The little dog that was scared of the wind.

She’d lay on the rug by the crackling fire
Once that evening’s good walk had caused her to tire
She fell asleep listening to the creak of the trees
As the boughs and the branches did bend in the breeze

But as she lay snoozing and snoring her snores
The wind began blowing much harder outdoors
It’s gentle caress of the leaves on the lawn
Came rougher and tougher, “A storm!” it did warn

She lay and she dreamt of a day in the sun
Chasing some rabbits and having some fun
She leapt and she gambolled and sniffled and snuffled
Through hedges and rivers and long grass that rustled

But back in our world where the cold wind was growing
From gentle to harsher then further to blowing
The panes in the windows and knockers on doors
She awoke with a start and leapt to all fours

Light it had been when she’d closed tired eyes
And settled down for her nap, with trumps and with sighs
But away in her dream world she’d no way of knowing
Of the light slowly dying and darkness now growing

A dog doesn’t know when it’s dreaming, you see?
It isn’t as wise as you or as me
So this world full of thunder, of wind and of rain
To which she returned from her dream seemed insane

She growled and she trembled, then barked in the night
Heckles high with teeth bared and ready to fight
To see off the beast that roared at her door
So she could sleep and dream once more

But the beast didn’t flee, he continued to scream
To bang and to rattle and disturb her dream
No respite he took from his horrid assault
He pushed at the door, secured by a bolt

He breathed through the keyhole, his breath cold as ice
And peed on the window, that wasn’t nice
And when he realised his way in was barred
He kicked over the dustbin that sat in the yard

She rushed to the door to check it was safe
But the beast found a way in through the fireplace
Whistling and screeching and wailing a wail
It whipped up a shower of sparks with its tail

A log that had smouldered and crackled and popped
Leapt from the fire and rolled to a stop
Beneath the big chair that sat by the door
It smouldered and fizzled and set fire to the floor

The man of the house muttered “Blummin’ mutt”
As he slipped his right slipper onto the wrong foot
Then struck a long match and carefully lit
The lamp by the bed upon which he did sit

He mumbled and grumbled and, bleary eyed,
He came down the stairs intending to chide
His furry best friend who had disturbed his nod
“What the hell is your problem, you daft, noisy dog?”

Tail wagging she met him, he tickled her head
“Shush now, you daft dog, there’s neighbours in bed.”
Then, glancing around, he noticed the flicker
And smelt burning carpet and his heart did beat quicker

He snatched up a bucket and dashed to the tap
And filled it with water then went running back
The way he had come and through to the room
Where the flames from the chair were lighting the gloom

He threw at it the water, the bucket and all
It covered the flames and a good chunk of wall
The fire extinguished, though smoke filled the room
That daft blummin’ dog had saved him from doom

No more does he leave the fire alight
When the time comes for him to retire for the night
The room does go cold, it has to be said
But his dog now curls up on the foot of his bed

All cosy and warm, she lies there and dreams
Of chasing those rabbits through forests and streams
And when the wind blows, as it frequently will
She wakes and she listens and lies very still

She sniffs at the air, just to be sure
That a log isn’t burning on the parlour floor
Then, once that she’s certain that all’s safe and sound
She goes back to sleep, his loyal, faithful hound

J2H.

Goodbye, Mr Chips.

I love doing the ironing.

I reckon my enjoyment of a task that is almost universally moaned about stems from my youth. There was a time, in the late 1980s, that each and every Saturday evening followed a similar routine. Television on, parents, sister and both Grandmothers would congregate in our enormous lounge smoking Silk Cut, eating hand raised pies from the little bakery across the road and watching whatever vacuous crap the program planners at ITV had decided we needed to watch. Sometimes it was Surprise Surprise with our Cilla, sometimes Ted Rogers and his five fingered shenanigans and sometimes, my favourite times, the inimitable Roy Walker's Catchphrase. Week after week, being urged to "say what you see", we'd play along.

Whilst the show was on I would, having taken my extra long Saturday night shower and stinking of Insignia antiperspirant and Jazz eau de toilette, stand behind the settee and iron my outfit for that night. You may struggle to believe it if you've ever been witness to the disheveled appearance I now sport, but back then I cut quite the dashing figure. Always a suit, never a tie, silk shirts and matching underpants, the shiniest of shiny shoes and as much gold jewelry as an Inca high priestess, I would wander the streets of Manchester from swish venue to swish venue before, the next morning, performing the "walk of shame" through Salford and generally calling in at a cafe or a friends house to boast about the glamour model I'd spent the night with. I'd arrive home, grinning, and would invariable be greeted by my father who would ask me who on Earth "that dog" whose house I'd been spotted sheepishly leaving was. I have never, in my life, slept with a "dog".

I've woken up with fucking loads though. Isn't beer brilliant?

My dad's long dead. I miss his mocking. He had a knack that I like to think I share, the ability to be offensive without causing offense. He would wander around his pub at chucking out time shouting;

"Pacey, pacey. Andale! Andale! I've had your money, now FUCK OFF!"

Like Mr Walker's "Say what you see", this was my father's catchphrase and, although quite plainly highly offensive, not one person ever took offense.

He was full of little phrases he'd use over and over again. When I was little, probably too little for safety's sake, he taught me to use a hammer and saw. "Don't cut the wood, son, let the saw cut it" and "Don't throttle the hammer" when teaching me how to use the tools meant that, by age eight, I was spending many a Saturday afternoon banging away in his shed producing go-carts or toy castles for my Action Men. Little tips, repeated often, that stuck in my tiny mind and have stayed with me ever since.

One afternoon, when I was a father myself, I came across my mother hanging pictures on the stairs. She was making a right pig's ear of it and so I took the hammer from her and said "Here, mam, don't throttle the hammer". I glanced down the stairs and saw my father was passing, looking up at me and smiling. I knew why he was smiling but, and I've no idea why, I smiled back and said "What are you laughing at?" He shook his head and walked on.

