when to get up, when to sit down, when to stir their tea or take a sip. With book in hand they should be experimenting not adding finishing touches.
I am very aware that I am not directing. I am not involved. I am only a guest but eventually I crack and have to speak. I am not rude, I don’t push my point but I inquire if this or that might work, perhaps if they tried it a different way. I, personally, would like more intimacy and maybe a little less movement. Possibly. Maybe? Don’t you think?
My thoughts are taken graciously and even enthusiastically so I cut myself short, not wanting to tread on toes or hurt feelings. I make a joke and get a laugh; hopefully I haven’t offended anyone too much.
The director, the control freak in me wants to get up and snatch the script. He wants to start the scene again and play it totally differently. He wants to sit the actors down and get them to read, to speak, to actually speak the words to each other. He wants to take them back to the very start and find meaning.
The actor inside wants to take on the male part. Inject it with lava. He wants to erupt with volcanic passion and give the scene the energy, the lust it requires. But this is not my scene, this is not my rehearsal, this is not my night so I let my frustration dissipate.
It has been many, many years. Too many years. The embers of that life glow somewhere deep inside me. The energy, the passion, the flutter of excitement in my belly is still there. I thank them for their hospitality and skulk into the night.

Sicky

I’ve retreated to the bedroom. I’ve been ill all day and even though I’ve scarcely been out of bed for two hours, here I am again, hiding from the family. The Relatives are down for the Youngest’s birthday and the house is to girly and loud for my tender constitution tonight.
I feel rough. I woke up with a massive temperature. The Girlf assured me she could actually feel the heat emanating from me from all the way across the bed. The night had been fitful and restless, I must have been up half a dozen times and even though I was fucked this morning I still got up when she got up.
Now I’m regretting this, I should have blocked out the world and gone straight back to sleep but no that would have been to easy. Instead I got online and settled down to a day of pampering which although promised wasn’t forthcoming. Neither was my Night Nurse. Birthday parties have taken precedence over my comfort and the Girlf placed more importance on buying the essentials for her three tiered chocolate cake than buying me the medicine I needed.
Thus goes my first bank holiday off for over a decade. My last one was in May ’97. I don’t often pull sickies, in-fact if my memory serves me correctly I’ve managed to incorporate my last two bouts of flu into my days off. I’m considerate like that.
There was no getting past this though today, I am one big ache, although in fairness to me I was diligent enough to pump out a forty hour weekend before I was struck down. I think I’ve earned a day in bed.
The Girlf is delirious to have me for three days this week. She’s on leave at the moment so she’s got me all day tomorrow and Thursday. She’s very, very, very happy. Her love for me is so intense that most nights, whilst I’m working, she bombards me with love texts. Pledging herself to me and describing the agony she feels from the separation. It is very sweet.
She’s also very turned on by my pathetic weakness. I can’t fight off her advances, I don’t have the energy and she’s taking delight in being able to force her self on me. Normally I’m a whirling tornado of testosterone, a sexual tyrannosaur and much as she enjoys my dominant, relentless, don’t-take-no-for-an-answer nature I think she’s relishing the role reversal. The machine is having an off day and she’s filling the vacuum with gusto.
I must get plenty of sleep tonight, more relatives are scheduled to descend tomorrow and I’m told I’m cooking. Also tomorrow is the day of the BIRTHDAY PARTY. All in all there will be thirty people under our roof and the biggest single demographic will be TEN YEAR OLD GIRLS. Already on the ‘threat’ list she has a Tweeny disco organised either proceeded or followed by a make-over session run by the Eldest and her mate.
I can see the carnage now, at some point I will be pebble dashed with either nail polish or glitter or both. Thankfully the threat to paint the gym pink for the aforementioned disco hasn’t been carried out. The Girlf wasn’t winding me up over it, in the end she was hindered by her extreme laziness and poor time management. I knew she wouldn’t do it but it was one of those keep your mouth shut and watch it play out situations. I love being right.
I suppose I’ve been ignorant enough and best get downstairs and be sociable. This is a rare visit and I am being naughty. I debating a whisky, purely for medicinal reasons you understand. The Night Nurse never materialised so I’m sure I can justify it.

New world order

The new dustbins have arrived. Boring suburbia has finally succumbed to the new waste management regime. The party is well and truly over. Where there were piles of black bags there are now wheelie bins and food waste tubs. The world of chaotic abandon that we knew and loved has died and has been replaced with cold order. Our masters have spoken and now we have to separate all our rubbish and limit what we discard.
I can no longer waste food. The finite dimensions of the brown bin are my weekly allocation and that’s it. Guests will leave my dinner parties hungry because I have to serve up conservative portions out of fear of ramming the bin. I am giving serious consideration to buying a pig.
When I was kid I was an anti-establishment eco warrior but now the hippy pricks I went to college with ARE the establishment and I take a perverse delight in throwing tin cans into land fill and feel the need to burn tyres in the back garden.
The wheelie bin is tiny. At a push, with discipline we could probably cram a week’s rubbish into it but they’re not going to collect it every week. They’re going to collect it ever two weeks. We are fucked. We are well and truly fucked.
Ever so slowly Big Brother has crept up behind us in the shower and bent us over. He’s distracted us with pictures of polar bears and glaciers, he’s fed our guilt. We were so busy cooing over Knut he managed to sneak all those green bins onto us and now I’m not allowed to produce any by-products!
This is the thin end of the wedge my friends. It will be your water next. You’ll be rationed to limit the hydrocarbons needed to clean it. We’ll live in a world where we’re only allowed three hours of electricity a day and you can forget gas.
How dare we progress as a species! How dare we get used to the lives of relative comfort that our forbears died for. How dare we have children and use plastic bags to carry our food back from the hunt. Bad, bad mankind.
What we have here, my brethren, is another system of control. The planet will die if you don’t conform, you should be shamefaced, look at the floor. What you have to understand is that everything is your fault. Landfill, that will be your fault for spending your whole life eating a couple of times a day you selfish bastard. Shit summer? What do you expect with all your ‘going places’ in machines they let you buy or ride in?
They built you a road and you only went and used it didn’t you? God, you’re pathetic.
Well you can forget all that now. A couple hundred litres of rubbish a month is all you’re allowed. Get used to it, adapt to the new order or you will be punished. Make no mistake, you are being watched, your consumption is being monitored. Task forces are being employed and statutes implemented to keep you in line. You thought you were a good person but you’re not, you’re wasteful and ignorant and selfish and stupid and you have to learn the error of your ways or the polar bear dies and you won’t like that will you because they’re cute.
The rats will be ok though. They love it. As do the foxes. Obviously they’ll probably attack your children more now because they can’t get into your wheelie bin to feed and your offspring will look mighty tasty and tender but the cute mammals are fucked.
The fly’s and the weevils and all the those creepy crawlies that actually make up the majority of the biomass of the planet aren’t doing to badly either but you wait and see, it’s those niche species, those evolutionary dead ends that will pay for your behaviour.
We have arrived too late. We’ve come through the door full of optimism and there’s nothing left in the drinks cabinet but half a bottle of Midori that no one wants. Everyone that was going to put out has already put out and the lounge smells of vomit. We’re just in time to help clear up and go on the rubbish run. We’re the designated driver having to scour the streets for public bins to dump the tinnies in.

