I've never suited plaid.

Aren't there a lot of crows about?

Sorry, I was miles away.

It's been an eventful couple of months since last I addressed you. A major upheaval at home, a downturn in fortunes of a fiscal nature, a shitload of DIY and, to cap it all, I lost my funky Zippo lighter in the long grass on the field.

I chose a camouflage design Zippo. It looked lovely, but with hindsight the drawbacks should have been obvious.

Despite all the rigmarole, I've also managed to squeeze in one of what I have come to fondly call my "little heart tickles". Imagine having your chest stamped on just once, but by an enormous ape's foot that immediately finds its peak pressure and keeps it applied.

Now, I'm not the world's most ticklish guy, but even I find these tickles debilitating.

This most recent tickle wasn't as bad as last. This time I was fit enough to sign a form saying I didn't want to be taken to hospital. Amidst the current turmoil a break would've been nice, but the closest hospital is many miles away and I knew that I didn't have the cash for extravagances such as bus fare home should I have been unfortunate enough to survive.

Last time, scrawling my moniker on a disclaimer wasn't an option. As I was being driven away in the ambulance I was panicking and worrying about the post-me world. How would people cope?

Ha.

The day after that tickle, once back home and alone but for my faithful hounds, I thought some more about the painful experiences of the previous evening. What if? I gave it some serious consideration.

Would anyone miss me? Would the world be a better or a worse place for my departure, or even for my having arrived in the first place? I drew deeply on the pipe my doctor has said I shouldn't draw on and gave the matter ever more consideration, eventually coming up with the answer.

I don't care.

Or, at least, I won't care. I'll be dead. Balls to 'em all.

I have, over a number of years, developed for myself a memory palace. Initially just a technique to remember passwords, phone numbers and to-do lists (a now redundant technique given my over-reliance on the almighty Apple) it has evolved into something of great beauty that I can never share.

In my mind's eye, doors from various locations in my past open up into others. If I imagine opening the gas cupboard in the council flat that I once loved and crawling through it I emerge from the cash-box door on the front of one of the fruit machines in the pub in which I grew up. The cellar door in that pub leads to a dark and familiarly scented staircase which, in turn, leads to my 'happy place', a garden by a brook with a bench beneath which my best dog snoozes.

If I follow the brook upstream, my footsteps echoing as I pass underneath the hump backed bridge that forms part of the garden's boundary, the brook becomes a river and, when I emerge from the cool, moist air of the little tunnel I find myself walking along beside an enormous field, the sky above lilac and the wind rustling through and bending the long grass.

In the centre of that field looms a giant version of the doll's house I bought for my granddaughter back in those long ago days when I was still the kind of man that did that kind of thing. Dark and forbidding beneath the heavy, stormy clouds that constantly roll overhead, tattered curtains flap from within the glassless windows while the flimsy plastic door swings open before slamming shut with a regularity that's almost rhythmical.

It looks dark in the doll's house. 

I don't know what possessed me to add this last feature, let alone the scarecrow in yellow sou'wester that stares at me as I walk by the gate-less gate posts. I've remained too scared to investigate further, only ever seeing the house from the distance. Maybe one day I'll take a look.

Past the diabolical doll's house and around the bend, where the river magically morphs into a canal, I arrive at a barge. 

My barge, in which I can travel to the pub for lunch or smoke a pipe and listen to the little clockwork radio (with integrated LED torch) I used to have in my camper van dwelling days and that now sits by the pot-bellied stove in the corner. When it rains in the real world and creates that familiar and soothing pitter-patter soundtrack on the windows I close my eyes and imagine they're beating their tattoo on the roof of the little, red barge. I like my barge.

The barge is moored at the bottom of my garden. A beautiful garden that leads up to the beautiful house that is my dream home. A fantasy dwelling into which I've put an enormous amount of work and detail and in which pipe smoking is never allowed.

(Unless I'm in the high backed, green, leather armchair that sits by the crackling fire in my dusty, musty, study.)

There's a tree house in the front garden. As with the doll's house, I've never visited it, though it looks far less intimidating.

Scattered throughout these locations are my memories and the equipment I need for the myriad of coping strategies I find necessary. In my beloved council flat the lists and phone numbers I need to remember are kept, usually short term. The pub I grew up in contains the things I loved. The meetings and partings, cherished memories and the things I mustn't forget.

