Look all around, there's nothing but blue skies.

Mouldy and draughty, my house is a pit

And even the dogs think the place shit

But it's all that I've got and I can't afford better

So when the boiler breaks I just put on a sweater

I'm grateful for whatever food's in my belly

And until recently had a thirty year old telly

It worked well enough and gave me the impression

Of action and drama in soap operas and Westerns

But then one night during a show with Stephen Fry in

That crackling, old box gave up even trying

It popped and sent smoke that was thick, pungent and white

Drifting up high while I sat and said "Shite!"

So off I went to Tesco to get myself

A deal on a telly that came straight from the shelf

I carried it home, these new one's are light

And looked forward to my usual Saturday night

I settled down deep in my favourite chair

One foot on a dog that snoozed and snored there

Lay on the floor halfway in between

The chair I had chosen and the flat, shiny screen

Looking so lost, sitting dwarfed in betwix

A vase with a flower and a set of six pics

I squinted at the remote clasped, tight, in my hand

Then turned on a film about a brass band

The picture was crisp and the speakers were sound

Then flicking through menus I suddenly found

All of those channels that, until recently

Had been unavailable for me to see

Those familiar shows watched without ever

Seeing a spot on a famous presenter

Or straggly hairs on the side of a beard

Or how that bloke off the weather looks a bit weird

All these now clearly presented in glorious HD

Even the wrinkles beneath Rachel Riley's knee

Spoiling my long held, low-def delusion

Of perfection whenever I'd put local news on

The novelty of the benefit hi-def had brung

Didn't linger around for very long

I longed for the time of blurry ignorance

I'd had and enjoyed while celebrities danced

Then, as ever when Monday morn' came around

Sat eating toast was where I could be found

Staring through eyes that longed for the gloom

At the flat, wicked window in the corner of the room

But what was that, sitting on that settee?

Glimpsed through the steam from my hot cup of tea

Was a woman who looked even better today

And sent all the grey clouds drifting away

Now she's the reason I tune in each morning

Scratching my arse as the new day is dawning

Munching on toast and loading a pipe to

Enjoy on my dog walk while cleaning up dog poo

A Cupid's bow and eyes dark and bright

A smile that'd make all wrong things right

I hang upon every word that she breathes

And won't start my day 'til she finally leaves

No matter the matter she's having to cover

Her words mesmerise like a whispering lover

Naga Munchetty, she's always enough

To brighten the day of an old bloke with a cough.

Enjoy the little things.

J2H.

The murder of the tree.

There once was an unremarkable tree.

The unremarkable tree nestled between a small block of flats, a wall and a ginnel. It towered above the flats, it's canopy spreading wide and the tips of it's wooden fingers reaching for the windows and roof tiles, scratching at them whenever the westerly wind blew.

My house is a shit hole. Mismatched brickwork, a rotting gate and a yard filled with builder's detritus as a result of the stunted reparations to the crumbling residence taking place within our walls but it did have, until recently, a remarkably good view of the unremarkable tree.

I smoke a pipe and, most mornings and every evening, I'll spend half an hour or so tucked between the bins at the back gate taking shelter from the wind, rain and snow as best I can whilst enjoying a bowlful of Steeplechase, Avro or Kentucky Nougat. There is little of beauty to look at around my shit hole (ooh, matron!) so I tend to lose myself in my thoughts as I puff away.

Over time and without noticing, I became familiar with the unremarkable tree. It had a rhythm in it's wafting and the tree would entertain me as it tirelessly performed a swirling, whirling jig. In the evening bats would join the ballet and perform complex acrobatics in the air around and through it's branches, occasionally buzzing me as I puffed away. In the morning, a crow would land on the very highest branch and caw his appreciation of the brand new day.

The crow was, for a time, the only bird brave enough to alight on the tree. At some point in the past so long ago that it now seems it was always there, a plastic bag from a supermarket became entangled in the tree's spindly canopy and would flap in the blustery winds, sounding a little like a hundred wings taking to the air all at once. The noise had become part of the soundtrack to my pipe-times, eventually going mainly unnoticed by either the bird or me. Over recent weeks my friend the crow had been joined by his brethren. First, a second crow appeared, followed by a third until a whole flock would arrive each morning.

I'm given to flights of fancy, spending much of my time lost in bizarre imaginings, and I started to name the crows, even giving some of them back stories. They would sit in approximately the same place each time, spread throughout the branches in a pattern that resembled a living family tree.

