I Swear On My Life

Some phrases are just never enough. Yes, I use words to convey meaning either as singular soundbites or within a collection of associated or complementary words, but I very often find that no matter how eloquent I’m being, and no matter how erudite or descriptive the words I choose are, they somehow lack weight, or brevity or whatever.

Sometimes you can tackle a thought, jot it down and spend hours refining, re fashioning, embellishing and diluting until you are relatively certain that what you have conveyed on the page is nothing short of an unmitigated triumph. However, having taken a break from it and cleansed your literary palette so to speak, with fresh eyes it often feels somewhat saccharin, insipid or worse, moribund.

Once complete, the trick then is almost to de-polish it; re-work the edges, inject some grit and candour, conjure the depth of your character and sprinkle it with words that really showcase your true personality; words like fuck and balls.

Pi Eyed

Anthony Tibbet had issues. Not just every day challenges, but real, deep-seated cognitive issues that rendered him unable to conform to the everyday societal norms the majority of people negotiate without much of a thought.

He was cursed (and had been clinically diagnosed), with a dizzying array of mental conditions which often rendered him unable to function at all, which meant that he was, to all intents and purposes, a shell of a boy. Or that’s how it appeared outwardly. Inside he was in turmoil, immensely frustrated due to his inability to display even the most modest expression of emotion that would provide his mother some maternal joy, however fleeting.

He usually just sat, a prisoner of sorts, locked in his inner consciousness…staring into the comfort of middle distance without so much as an utterance or gesticulation. Consequently, his mother was often bereft of ideas of how to converse with, care for, and nurture him, and this created within her a deep anxiety and hopelessness; a circumstance which remained throughout the early part of Anthony’s childhood.

At some point around his eleventh birthday, however, things began to change. Anthony’s mother had been cleaning his room one afternoon, when she happened upon a notebook tucked neatly down the back of his bed, a notebook which opened a window into the hidden machinations of Anthony’s mind. In it, was scribbled what appeared to be extremely complex mathematical equations, formulae, statistical methods (however you’d like to describe it), which Anthony had been working on in the solace of his room.

Alongside many of the computations were diagrammatical depictions of real world problems that his calculations were purported to solve; these included, amongst other things, engineering and building challenges, solutions to open questions in science and computing, and theories relating to quantum physics. The find was not only a veritable cornucopia of revelatory science, but also much needed emotional relief for his mother. At last she had found the thing that made her son whole. She was ecstatic.

Over the next year or so, she bought Anthony a plethora of books which she thought would encourage him to develop his skills further, and evolve and expand his outlet to the outside world. Naturally, Anthony absorbed this new information, and spent day after day scribbling away in countless notebooks, gradually filling up his bookshelf.

Encouraged by Anthony’s now prolific endeavours, his mother decided to embark on a path of assessment to gain a picture of Anthony’s true, and by now quite obvious genius. She approached a number of institutions who specialised in the clinical assessment of children with extraordinary capabilities, one of whom in particular was willing to assess his work with no fee.

When the day came, Anthony’s mother hand-delivered all of his notebooks (of which there were dozens) to the institute, who explained to her the arduous and rather extensive process they would have to go through to investigate Anthony’s intellectual brilliance. The initial stage, a comprehensive analysis of his papers, would take a minimum of two to three weeks, followed by an in-person assessment with Anthony himself. The initial investigation into his written work, however, would be exhaustive and would dictate the format for the subsequent in-person examinations.

Approximately three weeks following the submission of his notebooks, Anthony’s mother received a phone call from the institute to provide their findings on the documents she had provided them. After some initial dialogue confirming they were indeed conversing with Anthony’s mother, they informed her that they had reached a conclusion on the contents of Anthony’s notebooks, following this with a detailed explanation of the steps that they took to reach their verdict.

Before they were able to finish their explanation, however, Anthony’s mother, growing increasingly impatient to hear the outcome of this initial assessment (and struggling to mask her excitement), asked

“This is all excellent information, but please…cut to the chase. Tell me what level of genius are we talking about here?”

“Well Mrs. Tibbet…” came the reply…

“…after our comprehensive analysis, we found that the calculations in your son’s notebooks were all completely wrong. I’m afraid your son is, in fact, thick as mince”.

Write of Passage

Sometimes I find it relatively easy to write. For example, if I’ve experienced a particularly memorable scenario, or if I’m able to conjure poignant moments from my past and transform them from a hazy collage of reminiscence, into a carefully constructed riposte (if my memory allows). Occasionally, I have this surprising ability to exercise an element of my brain which amazes even me; a dark hallway of cerebral absurdity which permits me to spawn anecdotes of such wanton folly and banality that it is testament to the resolve of both myself, in that I am able to create such ridiculous diatribe, and the reader, in that they actually spend the time entertaining it. That is of course, if anyone actually reads it; I humour myself by pretending that they do.

Sometimes, however, I get this sort of writer’s block. Although, it’s less writer’s block, more an inability to apply myself; a sort of lingering procrastination that can persist for weeks or months. It’s not that I don’t want to write, quite the contrary…when I am not writing I almost melancholically miss it, and with every day that passes where I don’t immerse myself in some literary application, I become increasingly concerned that I’ve lost the knack.