My garden is where I leave the things I don't want to remember, that I want to be free of. I sit on the bench and take the wooden cigar box that my father brought back from Portugal from beneath my seat. (Every time I visit, the box has been replaced) After slowly opening the heavy lid and breathing deep the exotic aroma I place whatever pain I've brought with me inside, clicking shut the lid and engaging the tiny, brass hook and eye. When I'm ready, I place the box in the clear, shallow water as it babbles by. I sit by my best dog, light my pipe and watch as the box floats away, ever faster around the bend and down the weir, taking my pain with it.

As for the doll's house, fuck knows what's in there.

The barge is my thinking place, the dream house my safety. I spend a lot of my time in the house, usually either cooking or watching a film in the jacuzzi.

I've spent many years creating this micro-verse inside my head. I know every detail. I can't change anything for want of ruining it all. Laws of physics are observed. If I dream, I now dream of that life, not this.

This time, with my heart tickly and with the sure and certain knowledge that I'd not give a shit about the outcome of this situation that was clearly out of my control, I went there. I heard the words of Patty, of the paramedic that was treating me and, I seem to remember, of a cat that happened on by (He seemed perturbed to find me lying on the pavement and wasn't particularly sympathetic to my situation) before I tuned into the other world and, safely ensconced in my own imagination, began tapping out my pipe bowl against the garishly painted watering can that sits on the stern of my barge. I wandered slowly up the garden path and said good afternoon to the tramp that I found breaking into my shed last winter and who I've agreed can now live there.

I feel like I should be more in control of my fantasies.

I went indoors and made beef stew and dumplings as some of those I've lost milled around. It was very pleasant, once I'd finally managed to disregard the sensation of that giant shoe threatening to invert my ribcage from another reality.

It was an odd experience set amid an already tempestuous period and one that I didn't have much time to consider. Once back in this greyer reality I share with you, once my hands had stopped shaking enough to be able to pack a pipe with my granddad's favourite tobacco and once I could stand at the back door unaided by anything other than the door frame I set about trying to forget what had come earlier. It wasn't so difficult. Other matters of far greater importance than a dicky ticker were easily focussed upon at that time but now, during this relatively pain free period of calm I find myself enjoying, I've begun to wonder.

Why didn't I struggle? Why did I actively try to control what might have been my last thoughts in such a way? Was I trying to construct my own afterlife? One's last moment on earth would seem as an eternity once passed. I'd have given myself that eternity in my own, personalised, perfect world had the tickle become something more.

It's not that I have nothing to lose, (Have you seen my dogs? And I've got half a Twix in the fridge.) it's just the realisation that we can only lose anything whilst alive. You can lose nothing when you die, all you could have lost is already gone. It's those unfortunate folk that stay behind that lose something, but they get over it. Or they don't.

Either way, it'll not bother us if we're dead.

This week has provided me with a brace of epiphanies. The first being that a man with nothing to lose can't be hurt nor made less happy. This epiphany has caused me to snarl a lot more than before and to give fewer shits.

And the second has been that Codeine is BRILLIANT. This epiphany has caused me to snigger a lot more than before and to take fewer shits.

It is also responsible for the disjointed blog entry you've just endured. Sorry about that.

I think I'm almost ready to make a detour through that long grass and pay a visit to the doll's house. It'll be okay, there's a torch on the barge, I'll take that with me.

Maybe I'll find my lighter.

Enjoy the little things.


J2H.

The black heart of Jimmy Greenteeth.

Taken from the upcoming children's book, Jimmy Greenteeth and the Magic Kettle, by John Spacey.

If walking through the woods that lie
Beside the stinking river
You feel a wind upon your neck
That makes you gasp and shiver
Run and run and run straight home
And never look behind
For if you pause to take a glance
Pure evil you will find

That breeze you feel, that's not the wind
But the breath of something wicked
An evil looking, crooked toothed fiend
Watching from the thicket
Dressed in clothes once fine but that
Had now seen better days
Hunting for his supper
Of unloved waifs and strays

He'll start by tearing out your tongue
So you can scream no more
Then drag you to his evil lair
And fling you to the floor
He'll feast upon your flesh and bones
One piece at a time
And laugh and sing and taunt you with
His wicked, scary rhyme

So, parents, if you value them
Keep your sons and daughters
Safe and sound and well away
From those oily, stinking waters
For evil like you've never known
Dwells in the dark beneath
The silvery light of the moon at night
In the heart of Jimmy Greenteeth

Author unknown.

Mr. MacGuffin's road to nothing.

If your life were a book, who would have written it? And if that book had a hero, would you be he?