There was Tarquin, the original crow who took the highest position. Big and good looking, the oiliest of his clan, Tarquin was my favourite. Finbar was a bit of a clown, Tinny Lynnette loved a drink and Dave the Beak was a ladies man.

The motley crew were made complete by the addition of the final three, Twitchy Pete, 'Arry the Bastard and Carl Sagar.

A couple of weeks ago a man with a chain-saw arrived. He spent some considerable time attached to the thicker branches by a loop of old rope as he removed the less thick branches higher up. I watched him, all the while hoping that each time he loosened the rope and began to descend that his job was complete and that what remained would remain. But he didn't.

Once he'd reduced the crow's roost to a stump, the man with the chainsaw used a vicious machine to transform the woody perennial's dismembered cadaver into wood chippings and departed. The following day, someone set fire to the stump and, like a man pissing into an open grave, threw a stained mattress and some bags of rubbish on top of it.

The bats will find another hunting ground while Tarquin et al will find another tree to colonise. The new mattress that necessitated the burning of the old mattress will become stained and flattened with time. The wood chips will be spread over flower beds or treated and used to cushion the fall of children falling from swings and slides and I'll will still smoke my pipe in my grotty back yard. Life goes on.

But the family tree's gone.

A week or so ago, my uncle Jack shuffled off this mortal coil. I'd not seen him in donkeys' year, not since we buried his mother, the inimitable Granny Annie. His departure has resulted in my elevation to oldest Spacey, a status my uncle's younger brother, the bloke I called Dad, never achieved. My mother's still around, but she wasn't born a Spacey.

Yes, I'm aware that I'm displaying terrible sexism in discounting her but, in my defence, that's only because I'm terribly sexist.

I discovered he'd died when someone left me a message, in the form of a comment on a blog post. The Twitter-age version of slipping a note under a door, it was quite the shocker. The comment further broke two other pieces of sad news to me, in a sort of rip-the-plaster-off-quickly fashion, and was signed with a couple of kisses.

To be fair, it's so long ago now that I can no longer remember the last time I spoke to any member of my family, so I suppose that even bothering to let me know was a kindness I couldn't have expected. Of course, given my state of familial estrangement, it would have been possible that I go to my grave without ever having heard the news, creating a sort of Schrodinger's Uncle and keeping his jolly face and dry wit alive within me, but that wasn't the case.

I cried. Alone. The dogs were with me, staring at me and wondering if I had any food (Mercenary bastards, dogs are) but no one else who'd known him now knows me.

A family tree, gone.

What happens when Tarquin finally mistimes his escape whilst feasting on the remains of a cat on a dual carraigeway? Without the family tree he'll not be missed. Even if one of the other crows witnesses his cold, flat corpse how will they let the others know?

It'll probably be through an online comment section, but only because crows can't tweet.

J2H.

If stretched, your bowels are as large as one hundred acres of woodland.*

I've had some shit holidays in my time.

What's worse, I forced many of those shit holidays on my children. Some of the holidays were so shit, I doubt they even realised we were on holiday.

Generally slightly out of season (my times of austerity existed long before the advent of crooked bankers and guerilla class warfare) and involving a tent, caravan or canal boat, I'd drag them away for a few days of walking around, clambering over fences, climbing trees, exploring rivers and trying to light fires.

One year, I dragged the poor buggers to my mother and father's new static caravan on the outskirts of a quaint, little fishing village.

Blackpool.

Once we'd finished setting up whichever game system was en vogue at that time we went to explore the site. It didn't take much time.

As the sky began to turn from blue to magenta we headed back. Close to the caravan there was a small clump of pretty trees and the boys decided they'd like to round off an eventful day by acting like baboons. I left them to it and went inside, leaving the door open so I'd be able to hear the screams when the inevitable, easily avoidable, simply horrendous accident, that must surely take place, took place.

I sat with my feet on the little coffee table that would later provide support for a double bed and watched the television. Before long, the five year old came crashing through the little, rattly door.

My youngest was going through a phase that caused him to be referred to as "the fridge magnet", given his propensity for hanging off the door of the fridge and staring at the food inside whilst eating a bag of crisps and wondering "what next?" He went straight to the fridge and made himself a jam sandwich before flopping onto the seat next to me and taking the remote control from my lap as I took a twig from his hair.