Once dead, he had to be cremated. I say "had to be", there were other options, but the taxidermist was mortified by my inquiry, as were the lads at the tip, and burial is fucking expensive so cremation it was. One of the customers from his "Pacey, pacey" years offered to speak at the service. I really wanted to, but back then I was terribly shy and I thought, with all the emotion that day would bring with it, I'd make a mess of it. So I sat quietly as this man, a man that had known my father for decades, gave the worst eulogy ever. Bar none. He mumbled his way through it, saying so little. No funny anecdotes, no entertaining insights, nothing. It turned out afterwards that he'd had a speech prepared, one that told of my father's exploits, his naughtiness and unprofessionalism, all the things that made him a great pub landlord but, upon seeing the faces of some of the brewery bigwigs in the crowd and realising my mother still had one of their pubs, he'd bottled it. His tales of events after hours and of fights and threats and Del boy like double dealings remained unimparted.

He'd plainly never watched Catchphrase.

I wish I'd had the courage to speak, but I didn't. I wish I'd stood up there and told the people, gathered there from all over the country, what a rum-fucker he was and that I loved him. I don't think I ever told him I loved him. Not since I was a small child anyway, and back then it would have been an automatic response to his telling me that he loved me. But, as unspoken as those three little words may have been, I genuinely, unconditionally, loved that man.

The thing is, he knew that anyway, so I've no regrets in not telling him. There is one thing I wish I'd said though. If I could have the chance to give him one more message it wouldn't be "I love you, dad", it would be more personal than that. I would correct a massive mistake I once made, let him know something that I hope he knew but that, because of one little, inexplicable oversight, a silly choice, I'm not sure he did. A few short words that might have confirmed to him that without him, without his words and his love and his caring, I'd be nothing. Everything I am, everything I believe, he taught me, or at least taught me how to use the necessary tools to learn for myself. I'd stand before him, smile, and simply say...

"I knew what you were laughing at."

Say what you see, folks. It's very important.

J2H.

The word is not enough.

Had things gone to plan, my life would be very different now.

I’d not be living in a squalid, two-up two-down terraced house on the outskirts of a failed industrial town in the north of England. I would, right at this moment, be dressed in a tuxedo, pistol tucked away in my shoulder holster and snogging the face off a raven haired beauty queen as I piloted an elegant speed boat away from a scene of devastation with a micro SD card containing the plans to a foreign power’s new nuclear facility in my possession. But, alas, it wasn’t to be.

It turns out that I’m too tall to be a successful secret agent, I stand out like a sore thumb. I’m also far too pretty, I would draw too much attention oozing, as I do, raw sexuality and animal magnetism. It’s hard to fight off the baddies with one hand as your fighting off the ladies with a shitty stick in the other. Also, I’ve got Asthma, a gammy knee and a dicky heart.

And so I sit here, the most successful spy the world has never known, banging away at the keys on a laptop so old and in such disrepair that, just like my heart, it threatens to give up at any moment. C’est la vie.

My failed career in spying started early. 

Either by coincidence or because my father was forever coming home with things that had survived, intact, a fall from the back of a lorry and selling them to our neighbours, one Christmas I received a gift that my friend from across the street also received. A spy kit.

I’d torn the wrapping off eagerly to get at it, already having a good idea what it was having seen half a dozen of them in the garage under a tarpaulin alongside some orange Decca turntables and a case of whiskey. My mother admonished me for being so eager and told me I should read the label to see who it was off. I knew who it was off, but I did as bid.

“Lot’s of love, Mum & Dad. X”. My mother had a vague understanding of apostrophe usage.

The spy kit contained many things that would be of use in a daring mission. There was a briefcase that fired little plastic bullets and contained a false bottom. Beneath the false bottom, upon which was printed an incredibly unconvincing picture of some neatly packed clothes, was a treasure trove of espionage equipment. A knife, the blade of which disappeared into its own hilt so you could, pretty convincingly as it turned out, pretend to stab your sister to death, a gun with a silencer to muffle the faint click it made when you pulled the plastic trigger, a pair of binoculars that made things appear ever so slightly closer and a little bit blurry, a camera that squirted water and an I.D. card to prove you were working for MI6 and make any prosecution if captured behind enemy lines a cake walk for the foreign powers. Even to my young eyes, I could see this was a particularly shit present.

There was, however, one other item that proved invaluable. A little, black, plastic box with a slide switch on the side and four slim mirrors on the front that, when the slide switch was slid, tilted, rather like a Louvre blind. By directing this at a source of light it could be used to signal and communicate using Morse code. There was even a handy, little card that had the key to the code printed on it. Had I been the only one to possess such a remarkable device this, too, would have been particularly shit. But no, my mate Paul had one, and Paul’s bedroom faced mine. Handily, between our two bedrooms there was a street lamp providing the light source required for covert conversations.

It being winter, as is generally the case around Christmas time, it was dark more than it was light and Paul and myself would spend many any hour sending messages back and forth. It would take an age to have a conversation, we both knew it would be far easier to open our windows and shout, but our way was far more fun.

Many years later, after watching Smokey and the Bandit, I discovered the delights of Citizen’s Band radio. Having talked my parents into buying me one for Christmas, wrapped in gaudy paper and with the obligatory “Lot’s of love, Mum and Dad. X” label, I would spend hours chatting to people for miles around. Invariably, I knew the people I was chatting to and had their phone numbers, but our way was much more fun.

Then came the internet, mobile phone and social networking. Now, finally, I can chat to people from all over the world, share thoughts and ideas, pictures and videos, without ever having to clap eyes on a single one of them. A wonderfully wide and eclectic selection of people are at my fingertips, I can share my ideas and listen to theirs, I can have long held beliefs challenged and changed by the words of people that I would never normally encounter and I can challenge and change theirs. Or just find myself blocked and called some nasty names. I could, of course, do exactly the same thing in person by getting out more, meeting and engaging with the wonderfully wide and eclectic selection of people that live lives like mine all around me, but I don’t. Although that way would be much more fun.

As is so often the case when I sit here puffing on my pipe and trying to get a vague point across using pretty words, I’ve digressed.