When I do muster the inclination to write something, I begin to question why I write in the first place. My ‘readership’ is so magnificently diminutive that it is egotistical to even refer to it as such, and thus it is implausible, no, an impossibility, that I could be writing for praise or adoration. Couple that with the fact that my material offers little in the way of value, or even creates any remote modicum of personal joy, and I am left bereft as to my motivation. So why do it?

I mean, if I sit and ponder it for a while, I realise (and am therefore blissfully aware), that I’m no real writer…merely a two-bit hack with no real substance; a literary fugazi with a poorly marketed outlet, peddling some hashed together anecdotes written in a style I am sure most editors would be fucking appalled at.

As far as I can surmise then, the value in this whole wordy vanity project is that it occupies my mind, separates the reality from the fantasy, the bants from the pants, the shit from the skit. It immerses my brain in hours of literary contemplation, steering it from a whirl of psychological complexity and needless fret. The byproduct of course, is reams of material that I can peddle to family, friends and acquaintances (forcing them to either pretend to have read it or, if they have read it, leaving them perplexed as to what it’s even for). And in a way, that amuses me.

Cry Just Once More

Here’s a new song available to drip feed into your auditory canal like liquid grease descending, and subsequently flushed, into the plughole of uncertainty and expectation. Imagine, layer upon layer of audio delights permeating into your mindscape, planting the embryonic forces of musical rebirth and allowing them to flourish to create a melodiously woody thicket of harmony…and so on.

It came out today, 9th May 2025. It’s probably shit…

Find it on all streaming platforms (Spotify/ Deezer/ YouTube/ Amazon/ Apple Music etc.)

Misery

What is this life? A bitter fuckfest of inadequacies; a bunch of half chances smothered by the spiteful hand of destiny, offered and then drawn away to deny any modicum of fulfilment. It is a relentless rhetoric, drip-fed into your consciousness, solidifying the narrative that we are the lucky ones; the chosen few living in peaceful luxury.

We have no pain, no war, no generational struggle to call our own; we are a world away from real torment. And yet the torment is there, hiding behind the thin facade of middle England; perpetuated by an inability to gather the real fruits of our labours.

The struggle is the inability to embrace the fucking clown show we are immersed in and breeze through, taking what we want regardless of the rules, as if skipping through an orchard reaping fruits that don’t belong to us.

For some of us, this ability is a gift, the antidote. And for them life is a joy. The rest however, no matter how hard they try, and irrespective of what they achieve, must trudge wearily and relentlessly through the shitty sludge of mundanity. Day in day out. Reaching in vain for that one golden nugget perpetually dangled in front of them.

This is the game. It is not beautiful yet neither is it terrible. It is constantly wearing, like Chinese water torture, niggling, taunting, drowning our dreams until we wonder…what’s the fucking point? And as the years pass, the clarity of the window of belief that we peered through in our youth becomes evermore opaque until we can see no more.

Vanilla Ice

My mother liked the simple things in life. Yes she was a matriarchal powerhouse, single-handedly steering the ship of domestic and social bliss while my father immersed himself in the sanctuary of corporate revelry, but beyond all the glitz and glamour of subdued 1980s suburbia, all she really wanted to do was to spark up a fag and do the crossword.

She was accomplished in the kitchen, having honed her gastronomic prowess through an appreciation of cultural diversity and an ability to blend and marry flavours, however, she also had an uncanny ability to generate a comprehensive spread in haste. You could say, she was a master of conjuring culinary satisfaction on the fly. But coming up with a multitude of dishes in short shrift could sometimes prove to be a challenge. Fortunately, the eighties saw something of a revolution in pre-packaged foodstuffs, a technological advancement that my mother fully embraced, and which lent itself to bringing perfectly formed dishes into a social dynamic in short order.

There was some degree of experimentation of course; Findus and Birds Eye for example did not have the gravitas of a Sainsbury’s chicken Kiev, however, there was always a dessert staple that she could rely upon. At Christmas in 1982, Walls released a dessert so unique and refined that it revolutionised the social dining circuit and changed the face of what was acceptable to unveil, post main course.

The Viennetta was unashamedly distinctive, with thin sheets of delicate chocolate sandwiched between layers of creamy ice cream, somewhat reminiscent of Italian Stracciatella. It was impossible to embellish, transform, disguise or pass off as anything else, which led dinner party hosts the length and breadth of the United Kingdom (my mother included) to throw caution to the wind and brazenly unveil the Viennetta at the table, box and all. I mean, it is what it is…fuck it.

And what should have been met with utter derision was almost universally accepted as a sign that the hostess was willing to sacrifice outward displays of culinary virtuosity for the good of the night. Yes, we can all appreciate the debut of a strong homemade dessert, but what every well-meaning dinner invitee from York to Yarmouth really hankered after, was a cheap, mass manufactured frozen slab of ice cream that could only be served by going at it with a fucking carving knife.