Whisky fuelled rant

It’s three in the morning and I am in the mood for a whisky fuelled free flow of thought. Perhaps I should apologies in advance for my drunken ramblings but I won’t because a) I’m not that drunk and b) it’s my blog and I can write what ever I like.
The Girlf slumbers upstairs, annoyed by my abandonment of her tonight, it vexes her when occasionally life takes precedence over her. My honeyed words fall on deaf ears and, disgruntled, she hurumphs me as I try to cajole and soothe.
Well, sleep my sweet your man had other commitments and duties and your needs are limitless and will have to wait for my attention.
For the last two days I have been reeling from a line I heard at the end of a very good film. A throw away line, cheesy and used for effect but for some reason it ignited something in me. A little spark in the centre of my chest; it energised that kernel of my being. Occasionally you are reminded of the child in you, the dreamer, the visionary you once thought you were.
The day to day drudgery can make you forget. We embrace our boredom and call it contentment. We plod along stupefied and accept it as reality. It is so widespread and ordinary we take solace in it.
Every day I wash up. It’s part of my routine, one of my household chores. On no day do I sod the washing up, jump on a plane and end up in Goa. This would not be part of my routine; this would be out of the ordinary. In fact this would be so out of character for me that the thought to drop my sponge and end up on the other side of the world never crosses my mind.
It could however be possible, I could tear off my rubber gloves and find myself anywhere on the planet within the day. The fire in my chest would allow it. The fire inside me would relish it. That urge, the child’s urge wants to fly to distant stars. It wants to traverse the universe and experience the whole of its majesty.
The enormity of creation overwhelms me; my nothingness compared to all that is crushes my ego and dissipates the self. In my sphere of thought and feeling I am God. I am the only sentience that I’m totally sure of. After all, you could all very well be figments of my imagination.
‘No, no’ you shout, ‘we are all as real as you. Don’t be stupid.’
Your protestations are nought, because, of course, you would say that wouldn’t you? You can’t let me believe that reality is merely here for my convenience. That knowledge would unleash megalomania never before seen, the universe my plaything? No man could be entrusted with such a thought.
Here lies man’s reality. The vastness of everything hems us into our little corner of existence. It would take us tens of thousands of years to travel to the nearest stars, let alone the nearest galaxies. We are trapped in our little corner of space and it is a very little corner relatively speaking.
Confronted with these magnitudes we are prisoners stuck in our cell. We can see through the bars but we can never leave. Trapped by distances scarcely comprehendible, distances that reduce our planet to nothing more than an atom in space. So that in the next hundred years, long after all of us are dead, perhaps people may set foot on Mars, maybe orbit Jupiter, perhaps surf through Saturn’s rings yet these dreams, these aims are those of children, trapped in their parents homes dreaming of the day that they can walk the streets beyond the window alone and un-accompanied. Like the child these dreams are the pinnacle of what we hope to achieve, yet they are small fores into the vastness of space. The child is sent to the shops for milk, humanity lands a manned space craft on Mars.
The whisky as worked its way through my system. I am sober and tired. I yearn for the warmth of my woman’s flesh and the peace of sleep. The comfort of oblivion is calling for the sun will be rising soon and its eight minute old light will keep me awake as it triggers primordial evolutionary responses in my system.
For I am a system, a result of billions of years of false starts and dead ends, billions of years of winding evolution that has resulted in whisky and keyboards, contemplation and need. Eons that have given us love and confusion, wonder and frustration.
Right now I am at the zenith of creation, as you are reading this. All that is has led to this point. You are holding the now in your hands.

Weights, telly and porn

My shoulder’s fucked. Left to my own devises last weekend I think I over capitalised on the opportunity to lift weights. This morning I woke up at seven o’clock ‘fuck, fuck, fucking’. It’s one of those movement pains. Doesn’t bother me unless I move my arm into certain positions then I’m rewarded with a sharp, wincing shock. Consequently I’ve been resting it since Monday.
Living on pain-killers is no way to live and to be honest after six months on it I deserve a break. It’s a nice opportunity to take stock. Since January I’ve increased my bench press by over thirty five percent and my arms by fifty percent but to be fair after half a year day in day out it does get boring.
This gives me an opportunity to catch up on some well needed cardio. I used to be very fit but that has all gone by the wayside of late, opting for mass as opposed to speed and endurance. I’m not going to be getting all that iron up for a while so I’ve got no excuse but to concentrate on movement, back to the good old days, dust off some of those old skills.
Technically I’m still a black belt so yesterday I found a boxing timer on-line and shook off the cobwebs. I’m happy to report I didn’t do to badly. Ten three minute rounds of kicking and punching without to much difficulty or strain, albeit with a lot of sweat.
The way I see it is I can’t not do anything. I have to do something, weighing in at thirteen stone. I can’t allow the middle-age slide to begin. My kicks weren’t bad at all once I’d warmed up. I’m chuffed considering I haven’t done any stretches for 4 years. Surprisingly, today my legs are fine, I expected them to be stiff and aching but no, they’re good. It’s nice to have all those old skills manifesting after such a long break. I’m going to have another crack today and then we’ll see exactly how fit I am.


My Sky’s been cut off. The Girlf has never been good at paying bills but it would seem this one was wilfully neglected. She’s apposed to paying seventy quid a month for something she doesn’t watch. I’m steaming, the season starts in two weeks and I haven’t got Sky sports. I’m debating whether or not to withdraw sexual favours.
We still have all the terrestrials and all the radio stations which I suppose is something. Currently I’m listening to NME radio. It appears someone has plagiarised my youth and is broadcasting it. Green Day, however, have robbed a Stone Roses drum intro so three times over the last two days I thought I was going to get Fools Gold but didn’t. The digital age has allowed radio to turn into a mix-tape. I listened to it for three hours and didn’t hear a human voice once, all wall to wall music. It’s de-constructed to the max and really it makes perfect sense. When you want to listen to music you want to listen to music, all the phone ins and competitions grate.
There are quite a few channels that haven’t been cut-off. I do have all the God channels, a lot of black channels and several paranormal channels. This would be ideal if I was religious, African and stupid. I’ve still got movies4men which is the worst movie channel in existence. It should be called movies-str8-to-video. It’s awful, in the early hours it goes all erotic, or not as the case would seem. Soft core, girly bollocks which I can’t believe has any kind of audience in an XXX internet era. There’s nothing arousing about an eighties mullet.
The internet has led us into a debauched age of pornography and out the other side. I have a severe case of porn apathy. There is far too much choice, it’s gotten completely boring. I come from a world where you could live on a flicker-y, black and white VHS for a couple of years, now I’ve got whatever I want at a click. Subsequently I don’t particularly want any of it. You get to the point where you’re so numb to it you’re making judgements on the camera angles or the set. More than once I’ve found myself ignoring the writhing mass of human flesh and admiring the decor. Those houses are lovely, Californian sun streaming over the pool, through the ceiling high widows and on to the marble laid floor. I don’t care what’s going on the white leather sofa.


There’re some filth bags out there with spectacular homes.

Women and football

I have the house to myself this weekend. The Girlf and the Eldest are off on a Cheer jaunt. The Eldest has been practicing her solo for weeks. I’ve seen it so many times I can do the routine myself.
The Girlf hates these Cheer meets. They bore the hell out of her and cost several hundred pounds. Normally she takes half a dozen books to help her get through the fourteen hour days. For this one she has included a compilation of Einstein’s papers.
This is clearly a distancing exercise, a way of separating her self from the rest of the grinning cheer-mums. I call her up on this self riotous, smugness but she hotly denies all.
Already I’m enjoying the tranquillity. Although I’ve only been up for an hour the kitchen is already gleaming. This weekend is a great opportunity for a man clean. The house is best described by the Latin term shit-hole.
The Girlf has been down with a virus all week and every room is strewn with cake crumbs and empty crisp packets. She’s spent the last few days moaning and crying in her death bed, between mouthfuls obviously.
Things got serious on Thursday when her chest began to hurt. She has NHS Direct on speed-dial as it is less effort than getting down to her G.P. Fully expecting to be told it was no-more than a chest infection she was shocked when the health assistant informed her his computer was prompting him to call an ambulance. Funnily, all her symptoms were pointing towards a heart-attack.
Four bloody hours in A and E. She had everything, three types of blood test, scans and x-rays. There’s nothing like a hypochondriac faced with the possibility of there actually being something seriously wrong with them. She spent all the time telling the doctors and nurses she was fine. They just got on with the procedures and left her to wait for the results with a multi-valved tube hanging out of a vein in her hand.
Turns out it was a cartilage inflammation, pain killers and rest. The German doctor thought normal oral pain killers wouldn’t be strong enough and was very insistent on pushing the suppositories on her. A bit too insistent I thought. She said no several times before he stopped trying to persuade her to allow him to shove medication up her arse. All the time the nurse had a ‘not again’ expression on her face and I noted he hadn’t offered them to the rough looking bloke with half a finger on the other side of the room.
If you ever have to go to A and E it’s best to avoid late afternoon. It seems to be the school rush. When we got in at four there were half a dozen little boys in front of us hopping around on one leg. Things calm down about eight then I suppose they get busy again toward mid-night when the piss-head rush starts. With hine-sight we really should have taken the ambulance. We would have got seen a lot quicker.
All alone on a Saturday afternoon and the football season hasn’t started. I’m loving the tranquillity yet I can’t help but think if this was next month the day would be perfect. I could ramp up the radio and peacefully enjoy a match without any distractions. The only time a managed it last season was when she spent a Saturday afternoon asleep, hung-over.
The heady rumour mill of transfers has already started. The Fabregas debacle continues. I thought he looked rather fetching in that Barca top that was ‘forced upon’ him last week. You could almost feel the Gooner’s steaming all over the country, adding to the hot weather. Must be horrible when your captain wants to desert you, eh? Cunts.
It’s pleasing to see that Rooney has had a thirty thousand pound a week pay rise! Good for Rooney, he earned every penny of that in South Africa. Word on the grape vine is that he didn’t perform because he was missing his kid. It’s coming to something when ugly, aggressive pikey tinkers are acting like fags. Try winning a World cup Wayne, give your kid something to be proud of, how about that? Surely that would be better in the long run than pining over missed nappy changes. Cunts.
It’s controversial but I’m starting to feel sorry for Ashley Cole. I’m not surprised he wants to get out of the country. One of his old school reports was in the paper the other day. The gist of the article was ‘look, he was a wanker then as-well’.
The poor bastard gets shit for getting laid now and he’s single! Is it me or did Cheryl move on a little too quickly for a heart broken woman. She was ‘being comforted’ by her new bloke within a week. No over lap then Chez, mmmm?
I can’t be too hard on her I suppose. We should be glad she didn’t do a load of coke and start on a black woman in a toilet again.