Apparently, rather than a secret agent, I’m a writer. I would never describe myself as such. I regularly get introduced to people as an author. I stare at my feet, embarrassed, thinking “no I’m not, I’m just…” but then I struggle to think what other word would describe what I do and can’t think of one. So, how can I be a writer if I can’t think of the right words to explain to people that I‘m not a writer? It’s quite a paradox.

I didn’t ever intend to be a writer. I certainly never believed I would be asked to sign a book I had written by a complete stranger, a person that knew me without me knowing them, but it happens now and is happening more and more frequently. People say they like my books and that embarrasses me. I keep thinking that, at some point, I’ll be found out, that someone will say “hang on, he’s not an author, he’s that lad from Salford, the one that never settled down and was never any good at anything”. I see a new review has been left for one of my books and my dicky heart skips a beat. I take hours to summon up the courage to take a look, convinced that the poor fool who parted with hard earned brass on one of my books will have said something along the lines of “this wasn’t written by an author, he’s taking the piss”, but, at least so far, that’s not happened. Yet.

Rather than being an author, I think I’m just a bloke that enjoys telling stories but that lacks the confidence to talk, so I write them down instead. I can’t help myself. Since my day’s of street-lamp powered Morse code I’ve had an almost constant urge to tell people things, to offer opinions, to share my thoughts. When I write them down, people can choose to not read them. If I’m boring someone, or if I offend them, they can choose to close the book, but I’ve already said it all. My words may remain unread, but never unshared. And that’s the important part.

What is the point of a thought or idea if it remains unspoken? Is it ever right to keep perfectly good words locked away inside out heads to wither and die? Shouldn’t all thoughts be shared?

There has been an awful lot of talk in the media lately about freedom of speech. It’s an important concept, one of the foundations of western democracy and can provide the catalyst for change. I fear change, but I have to admit change is good.

(Usually. Don’t get me started on energy saving light bulbs.)

A thought spoken, however vile it may sound to someone, didn’t exist any less and was no less vile before it was uttered. It was still there. Words float away on the ether once the mouth that spoke closes. We can’t help being offended, and by God it’s our right to be offended. In my case, it’s a very enjoyable right. I love to be offended, to have something to disagree with and to be given a chance to speak words of my own.

It’s very hard to be offensive. Impossible, really. No one, other than a professional comedian playing a part, is offensive because he or she wants to be offensive. To them, their opinions are perfectly reasonable and should be shared. And they’re right.

Be offended, by all means. Tell the offender why they’ve offended you. Offer your own opinion but then, once offered, bear in mind that you might have just offended them. You might see your words as perfectly reasonable, they may well be, but always remember that the offender felt exactly the same way about his words.

No matter how offensive words are, accept them, consider them, reason them out and respond to them. Words, even the shortest of words, are to be cherished.

My dad died many years ago, just before Christmas. I had children by that point, so we still celebrated it, gathered around the tree at my mum’s place. I was last to open my gift, I don’t remember what it was, but as ever I read the label before tearing at the paper.

“Lot’s of love, Mum. X”

Sometimes, it’s the lack of a word that can hurt the most.

J2H.

Don't look down.

Scared of heights?

It's perfectly natural. It can never be described as a phobia, falling a long way is bloody dangerous. You don't even have to be above sea level to feel the fear. If you're stood looking down a deep enough hole you get the same anus-puckering sensation, but you're stood on the floor.

Many times in my life I've had to work at height. I'm not scared of heights, but I am aware of the intrinsic danger involved in being up there. When I've not had to expose myself to the dangers of being high above the stony ground below for a while, I lose a little confidence and it takes me a while to get back into it, sometimes hours. But, eventually, I'll be scampering up the outside of the scaffolding like a gibbon with a death wish again, or "hopping" the ladder I'm stood on left and right rather than keep climbing, safely, back down and moving them, safely, along. That said, if I see someone else taking the same ridiculous chances with their own safety, my heart is in my mouth.

As a child, I had a friend. Gary Young was his name, and he was the first person I knew that lived in a tower block. He lived there with his mother and younger brother. One of his and his brothers favourite things was to lean out of the bedroom window, twelve floors above the street below, and try to spit on visitors to the block. The first time I visited I myself had a go. Putting my head through that window and feeling the wind suddenly fill my ears, seeing the world below from a distance I'd never before experienced, the eight year old me very nearly soiled himself. I threw myself backwards into the room and fell to the floor shaking, but eventually I managed to stand and, on still shaky legs and with my friends five year old brother laughing at me for being a "poof", I approached the window for a second time. On this occasion I knew what to expect and found it a little easier. I hocked up a "greeny" and joined in.

The little balls of kiddy-spit rarely found their intended target, blown by the wind that whistled by and buffeted the block, but very occasionally one would. The unfortunate recipient would feel it strike their shoulder or head and would immediately look all around them, eventually looking up but not before we'd had time to close the window and crouch, giggling like the schoolkids we were, beneath the window sill.

Gary and his brother were the only children that lived in the block. His mother was single and, I think, fleeing domestic abuse. We spent a lot of time wandering around Rochdale town centre on a Saturday, visiting the cafe for toasted teacakes and a can of coke then taking in the Saturday morning matinee at the local fleapit, after which we'd hang around the shops just wasting time.

On a Sunday, however, there was next to nothing to do. Shops, cinemas and cafes were invariably closed in those days when Sunday was still special. On Sundays we'd generally go further afield, but occasionally, Gary being a sickly child, we'd have to stay close to his home in case he had an "attack". On these Sundays we'd play in the disused garages and little clumps of bushes that surrounded the flats and, occasionally, in the flats themselves.

Playing in the flats wasn't allowed. There was a caretaker, a big, scary chap with a tool belt who never smiled, and he would chase us off or, if we were unlucky enough to get caught, clip our ears.

One way we would entertain ourselves was to play "knock-a-door run". I'm sure you're familiar with the game, bang on a door and leg it. Simple pleasures in those Halcyon days of our youth. One afternoon, as we knocked on a door, the door from the stairwell at the other end of the corridor opened and the caretaker walked into view. He saw us and, in the time honoured tradition, gave chase. We burst through the stairwell door on our side of the block and I immediately went to run down the stairs. Gary, being more used to life in a tower block than I, grabbed my shoulder and dragged me with him upstairs instead.