It wasn’t quite ice cream, yet it sort of was. It wasn’t quite cake, yet you cut it like one. It wasn’t quite a loaf, yet it was almost reminiscent of one. It was frozen, yes, but that honest, somewhat over embellished faux Italian edifice of E numbers, had the ability to thaw even the frostiest of conversations. In a world of homemade lemon meringues, baked alaskas and arctic rolls, the Viennetta changed the game. It was a life saver.

Of course, the Viennetta was so good it stood the test of time and is a dining table mainstay to this day (despite the fact it looks like Liberace’s doorstop). It was also spelt with two ‘n’s’ and two ‘t’s’…so, grammatically it’s a bit of a joke. From a taste perspective it is certainly hard to surpass; as a pre-made dessert it is perfect. And yet despite this, Walls decided to fuck it up by adding mint.

Tuesday

Tuesday. Just another day of hopeless monotony masquerading as life. The dreams of the common man presenting as an eye rolling pastiche; the unendurable drudgery of the middle classes. Nine to fives, bills, finance, late payments, missed payments, credit; the wild horses pulling the chariot of desolation on the rocky path to hell. We are passengers. Unenlightened, unforgiven.

And passengers we will remain. Unable to bail. Vainly trying to influence the chariot’s direction. Narrowly avoiding the most serious of obstacles, or creating new ones of our own which only serve to make this unyielding journey that bit more challenging. Lost, disillusioned and hopeless, filling our lives with additional, unnecessary complexities which render us riven with anxious consternation.

We are life’s little failures, having scant thought as to who we are, where we are and why. Meetings, calls, workplace fails…battered into helpless submission. We need help, a lifeline, or just an ending. Perhaps just an ending. And it’s only Tuesday.

Cheesy Rider

Dave and his mates had perched themselves (somewhat ambiguously) half on, half off the road; legs astride their pricey Canondales and Treks (trusty time trial hacks and steeds of steel…or carbon fibre composite). They each had dreams of being the pinnacle of the peloton, the yellow jersey from Bermondsey, the spoke coaches from Stoke Poges.

Lycra, lubricant and levers, the chain gang of middle managers (and blokes that got bullied at school) joined together in a frenzy of frenetic fraternisation every Sunday, causing havoc with every driver from Reigate to Rudgwick (naively attempting to visit a demented parent, or ‘popping down to Notcutts’).

They were geared up in tight, hostile garb, emblazoned with advertisements that exuded a luminous vibrancy and that made a statement…‘We’re over forty’. But being over forty didn’t necessarily mean that they had achieved a level of sageness that precluded them from trawling through a cycling shop and acquiring a set of dubiously, and unacceptably figure hugging threads.

Anyway, regardless of what they looked like, they sat roadside (sort of), drinking from plastic-topped ‘designed-in-a-wind-tunnel’ water bottles and discussing Strava sprint times…quite freely. When in flight, they would converse with their riding partners in raised voices in order to overcome the rush of the oncoming wind.

This gave an audible yet indecipherable warning of their presence (from some distance) to innocent bystanders quietly enjoying their front gardens…with only a snippet of conversation about their upcoming promotion being understandable as they passed before trailing off again.

They rode in a large group, occupying a section of the road that stretched from the kerb, right across to the centre lines. The effect of this was threefold: it made them feel like they were participating in the Tour De France, it gave them strength in numbers, and finally (but easily as importantly), it made almost every other road user want to commit a crime.

But of course, the real crimes were those perpetrated by Dave and his companions; riding in a peloton and deciding that it is okay to obstruct other road users under the guise of ‘the Highway Code allows us to ride two abreast’ even though it doesn’t when vehicles approach from behind, riding in groups so large that when drivers innocently drive round a blind corner they are confronted with straggling cyclists riding in the wrong lane, causing a near accident (and then when chastised by the motorist, suddenly think they are street smart and start answering back blissfully unaware that their bike may get thrown in the hedge), and wearing clothing that belongs in the velodrome and is unacceptable in any other environment.

To be clear, Dave and his accomplices were specifically racing-bike enthusiasts and not mountain bikers. Mountain bikers get a pass based on the fact that they seem to be cut from (and wear) a different cloth.

Amazon Crime

I’ve sat here for approximately fifteen minutes contemplating the sheer magnitude of my last seventeen years of troublingly prolific television consumption; a vast and contemptible catalogue of visual dross, that I have unashamedly consumed with wanton abandon under the sometimes rather tenuous banner of ‘entertainment’.

In amongst the gems, those relatively rare programmes that one could argue are worthy of burning significant hours of valuable existence (like The Sopranos), have been some utter travesties. Line of Duty for example, is an oft eyebrow-lifting,  monumentally risible, scriptwriter fuckfest, delivering just enough to ensure you remain in your seat, yet disproportionately sullying and putrefying your mind to an extent that it leaves you feeling kind of grubby. A perfect example of a brazen embezzlement of one’s time, that indubitable shit-shambles of a show robbed me of approximately thirty six hours; time wasted witnessing a miscellany of superficial relationships, farcical policing scenarios and comically overblown dramatics…time never to be returned. And Line of Duty is not the only offender.