As a young man, as with all young men, I harboured great expectations that, one day, I'd be revealed as the hero of my own story. The adventures of my grandfathers (men unfortunate enough to have been born into an age when it was possible for an ordinary man to live or die as a hero and fortunate enough to fall into the former category) were still relatively recent history. I saw photos, read letters and enjoyed tales of derring-do while balanced upon the bouncing knees of my still-living ancestors, looking forward to the day when I'd have stories of my own to tell.

I'd been born on the cusp of two decades, one of flower and one of dour, and so my teenage years played out before a back-drop of black ash furniture and Grolsch stoppered shoes.

The eighties were shit.

Chances for heroics in Thatcher's Britain being as thin on the ground as gruel in an orphans bowl, I eventually settled into my role as a bit part in a series of books written for others by authors I'd never have chosen to read.

When finally I stumbled upon it during a period of abject poverty, the genre that suited me best turned out to be not action/adventure or eroticism (my preferred choices) but Dickensian. My role was neither that of romantic lead nor overcomer of perilous tribulations. I wasn't a love interest and I wasn't a baddie. I was just the chap leaving the pub who stumbled into the hero of the tale causing him to drop and lose some important plot device in the snow, thereby necessitating an intriguing series of events. I was the Maltese Falcon to someone else's Bogart and the suitcase stuffed with money in the trunk of a monochrome car, pushed into a lake by a motel owner with an Oedipus complex. I had to be in the tales, but only so the tales could be told. I wasn't important to, or even mentioned in, any climactic final chapters.

As I grew into the role I'd been given I began to develop my character (I felt he should be a pipe-smoking wearer of increasingly bizarre millinery, as is befitting of a Victorian money lender or ruddy faced drunkard with a cough) and I began to enjoy it.

Many people have said that I put the "Dick" in "Dickensian". 

I began to feel at home just sitting on the sidelines and watching the delicately interwoven stories of others being written around me.

Recently, as is if my life needed to be any more Dickensian, a street urchin joined my little band of minor characters. A waif, not quite stray, who has gatecrashed my life at the point where I'd come to think I could just shut the door and cease to give a shit.

Disappointingly, he's not an orphan with a surprising heritage. He's not even able to pick a pocket or two.

But he's learning fast.

The urchin is, in fact, the spawn of Dickfingers and, until recently, he'd lived what I'd previously believed to be a lovely life a couple of hundred miles away with his father. I'd only spent a few weeks of the few years I've been putting up with his mother's shit in his company, at Christmas and such like, so my view of his happiness was skewed by the fact that he was generally in possession of a new bicycle or mobile phone. It's easy for a child to be happy when he's getting gifts in a house many miles from any problems.

For one reason or another, though, he wasn't quite as happy as an eleven year old should be when he went home.

One dark and stormy night things came to a head. His father, along with the obligatory wicked step-mother, were what could only be described as at the very tip of their tethers and, abracadabra, a snotty child with a suitcase and an appetite that has devastated my fridge turned up on the doorstep. Fittingly, it began to snow shortly after he'd plonked himself under a pile of dogs and commandeered the remote control.

All we now need is for him to befriend an escaped criminal, that'll pop a blob of icing on our Dickensian cake.

Initially for a weekend, then a week, then another weekend and, as is the current state of play, until some future time yet to be decided upon, my life changed from one of wandering around with my dogs and smoking the occasional pipe in front of the fire to one of wandering around with my dogs and a child and smoking the occasional pipe in my back yard. No great shakes, really. There's not a great deal of work being done, my being in the fortunate position of having to answer to no one means I'm playing the role of responsible adult for much of the time instead. I'm also eating a lot of sweets, to heroically save the little bugger's teeth and to starve the legion of tapeworms (that are plainly helping him to dispose of all my bacon) into submission.

It's fucking brilliant.

Still only a bit part, and one that will eventually end when the action moves to another location, but maybe I'll get my name in the credits.

It turns out that although all kids want to grow to be heroes of one kind or another, most of them don't achieve it. To realise one's insignificance in the whole grand scheme of things takes some of the weight off our shoulders. We shouldn't fight our way to the top of the credits, the most that will achieve is cement our place as villain of the piece.

Had I been able to write my life myself, my version would've been cram-packed with cowboys, dinosaurs, bionic limbs and a golden castle. I would travel everywhere by hovercraft and my best friend would be a threadbare Teddy bear by the name of "Mangy". I would never have been to school, I'd be employed as an astronaut and, right, now I'd be sat on my father's knee watching Bodie and Doyle kick arse as my mother makes choc ice and chips for tea.

All well and good, but who'd have helped the urchin?

J2H.

No hot ashes.