"What the," I thought, "We can run downwards faster, and there's nowhere to escape to up there."

We climbed two flights of stairs before Gary stopped, put a finger to his smiling lips and gestured to look over the banister.

There, two flights below, was the back of the caretakers head, looking over the banister as we were and trying to spot us below him. He didn't think to look up.

We waited until he'd given up and made our escape. Brilliant.

A few years ago I was working on a building site in Partington. I was nothing more than a lowly labourer, one of two, building a small block of flats. The other labourer and I were pretty damn good at our jobs and had the site running really very smoothly. As a result, we had a lot of opportunity to piss about, playing cards, nipping to the pub or just hanging out of the windows and watching the world go by. As time progressed, we began to engage in silly, little games, constantly trying to get one over on each other.

One of these silly games would be to steal and hide the other's tools. Increasingly ingenious techniques were employed in an effort to flummox and perplex one and other.

The most used tools in a site labourers arsenal are his brush and his shovel. If you've nothing to do, rather than face being laid off, you push a brush around, floors on building sites are always dirty.

My colleague was like a bloody ninja. He had an unnerving ability to enter a room I was working in, snatch my shovel, hide it and be gone without my knowing. Almost every time, he would hide my shovel in the same place.

Being a block of flats, the floors, and therefore ceilings, were of the concrete block and beam variety. A few inches below the concrete ceiling, skinny joists were fitted for cables and pipes to run above and plasterboards to be fastened below. These plasterboards were always the last things to be installed, and he would take my trusty "banjo" and slip the shovel end between joist and concrete, suspending it there almost magically. I would turn to pick it up, find it gone and, every single bloody time, I would spend minutes searching the room without once thinking to look up.

Every, bloody, time.

I would, invariably at some point, see his giggling face watching me through a window or door, pointing and demonstrating to whatever brickie he was chatting to what a pillock I was, and only at that point would I think to look up.

That's the, very convoluted, point I wanted to make with this post. We never, ever look up.

When searching for an answer to a problem, we look all around us, but always at eye level or below. If we have a problem, we search for it down there. Never up above.

Are you struggling? Do you think you're paying too much tax? Are you sick of the feckless underclass holding you back?

Look up.

It's those bastards up there, those that are creating and manipulating the feckless underclass, that are your problem.

The benefit scroungers exist, we've seen them. But, do you know what? If you wan't to make the world a better place, help them. Raise them up to your level. Give them benefits, give them homes, give them free health care and an education and let them be happy.

We can't improve our nation by chasing them, they have nothing. They own nothing. They have zero assets. Whatever we do to them won't improve a single, solitary thing. And if we let them starve or freeze to death on the streets then people like you, possibly your children, will eventually have to take their place.

The wealth of the few means nothing without the poverty of the many.

It's those bastards up there, the ones giggling as they spit on you, the ones that are ferreting away a nation's wealth and jamming it above the rafters, it's those bastards that are the cause of all your problems and woes.

Don't look down.

J2H.

Shittin' by the docks and in pain.

Do you remember your best ever day?

Of course you do. It was, after all, your best ever day. Who'd forget a day like that?

Memory's a wonderful thing, as are the memories themselves. Some are sad, some are happy and some are useful. Remembering when your first pet died is sad. Remembering the bits that came before tend to be happy. Remembering to feed your pet is useful, especially if you want to put off obtaining the dead-pet memory for as long as possible.

We're nothing without our memories. As far as we're concerned we don't even exist until we have them. When we were newborn and swaddled, lay in our pram behind the television with the sound turned up to drown out our caterwauling, we were nothing more than a cute, gurgling drain upon the resources and good humour of our poor parents.

If you're as lucky as I am, then the memory of the first four or five years of your life will be chock-a-block with good memories. Little, distant glimpses of cowboy outfits, football in the back garden and black and white television shows watched with your father on a Saturday morning. Even the stuff that seemed bad at the time will probably, with the years, have had the pain dulled by distance and become nothing more than a funny anecdote to entertain your friends with. The bollockings for breaking windows, the smacked legs for cheeking the neighbours and the being sent to beds without tea for nicking your sister's jam butty and swearing blind it was the dog that ate it whilst being unaware of the sticky, red evidence surrounding your cheeky little chops, all were majorly upsetting at the time but now, who cares?

What's your favourite song?

I have many, depending on my mood. But one song comes to mind whenever I'm asked that, frankly puerile, question. It's not a song from my youth, it's a song from before my youth. A song that has been playing in the background during the most memorable events in my life since age eighteen. It's become a stalwart of my memory.

I'm sure it wasn't playing on the radio in the ambulance that took me to hospital after the unfortunate trampolining incident of '75, but when I think of that adventure there it is, playing in the background and soothing my tears.

The first time I'm aware of hearing it was in 1987 when a group of my friends and I found ourselves at the Willow's variety club in Salford. All now of age and keen to make use of our age confirming driving licences we decided to pay a visit to this most illustrious of venues, with it's cheap entrance fee, sticky carpets and multitude of middle aged divorcees all hungry for the flesh of the young.


We arrived, suitably suited and beautifully booted, with packets of cigarettes and wallets with condoms tucked behind the five pound notes (Only fivers, that way the wallets looked fatter). The wallets contained little, plastic windows to flash our I.D.s at the uninterested bouncers as we swept through the big, double doors in the mistaken belief we looked like something from a movie, rather than the truer picture. That being the Bash Street Kids from the Beano going to youth court.

Having been brought up in a pub, I had more experience of how to behave when in licenced establishments than my peers. We'd all experienced alcohol before, copious amounts of cheap cider swigged from two litre plastic bottles while attempting to breakdance on the pavement outside the Thresher off licence on a piece of vinyl one of the less intelligent members of our "crew" had provided.