Since Netflix’s inaugural year in 2007, I suspect that I have spent an average of approximately one hundred evenings per year transfixed by the creativity of other peoples’ imaginations represented on screen (assuming less than fifty percent of my weekday evenings, to be conservative). Statistically, this tragic squandering of an ordinarily furtive mind equates to the following…

Roughly five thousand, four hundred hours of missed opportunities (I could have been doing something constructive), one thousand, eight hundred bags of crisps (around two hundred and forty thousand calories), one thousand, eight hundred chocolate bars (one hundred and sixty thousand calories), three thousand, six hundred cups of tea and one thousand, eight hundred late nights. People have become proficient in languages in less time; worse, they have become Olympic medal contenders, doctors, lawyers and accountants (honourable, commendable, lamentable and unfathomable; in that order).

Considering my own Olympic aspirations, if I were to attempt to shake off those additional calories in an attempt to garner glory for my home nation (whichever nation that might be due to me being of confusingly diverse descent), I would need to run for approximately twenty five days straight averaging constant ten minute miles. I’m not going to do that. Sitting on your arse for prolonged periods has the effect of quashing any desire to exercise, and I am at the point where being sedentary is complimentary to my incredible aptitude for doing fuck all. It also means I don’t have to learn the lyrics to God Save the King.

I am therefore, wedded to this existence. I am stuck trawling the unending thumbnails of idleness relentlessly proffered by the streaming service content cowboys who have, to their credit, offered me the white horse of banality (charged on credit) to ride into the sunset, to the credits.

Creative Righting…

It’s back…my inner ineptitude has proliferated exponentially to the point that at this current juncture I am unable to write anything worth a shit. It’s literally been months now. Blank canvases aren’t meant to remain blank, they are supposed to represent the playground of the furtive mind, the basin that captures the glorious liquid gold of continuously evolving ingenuity that overflows from our consciousness. Except the tap has run dry…the hose that delivers that sublime creative lyrical caviar must have a fucking kink in it somewhere.

So I’m at an impasse. Yes I’ve tried to rectify it; spending hours writing thousands of words of fictional detritus, some amusing, some complicated, some even mildly interesting, but none worthy of review. And therefore, I sit in perpetual wonder, surveying the barren landscape of  my creativity and questioning whether the last couple of years of blossoming inventiveness were merely a short oasis of agreeable wordsmithery, in an otherwise tragically mundane existence.

But it’s happened before; the field has been fallow in the past and I suspect it’ll be fallow in the future, and I’ll still be there frantically churning the soil praying that it might successfully propagate some fruitful ideas. For now though, I’m stuck writing this bollocks.

No Fox Given

He was like a wizened and cunning fox. A knower of truths; a mastermind, possessor of a brain so nuanced and complex it seemed implausible for lesser men to have exercised sufficient intellectual cultivation to keep up…lest they had the temerity to try. For if they did (try that is), they would be instantly rebuked. He was, after all, operating on a cerebral plateau at the very pinnacle of human consciousness and thus, to all intents and purposes, he was (in his mind), a fucking god.

And to compound this enviable percipience of all things, he had perfected an aura (underpinned by a view held by his peers that his judgment was somehow paramount), that meant he could use this perceived erudition as a sort of invisibility cloak, a reality curtain, a shroud to hide what he was really like.

In a way he was a salesman. Peddling not a product or a service but a persona; a solid gold, triple A-grade persona…the all knowing, big daddy of decision making. Every opinion, every suggestion and proposal other than his own, was irrelevant; an infuriating noise and an annoyance to be subjugated. It was his way or the highway.

Those who possessed even a modicum of sensibility, however, were well aware that his aloof, confrontational style was merely a diversionary tactic designed to cloud and confuse; a way to divert the dogs from the scent. And employing this rather Machiavellian strategy meant he could get by not knowing very much and doing very little. A masterstroke, he thought.

However, the cunning fox inevitably always gets caught and of course, he ultimately succumbed to the happy happenstance of inevitability. Although he wasn’t a fox. He was just an overweight, lazy twat.

The Reluctant Exhibitionist

Pierre Ribault was an artist…of sorts. An expert in mixed media, a vocally-cultured, well coutured costume-dandy and a lover of exuberance and pomp; a truly dedicated disciple of the house of bon viveur. Most who knew him considered him to be a flamboyant pastiche of fashion invention; a fancy Dan with an aloof perception of his own visual glory, but with a look that screamed ‘cliched fashionista’ rather than groundbreaking trailblazer.

His art was often described as ‘Abstract Impressionism’, a term he despised. He took the notion that labelling of any form was inhibiting and contrary to the ethos of free expression, encouraging artists to remain confined to a narrow bandwidth of creativity. For that reason, he would often, and quite at random, create pieces that were completely at odds with his normal output, mixing renaissance with modernism, symbolism with pop art, cubism with surrealism and so on. It was precisely due to his reluctance to conform that critics had a challenging time extolling his virtues, and as a consequence he struggled to establish his brand. He was unpredictable, edgy and…poor.