For many children, their first day at "proper" school is the beginning of the most epic journey they'll ever take. Some kids can't wait to don those grey shorts or those ankle socks and slip into the ridiculously shiny shoes their parents took them to Clarks' for, to pass through those gates and into those dusty halls where they'll gain the brief freedom from the restraints placed upon their every move by their despotic parents.

But I dreaded it.

My father, the selfish bastard, had taught me to read and write long before I'd got anywhere near a school hymn book or desk. A patient man, he'd write down words for me to copy on Sunday mornings at the big, round kitchen table whilst my sister broke things and screached and my mother stood in the hallway chatting to her friends and occasionally shouting "shut up, I'm on the bloody phone".

We would make up stories together, usually about cowboys or space-aliens, and he would transcribe our imaginings into words on paper, leaving space between the lines for me to copy the words he'd magically formed. Writing was a piece of piss.

Reading the written word I found to be a little more difficult, but I managed to perfect that too, thanks mainly to the comics he bought me. The Beano, the Dandy, Topper, Beezer and Victor. Tales of war, tales of naughty schoolboys, of a huge cowboy with a penchant for red meat and a myriad more fantastical things.

On the eve of my first day at 'proper' school my father found me hiding in our dustbin, with a torch, my teddy bear "Mangy" and a (by then empty) box of Farley's rusks that had previously been bought to placate my constantly bawling sister, liberated from the top shelf of the larder.

I stole those delicious little rusks at every opportunity, and there were many opportunities. It was the early 1970s and my mother thought nothing of shouting "I'm nipping to the shop, watch your sister" to her four year old son as she disappeared out of the door.

These brief spells free of parental guidance and control gave me a window of time just long enough to drag a dining chair to the shelves and clamber up, never stealing more than a couple and only ever from an already opened box so as to ensure my theft remained undiscovered and a new, potentially more difficult to reach, hiding place wouldn't be found and used and require new circumvention.

I'd been hidden in there for what, to me, seemed like days but was probably no more than twenty minutes. My father lifted the lid and deposited a bin bag on me before he noticed.

"What are you doing in there, son?" He smiled down at me with a look of confusion on his face.

"Practising my reading, dad."

"In the dark?"

I smiled as I clicked on the torch, pleased with myself for my quick wits and silver tongue.

"Oh, okay, what were you reading?"

I panicked as he lifted me out of that stinking, plastic tub. I'd not for one second expected a follow-up question. I looked around.

"That." I said, pointing at the little label on the inside of the bin's lid.

He didn't believe me, even when I correctly deciphered the legend. He knew exactly what his five year old prodigy was doing hidden in a waste bin with the toy he'd owned since the day he was born and a (by now empty) box of his sister's rusks on the evening before his education was set to commence. 

He took me inside and we sat at the kitchen table. Then he had brought me my favourite comic and, as I began to flick through, he put a plate stacked high with rusks and a big glass of Vimto in front of me.

"So what's up?" He didn't look at me as he asked, he just unfolded his newspaper and began reading. It's easier to open up to your dad when he's reading the back page of his evening paper, so I came clean.


"I don't want to go to school" I replied from behind my new, purple, Vimto 'tache.

"Oh, right." He paused a moment as he turned the page. "Why's that, then?"

I opened my comic to the centre pages and turned it to face him.

"I don't want to be caned for being naughty" I said as he smiled at the colourful images I'd shown him.

"The Bash Street Kids?" He laughed. "Son, that's not real. It's just a comic."

"But I saw a program on the telly..."

"That's not real either" He said as he licked a thumb and turned a page, "And stop picking your nose".

My dad explained that those tales were fantasy, like the tales we'd written together at the very table I was dropping crumbs on. The creators of my early literature were liars, the lot of them. Comic book artists and the heroes of my favourite TV shows had mislead me terribly. Not only would I not be caned but, my father promised, I'd also not be going to war, fighting off savage red-skins or flying to the moon.

I never did get caned (though I was walloped by a PE teacher, given the slipper by a woodwork teacher, winded with a vicious prod from a headmistress and dragged by my hair away from a fight by a dinner lady) but, all the same, I hated school.

My taste in comic books matured as I grew from a snotty nosed five year old newbie into a confident and strutting eight year old with a snotty nose. I now read of heroic, square jawed Americans with the ability to don Lycra and fight crime, of alternate realities and of evil, megalomaniac villains.

Most mornings I would walk to school alone, a coin in my pocket to spend at the healthy tuck shop at break time. Not being a fan of apples, crackers or bottles of panda pop I would, along with a couple of friends that always met me at the subway where we could safely pass underneath the dual carriageway, pop into the paper shop next to our school and buy packets of Space  Dust or bags of Golden Wonder Cheese & Onion instead.