Cunts.

Raoul Moat

Finally I sit down to write after far too long of a sabbatical. It’s been over a month and plenty has happened in the interim. I have worked many hours, wedding plans have changed, I’ve buried an uncle and there has been an entire World Cup. So it is with a little trepidation that I sit back down at this keyboard to write, after all I am slightly out of practice.
Upstairs the Girlf sleeps off her virus which the morning will reveal to be either imaginary or substantial and that revelation will dictate my day. Therefore it is at this late hour, sweaty and tired from work, that I shall let my mind and fingers flow and get back into the swing of things.
Raoul Moat is dead. The soap opera of the last week has reached its inevitable conclusion. Compulsive viewing, compulsive reading, pulling me away from the back pages, away from a dour tournament into a gory tabloid heaven of voyeuristic smut. Joy.
Each new day has brought forth yet another sweetmeat to titillate me. Jealous revenge, written confessions, arrests, kidnappings, accomplices, ex’s. Dirty revelations that have had my fertile imagination working overtime, fleshing out what journalists can’t and won’t say.
Drugs, violence, searches, dead-ends and the most talented footballer of his generation all coming together to intrigue and amuse.
People are stupid.
A strange man with a misspelt name infatuated with a girl young enough to be his daughter, straight from prison, embarks on a rampage. Murderous, he cast himself as a hero. A wronged lover victimised by society and by the police. A down trodden renegade he moralises about his action, justifies them, blames everyone else, glories in the limelight and develops a cult following.
Tragedy becomes farce as he evades capture in an area scarcely bigger than a football pitch. He pops up to steal a tomato or sleep in somebody’s spare room. He brazenly saunters down the main street in a small village and gets away with it and all the time the families of his victims and friends leak stories of domestic abuse and violence. In every picture he looks increasingly deranged and yet he still thwarts the police like some kind of criminal mastermind.
He knows the area like the back of his hand we are told because he’s fished there. The area is tiny so no doubt anyone could know it ‘like the back of there hand’ after a couple of visits.
He discards mobile phones as if he himself is getting bored of the police’s inability to shot him and has to resort to leaving clues. Slowly, slowly a legend is forming. There is a hitless of his perceived enemies. People are in hiding. Facebook groups are being created. We are told that he is a lovely bloke.
Then at the story’s denouement Gazza turns up with a chicken dinner for his best mate Moaty. Gazza’s people are speechless and the police aren’t swayed by that goal against Scotland so Moaty doesn’t get his chicken dinner or a one to one with the great man.
A long winded search turns into long winded negotiations. On his knees with a shotgun to his chin Raoul Moat cry’s that he never knew his dad. Clearly he was fucked from the start. His ‘One’ has abandoned him, all is forfeit and still the police don’t put him out of his misery. ‘Just shoot the cunt’ we scream at the news.
Eventually the poor prick has to suck it up and do it himself. It takes him seven hours to pull the trigger.

Fin.

No. Not Fin, because this whole sorry saga brings to the fore the worst in our society, an abandonment of our natural family ties. All those connections of love, all those bonds that should have held a nutter like Moat in check weren’t there. I’m not just referring to the hackneyed poor me story of his non-present father.
What of Samantha Stobbart’s parents, her mother, who allowed her to take a doorman’s number on a night out when she was only fifteen, a doorman twice her age. What of her stepfather, who was initially against the relationship but was ‘won over’, charmed by this thirty one year old, steroid using bouncer who was fucking his 15 year old daughter. Like we’d been already told, he was a lovely bloke. He didn’t throw 15 year old girls out the clubs he worked in, he fucked them. Both primary carers complicit in all this and what do they do as it becomes apparent that he’s not as charming as they once thought? When he starts to become increasingly controlling and begins to isolate her from her friends and family? What do they do when the bruises start to appear? They emigrate to Tenerife taking her ‘loving’ sister with them. They leave her to her fate; they leave her to deal with choices she made as a child.
Nice family.
What of Raoul Moats own brother? Who had to watch the ‘execution’ live on television? He is reported to be devastated by this. Obviously not devastated enough to get his arse off the sofa and away from the television. Not devestated enough to get to the scene of the stand off and perhaps talk his brother down. Not that devastated after all they hadn’t spoken for nearly twenty years. He of course blames the police, not his psycho brother who blew his own head off.
All these natural connections, all these stock responses haven’t been forth coming during any of this soap opera. Moat never knew his father, so he became an awful father. He was violent and controlling so his women bore him children and everyone involved was left to their fate by the extended families.
Samantha Stobbart apparently still loves him. He took her child hood, he beat her and eventually shot her with her child in the house and yet she still loves him. He murdered her new man, perhaps a relationship she fostered merely to keep Moat away from her, yet she still loves him. Perplexing. Perplexing and depressing.
People are stupid.

Work

I’m six hours into a nineteen hour shift, minus this break, and so far it’s not too bad. The hard part is pulling your weary arse out of bed after five hours sleep. It’s listening to the Girlf gloat from under the duvet informing you that she went to bed at half twelve and has no intention of getting up for hours. It’s knowing that you won’t be able to get back into bed until six the following morning.
Straight into a fortnight of double shifts on a bloody Saturday. Weekends are the worst. Friday, Saturday and Sunday equates to fifty hours behind the counter when you’re double shifting. It’s as close to hundred hour week as you can get without exaggerating too much about your workload.
The Girlf, who’s unlikely to break forty hours any week of the year, has no sympathy. My life choices are my life choices and her inner Tory tuts at me then moans that Saturday afternoon is our rolling around in bed time. Generally we eat up the whole day with gratuitous nudity, so my pain is completely over-shadowed by the denial of her fun. Clearly I’m of no use to her today so all I get is a cursory wave as I crawl out from beneath the duvet and attempt to wake myself up in the shower.
I’m five minutes late and the Pole is already staring out of the window when I get to work. I speak loudly and slowly gesticulating with my hands that it was the taxi’s fault. She’s polite enough to pretend she under stands and gets on with putting my chicken and wedges in while I scoot around turning on gases and filling up the cabinet. It’s eleven thirty. I will be finishing in eighteen and a half hours.
The old man has left me precious little to be getting on with so I spend the first couple of hours cutting sixteen chickens up and tinkering with the menu. Things are going nice and smoothly then the Girlf texts me that she’s now awake and bored. I didn’t expect the sexual frustration to set in this quickly so I invite her down for lunch. She’s never been one to turn down one of my meals so she rolls in an hour later in dirty joggers and an old t-shirt starving. The beauty about having a take away is you can pretty much knock up anything from scratch at a minutes’ notice. I make her a wicked souvla and salad and she goes and ruins it by requesting chips and gravy to go with. I’m on five hours sleep so my distain is vocal.
I’ve learnt from experience that it’s not a wise move to keep her from her gravy so after some token grumbling I get her some. It’s probably close to eighty degrees in the shop but this doesn’t stop her covering her chips with it and demanding cheese. This is the girl that originally wanted something green because she was having a fat day.
Gee is doing his usual sullen, pacing mope so is ill prepared for her exuberant excitement at slumming it. She’s amazed that people can go to work without being required to wear a suit and starts demanding jobs and an apron. I let her cut the cucumber as it’s unlikely that she’ll mess it up and off she goes enthusiastically chopping with me wincing as I can see how close she’s coming to cutting one of her fingers off. Gee asks if she’s ever done any manual work before as we quietly watch her make it a lot harder than it actually is.
The Girlf being the Girlf soon turns this mundane task into world domination. We discuss colour schemes for ‘our’ shop because obviously this is the most important factor, way above menu or location. I refuse to wear a pink apron point blank and tell her that the black alternative is lazy. Black just says you can’t think of anything else. It is the male pink.
The plan seems to be she’ll handle the decorating and marketing side of things while I do all the actual work. She’ll help me as and when she feels like it. I know, deep down, I’m probably going to end up doing most of it on my own but, to be fair, that appeals to the control freak in me. She can paint the place whatever colour she wants as long as I retain artistic control of the menu and seeing as I’m the one who can cook I would posit that'll probably be the best plan.
We settle on a mixture of browns and creams (beige and light beige) for their warm qualities and then she starts demanding to serve a customer. Time to leave I think darling. I tell her if she wants something to do she can wash up. That gets her out the door pretty fast.