The dimwit in question had taken a Stanley knife and had cut the large square of vinyl from the middle of the kitchen floor at his mother's house. His mother had hunted us down, which wasn't difficult. The crackle of the static from our track suits, the sound of UTFO and Roxanne booming from the ghetto blaster I had received for my fifteenth birthday and the fact that we rarely wandered far from the only off licence in Salford that would serve us alcohol made us sitting ducks. She made us return the piece, only to dump it on the wasteground that had once been a row of terraced houses between her house and the old Salford docks, allowing us to reclaim it the very next day.

That night, though, we had a wide variety of beers, wines and spirits at our disposal. Bitter, lager, whisky, brandy, even creme de menthe which, when dumped into a pint of Stella Artois, made a council house cocktail we named "dirty beer". All were imbibed, mixing in our bellies and creating a cocktail that should never have been.

One by one our party diminished. Brave companions falling by the wayside. Some vomiting, some picking fights they could never win and all cast out into the cold, dark air by the disinterested doorstaff that had probably known this was coming when allowing us to part with our entrance fee earlier.

The stage show was set to begin at nine p.m. and, by curtain up, our party had shrunk to just four.

We'd managed to get ourselves a table to the left, and with a good view, of the stage. We had, up until this point, been unaware that their would be a live band on. Our "playlists", had such things existed in the 1980's, was restricted to American hip hop music. And the Bangles, but that was mainly because Susanna Hoffs was the bathroom-buddy of choice to my generation. We were most disappointed to hear the band announced as :

"The one, the only, superstars of soul.... Mr Jimmy James and the Vagabonds".

The crowd, with the exception of our now sparsely populated table, went wild. Whooping, cheering, screaming and applauding. We headed for the bar as the group made their entrance. Then,

BOOM.

What followed was an epiphany. A revelation. A stage show like I had never before, and have never since, seen. There, in the middle of Salford in a nightclub with sticky carpets and twice-weekly bingo, real, bonafide, soul sensations. A non stop performance of songs that we'd all heard before but that we'd never taken the time to enjoy. A fat, black, epitome of the genre, dabbing away at this sweaty brow with a white handkerchief, dancing like a man half his age and a quarter of his size, backed by singers in velvet suits with dance moves like we'd never seen and belting out some of what have since become my favourite tunes.

We drank no more that evening. We danced. We cheered, we smiled, we laughed. We had the best night out I can ever remember having.

The end of the night came and the music slowed down. A melodic intro kicked in, the stage lights went out and a spotlight came on, illuminating only Jimmy as he sat on a tall stool near the front of the stage and finished his amazing show off with what has since become my favourite song. We began to file away from the dance floor, smiling and exhausted, but were ambushed by a table of middle aged women and dragged back toward the stage to round the night off with what we later learnt was the period colloquially known as the "grab-a-granny erection section".

At that age my self control wasn't great. The sensation of this well-upholstered, fifty-something's ample bosom against my tummy and her gnarled hands clawing at my arse was more that I could stand. I tried to control myself with a self-taught trick. I closed my eyes and imagined watching Man City play, but then David White scored and it all began to go wrong. So I concentrated on the lyrics and tried to wriggle sideways in her grasp.

"...watching the tide, roll away..."

Lovely words, a tune that matched, soulful crooning, it was, to my mind, the perfect song. "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", originally by, I later discovered on my visit to the Vinyl Exchange in Manchester city centre, Otis Redding.

Once free of the grip of my cougar with a cough we departed the venue and four friends went four separate ways.

The mixture of minty liqueur and Belgian beer, with their different specific gravities, in my tummy, combined with the fresh air and the tray of chips and gravy I purchased en route home, began to have an unfortunate effect on me as I took a shortcut across the wasteground behind the house with the vinyl-less kitchen floor. I realised, for the first time since queuing to see Santa in Debenhams, aged four, I wasn't going to make it to the toilet and that, this time, it was going to be far worse. My stomach cramped and gurgled as I frantically tugged at my belt, dropping my trousers to reveal my novelty Donald Duck boxer shorts and looking around to see if I was in danger of being seen. It was pitch black, no streetlamps illuminating me and a good distance from the nearest house, so I squatted.

First came a hot explosion of brown water, then the warm ooze of something that felt, but didn't smell, like thick custard. It smelt like someone had taken a shit in a big bowl of polo mints.

The shame I felt was only diminished by the sweet relief at my solitude and the soothing sensation of my rapidly evacuating bowels.

Finally finished, I realised I had neglected to bring any toilet roll out with me that evening. I wished I was as cool and forward thinking as the soul sensation that I had just witnessed. If only I had a clean, white handkerchief.

In the gloom, just to my right, I spied a leaf. A large, wide and soft looking leaf. A dock leaf. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, farted one more time, snatched the leaf from it's stem and gave my burnt backside a vigorous and frantic wiping.

As I cleaned my undercarriage I remembered the first time I had learnt of the therapeutic properties of the dock leaf. My granddad had used one to wipe away the pain and discomfort caused by the rapidly spreading rash I had on my arm after falling off my bike into stinging nettles.

"Wherever there are nettles, son, you'll always find these."

The other side of this particular nugget of handy information is that wherever you find dock leaves, you also find stinging nettles.

In my haste to clean myself up I had inadvertently grabbed not only a lovely, soothing dock leaf but also a fistful of nettles. And wiped my fucking arse with them.

I sobbed like a baby and winced with every step of the remainder of my journey home, vowing never to tell a soul what had happened.

Many year later, while backpacking around France, I found myself sitting on the dock of the bay for real. I had nothing to do but watch the tide roll away and waste time. A perfect moment. I had with me a small, transistor radio and, quite coincidentally, Mr Redding's dulcet tones began emanating from it's little, crackly speaker. I was immediately transported from my place, basking in the sun on the old wall around the bay at St. Tropez, and back to that cold, dark night in Salford. A night of incredible highs and devastating, embarrassing lows. I laughed out loud and recounted the story, in all it's gory detail, to the young lady with whom I was travelling. It was the first time I had ever told anyone, and we laughed like loons.