But he didn’t care about all that. His focus was on his relentless pursuit of individuality, his desire to be free from the corporatisation of the arts, and his love of the high brow and exclusive underground art scene that he immersed himself in. He hated anything mainstream; that simply wasn’t him. He wanted to be immortalised for how he lived as much as he wanted to be lauded for his art.

In late August 2010, Pierre visited Connelly Plastics Limited, a small family run entity who specialised in injection mould processing for the manufacture of miniature novelty farmyard animals. He was visiting their manufacturing plant in order to ascertain whether their liquified plastic could be colour blended to produce a vibrant multicoloured swirl, an effect he wished to incorporate into his latest visionary art installation. Unfortunately, it was during this short tour of the plant that Pierre accidentally tripped while traversing an overhead gantry and fell directly into a large vat of molten plastic, rapidly becoming completely submerged. Consequently, Pierre drowned despite Connelly Plastics Limited staff’s best efforts to retrieve him; the first death at a Connelly Plastics Limited facility in a little over three years.

Few, if any of the plant’s staff had any idea of who Pierre was and, whilst recognising both the cataclysmic misfortune that had befallen him and similarly, the potential scrutiny that the occurrence might have on their health and safety policy, they reached a consensus (subject to some brief research on Google) that his loss would probably not be deemed to be a great catastrophe within the art world. Nevertheless, they were keen to ensure that they had been seen to ‘do the right thing’ and not just engage in collective ambiguity in the inevitable ensuing investigation, as they had done with other similar mishaps in the past. This time, things had to be by the book.

Connelly Plastic’s leading technician decided, due to the depth of the vat, that retrieving Pierre’s body whilst the plastic was still in liquid form would be a hazardous endeavour, and therefore decided to turn off the vat’s heating element, wait for the plastic to solidify, and literally ‘chip’ him out; an exercise that took several days. Although somewhat macabre, this process actually produced something quite revelatory. The dried plastic had created a perfect, life size ‘Pierre Ribault’ cast, complete with the vibrant, multicoloured swirl pattern Pierre was hoping for; a happily ironic happenstance.

As they stood back and admired the cast, the staff from Connolly Plastics Limited collectively agreed that it would make a wonderful objet d’art. They subsequently sold it to the Tate Modern who created an innovative ‘Immortalised Artists’ exhibition, of which the ‘Ribault Cast’ became the centrepiece. The exhibition achieved worldwide critical acclaim, attracting art lovers from every corner of the globe. Now in its thirteenth year, it has travelled to over twenty museums worldwide and remains one of the forefront creative displays in mainstream art to this day.

A Slice of Rock History

At the summit of Wendowen’s Peak stood an ancient granite monolith; a solitary motionless statue silhouetted against a bleak, unforgiving landscape. Impervious to the elements, it prevailed on the site for at least three thousand years, a silent reminder of the ancient civilisation who, with primitive tools, skilfully shaped and inscribed it, and who ultimately managed to transport it to its final location.

It was visited by an extremely small number of people, due to the fact that the surrounding terrain was so steep and undulating, and therefore challenging to navigate. Those that were lucky enough to complete the journey however, described it as a cathartic, almost life changing experience; a pilgrimage that provided an insight into the past and an opportunity to wonder at a monument unsurpassed in its historic relevance and importance.

In 1972, Abalone Kitchens, an outfit based in Bracknell UK, bought the land surrounding the monolith and began to quarry the area. By then, the monolith had already become well renowned among hippies and feckless, stoned students from affluent parents (probably on a gap year), and subsequently, a number of Abalone Kitchen’s wealthier clients began to inquire as to the possibility of acquiring a piece of the monolith for their kitchen surfaces.

Abalone Kitchens inevitably bent to economic pressure and acquiesced to their clients’ requests. The monolith was broken into pieces and the granite cut, polished and sold off. It then found its way into the houses of the rich and famous to serve as a solid base for enthusiastic vegetable preparation, and a point-scoring conversation topic at inane dinner events. Although the majority of the monolith is now sadly lost, thankfully there are a few significant pieces that remain and, despite violent protestations (predominantly from the British Museum), Abalone Kitchens have resisted the urge to let them leave their warehouse to languish in some dusty display cabinet in central London.

If you have a kitchen project that requires a large area of workspace in a granite that is frankly incomparable, and is the true epitome of tragic historical debasement, then give Abalone Kitchens a call today. They ship worldwide. You can call them on…

Memory Test

When you’re young you exude an unenviable exuberance; a life at its infancy, unencumbered by the complex occurrences that befall us all. Youthful, excited, and with our eyes wide open to endless possibilities, our young selves are yet to feel the impacts of the inevitability that lies before us, both good and bad: the pain of anguish, the depth of true, lasting friendships, and the banal tediousness of everyday life. We are yet to find a purpose, yet to find ourselves, and above all, yet to find wisdom.

And it is wisdom, the wisdom borne of maturity, that makes a half decent writer. As with most things in life, a talent for writing is made up of a history of repetition and life experience; things that can only come with time. So it stands to reason then that, on the whole, the greatest writers should be enlightened, ageing in years and carrying both the physical and metaphorical scars of life. It is the cumulative years of experience that should serve as the source of a good writer’s material. And therein lies the paradox.