Xenophobia

The natives are getting restless. The word is on the street, there are hints in the papers and Facebook is buzzing with it. They’re banning England shirts in pubs! They’re banning England shirts in a World cup year!
Well actually they’re not but it seems a lot of people think they are. This all appears to stem from a Sun story where the police had advised pubs in Croydon not to allow football shirt wearing fans in during the World cup. This is mainly because of the carnage of 2006 when it seems Croydon turned into a football related bloodbath.
This localised story has gone viral and, not helped by the Sun’s headline of ‘England shirts banned!’, seems to have evolved into ‘England shirts banned because they offend foreigners, you can’t do anything anymore, it’s political correctness gone mad!’.
That didn’t take long did it?
The natives have grabbed this with both hands. Last night I was taken home by my ‘racist’ cabby, to be fair he’s probably not but he always seems to get onto the subject and picks and chooses his words very carefully. The last time he picked me up we had a ten minute debate in which he tried to convince me I was English. He seemed completely shocked that I didn’t consider myself as such.
‘But you were born here.’
‘Yeah, but it’s a cultural thing. Being British and being English isn’t inter-changeable. You wouldn’t expect a Welshman to say he was English but he would probably concede he was British.’
I could almost hear the cogs of his brain turning as he tried to digest this. His main gripe was that his national pride was being taken away from him and he felt marginalised in his own country.
‘But you were born here!’
Right.
I’ve never been a flag waver of any description but this has seemed to be a bit of a running theme of late. Part of me hankers for the time when people were happy for me to be foreign and be done with it. Now every one wants to adopt me because a) I’m white and b) my English is impeccable. The Girlf her self struggles with it. She tells me I’m not really Greek.
For these two reasons a lot of people seem to be under the impression I’d be happy to convert. My personal favourite quote is ‘you lot are alright, it’s the Paki’s we hate’. Clearly I’m ment to be charmed and feel excepted by this sentiment but I digress.
Cabby’s main issue seems to be that immigrants get an easier ride than the indigenous population, the laws are all geared to keep them happy and he can go fuck himself. The working Englishman has had his pride taken away from him and he can’t say anything anymore without appearing racist. My personal opinion is that is dependent on what you want to say. If what you want to say is ignorant or racist you will come across as such. Surely in a reasonable debate you won’t if you back your argument up properly.
Last night he brought up the England shirt/flag issue. It would appear the police tried to ban St George’s flags on the seafront but faced with blank refusal they backed down. So apparently, it would seem, flags haven’t been banned but this didn’t stop cabby getting wound up by it. It is just another example of his national identity being taken away, or not as it transpires.
I’m putting a flag up in the shop. It’s my shop and it’s the World cup, I’ve been doing it for years. No ones ever said anything and I suspect no one will because all this talk of banning shirts and flags is bullshit. People enjoy winding themselves up and it’s just another excuse to have a go at foreigners. It’s the ‘if they come over here they should adopt our ways’ mentality.
The irony is that’s exactly what most immigrants have been doing for years and while the general population tears it’s self to pieces over it’s national identity and it’s self imposed thought crimes the rest of us, the immigrants, the foreigners get on with our lives with a sense of bemusement.
People in this country have lost their identity and their pride and this is because all the things that made Britain great, all the wealth and power and prestige came from the rape and pillage and subjugation of three quarters of the planet. Queen Victoria wasn’t a queen she was an Empress.
Britain’s never would be slaves because everyone else fucking was.
So in three generations cabby’s gone from a world ruler, a member of an elite by default, by an accident of birth, to just another bloke. He can’t even call a Paki a Paki anymore because he’ll get into trouble and will look racist when he’s being racist.
Facebook is awash with this under current of xenophobia and groups are cropping up daily.

‘If we can’t wear England shirts, they can’t wear turbans!’

‘It’s our country, if you don't like it fuck off!’

Obviously I’ve corrected all the spelling and grammatical errors (no really, I’m not being funny. It’s true. It seems national pride goes hand in hand with an inability to express yourself correctly in written English).
People are scared of the differences, different cultures and different clothes. These people stand out therefore seem more prevalent than they actually are. This fear of strangeness is very pronounced in certain areas. The BNP has capitalised extensively in these places. Stirring up antagonism and generally making stuff up to fuel existing prejudices. BNP support is either racist or ignorant. It’s one or the other; you’re either racist or stupid.
The BNP is a racist party because all their policies come down to race. They target the poor and ignorant because they’re the ones most likely to live in diverse areas with social problems. The immigrants are taking their benefits. People with decent jobs aren’t going to be effected by an influx of people unable to speak the language. People on the state tit will perceive that they are because there are only so many houses and only so much money to go around. Throw a couple of burka’s into the equation and extremist parties can make hay.
Everyone should be allowed to express pride in their culture but they have to know what they’re proud of. You have to back up the statement with examples otherwise its just jingoistic nonsense. I have no problem with cabby being proud of being English but the subtext is he doesn’t know why he’s proud. He is looking forward to the World cup because it gives people a sense of national pride even though he ISN’T a football person. The poor bastard seems to be clutching at straws.
I’m proud of being Greek Cypriot. The Girlf says I’m arrogant and racist about it and really I’m English because I was born here. I’m not actually proud of being Greek but I am proud of the hard working, upper working class, lower middle class enclave of Cypriot-ness in which I’ve been raised. We’re a small immigrant community now in our third generation. We’re anglicised to an extent but we still retain a slightly old fashioned Cypriot culture which is dying out in Cyprus. As a culture we have evolved away from home so we are different from actual Cypriots and even though we’ve grown up over here we’ve held on to the old culture enough to be different from the indigenous population.
So for me national identity and national pride are abstract terms. My jingoistic pride concerns a population of a few hundred people. So I can be involved as much or as little as I choose with everyone else. I guess I’m lucky like that so if anyone wants to call me a Paki it doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s just one more person to walk past and ignore if they were on fire.

The best laid plans...