You see, that's the thing with bad times. The moment they're finished they become memories. No matter how low you feel, at some point in the future, maybe a long way away, all that will remain of your misery and discomfort  is a funny, little story you can recount while waiting for the ferry to St. Raphael.



And an aversion to creme de menthe.

J2H.

Vive la difference.

I take after my father in so many ways, some good, some bad. My height and my jet black, lustrous locks come in on the good side, my big nose and miserable demeanor on the bad.

One way in which I differ from my father is my parenting abilities. He wasn't perfect, but was pretty close. I, on the other hand, am absolutely shit at it. I tried, I wanted to be good at it, but when push came to shove I was shit. My son's are both happy and healthy, but despite my input rather than because of it.

When they were young I spent a lot of time in the car with them. My ex-wife had moved over to the other side of the mountains a couple of years after our divorce and, when it was my turn to have the boys for the weekend, I would drive over and pick them up. Generally, it being a fortnight since the last time I'd had them, there was plenty of catching up to do. The journey back to Salford would fly by as I was regaled with tales of playground skirmishes, football matches and minor misdemeanors. My youngest lad would bring his favourite CD with him to play in the car. For a good chunk of this period it would be the same album every week, "The Eminem Show", but the more child-friendly version with all the swearing bleeped out that his mother had insisted I buy for him. Unfortunately, my ex-wife's attempt to censor the lyrics was rendered redundant since the highlight of our journey was my shouting out "...fuck you, Debbie..." when the edit kicked in on that particular part of Mr. Mathers' poetry. 

Shit dad.

During one of our journeys my youngest son was giving me directions from his place riding shotgun by my side. I noticed he kept holding his hands up just before telling me to turn left or right and, when he saw my quizzical look, he explained that his teacher had taught him how to tell left from right, a basic life skill that had never occurred to me to teach him.

Shit dad.

"If you look at the backs of your hands with your thumbs out, dad, one looks like a "L" so that's left. The other doesn't, so that's not left."

An ingenious, yet beautifully simple, technique, and one that no one had ever shown me. I'd been taught a far more convoluted method, aged six, by non other than 70s heartthrob Mr. Lee Majors.

Lee had been star of one of my most favourite television shows as a child. He was Steve Austin, AKA the Six Million Dollar Man. (This was back in the days when six million dollars was still considered a lot of money.) 

Steve was an astronaut who'd received devastating injuries crashing a test plane. A man barely alive. A secret government agency had the technology, and the capability, to rebuild him, to make the world's first bionic man. Better... stronger... faster and, most pertinently to this tale, with a new, man made left eye.

I wanted to be Steve Austin. 

My mother bought me the tee-shirt from a stall on Swinton market, my granddad bought me the annuals and then, on September the tenth, 1976, I got the holy grail of birthday gifts. The Steve Austin action figure from my parents, along with a Six Million Dollar man space rocket that doubled as an operating table and a Steve Austin action figure sized space suit.

The action figure had a button on his back to operate his bionic arm, capable of lifting the engine block that was included, and a rubber, foreskin like sheath on the right arm that could be rolled back to reveal the circuitry hidden beneath. The face of the doll was uncannily like that of Mr. Majors, except for the left eye, which was a lens. There was a hole in the back of Steve's head through which to look and the lens made everything look really far away. 

This was the only disappointment. What the fuck? That's not how it was supposed to work. 

Still, I was the first in my school to own such a toy and I was as happy as a proverbial pig in a pile of proverbial shit.

To look through the bionic eye, it being on the left hand side of his head, meant using my own right eye, et voila. From then on, whenever I needed to know which side was right I simply had to imagine holding my favourite toy. I knew right from left. No more making a twat of myself limping to school with the shoes on the wrong feet, no more going to the wrong drawer when my teacher sent me to get paper or pencils and now I knew what my dad meant when he said I was "cack handed".

Thank you, Mr. Majors.

I still rely on this method occasionally. As I've aged I've started to get confused far easier than I did when all I had to worry about was getting home in time for "Battle of the Planets" or finding enough broken pallets to build my next den. I struggle to remember words that I've used a million times before. Occasionally I refer to my children by the wrong name or, as is becoming more common, by the name of one of my dogs, but Mr. Majors' method of remembering left from right keeps me from getting lost or run over when crossing the road. Without Mr. Majors method I'd have been flattened by a speeding motorist years ago. The Tufty technique of looking right, then left then right again is less than useless without it.

At about the same time that I was learning left from right, a grocer's daughter from Grantham was making history. The country was "on it's arse" as my father so eloquently put it. The grocer's daughter had become leader of one of the two main political parties and some people were very excited about it. The other party, the party in charge, were in power and some people weren't happy. There were strikes, protests, riots and power cuts. I was too young to give a shit about most of the upset, but I did enjoy the power cuts. My dad bought a little, black and white, portable television and a spare car battery which he left, on a piece of newspaper to protect the carpet, in the front room and connected to a trickle charger. Whenever the power went off, the candles would come out and my father would wire the portable telly up to the fully charged battery, et voila. We were the most popular house on the street, our living room filled with neighbours all laughing and watching with us.

Eventually, it was time for a general election. The grocer's daughter won, becoming our first and, to date, only female Prime Minister. She wore a blue frock and spoke dead posh, like my Auntie Sheila who I imagined was a member of the aristocracy and not really the sister of my sweary, pub landlady grandmother. To my young mind, that was the difference between the two parties. The grocer's daughter's party wore blue and were posh, the power cut party wore red ties and were as common as dog shit. The two sides were poles apart, blue grocer's daughter on the right and red, pipe smoker lot on the left. Piece of piss. I didn't need any ingenious toy-based system to know who was who.

As I got older I became more sophisticated. I read newspapers, watched the news and listened to my schoolteachers. The red pipe smokers liked the working man, the blue grocer's daughter's chums liked the bosses of the workers. Their opinions and views were poles apart and, depending on the viewpoint of the voter, one lot was good and the other lot bad. For those that weren't sure which side they were on, there was another lot, a sort of orangey hue, slap-bang in the middle. It was all so easy. Chalk, cheese and a little bit of chalky-cheese (Let's call those chaps "cheek", or "chase", whichever you prefer.) in the middle.