As I’ve aged, I have certainly built up experiences, a whole smorgasbord of interesting occurrences that formulate the bedrock of a rich narrative tapestry that is just waiting to be unearthed at will. Although all of those gloriously interesting anecdotes are just waiting to pour out onto the page, the cruel fact is that the benefit of all of this wonderful wisdom is massively diminished by a dulling of the brain through the ageing process. So, however much I’d like to be able to write like an Olympic medal-winning wordsmith,  the simple truth is that, of all those wonderful experiences, I really can remember fuck all.

A Realisation at Ritzys

So I seen this bird coming at me in Ritzy’s, got hair on her like she cut it off a Girls World and her lipstick’s smudged like the teacher’s marked some thick kid’s homework. In one hand she’s got a loose grip on a pint of Fosters, and in the other a Marlboro Light, a burning beacon of slowly evolving infirmity; her fingers, couple of fat meat tweezers, delicately balancing the glowing embers of a centimetre and a half of Philip Morris’ finest. Nursing it like it ain’t ever going out.

Eternal Flame by the Bangles is leaking out the speakers like some eighties audio aphrodisiac…it’s eleven thirty.  She looks hot as fuck. She’s spilling her pint all over the shop in the same way she spills those stories her mates tell her in confidence. I’ve sunk a few myself, and i’m a little unsteady on my feet, but thankfully there’s a stretch of carpet from here to the dance floor, and it’s sticky ‘cos it’s got the dried remnants of twenty years worth of the top quarter of carelessly carried drinks on it. The smooth soles of my slip-ons stick to it like the lips of the two Steven Tyler lookalikes to my left. I’m struggling to tell which gender’s which, but it’s nineteen eighty nine and I’m in a part of England which suggests that the odds are…it’s probably a boy and a girl.

So anyway I’m invested…all in. She’s got me completely captivated. Her top’s fallen down on one side, like a fabric catwalk stroke in cotton and polyester. A bra strap, now clearly visible, cutting deep into the fleshy deposits on her shoulder blade. It’s a look…of sorts…and I’m falling for it. She’s strutting over to me on black stilettos like a fucking stilt walker on ice; grabbing at stuff on the way to steady herself; stools, tables, bar rails, the lot. Whatever it takes to get to me.

She’s bouncing off revellers, my mind’s where the devil is, and I’m ready…arms outstretched in case she falls on arrival. I catch my reflection in the mirror, a sinewy, wirey haired zombie arsehole in an outfit that looks like I fell into a fucking seconds bin at Burton’s. Mentally I’m naive…visually, I’m retarded.

Anyway, she finally reaches me. Got this look on her face that I think resembles the look of love so I lean my head forward, shut my eyes, and purse my lips in glorious teenage anticipation. There’s a pause. Feels like forever. I’m waiting, hoping she doesn’t leave me hanging, a desperate blind statue to a misguided dream. I can sense her, my natural intuition bolstered by an alluring whiff of three quid perfume. I’m ready to feel that connection, and then…when I’m least expecting it, it hits me.

Her clenched fist connects with my left temporal lobe with brutal force. Her right foot pivots as she swings to achieve maximum power. She’s Mike Tyson. She’s got a better hook than an old Elton John record. My head jolts sideways colliding with my pint glass that’s now suspended in mid air having been dislodged from my hand. My eyes are suddenly wide open, ablaze with fear, and before I know it there’s this massive solid thing covered in sticky carpet coming at me from the other side. Man down.

I’m lying there in a sort of catatonic state, humiliated, a pathetic spectacle of defeat. My face adhered to the Axminster.  I’m trying to work out how things went south, I mean, I thought she liked me…yes the distance between us, the challenging lighting, the deafening volume of the music, and the fact that I had consumed an inordinate amount of alcohol, could have distorted my perception somewhat. But I wanted her to like me and I thought that was the inference. Perhaps I misunderstood the brief.

Anyway, as I’m lying there evaluating what just happened I hit a realisation. Sometimes you see something you want. And sometimes, when you want something that you think is going to be amazing, it turns out not to be the thing you thought it was at all, in fact all it does is bring you pain. And most of the time, in the cold light of day it was never that good anyway.

Existentialpist

I used to be drunk on life; couldn’t get enough. I was all over it, clinging desperately to that threadbare, oft-trod rope ladder of enticement, with all the world’s treasures at its summit. When the moment took me I bought stuff; things I believed would enrich my experiences. As it turned out, they didn’t. They were just things and I was just a spendthrifty twat.

But it wasn’t just ‘things’ that excited me, I collected a plethora of meaningless friendships and acquaintances too, a rich network of like-minded revellers and libertines; fellow passengers on the euphoria-bus to Fuckwit Station. Sure, we were having a blast but blasts are exactly that…short lived moments of expended energy.

Anyway, we drank and played music and generally made merry like we were in the fucking Beatles, and at the end of each evening, instead of wrapping it up we’d just carry on into the next day. Occasionally we slept, but to be honest, that was relatively rare; sleep being the playground of the virtuous. We were renegades, pitting our wits against the conventions of biological diktat. And we were knackered.