The Girlf is stressed. After a successful week of dieting her weight loss has ground to a halt. Six pounds and six days into it she is listless and irritable, she moans about her headaches and mopes around the house grumbling.
I compliment her on how good she’s looking but she just scowls at me.
‘This is all your fault!’ she growls.
With the wedding now less than a year away she is intent on slimming down. The fear of being considered a plus size bride has gripped her and her massive chocolate addiction is being tackled head on. The one who has to pay for her cold turkey is me. With no chocolate to stabilise her mood she’s taken to sitting and quietly rocking. Eyes fixed on nothing, she quietly mumbles incoherently to her self.
All my tender interjections of comfort are met with the death glare. I don’t understand and I don’t care it seems so no matter how much I cajole or pamper my sweet honeyed words fall on deaf ears, her mind is distant and fixated on the idea of Dairy milk.
To compound my pain simultaneously she has decided to give up Diet Coke. Her Diet Coke addiction has been the elephant in the room of our relationship. Maybe not so much an elephant in the room, more a pile of empty Diet Coke cans of equal size and mass to an elephant in the lounge. Clearing her empties away everyday would keep a couple of Polish women gainfully employed.
I would go as far as to say that I’ve actually noticed a marked improvement in the tone and shape of my ass since I moved in three months ago. I put this down to spending twenty minutes a day running up and down the stairs my arms full of half empty tinnies.
Subsequently she isn’t her usually happy bubbly self at the moment what with being constantly caffeine deprived and on a permanent sugar crash. She looks good for it though. No pain, no gain I suppose.
It’s becoming very apparent that I need a car. I am stuck in the middle of nowhere. Getting into town has become a military operation. There is no just strolling in anymore. My day has to be meticulously planned so everything I need to do at home is done before I ring a cab. Only then can I venture to do any other chores that involve human contact.
I now plan a trip to the bank days in advance. Once I’m in town I’m in town, there is no popping home anymore so a day when I go in early before work is a one stop shop. I have to clear my copy book in one fell swoop.
Yesterday was such a day. My beard had started to take over my face and my hair was several different lengths making me look exceptionally bald. I couldn’t put off a trip to the barbers any longer and I needed to get to the bank to top up the wedding fund. I never made it last week and subsequently spent too much of my wages. Clearly I needed to rectify that this week and pay in the difference. This week’s austerity juxtaposing last week’s frivolity.
So I entered the barbers near enough penniless and in a fit of unexplainable generosity which I can’t fathom I allowed a woman to cut my hair. I rarely allow a girl to get her hands on my head. My life has been a winding procession of women fucking up my hair. From childhood the prejudice has been justified over and over again and yesterday didn’t sway my conviction one little bit.
In all fairness my hair looks fine. It’s exactly what I asked for and she has made an excellent job of making me not look bald. Unfortunately she has decimated my beard.
My request was simple, a number one over the beard. That’s all a wanted, that’s exactly what I ment. Take the clippers, attach the number one setting and run it over my beard. I simple enough request you would think. For some reason she took it upon her self to give me a tidy up and before a realised what was going on she was shaving one corner of my neck into a neat curve.
I am totally at ease with my hairy neck; in fact I like my hairy neck. What I don’t like is the neat, gay looking beard cut she’s given me. Of course once she’d done the one side I was totally committed to having the other side done. I quietly simmered as she gave me a clearly defined border between skin and hair, smiling she turned my face into pre nineties Berlin. I will have to see a man about it when it grows out a bit next week.
Beards aren’t ment to be tidy and sculptured. I beard by definition is near enough an effortless procedure. You don’t choose to have one; you choose NOT to have one. Messing around with it defeats its purpose. You end up looking poncey and gay. All paedophiles have goatees, have you noticed that?
So now the shore line of my facial hair has been artificially pushed inland by several inches and for some reason it’s made me look like I’ve got a double chin. I’ve gone from caveman to medallion man in one sitting.

I swear on my cross I will never allow a woman to cut my hair again. This is an abomination to far.

More politics

Well, that all happened a lot quicker than I thought it would happen. I thought we were in for days of negotiation but no, it seems that the government conceded without any kind of a fight. If the Liberals are to be believed it sounds like they didn’t even try to form a working relationship.
A lot of sour grapes I think. After thirteen years of unchecked power it seems that the Labour party doesn’t want to share. They would rather throw their toys out of the pram and skulk off to sulk on the opposition benches.
Perhaps after three terms with such overwhelming majorities the thought of forming a minority government with the Liberals and having to pander to the Scots and the Welsh to pass anything through the house is a humiliation to far. No clear majority and too many concessions. They give up a lot and gain very little. Maybe the best idea is to let someone else sort all their messes out while they lick their wounds and plot the next election.
The left are going nuts. The casual observer would think the bloody Nazis had got into power so loud are the cries of anguish. Dave Cameron is being painted as the Anti-Christ, the resurrection of Margret Thatcher who ruined our lives and damaged the country so much we elected her three times.
A cynic would surmise they are all scared about losing their state hand-outs and are worried about their cushy public sector jobs and ridiculously high pensions. Surely not, surely they have all our best interests in mind?
The irony is any ‘Nasty Tory’ legislation will be tempered in this coalition. What we have, it would seem, is a grown up compromise, an abandonment of party politics for the good of the country. Right now we don’t need three minority parties in parliament bickering and not doing very much.
However you can’t tell Labour voters that. Anyone who doesn’t vote Labour, they would have you believe, is either stupid or a selfish bastard or both. Their arrogance has been palpable as they argue their right to rule even though they comprehensively lost the bloody election. All too quickly they co-opted the Liberal Democrats and highlighted their similarities so vehemently you would believe they were actually a splinter group of the Labour party instead of a completely separate political entity.
Well it hasn’t worked out for them. Their party didn’t want to work with the Liberals for whatever reason, probably a case of simple mathematics or perhaps maybe out of pure honour seeing as they lost the election.
Much as they loath it David Cameron is now our Prime minister despite his heinous crime of being a bit posh. This is still a hanging offence in this country, a reverse snobbery that limits the working class. I don’t care if Dave-o was born into a bit of money. How does this stop him running the country? Diane Abbot, who I actually like, is on the left of the Labour party, black and working class but none of these things stop her sending her kids to private school. Where Diane has her kids educated is up to Diane. By the same token if Dave went to a nice school good for Dave. He’s Prime minister, clearly it was worth every penny.
But Dave’s posh and Dave’s a Tory and apparently Dave didn’t stand close enough to his wife when he delivered his first speech so therefore he’s a cunt. With some people he’ll never win even though, it was reported, he cooked Sam Cam breakfast on the day of the election. To them he’ll still be nasty Tory Dave.
Of course the real winners in all of this are the Liberals. For the first time in a century they’ve got a bit of power and for all the talk about them selling out their support, how else could they have achieved this? They wouldn’t have. They’d win a seat here, a seat there, but never get into office.
Now they can push through their demands. Foremost this would be electoral reform. A change in the way we elect our representatives so that there are fewer wasted votes and a bigger proportion of views are represented in parliament. There seems to be talk of an AV system being put to a public referendum. This is how Wikipedia describes AV.

Under AV+, most candidates are elected from single-member constituencies under the Alternative Vote (AV), also known as the instant-runoff voting system. An additional 15–20% of candidates are elected under the regional party lists. Like the Additional Member System (AMS), AV+ list seats are allocated to offset the disproportionality created by the single-member constituencies. Unlike AMS, with 20% or fewer of legislators elected from party lists, AV+ would not achieve full proportionality, but would correct some of the disparity caused by single-member-district elections. List candidates are elected on open lists, meaning voters have a role in choosing which particular candidates on the party lists are elected. This helps address criticism that AV+ would create two classes of legislators: one with individual mandates and one without.


Get that? You still have a local MP but when you go to the poll you will be given the chance to vote for a second or third choice (or forth, or fifth depending on the system). If there is no clear winner with over 50% of the vote you go to the second, third, forth choice until you get one.
The MP’s on the regional lists will be elected depending on their parties’ percentage of the vote in a given region. So the higher the percentage, the further down the list you go, the more MP’s you get.
This way you get a local representative who is answerable to you and your party of choice will benefit from your vote if they don’t get elected in that particular constituency. What you end up with is the best of two systems, it’s more representative without getting into the messy carnage of proportional representation and you still have a personal contact with the executive.
This will be put to us in a referendum and we can make the choice to change.
All in all we are in very different, very exiting times. The political landscape is changing; it is indeed a new day.

Dave asked us to vote for change and now, like it or not, we have it. Everything is different now. Little did we know this is what we were going to end up with but it could be beautiful.