One morning early in 1977 my friends and I made our usual, brief detour. The owner of the newsagents, Frank (Or "Fat Frank" as all the local kids knew him), was using a flick knife to cut the bands that held the bundles of newspapers and magazines he'd had delivered.



"You like comics," He said as I gazed at the confectionery, "have you seen this one?"

He held up the first issue of a new publication. Only eight pence and with a free toy, a "Space Spinner". I've always been a sucker for a free Space Spinner and so, having quickly done the Maths and replaced the packet of fruit Polos I'd already selected, I bought it.

It was a windy day in February. The Space Spinner had, on it's maiden flight, been diverted from the trajectory I'd intended (the target being the back of my mate's head) and carried by the wind back across the East Lancs' Road where it landed gracefully in the playground of the High School that sat on the other side. No doubt some older and luckier child found it. I was gutted. Until I read the comic.

It was a British publication and, unusually, every bit as good as those imported comics with the tantalising adverts in the back for X-ray specs, stink bombs and hovercrafts that were, annoyingly, only available to American readers.

I loved it. Stories of cyborgs, of futuristic, fascist police men, great floods and natural disasters caused by man's mistreatment of his environment. Some stories told of a Britain plunged into civil war or of society breaking down and lawlessness taking over. In some tales the rich lived in magnificent, walled communities and employed security guards to keep them safe from the desperate, hungry masses. Poorer people lived insular lives in tower blocks, wars were fought over scarce resources, television was God.

Machines designed and built better versions of themselves, negating the need for human life. Cars drove themselves, men lived on space stations, most folk were obese, people communicated by video, smoking was banned in all public places and plastic surgery was as normal as nipping to the hairdressers. Mutants, the result of the Strontium 90 deposited on the UK by the atomic bomb blasts of the recently fought Third World War, were shunned and feared by their own neighbours. These "others" eventually left their own country, travelling to foreign lands and alien worlds before, eventually, returning to wage war on those they saw as their oppressors.

Every one of those brightly illustrated tales pointed toward a dark, and not too distant, future. The weak persecuted, the good lambasted, the evil in charge. Orwellian stories of a world in which man struggled to survive, in which cruelty and danger were everyday problems, twisted realities painting a future to fear. A future of scorched landscapes and of cities ablaze, the smoke of the fires carrying the cinders of our brothers and sisters away from their suffering and into our lungs.

It's a good job they're just comics, that there aren't really any fascist police officers, that our people don't really live on one side or the other, that we don't fear those different to ourselves and no hot ashes are choking our children.

Can you imagine if any of that shit came to pass?

J2H.

The second, annual, fast becoming traditional, J2H Christmas special.

As with last years offering, it's not for the little ones.

Plenty of sweary fucking words and some Nazis.

Merry Christmas my arse, I pray God it's my last.

#BUMHUG.

Once upon a time there was a tavern.

I thought I'd be good at being a grown up, once upon a time.

Like all fairy tales, turns out it was pure fantasy. I didn't do bad, for a while. I bought a house while many of my friends were still on their YTS courses, I had a lovely motorbike and a sexy car and I went to work in a suit. But I was never really happy.

I suppose it was just nerves, maybe I was amazed at my good luck and couldn't quite believe it. I think I was always scared I would lose it all, that I wasn't really worthy and sooner or later someone would surely notice, bringing the whole charade crashing down. Slowly, I dismantled the fledgling life I'd built and spent as much time having as much fun as I could.

And it was the late eighties and the early nineties, there was a lot of fun I could have.

Then came children, punctuated by a marriage, and a vain attempt to act as if I were worthy of this honour. I attempted to pretend to be something I wasn't and wound up failing, becoming a man I neither was nor wanted to be. I enjoyed it, being a family man. I was lucky enough to have two sons, what man doesn't enjoy bringing up two sons?

It's fucking brilliant, I heartily recommend it.

My marriage didn't really collapse, it fizzled out slowly. I was immature and wasn't suited to it and, inevitably, I took on the role of absent parent.

MacDonald's on a Saturday, football on a Sunday, museums, cinemas and DVDs. I was better at being the absent parent, something to be thoroughly ashamed of, but eventually I failed at that too.

At some point during my transition from shit family man to bitter old bastard I began living a life that was something like a mixture of Withnail and I and Train Spotting. During this time I had a brief relationship which ended after, I think, I'd gotten myself pissed and disappeared off the face of the earth for a day or two. It didn't matter, I'd given up on relationships and so it was easy to move on. Then I heard she was pregnant. Although I knew it was almost certainly my child, I'd discovered I'd not been the only man she'd slept with during what, if I stretched the maths enough, was the critical period. I got pissed again, for a very long time, and lied to myself.