But we didn’t fucking care…we were having it large, going off like rockets at a village firework display. Our lights shone bright (albeit fleetingly), following our meteoric social ascendancy, before slowly falling back to earth; burning embers scattered across throngs of honest souls. The big come down.

And now here we are, nursing the hangover of those heady experiences. Nurturing the headaches of our previous lives; bitter payment for the glory of fearlessness and ambivalence. Here we are in the real world, in the here and now, trudging through the thick snow of conventional existence. We are cold, tired and hungry and…we are sober.

Look But Don’t Listen

‘Look’; the staple monosyllabic opening gambit of the British politician. The go to time-buying, verbal intro of every institutional egotist from Warwick to Westminster. Almost every soundbite, every interview, every rhetorical salvo proffered by these rambling rulers seems to be prefaced with a patronising instruction to use our eyes.

‘Look…’ they suggest, as if we have forgotten how to see for ourselves. ‘Look…’ the preface of every answer; dropping it immediately after every sensible question like a patronising interaction with Ray Charles. And yet, the words which they usually follow it up with leave us blind, so indecipherable they are.

They are under the illusion that their voices are so bewilderingly smooth and soothing, they feel the desire to remind us to open our eyes based on a narcissistic assumption that we may be in a state of total relaxation; you know, just listening, sitting back and enjoying their dulcet tones (with our eyes closed) as though they are some crooning cabinet Dean Martin.

Yesterday I listened to a cabinet minister use “so, look…” to begin every single answer; this was look ‘advanced’. He clearly had the good sense to realise that almost every one of his peers used the term ‘look’ to begin their sentences and he wanted to set himself apart. Half way through the interview though I wanted him to set himself on fire (joking).

In summary then, I would suggest that the word ‘look’ is an inappropriate term to preface an answer with (to the point of being annoying). ‘Listen’ is clearly eminently more sensible, and actually makes sense. ‘Look’ is the sort of thing you say when pointing at something in the distance, or when attempting to divert attention away from an underhanded action. ‘Look over there’ for example is something a cheeky schoolboy might say before stealing your chips. And look, maybe that’s the point.

Nasty Trousers

From an early age, Denise Seine-Schuß expressed a keen interest in fashion. Her father was the driving force behind the evolution of her nascent enthusiasm, and at just fifteen she was instrumental in assisting him in the creation of one of Berlin’s most influential underground fashion brands. In the early 1930s a commercial tie-in with Hugo Boss proved to be the catalyst for exponential growth of the company she had helped her father create.

Although not part of the retail face of the consortium, Denise ‘s design work attracted the attention of fashionistas from across both the social and corporate spectrum, and garnered the adoration of many in the higher echelons of German society. Indeed, some of her greatest admirers could be found in military and political spheres, the Nazi party being one of her most prominent advocates. Hitler himself was a huge fan, extolling the virtues of her work and insisting that she was a key member of his clothing design steer group; the team responsible for the creation of the majority of the uniforms adopted by the Waffen SS, and the wider German military apparatus.

Denise’s designs could often be radical and somewhat left-of-field. A particular design of note, and what she often referred to as the ‘Inverted Flare’, were the black or grey woollen trousers adopted by senior ranked members of the SS. These Nazi trousers, which were extremely broad at the top, tapering into a narrow lower leg, were designed to facilitate two extremely vacuous side pockets that could be filled with looted trinkets, diminutive artworks, gold teeth, and other equally valuable items.

Of course, looting was a pastime often enjoyed by the Nazis, particularly during World War Two, and these trousers proved to be the perfect accessory. When each ‘pocket-sack’ was full, the entire upper trouser-width was deployed to accommodate its contents, the relatively thin material barely masking the swag within; somewhat akin to a hamster storing nuts in its cheeks for later use. And just like a hamster, when fully laden, a typical SS officer would feign innocence whilst knowingly packing other peoples junk close to their junk.

Sewn into the waistband of each pair was a label which read ‘Pants Herr’ which, literally translated means ‘men’s trousers’. It is widely thought that this is the derivation of the name ‘Panzer’, the term used for Germany’s highly successful heavy battle tank. The reason for this being that when viewed head on, the Panzer tank, with its narrow tracks, wide flanks, and protruding canon, resembled an SS officer wearing the inverted flare trouser with an open fly; a view often seen by young Hitler Jugend recruits before the Panzer zipped by, firing off in all directions.

Time was obviously not kind to the Nazis, their antics sullying the designs proffered by Denise and her counterparts in the fashion industry. Once the war was concluded, she set up a small footwear design shop in a village in the Tyrol mountains. The shop, which is branded simply using her own name, ‘D. Seine-Schuß’, is there to this day and offers bespoke ski-related footwear to rich tourists.

Despite its solid factual basis, there are many historians who would dispute the above and provide the counter argument that the trousers preferred by SS officers were in fact, merely a form of riding jodhpur, and that could also be right.