Politics

It’s been a long weekend hasn’t it? We went to the polls on Thursday and here we are entering Tuesday and still we have no government. What we do have are several options all of which seem to point to another general election within a year.
The first being a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats but this may be ideologically stalled from the start. There would be more common ground found between the Liberals and the Labour party but this new Lib-Lab pact wouldn’t have a working majority in the commons and thus wouldn’t establish a strong workable government.
The final option would be a minority Conservative government but this would have the same problems as a Lib-Lab coalition and would be dependent on the other two parties not seeing eye to eye when it tried to push through policy. It would, however, be very susceptible to an undermining block vote of the other two parties should they wish to gang up and hinder it whether that be for ideological or political reasons.
All of a sudden the Liberals have become the strongest players in British politics. They have become the debutants at the ball, making their rounds trying to establish the best match for their ambitions. To put it more coarsely Nick Clegg has spent the weekend wiggling his arse at the two main parties in an attempt to gauge who’s willing to pay more for the pleasure.
Inadvertently Clegg has given us a glimpse at what a proportional representative electoral system would look like. Make no mistake the Liberals have done very badly in this election. Although, in the run up, they came across as the sexy underdogs and although Nick Clegg himself got a boost in the televised debates, they actually lost seats. Despite all the talk of them deposing Labour as the second party they did worse than five years ago under Charles Kennedy, who was probably pissed through most of the election.
Now, five seats down from last week, they hold the keys to number ten. Whoever can charm them the most will establish the next government. This is how proportional representation works. The smaller parties, the parties that never had a prayer of winning the election will dictate its outcome. Some people would have you believe this is democratic.
Others claim this stalemate is the result of a ‘Progressive majority’, a unified and deliberate attempt by centre left voters to keep the Conservatives out of office. As if they conspired to wilfully lose the election and force a ‘Rainbow coalition’ of the left.
So we’re in a rather surreal situation where it’s very possible that Labour and the Liberals will join forces then tout for support from everyone else in the commons, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Nationalists and that Green party MP, bless her. We would have a multi-coloured coalition and the Conservatives, the party that won the most seats, the party that won the most new seats, the biggest single party in the house would be the opposition.
I fail to see how this would be democratic. Labour lost the election. They lost ninety one seats. Ninety one Labour MP’s lost their jobs. If you imagine a general election as nationwide vote of confidence on a government how else can you read the results as anything other than a massive Labour failure?
Labour polled twenty nine percent of the vote. Michael Foot achieved twenty eight percent in 1983 and has been universally blamed for putting Labour on the opposition benches for the following fourteen years. The difference between that election and this one is in that one the Conservatives got a majority.
The Conservatives gained ninety seven seats and with the final seat being voted on next month they will probably end up with ninety eight gains. Three hundred and seven seats, nineteen seats off the magic majority but although they are the biggest party, although they made all but one of the gains in this election, Plaid Cymru raised their tally from two to three; this does not entitle them to form a government. Even though over ten million people voted for Dave Cameron to be the next Prime minister there is nothing in our constitution to say this has to be the way.
If the Labour party and the Liberal party get their act together the two losing parties will form the next government and even though the country overwhelming voted to send Gordon Brown back to Scotland he will remain our Prime minster until September when the Labour party will poll its members on who they want to head the government.
Am I missing something?
These parties combined only achieved eight seats more than the Conservatives. Two separate players in the election couldn’t get a double figure lead on the largest party. I don’t buy this ‘Progressive majority’ theory. This is no deliberate move by the voting left. This is a quirk of the figures. Where’s the mandate?
All I see is self serving self interest in this. Labour is desperate to hold on to power. Last time they lost power they were out for eighteen years. Losing this one is unthinkable; in 1997 they inherited the strongest economy of any incoming government now the economy is in tatters, there is a real danger of the country going bankrupt. Should they leave office now what would be the chances of the electorate forgiving them anytime soon? As much as they claim that this sorry mess is the result of global factors out of their control they were all to eager to take credit for the bounty of riches that the John Major’s government left them. You can’t have it both ways.
By the same token the Liberal Democrats, for the first time in their history, have sniff of rigging the electoral system in their favour. They, up until now, have been the third party in what is essentially a two party system. Before this election they were bit players, a fringe group of weirdo’s who only ended up on the front pages when there was a rent boy scandal or they throw out their leader for his alcoholism (its worth noting that Charles Kennedy’s problems were overlooked while he was winning them seats and gaining them support and he was only pushed when he started to become a liability). Now they are the unpopular kid who’s turned up at the party with all the cocaine. Everyone one wants to be their friend.
This is their chance to push for electoral reform, their chance to push for a proportional electoral system that would give them more seats at the ballot box. This would be great for Liberal Democrats but pretty shit for everyone else. A proportional system would give us the same problem of the last few days every single election. No party with a working majority and backroom wrangling for days before any government could be established.
Israel uses proportional representation; they have to have an election every couple of years because the governments are so unstable and all the deciding votes are held by fringe religious extremists, which explains why Israel always seems to be in the shit. PR hasn’t fared to well historically. It was backroom compromises that saw Hitler becoming the German chancellor in 1933. He was elected to the roll as part of a coalition.
PR may be fairer but you end up with compromised, unstable governments and you let the nutters in. Under PR we will end up with BNP MP’s.
It is understandable that neither of the two main parties have been in any great hurry to change the voting system. Up until now it has suited them. It’s given them strong, stable power and a mandate to rule and implement their own ideologies.
It’s telling that yesterday Gordon Brown offered the Liberals electoral reform as part of a coalition deal. This offer is an admittance that he knows the party’s over. Before the election neither Brown nor Cameron would have dignified the idea by even mentioning it. All of sudden it has becoming the olive branch that could keep Labour in office. The fact that Brown would offer it is a sign of desperation. The present system elected three strong Labour governments, why give all that up?
Perhaps it’s the fear of another eighteen years in the wilderness; perhaps it’s the fear of being remembered as one of the worse Prime ministers in a century. Perhaps it’s pure narcissism that despite losing the election spectacularly he feels they still have the right to run the country.
In the next few days some kind of deal will be thrashed out between someone or another and our new government will be revealed to us. What that government looks like, at the moment, is anybody’s guess. Democratically and I believe morally the Conservatives should be at the centre of that government. They won the most votes, they won the most seats. They have the mandate to at least give it a shot even if it means going back to the polls later this year. Offering the Liberals a referendum on electoral reform is a nice move. Just because you have a referendum doesn’t mean you have acknowledge its results. Referendums are not binding they are merely a gauge of public opinion.
It seems that a lot of Liberal MP’s will be holding their noses if they are required to work with a Tory administration. One would wonder what would be worse. Working with the Tories or propping up a defunct and rejected Labour government that has failed on all its promises, a Labour government that has dragged us into illegal wars, a Labour government that has totally decimated our civil liberties over the last thirteen years. All things considered the Conservatives might be worth a go.

Writing

The Girlf wants me to write a book. The compulsion to story-tell grips her often and she hides her self away with my laptop, churning out thousands of words at a sitting in search of that first book that will get her published.
She’s a great writer. The snippets I’ve been allowed to read are very, very good but she’s protective of her work. In its embryonic form it is fragile and precious and secret. Only when several thousand words are in place, several thousand that she is happy with, only when the story has condensed from the swirling cloud of ideas and starts to take form am I allowed to look and give an opinion.
An avid follower and inspiration of my blog she wants me to take things a stage further and actually start working on a longer piece, a fiction but I’m apprehensive. It isn’t the workload, I could probably churn out in excess of a thousand words a day, it is the actual story. What would I write about?
Blogging is easy. I’m writing about myself, it’s a cosy warm retreat for the narcissist, an hour and a thousand words of me, me, me is very relaxing. The difficulty would be translating this style, this form into a fiction. There would have to be a semblance of autobiography for it to work but I would have to actually invent characters to fill this world. That’s where I blank, much as I like writing I have no story and no protagonists and even though I’m in no doubt that I could ramble on for eighty thousand words what would be the point. My opus, my Tropic of Cancer wouldn’t even get looked at, the modern publishing world being light years away from the fiction I grew up on.
Still, the egotist in me is rather enamoured with the idea of writing a book. I wrote a lot as a kid, clanking away on an old typewriter, supplementing my lack of experience with a hefty dollop of plagiarism. Back then I wanted to be a horror writer, I wanted to write ghost stories and I’d churn out a few hundred words here and there right up until the day of my first hard-on on which a lot of things fell away.
I’ve tried to get back into it since but it is only this blog that has borne fruit. I suppose the format suits me. Short, completely open ended and public. It’s easier to write knowing at least one other person will read it. It obligates you to write.
The month that the internet was down I started getting withdraw symptoms. I missed the act of writing, the act of editing and the act of posting. I missed the re-editing once I’d posted because I have a tendency to overlook punctuation or grammatical errors.
That month certainly showed me how much I enjoy writing and maybe, quite maybe I should push forward and try and write something longer but the stumbling block is still there, the subject matter.
The Girl is full of stories, she bursts with them. When one takes her it’s akin to being pregnant. It gestates inside her. She’s careful and secretive. No-one can know until it’s safely imbedded within her, no-one can know until it is viable and has started to take shape, until it has a life of its own and begins to grow effortlessly. Only then will she open up and announce the prospective arrival but even at this time there is still the chance of tragedy. The chance the life will ebb and it will die.
I few months ago I finished a first chapter. I liked it, I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, it worked and it was subtle but even though it opened up avenues for the tale to unfold and ideas swirled around me I never wrote the second chapter. Two and half thousand words hang in perpetuity on my hard drive waiting for me to return. My protagonist taps his foot and drums his fingers, the orbiting characters, their foundations established, await me to flesh them out. I’ve been neglectful.
However the story isn’t dead, mainly because there isn’t one yet. All there is is a starting point, some characters and an event that ended chapter one so theoretically I could pick it up at anytime and continue but I haven’t. I should really if only to see where it goes. I should.

The Girlf thinks it’s crap.