Of course, chickens always wander back home come roosting time. Although I've never met my daughter, she did contact me a few years back. She is both beautiful and bright, the image of my own mother when she was the same age.

Unfortunately, I wasn't any good at being that kind of parent either (No matter what those American sit-coms tell you, it's not all loft apartments and baseball mitts) and so, aged forty six, I have three children and two grandchildren that I never see, along with a mother and sibling whose life I am also absent from.

The separation came slowly, so slowly I didn't really notice it. During the time I was losing contact with everyone I had a few problems, some quite challenging, and have spent much of the last three or four years struggling with one thing or another. That which should have caused me heartache sat on the back burner and eventually became just how things are.

Last week, contact was made. It was quite a shocker. A comment on a blog post, one of the many entries that mention my children fondly, from a member of my family. I snorted derision and deleted the comment. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I wondered why my initial reaction had been such that I had immediately gone on the defensive without having felt a pang of guilt or moment of sorrow. Surely I should? I'm an emotional guy, after all. I cried at a Danny DeVito movie the other day, for goodness sake. So I gave the situation a good coat of thinking about. Maybe the person that left the enquiry will check back and see this, maybe they stumbled across the blog they commented on accidentally and wont ever see another post, but here's what I came up with, just in case.

Please bear in mind, you're only getting my side and for all you know I could be a right lying bastard, but I'm not. You can ask Robert DeNiro, he'll tell you I'm as honest as the day is long.

The longer the daylight, the less I do wrong. [Thank you, Suggs]

Don't ask Dustin Hoffman, he tells lies. He's still angry at me for getting sand in his Vaseline when we went to Formby.

So, back to my side...

As the fractures developed and my family became more and more distant, they began in-fighting and one or two tried to drag me into situations I had no connection with or interest in. When I wouldn't agree with whatever point they were making some spitefully told me what other family members thought or had said. 

I'm glad they did.

I discovered I'd been accused of something really quite horrid and, rather than anyone tell me, it had been decided that if I were to be given a particular decision to make I would have decided upon the course of action they decided I would decide on. Maybe they were right and maybe they were wrong, but I wasn't very well and, by then, I just couldn't be arsed correcting them. As anyone who actually knows me will tell you, I am a stubborn bastard and, though I'm not proud of it, I unconsciously said "fuck 'em" and got on with things. Not over night, there was a period of mourning, a feeling of loss, a couple of years of crossed fingers on father's day and a few tears over messages received but I'd become poor and hungry, those sensations muffled all else. Anger and self righteousness, I discovered, feels very much like hunger.

I shouldn't have deleted the comment, things like that shouldn't go unaddressed. I should have replied, but I didn't.

So, here is the next best thing, an apology for deleting in haste and a blog dedicated to answering, that wont get shared by me and may quite possibly go unread by the questioner. It's the best I can do.

I have no excuses. I could have tried harder, not focused on the things I focused on, but

I didn't. That was a mistake and I apologise. I can do no more.

Pertinent to the continued separation, I have my own questions, although mine are rhetorical.

• When I had my heart attack, where were any of you?
• In the middle of the night, when I wished I still lived in a high rise flat so I could throw myself out of the window and escape the pain I was in from the nerve damage in my knee, when my screams caused the neighbours to complain, where were you?
• When I sat alone in the waiting room at Salford Royal before the doctor could tell me how much damage my lungs had suffered, where were you?
• When I had to wrap my foot in plastic bags, socks and rags and hold it in place with gaffer tape because my only pair of shoes had one sole between them, where were you?
• When I wore the one soled pair of shoes to walk thirteen miles in the rain to collect a food parcel after not eating for four days and only eating sporadically for several months prior, where were you?
• When an elderly lady in a Salvation Army uniform held me while I sobbed after she turned up unexpectedly at my door and gave me the ingredients for Christmas Lunch, where were you?
• When I was scared, where were you?

I'd watched you all, for a while, keeping an eye on things. It's not difficult, in these wondrous times, to do so. It might be a bit creepy, granted, but I had the best intentions. Everyone of you, thankfully, were having a great time and doing more than fine without my ham-fisted, half-arsed help. Eventually, I stopped checking. I was busy. I'm sorry. In my defence, I'm of little practical usefulness these days anyway.