Chalk, cheese and a cheeky chase, easy peasy.

Whichever you chose, you hated the others. If the others had a good idea, you hated that. You invested so much time and energy into backing your own side that you found you had to oppose every idea that came from Left field or Right out of the blue. Even when your own side were failing to perform you steadfastly stood strong and, like a sufferer of Stockholm syndrome, stayed loyal. You knew where you stood, and you stood behind what you knew. Men all over the country drank in Conservative clubs or Labour clubs, their allegiance sometimes for noble reasons and sometimes because they were ha'penny a pint cheaper. Whichever side you were on was good.

In recent years it's become harder to know which club to join. The cheeky chasers put on a bit of weight and the Left and Right rolled inwards toward them. Eventually they began to melt, slowly at first, into each other until now, as a result of this and of my rapidly rotting grey matter, I struggle to tell one from the other. They don't even try to be different anymore. Now, the other side's idea is no longer a bad idea, they dare not say that. Instead, the other side's good idea is so good that they take it and say it was theirs all along. 

Nowadays, should an individual be naive enough to say what he or she thinks, rather than be derided in a smoky bar in between hands of crib or frames of snooker by the other side, they are castigated, pilloried in public, spoken about globally in conversations that all can see, All, including themselves. They allow themselves to be bullied into submission until, now, none dare say what they actually believe. They say what they think will cause them the least upset. They chicken out, scared of the opinions of those that will hate their ideas however inspired and well-meaning they may be, the opinions that people already held, have always held and will always hold. Now, we have no real choice other than to choose the least bad. There is no Left or Right and no right or wrong. Just one, huge, amorphic blob of platitudes, excuses, name calling and derision.

I used to vote, my choice based on which side I believed would be better for the country I love. I would still vote, if there was something worth voting for. Or if they add another box at the bottom of the ballot paper. A box that indicated;

"NONE OF THE ABOVE".

Where's Steve Austin when you need him?

J2H.

Don't bank on it.

Are you happy?

I sincerely hope you are. I like to imagine, whilst I sit here tapping away at these keys and occasionally blowing the fag ash out of the gaps in between them, that those of you bored enough to read my inane ramblings are seated upon a leather couch, iPad in hand, sipping a glass of white Zinfandel and occasionally popping a malteaser in your gob as your children lie on a rug playing with their favourite toys and half-watching the adventures of an anthropomorphised sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea.

I'm happy.

It's a curious paradox, my happiness. Anyone that could see the damp riddled, rat infested house with the black mold decor in the bathroom and bedroom in which I am currently forced to dwell would struggle to understand how I could be anything other than miserable. Were they to see my bank balance, they would be further confused, and if they were to see me, on the coldest of nights, lay crying with the pain that, no matter what I do, won't subside enough to give me even the briefest respite until the painkillers kick in and send me loopy, they'd call me a filthy liar.

But I really am very happy indeed.

I'm not stupid. I can see that, from outside, my existence is generally a pitiful one. It hasn't always been the case. Once, I was successful. I had a family that loved me and that I adored. I still adore them, but I don't have them any longer. If I focus on that simple fact for long enough I get sad and so I never focus on that simple fact for very long.

Once, I had a social life that was the envy of most. I was popular and confident, I ate in fine restaurants, visited foreign lands, drove lovely cars and rode lovely motorcycles. But I was never truly happy until things went wrong.

I was made redundant from a job that paid a decent age and that I was good at, but it didn't matter. I'd never struggled to get a job and so I didn't worry. I was unemployed briefly and, during this period, I had an epiphany. I had never done a job that I wanted to do, only a succession of jobs that I was good at and that would pay me enough money to enjoy myself once my working day was over. "Why," I thought, "don't I try getting a job that I enjoy?" After all, as my father once said, if you enjoy what you do for a living you'll never work a day in your life.

As a teenager I had a friend named Mary. Mary lived with her mother in a damp riddled, rat infested house with black mold in the bathroom. Her father had left shortly after Mary's birth. Her mother was considerably older than my parents, well into her sixties when Mary and I were thirteen. Mary loved me and I loved Mary. Mary would hold me tightly whenever she saw me, kissing my cheek and giggling. I would wriggle free, embarrassed, as soon as I could, and then she would come to the park with me where we would meet our friends. Occasionally, en route to the park, someone would shout a nasty name at Mary and Mary would cry. I would take her hand and we'd continue on as bigger kids who should know better would shout the vilest things at us. Then, once in the park and among others that had known Mary all their lives, Mary would sit minding our coats whilst we played football.

Mary had Down's syndrome.

I lost touch with Mary once I'd left school. I have no idea what became of her. I do hope she's happy.

But back to my tale. I decided, after much deliberation, that I wanted to work with people suffering with learning disabilities. I applied for a job as a support worker, a very easy job to get since the pay is obscenely low and very few people want to do it, and I began working with autistic adults, supporting them to live in the community in their own homes.

For the first time in my life I was as happy whilst working as I was whilst not. I seldom stopped smiling and every day I would catch myself, whilst out walking my dog, muttering the words "I fucking love my life" and smiling like a lunatic. I was assaulted by my clients, I had poo thrown at me regularly, I dealt with things that would turn your stomach and I absolutely, wholeheartedly, loved it.

Nowadays, that work has dried up. Some people that work in banks did some bad things and we decided that those who needed help most should shoulder the blame, rather than the bankers, and do without. They can't complain, so fuck them. We dare not risk upsetting the bankers.

I mourn the loss of my career, but I remain grateful to those individuals that I supported for making me realise something that we all should realise. I'm a really nice bloke. Not everyone agrees with me, I'm sure many people think I'm a prick and, to be fair, I do have prickish tendencies. Just like you, him next door and the local vicar.

Life for the last three years has seen a steady decline in my standard of living but I never feared the future. I knew, just like in the past, everything would be okay. Yes, I was going through a bad patch, but it wouldn't last. Later this belief changed to "yes, okay, the bad patch got worse, but it'll be okay."