Conversations at the Bus Stop

…yeh, well…I’m sitting on this bench with my boy. He’s some sort of a geezer; bit of a roadman. We’re just shooting the shit, chatting about old hist’ry ‘cos I haven’t seen him for a while. He’s telling me about this business idea he’s got…it’s a long shot but if it comes off he’s gonna make a shit ton. Said he’ll sort me out but I doubt it.

I tell him that I’m focussed on my side hustle but that making beats and drawing makes no one rich. I hear myself saying (quite unconvincingly) that I’m doing it for the ‘art’. In the back of my mind though I’m secretly resigned to questioning the point of it all. He’s all full of zest and a hunger for life while I’m just this apathetic melancholy motherfucker. I don’t speak that much but thankfully he’s got a lot to say, so he’s single handedly carrying the chat for us both.

Anyway, the bus pulls up, the number forty three. A couple of kids saunter up to the door, trousers too short, dragging one leg behind them like they shit themselves. They’re full of it…a right couple of budding Bezos’s, self-assured, fully informed…talking about influencers, NFTs…how ‘real’ jobs are for losers. They got the world sussed…really fucking bossing it. That’s why they’re on the bus.

The doors open like the breaking of a seal…the hydraulic door of some intergalactic starship from Arriva with smoke and all that. That’s how alien public transport is to me. I’m staring, and sure enough, from the haze comes a troop of what could be the spawn of some other species. They’re dragging one leg behind them as well…not to be cool, but because they’re either fully laden with bags crammed full with the evening’s scran, inadvertently got their foot caught in the handle of some other passenger’s trailing bag, or maybe they had a motorcycle accident once and one leg is shorter than the other. I don’t know. Maybe it’s all of those.

They all manage to get off the bus by hook or by crook, but the doors stay open ‘cos this old dude’s making his way, excruciatingly slowly, down the aisle. He’s last. He’s gripping (for dear life) on to the handrail at the door, one foot on the exit platform and the other hovering mid air, blindly searching for terra firma. I’m watching…he’s unsteady. He’s making a real meal of it so I spring to my feet and go over to assist like I’m in the fucking Samaritans. I mutter something like

“Here, let me help you” which he acknowledges with an unimpressed grunt. I think it was a ‘thank you’ but it could  equally just as easily have been ‘fuck you’.

Once he’s on solid ground I realise how short he is; not because he’s actually short but because he’s so stooped. He’s got on this trench coat and his hair’s a mess, like he’s  some geriatric Robert Smith from The Cure. But anyway, I’ve successfully manhandled the guy onto the pavement and it’s at that point that I realise that he’s all hunched over not because he’s old, but because he has these solid-arse chains all hanging round his neck. Real heavy. There are some with medallions, a couple with Cuban links and some are just thick chains. It’s like he’s into nineties hip hop or something.

I ask if he’s alright…he tells me yeh. So I’m about to let him on his way but I’m intrigued, so I decide I’m going to get to the bottom of what appears to be a very fucking unusual fashion accessory choice for someone in his demographic. I’m like:

“Hey, that stuff round your neck…that looks heavy. You might find it easier to get around without all that clobber?”

“Very possibly young man.” He replies wearily. I figure I could leave it there but I still haven’t got any answers so I press on…

“What are they for anyway? I mean, they look cool and all, but, why wear something that’s clearly a hindrance to you?”

He sighs, looks me straight in the eye and says…

“Well, since you ask, I’ll tell you…you see, I never used to have this many. I just accumulated them over many years. At different times in life I hankered after each, and when I got them I’d polish them and wear them and people would admire them and say complimentary things about them. I guess they sort of defined me. As time passed I found it more and more difficult to let them go, despite the fact that over time they became something that people started mocking me for. So I guess, whilst I was young they gave me a certain feeling of pride, as I’ve gotten older they just seem to be less and less relevant. Now they just weigh me down.”

“But what are they? Aren’t they just old jewellery?” I ask.

“They aren’t just old jewellery.” He replies.

“They are my dreams.”

Reinvention

And again my brain is empty, like a butterfly’s cocoon, the beauty having left long ago. Where there was once a rich Savannah of creativity, brimming with ideas and thoughts, there is now desolation; the drudgery of corporate life, like the poisoning of a landscape, having rendered it a charred and lonely wilderness. Yes, new ideas create brief, fleeting moments of exaltation, but they are very swiftly dissipated. Every idea like a candle’s faulty wick.

I sometimes tell people that I could have followed another path, you know, like maybe I could have become world ping-pong champion…but it’s who you know. A well trod joke, but one borne from a deep-rooted suspicion that I could have evolved and excelled at something worthwhile had I not been so solely fixated on music. But to excel on any path you need skill and an engaging personality to match and, while one can develop skill, personality can always be a hindrance…I know mine is. Let’s face it, being endearing is just not my forte. If you agree with me then fuck you.

And anyway, I’ve been beaten to it, my career diversity joke-turned-reality having already been realised by the artist known as Bob Dylan, the sculptor known as Brad Pitt, Tom Hardy the jujitsu champion and the actress, singer, dancer, record producer, songwriter, model, film producer, pianist and self re-inventor Lady Gaga. And what do they all have in common? They stole my fucking joke. I bet they’ve got nice personalities too.