When I mention my family fondly, write about good times or bad, there is no pretence. Those memories are from a time when my love wasn't in doubt by anyone. It was real, and continues to be. I have little else, I won't be allowing anyone to refuse me access to those happy snippets of my uneventful existence that preceded this portion.

The years of "fun" in the late eighties and early nineties must surely have shortened the functioning lifespan of my long term memories, they'll be gone soon enough and then I'll just blog about which soup I had for lunch or how my home-help steals my tea bags. 

And I'll have some nice memories to revisit if I scroll back on my blog far enough. 

If my prostitution of the past offends anyone, then maybe anyone'd be better served not reading my nonsense? 

They should probably steer clear of YouTube too.

Some love is unconditional, the spring doesn't run dry. When no one takes a sip from the stream the spring water eventually joins the river and is lost, but it's still there, somewhere. Lost, but not wasted. Nothing we enjoy giving is ever wasted. 

I sincerely hope that all of you reading and all those I mention in these blatherings flourish and live long, happy, fulfilling lives. Take care.

N.

Black cocks and tatty tits.

My high school was massive.

At some point in the early 80s the head of our sports department was becoming increasingly sick of his wards standing on the touchline with their hands down their shorts complaining it was too cold, with hacking smoker's coughs punctuating their expletive peppered entreaties.

And the boys he had to endure were no better.

He came up with one of those rare things, a solution to a problem that was welcomed by all. He called his master-plan the "elective initiative".

It sounded cool and was even cooler.

Electives were what we could choose to do instead of learning to dodge around dog shit at high speed on an inclined football pitch, the result of our school having been built on a hill. The teachers came up with a short-list of activities and, to everyone's surprise, there were some pretty good options on there.

Through my last two years of school I spent a couple of afternoons a week doing and learning things I wanted to do and things I was interested in learning about. Sailing and canoeing, rock climbing and abseiling. I became a fencer (of the fully buckled swash variety), a toxophilite and much more besides.

And I learnt what a toxophilite was.

One day we arrived half an hour late back to school after a hard afternoon capsizing Toppers on Rivington Pike, a brief but powerful downfall of snow having brought the motorway to a near standstill. My school bag had gone missing whilst I was out on the water pretending to be a pirate and I'd been provided with a Kwik-Save carrier bag to cram my wet clothes into for my journey home. The bag had a little rip in it. It was a shit bag.

As I crossed the main road from our school gates I spotted a gang of lads from the neighbouring school sat on the wall of the park. Our schools were forever fighting each other and I jokingly said to the only other of my schoolmates that had left by the same gate as I, "Look, we're going to get battered now".

I really didn't think we would. I'd done nothing to these chaps, had never clapped eyes on a single one of them in my life before, why would we?

As I crossed the road and stepped onto the pavement the little rip in the shit bag became larger, reaching it's event horizon and tearing itself in two, depositing my wet clothes in the crisp, white snow. I stopped to pick my things up as my schoolmate walked on.

I saw two of the boys from the other school jump down from the park wall and jump him from behind, dragging him to the floor and beginning to administer a damn good kicking. Two on one, that wasn't fair. Like a complete knob head I ran, arms flailing and notions of a heroic and righteous battle ahead filling my head, to even the odds.

I completely disregarded the other eleven members of the neighbouring school's assembled war party who hadn't joined the fracas. Yet.

I remember a hand on my shoulder, then I was on the floor and could see my schoolmate fleeing down the hill. Doc Martin boots rained down on my face, chest and stomach. Toe caps mashed my testicles into my pelvis. I curled into a ball and tried to roll away.

As I rolled onto my right side a blue Ford Cortina mounted the pavement. It skidded in the snow, snow that was now scarlet with my blood, and the tyre came to a halt within a few inches of my shattered nose and cheekbones. I rolled away from the car, driven on purpose into the crowd of feral school kids by a man who made the decision that yes, he might kill me but if he didn't I was surely to die. He later told the police the attackers were taking it in turns to run up and jump, stamping on my head with two feet. As I rolled back onto my left the last of the attackers decided to give me one for the road. He aimed a foot at my face and swung.

I have no idea how but I caught his foot and held it, managing to struggle to my feet. His face changed from a contorted grimace of hatred to a picture of pure terror, he looked so young as I head-butted him. I was red with my own blood, my shattered face already swelling and the wounds wide and raw. I roared and he began to sob and plead through the mixture of our blood that surrounded his mouth and nose, mine dark and lumpy and his bright and frothy. I don't think I cared.

That's the last thing I remember before waking up in the back of my sports teacher's sports car and apologising for the blood on his seats, then I was in hospital.