I made cut backs, refusing to claim benefits. After all, I thought, I'll be okay sooner or later.

Except now I was in my forties and I was competing for work with many younger than I and in the same position.

Eventually, I gave in and went cap in hand to the state. I filled in forms, attended meetings and was awarded JSA, but still I struggled. So I sold my possessions. My motorcycle, my cameras, my phone, my jewellery. I couldn't understand why I was still struggling so much. Others were in my position but weren't walking the streets in shoes with minimal sole coverage, they weren't eating beans on toast for every meal, skipping breakfast and freezing cold in a damp house. It must be my fault, I thought, and tightened my belt further.

I'd had several credit cards when times were good. I hated using them. Every month I would pay them off, in full, never having to pay a penny in interest. Once I wasn't working I'd stopped using them but now I was desperate. Just a tenner, that wouldn't hurt, would it? And anyway, I'd be able to pay it off soon.

But I couldn't. A tenner became two tenners, then three. Eventually I couldn't afford to pay anything off the balance and so I stopped opening the letters they sent.

Then, after walking the nine miles to the job centre to sign on one week in late October I was told that I could have no more. My contributions were depleted. But there was good news! They had made a mistake on my initial claim and I had only been receiving half the amount I should've been, the reason I'd been going hungry. They apologised and told me that the balance would be paid into my bank account.

"When?" I asked.

"Yesterday." They said.

I was saved. I dashed to the bank to draw out what I could. Except one of my credit cards was with my bank, so they'd taken it. It had appeared in my account and was immediately taken toward the debt I owed. Fair enough, I thought. I did owe it, after all.

I trudged home, thinking about the beans on toast I would be having for my tea. Everything was going to be alright, something would save me, I was sure.

DickFingers had been ill for quite a while and unable to work. She'd been attacked doing the same job as I had loved and, as a result, will never be able to work in that industry again. She wasn't eligible for benefits herself but had been receiving a small, monthly, statutory payment from her employer. She could've prosecuted her attacker and sued him, but she couldn't bring herself to do that. A letter had arrived whilst I'd been out. It informed her that this was to be the week her employer's obligation ceased. We now, literally, had zero income.

At this stage I began to worry a little, but I needn't have. DickFingers is considerably younger than I and she found a job. Not a great job, but a proper, full time job. It was minimum wage but, by that point in our lives, it was equivalent to winning the Lotto. We rejoiced. We were going to be alright. Well, next month we would, as her start date was mid November, but we'd make it. We had beans and bread, what more did we need?

(Butter would've been nice, but we're not greedy.)

She started work and we looked forward to payday, the last day of the month. It was going to be close, but we'd made it this far, all we had to do was hold on a little longer.

Payday approached and she came home one night in tears. There had been a problem processing her forms and she'd not be getting paid until the following month. As with so many things in this computer-age, there was nothing anyone could do to help her.

We were, I had to now admit, fucked. We would die of starvation in a cold house. There was nothing anyone could do to help.

We ate every other day for a week. The following week she ate every other day while I pretended I'd eaten whilst she was at work and I went two days between meals. I'd gone from fourteen stone to less than ten as we'd slipped into poverty and I was beginning to ache all over constantly. But I had a plan.

DickFingers has a family that love her but that knew nothing of our predicament. If, I explained, she went down south to stay with them for a while then I was sure I could sort things out up here and, as soon as there was food in the cupboards and I'd cleared the debts, she could come back. I smiled as I told her my plan, I acted as if it was ingenious, infallible, that I couldn't and wouldn't fail and that it would take a month, maybe two. Then she could come back and we'd live happily ever after.

Perfect.

I didn't tell her the whole plan though. I missed out the part where I would steal a bottle of whiskey, get pissed, walk up Winter Hill, throw my coat away and drink until I fell asleep in the snow never to wake up. I've never told her that part. The first time she learns of it will be if she bothers to read this blog.

She considered it. She didn't want to, but maybe it'd work. But first, she said, why didn't we try and find out if we could get some food from one of those foodbanks that she'd heard about?

So that's what we did. I walked nine miles to the nearest C.A.B. where a very nice doctor who was volunteering that day agreed we deserved a little help and gave me a voucher. He raged about how he hated our country, a rich nation, where he was spending his days dealing with people like me. "If I'd wanted to deal with starvation and poverty", he said, "I could've stayed in India."

We had to survive one more weekend before we could collect our parcel. Just one more. Then on Monday, having not eaten for four days, we walked a thirteen mile round trip to collect our food. I cried when I saw the vegetables. I actually cried, all because we had a fucking cauliflower to cook.

We carried the food home through the rain in several sports bags slung around us. At one point I honestly believed I wouldn't make it, so DickFingers took one of my bags and my hand and told me it was going to be okay.

We didn't eat much that night, we didn't know when we'd get any more.

The following Monday, still just half way through the parcel that was only supposed to last us a week, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to be greeted by an elderly couple, smiling and wearing Santa hats and Salvation Army uniforms. They had unexpectedly brought us another parcel because it was Christmas, and this one had a chicken in it. And fruit. And biscuits. I have never in my life been so grateful for a packet of bourbons and a tub of brandy sauce.

We survived through to Christmas and beyond. DickFingers got paid. I wrote some books. Between us, we now keep our heads above water. Paying off the consumer debt and the penalty charges that these unpaid debts have now accrued is still but a pipedream. We'll pay them eventually, if we don't die first. Either way, it's something we've long since ceased to allow to cause us sleepless nights. Some may say we should be ashamed of our poverty. In truth, we are, but one day we'll be dead. Why allow the time between this day and that to be filled with misery?

A bank caused our slide, another bank saved our lives. Not all bankers are bad.

Last month, for the first time in over a year, we treated ourselves to a chippy tea. TWICE.

This week we managed to put the heating on when we were cold.

I found thirty pence on the floor earlier.

And that, dear friend, is why I'm so fucking happy.

Enjoy the little things, folks. S'very important.

J2H.