The Girls

I’m sat in the garden to blog today. I thought I’d write whilst topping up my tan. Unfortunately I have to sit in the shade in order to actually see my computer screen. Still, I’m thankful for the fresh air and dreaming of a ridiculously hot summer.
It’s been far too long since we’ve had a proper nasty oppressive one, the kind of heat that kills old people and dogs in cars. All I can do is hope and dream.
The Girlf has recovered from her migraine and gone to work chirpy. I’m amazed how she can go from deaths door and straight back to everyday life after eight hours sleep. Last night I was contemplating picking her up and taking her to casualty, her crying and moaning actually scaring me. Eventually a combination of Nurofen, an icepack and two hours of fussing and stroking was enough to cure her.
She’s having a tough week, bless her. On Friday she hits thirty. She’s taking it badly bemoaning her lost youth and multiplying wrinkles. I keep telling her she’s still a baby but she isn’t having it. A wardrobe malfunction last week has forced her onto another diet. Squeezed into a tight pencil skirt her arse went supernova spraying fabric and pieces of zip out into the cosmos.
Shame faced she showed up at the shop in search of safety pins and a sixty year old woman to rectify the matter. My mum patched her up and we sent her back to the party embarrassed but secure.
The incident has shocked her. I’ve tried to re-assure her telling her the product was clearly wrongly labelled and it must have been a size ten and not in fact a fourteen.
Personally I think there’s nothing wrong with her booty. It is indeed bootilicious but this falls on deaf ears and since it happened she’s been living on fruit.
All this has delighted the Eldest who has seized the opportunity to remind us both how skinny she is. She stands proudly pulling out the waist band of her trousers and trumpets that they’re a ten and they’re loose on her. The Girlf dryly cuts her short and informs her that they’re hers and they’re actually a twelve.
Undaunted she jumps around in her underwear for a few minutes just to rub it in. The Girlf broods and sulks from the comfort and safety of a baggy pair of joggers.
Luckily for me the girls are now back at school which means I get the Sky and the broadband to myself. I can spend my afternoons watching Youtube videos immediately rather than having to wait for them to load up. I think this is how people feel when they have a plaster cast removed from a healed limb. Fan fiction has been relegated to the evening so I can enjoy my surfing all afternoon long without being impeded and inconvenienced by the Eldest writing her Gossip Girl pseudo porn homage’s.
This weather is gorgeous. I celebrated it today by going to Morrisons dressed as a terrorist. Khaki combats, tight black vest, boots with a beard that now automatically faces Mecca of its own accord. Occasionally one has to fuck with suburbia. It’s good for the soul. The neighbours often ask me if I’m lost when I’m waiting for a taxi so it’s good to give a little back once in a while.
A few worried looks off the natives soon puts a spring in my step and it’s into Morrisons to buy a new wok. One thing you can say about Morrisons is that it’s certainly no Tesco. Where’s the wasabi sauce for God’s (Allah’s) sake?
The Indian guy working there is no help. He gives me the ethnic shrug and bottom lip as if to say fucked if I know. It makes me laugh, my grandmother used to do the exact same thing much to the annoyance of the natives. Apparently it’s rude. I knew where he was coming from.
The Girlf berates me because I haven’t bought anything for the Youngest’s dinner. She doesn’t eat what we eat. She is a ‘fussy’ eater so therefore lives on bread and butter, mash potato and fish fingers. She is also addicted to chips. In my experience ‘fussy’ eaters never have a problem with chips or indeed MacDonald’s. It would be safe to say any manner of junk food makes it past their ever so sensitive palettes.
I mutter something about people starving in the world but she knocks me back telling me I’ll be different when we have kids. My kids will eat what ever they’re given as I did, as everyone I grew up with did. We had to; it was either that or starve. She moans that she‘ll have to drive to the shops after work. I have no sympathy; I’m on foot, hands full of shopping bags with a wok tied to my combats.
Clearly the girl doesn’t want to waste anytime getting home to the love of her life. Lazing in bed this morning, still reeling a little from the migraine she moaned at the fact that I’m not richer thus being able to subsidise her laziness when she can’t be fucked to go in of a morning.

I reminded her it wasn’t the size of my wallet she fell in love with.

Tottenham

Wednesday night signalled the end of an era. For the first time in ten years Tottenham took three points off of Arsenal. Our first league win over the scum this millennium. That’s twenty games without a victory. A Premier League record.
A couple of years ago we beat them 5-1 in the Carling Cup semi final but this ment little to the Goon. They, to this day, stress they were playing their ‘kids’. This was a reserve team that ended the game with FIVE first team players on the pitch.
Kids or not getting annihilated, yes I said annihilated, by your local, hated, rivals must really, really hurt and although they put a brave face on it and fell behind the excuse that it was only their kids and it was only the Carling Cup they had to admit, at least to them selves, that it was their worse defeat in twenty years and more importantly it was US that did it to them.
But your average Arsenal fan erases such damning facts. Even though we had that win over them, which nicely juxtaposed our three nil victory against them in the ’91 FA Cup semi they still had their incredible league success to fall back on.
Mike the Mav tells me repeatedly that his thirteen year old son has never, never seen Arsenal lose to Tottenham, that we hadn’t beaten them in the memory life of a teenager.

That stings, that really stings.

This week though, this glorious week, puts an end to that. That record is over. It is now part of history. They can still mention it and they will, no doubt, but it’s no longer relevant, no longer current. Now, it is only words and now we have effectively ended their title hopes this season.
Before kick off they had an outside chance of snatching the league, in their eyes the head to head between Chelsea and Man U would be decisive in that. Now, with three points dropped to us that fixture becomes redundant. A draw would have put them in the running but now it makes very little difference.
They still dropped three points on Wednesday night. They still dropped three points to us. If they fall two points short of the winners at the end of the season it will be thanks to us that they lost out on the title. I hope that happens. That would be glorious and I will thoroughly enjoy rubbing it in over the summer.
By the same token if we finish forth, and we’re still in the running, by a point by a single, solitary point it will be thanks to them. I will shake every Gooner by the hand and thank them profusely and repeatedly until they tell me to fuck off.

What a great night. What a superb game of football. This was a Tottenham team that had played two hours of fruitless football on Sunday, heavy legs going into the game on Wednesday. Two turgid hours that knocked us out of the FA cup, against bloody Portsmouth of all fucking teams. Then to face the scum three days later, with our record?
My stomach was a knot. You always believe, but still you know what it would mean to lose again. The shit you’d get for it and the nasty dirty feeling you’ve known for a decade that envelopes you. No amount of scrubbing shifts it. That horrible, sickly, sticky feeling you feel all over from just watching your team breathe the same air as them.
You can feel the infection permeate the ground, it’s said the Tottenham board disinfects the away changing room after the derby, and to lose makes it all the worse. You exposed yourself to that evil for nothing. To lose just reinforces the notion that we live in a Godless universe where everything you ever believed is nothing. The bad triumph and the good die slowly in pain.

Then Danny Rose’s goal.

Young Danny Rose, always on the periphery. Young Danny Rose on his league debut. You want to talk about kids do you? You want to talk about injuries do you? Half our team crocked the other half still aching from Sunday then little Danny Rose, thirty yards out, left footed, boom!

What a volley, his first touch of the game. Boom! How do you like that?

Eighty percent possession in the first ten minutes? Fuck you, you know how it works.

A beautiful, beautiful goal. The kind of strike that reminds you why you love this game. A game where a nineteen year old youth player can, in his first start, make himself a legend. Amazing.

Where was the beautiful, continental football that Arsenal fans always wax lyrical about? They stoked the ball around nicely in mid field but Gomes was leaning on his post for most of the first half.
Where were our tired legs? The whole team were going in quick, hard and fair, all Gooner assaults smothered by our defence. Was that Pavlyuchenko I saw tracking back and doing a job when he had to? Pavlyuchenko, a striker, a poacher, filling in in midfield? Working, working hard and putting Berbatov to shame? I think it was.
Then the second goal. Their defence has gone to sleep, Gareth Bale, sprinting up the centre arm raised, picked out by Defoe. A gorgeously weighted pass. It curves in-front of the defender to find Bales’ feet and he, to calmly for a left back, passes the ball under Almunia into the Goal.
White Hart Lane loses its mind. Two nil up against Arsenal, for a minute the Tottenham fans forget all about Sol Campbell. Two nil.
No one is celebrating yet. I’m reminded of the Carling Cup final where it was three one to us and we were under a constant barrage. I’m reminded of last year when we came back from 4-2 at the death to draw.
I’m proved right in the last ten minutes. Gomes, crazy Gomes, world class Gomes, Gomes with little to do for the whole game then one, two then three amazing, instinctive saves. Finger tips, finger tips without thinking, no human being can have that reaction time, it’s not right!
Gomes, Gomes exploding the myth that a free kick placed in that top right hand corner is un-saveable. I believe he just fucking saved it!
Unfortunately this is Tottenham v Arsenal and they were going to score and make the last ten minute unbearable. I knew this would happen. Ten minutes, but the clock started ten years ago. Tick tock, tick tock, I can feel every second. Every minute is five, my hearts racing waiting for the final whistle. Tick tock, tick tock. If we concede now I’ll put my hand through the wall.