I gained quite a reputation, returning to school within a few days with battle scars that brought forth promises of retribution from boys who, until this point, hadn't even liked me and made the girls either cry or swoon. I'd have made full use of the latter effect were it not that my genitals were now black and, although three times their more usual size, really rather tender.

And just because that's the way life pans out for me, the swelling went far earlier than the pain. The whole kit and caboodle was both pretty much non-functional and aesthetically un-pleasing until well into the new year.

I had a new party trick, though. My nose was now sideways across my face and would remain so for a year before I could get it fixed. If I closed my right (Or, to be pedantic, "bottom") nostril and sucked hard through my left (Top?) nostril I could make a noise similar to that which the comms system on the Star Ship Enterprise made when a call came through.

No one was charged. The police said they couldn't put any one injury down to any one assailant. That made my parents angry, but I wasn't bothered. Many of those lads had already been on the receiving end of violence done in my name but without my prior knowledge. This, of course, led to more gangs waiting for our pupils in the park, more running battles across the pitch and putt, more fights, more stitches, more shattered jaws. Blood spattered jumpers in the noble grey of our school or the shitty blue of theirs littered the hedgerows.

My mashed face wasn't the catalyst for this spate of violence, our two schools had been involved in fights for decades, I was just the first victim of this most recent escalation. My injuries were still raw, my nose still whistled and the left side of my jaw would occasionally drop out if I tried to say a word that began with a "P". I was immature, I'd been hurt and my nice persona was still decades from perfection. I rejoiced in the stories of another settled score and I joined in wholeheartedly whenever a fight broke out at the bus stop that both sets of pupils had to use. No one, not even me, cared whether members of the original hunting party were the ones on the receiving end. More innocents were hurt on both sides, more victims became aggressors, more comrades joined both sides and more anger resulted.

Many years later I discovered I was working alongside one of the chaps from the original hunting party during a chance conversation in a building site crew cabin in Birmingham. Up until that point the chap in question and I had got along swimmingly, both he and I being from the same home town and being of a similar age. We'd spent nights in the pub together, covered for one and other at work and mocked the accents of those around us. He mocked my big nose and I mocked his lisp. A lisp that he hadn't had for the first fifteen years of his life but, it turned out, that had arrived after he'd bitten off a portion of his tongue when head-butted, by a boy with a bloodied pulp where a face had recently been, on a snowy street corner in Salford two decades earlier. He didn't laugh when he told us the story. The passage of years hadn't changed his tale into a clever, funny tale. He described himself as a coward, said he'd joined in right at the end and had deserved what he got. The whole story bookended by two very different shitbags.

Maybe he'd recognised me, maybe he was confessing. Whether he was or not, the remorse was certainly there. His leathery face did a fine job of remaining neutral, but was betrayed by his watery eyes.

I didn't tell him. I no longer cared. I'd bought a car with the compensation, had my nose fixed (fixed as in straightened, to this day it no longer works, but I can now breath through my left ear. An anomaly that has made me even more popular with the ladies than the big, black cock of '85) and had briefly had my pick of the girls at school.

He'd got a lisp leading to a new nickname, "Lizard".

He'd been that kid that tried to get one last kick in. Unlucky number thirteen. The child that might have killed me, that may have dealt me the camel's back breaking straw of a blow and ended my time on this earth but instead led to years of hatred and an escalation in violence until no pupil from either school was safe. Vendettas were formed that lasted long into adulthood. This, of course, would still have been the case had he killed me and not bitten off his own tongue. It had been a lose, lose situation from it's very inception.

I didn't socialise with him after I'd found out who he was and he never asked why. We just settled into civility.

And let's not forget, I got a bright yellow, MKIII Escort out of it. Every cloud, and all that.

It had only hurt for a minute, but something like that can't be over in a minute. We don't let things like that be an end. Those things require a response. Someone hurts us, we hurt them, creating justice at the same time we create a new, injured party, who then seeks justice of his own.

If we decided something had to be done about world hunger but we couldn't figure out how and some bright spark said "lets make more people hungry and see if that helps" they'd be laughed out of the room. If we listened to them, we'd be adding to the problem. We're not so stupid.

It would seem, though, that violence is the one problem we treat with like. Tit for tat and an eye for an eye would leave the whole world full of tatty tits, though fortunately we'd not be able to look at them.

Fighting fire with fire, it must be remembered, at least briefly creates a much greater fire. That's why firemen use hoses and not flame-throwers and why today, given our nation's decision regarding military action in a land thousands of miles away, we're all just a smidgeon less safe.


J2H.