And then, and then with us fucking around with a corner, wasting time, it blows. The ground erupts, Arsenal players, hands on their hips, stare at the ground. They know they’ve lost something. Not just the points. Not just the league Something deeper, much deeper than that. Something’s changed.
A different Tottenham celebrate on the pitch and around the stadium. It isn’t the same Tottenham that started the game. We beat you, we can beat you and next season we’ll be stronger, we’ll have key, injured, players back, we’ll be at full strength and we will, we will be coming after you.

Stel XL

Every so often a man has to sit up and take stock. I had such a moment on Sunday morning when I came into contact, for the first time in a month, with a set of scales. Staring up at me was my actual weight.
For weeks the Girlf has been mocking my belly and calling me fatty. To be exact she’s been calling me her fatty and I suppose the added affection dilutes the word a bit but all the same it stings when she says it.
I’m aware I’ve put on some weight. It’s almost impossible not to in this house as there is food everywhere. My massive man appetite is tempted from every cupboard and corner with all the crisps and chocolates and croissants and hams and dips and crusty breads and spreads.
Even so I think I’ve done well keeping my midnight munching to a minimum. With my strange working and sleeping hours I do get hungry at all the wrong times and with so much temptation personally I think I’ve done well not to go totally overboard.
When I was weighing myself regularly I was generally knocking around the eighty kilo mark. That’s twelve and a half stone in English. Certainly that was way above my fighting weight of seventy k when I was kickboxing but then there was an immense amount of cardio going on and my cupboards were bare at the flat. Food had to be planned and flown in.
Clearly eleven stone was a little light for my frame but the combination of retirement and the Ex soon put an end to that.
Now, being in a relationship with a woman that’s heavier than you will encourage you put on the pounds. The Ex wasn’t apposed to cooking a pasta bake at two in the morning and ever so slowly but ever so surely I crept up from eleven stone to a whopping thirteen over the course of a year.
Eventually I was forced to take action and quite quickly got myself down to a svelte twelve by the time we split up. At the time friends did tell me I was starting to turn into a porker but were too embarrassed to mention it. Also they assumed I’d gotten into one of those mutually dependent, enabling relationships and it was centred on food. It was none their business and assumed we were both happy with it.
Now I’ve been away from the scales since the beginning of this year and my assumption was I was still knocking around the twelve and a half to thirteen stone mark that was at the last time I weighed myself. However staring up at me from the scales on Sunday morning was an incredible thirteen and a half stone!

I’m a fucking cruiser weight!

I’ve never weighed thirteen and a half stone in my entire life.

I am actually a fatty.

I’m Stel XL.

Now before I run screaming through the streets of Weston let’s pull up the reigns on that statement. I’m NOT fat. I’m carrying a bit of extra timber on my gut but my moobs have been with me since childhood. I went down to nine stone as a Raver in the nineties and still kept my man tits.
I’ve gotten chubbier since I’ve been with the Girlf but not considerably. What I have been doing is attacking the weights daily since the beginning of the year and strongly suspect the majority of this mass is muscle. I’m turning into a big lad but my concern is to not turn into the wrong type of big lad.
Having your woman call you fatty in a cutesy kind of way is one thing but everyone else thinking it is a completely different matter. Stock has to be taken and I’m going to have to get my arse on the treadmill a couple of times a week and increase my cardio.
Certainly I’ve got to leave the crisps alone and go to bed hungry.
The Girlf is certainly a bad influence. This house is rammed with food and her penchant for cheese, chips and gravy has grown on me. In fact the quantity of CC and G I was bringing into the house was starting to concern the Eldest. She took me aside for a quiet chat and as far she was concerned I could still bring it home for her but I was under no circumstances to give it to her mother. For her own good you understand.
Now if my baby asks me to bring her back chips, cheese and gravy after work, how can I possible refuse her? With hindsight I suppose waking her up and giving her a plate of it in bed was excessive. Getting up for ten minute to put away a portion of chips isn’t the healthiest past time and now it seems me showing my solidarity by caning a load myself hasn’t done me much good.
The time has come to get to grips with myself. I have to work off this chub but still keep the muscle and strength. I think a few weeks of healthy living are needed. I have to start eating breakfast and no more midnight munches.

The moobs are with me for life. There’s nothing I can do about them, although there is always the option of surgery.

Back once again...

Finally, finally I am back online. After a month of faffing and phone calls BT has deemed us fit to rejoin the world. In celebration I’m raising a large Ardbeg, a divine ten year old Islay, in celebration and as its peaty complexity intoxicates me I shall conjure a blog and morn all the blogs that have fallen, unwritten, by the wayside over the last month.
With no internet to distract me over the last five weeks I have become quite domesticated. Sky TV can only occupy you for so long of an afternoon. There is only so much History and Discovery channel you can take.
So, much as I’ve enjoyed learning about black holes, the emergence of the Shogun in Japan and the rape of the new world by the Spanish I’ve more often than not found myself elbow deep in the kitchen sink.
Subsequently the Girlf has been reluctant to get us reconnected. Not only is the kitchen sparkling when she gets home but over these last few weeks her daughters have actually started talking to her again.
Before, the Eldest would disappear to her room, Wi-Fi’ed up, to MSN the world. Communications only restored when she hollered down for a delivery of crisps or diet coke. Need for stimulation has forced her back down to the lounge to crash out in front of the telly and grace, by default, her mothers presence.
The Youngest had already tired of the World Wide Web before our exile. A broken lap top had shown her that there was nothing there to maintain her interest but her sisters re-emergence coaxed her down into the family bosom.
Brimming with a mothers pride and love the Girlf therefore has managed to delay our re-connection blaming everything on BT dragging its feet. I, ever the sceptic, am suspicious this denial of my net is more to do with her design rather than us being buffeted and tossed by the winds of fate and begrudgingly she has finally capitulated and gotten us reconnected.
All Blackberry users are at heart very selfish people. So, as she could check her e-mails and Facebook at will the rest of us had to suffer, outcasts from mainstream society, limited to the people we actually met face to face or texted.
At last this half life is over and I pour myself another Ardbeg.
Whisky is an acquired taste. It is the older mans poison. Sooner or later everyone ends up on whisky. All it takes is a couple of decades of abusing your taste buds through smoking, drinking and rich food. It dulls them to the point that you can happily chug a straight malt without complaint.
The young don’t appreciate it. Hard liquor is hard liquor, a means to an end. Nasty, foul some, noxious liquid imbued to achieve the transcendence of drunkenness. An eighteen year can’t tell the difference between a twelve year old Glenfiddich and fucking Teachers. That’s why they drink vodka. It’s inoffensive, mixes well and gets the job done.
To make a spirit that is palatable without the mask of a mixer takes time and love and dedication and time is something the older man understands.
This particular bottle started life ten years ago. Ten years, a decade. The year two thousand, what were you doing? That was before 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, Big Brother had only just started and was a media revolution not the mainstream dross that it is now. This whisky has taken more than a quarter of my life to perfect. That’s something isn’t it?
But what of a fifty year old malt? There are some around. Although your local supermarket normally only goes up to twenty five year olds, you could find yourself in possession of a bottle that started its journey in 1960. Pre Beatles, pre Vietnam, your parents were children or maybe not even born when these spirits were put into casks and kept for prosperity.

It’s humbling...but then again I’m pissed.

So this drunk continues to play with his toy. It’s good to be back and I promise the next blog will be more tempered, and sober and less rambling but after a month of absence the desire to post has been too much to contain and I was loathed to wait until the morning.
Tomorrow I’ll be sleeping off this spontaneous drinking session and mourning the lack of Ardbeg. My head will hurt and I will curse myself but for now I shall enjoy the moment. I am warm and fuzzy and happy and life is good and I have my internet back so I shall leave you and indulge myself with an hour of surfing then collapse, a snoring mess, next to the Girlf. She will moan and bitch about it tomorrow but tomorrow is another day.

Goodnight all and God bless.