"Dad, where does poo come from?"

I shook my head and smiled that smile that every father smiles whenever asked a question by a son still more stupid than he.

"From your tummy, son."

"What, MY tummy?" He furrowed his brow.

"Yes, well, anyone's tummy."

"But, how does poo get there?"

"Erm, well, your food gets digested and the stuff your body doesn't need turns into poo."

He mused over the information for a while whilst trying, unsuccessfully, to lick a blob of strawberry preserve from his own chin.

"And then what?"

"It comes out of your bottom."

The five year old wrinkled his nose.

"Eww, that's disgus... oh, Gladiators!" He exclaimed as he flicked through the few channels available on the little portable telly with the pound shop aerial.

We sat and watched Wolf and his colleagues batter people with giant cotton buds and kick them whilst dangling from hoops for half an hour or so when Jet, my personal favourite, appeared.

The twelve year old who wasn't there was almost as big a fan of the physically fantastic Ms. Youdale as his father was. I turned to my youngest prodigy...

"Where's your brother?" I asked the little, ginger, bundle of joy by my side.

He looked pensive for a moment, then his eyebrows arched and his mouth dropped open.

"Awww, I forgot..."

He rose to his feet, scattering crumbs of the light, curly, potato snacks that he'd had to follow the sandwich, the apple and the half a packet of Malted Milk biscuits he'd devoured onto the floor,

"...he's stuck up a tree and he can't get down and he said for me to come and get you."

I scrambled to my feet. By my reckoning, we'd been sat watching crap on telly while we spoke about crap and ate Quavers for  good thirty minutes, during which time it had gone dark.

"Quickly!" The absent minded child yelled as he leapt through the still open door, as if my tardiness was what had led to whatever terrible fate his brother had succumbed.

He'd done well, the twelve year old.

He'd successfully scaled the tallest of the trees to it's very top, though his forward planning had left much to be desired.

During his ascent he'd snapped off many of the smaller branches and used them as foliage-to-earth missiles to launch at his brother below. After a rousing chorus of "I'm the King of the swingers", complete with monkey noises and a shimmy that had nearly dislodged him, he'd found himself unable to come back down, there being few hand or foot holds left beneath him.

I got him down easily enough, using the same technique my own father had perfected on many of the shit holidays of my youth. He was cold, bored and his pride had been dented.

Also, his brother was "an idiot" and had "better not have eaten my Quavers".

Eventually, once he'd finished complaining about his arduous ordeal and had pestered me until I went to the co-op down the road for more Quavers, all was once again well with the world and I got to enjoy what was my favourite part of the day on a family holiday, putting the kids to bed.

The boys shared the bedroom with two single bunks and, after much giggling, flatulence and screams of "stop it Jamie, I can't breath" I went in to say goodnight and tuck them in.

"Dad, tell him, I've got Asthma you know? His arse might kill me." Never one to be overly-dramatic, my youngest did his best to get his brother in trouble, achieving a bollocking of his own for his use of "arse".

To be fair, trouble was always something my eldest was able to get into without the help of his wheezy sibling.

"Can I read my book?" The five year old asked.

"Of course," I replied, "where is it?"

He pointed to his little holdall and I rummaged around inside, retrieving his book and passing it to him. He inspected the cover, wrinkled his nose and tossed the tome onto the floor.

"I've changed my mind." He curled up with a sulky pout and a Gameboy, "I've gone off it now, it's disgusting."

I picked up the book, along with the underwear and inside out tracksuits that lay scattered around, and smiled.

With arms full I navigated my way backwards through the narrow door and out into the equally narrow hallway.

"G'night, kids." I called over my shoulder as I dumped the dirty clothing on the floor of the kitchenette and grabbed a can of Guinness from the cupboard.

I took a seat at the little bistro set outside, smoking a cigarette under the stars. The set sat upon the dozen or so concrete flags that my father had laid and that constituted a patio, it's uneven surface turning the seats into rocking chairs. My son's book was face down on the table as I enjoyed the peace and quiet and shortened my lifespan for no good reason. I considered my day, as I do when each day draws to a close, making sure I'd learnt the lessons life had delivered. That day, I'd learnt that trying to climb to the top is fine, just make sure you've a way back down if you need one and, a bonus life lesson learnt late in the evening, the importance of ensuring no ambiguity in one's questions.

I stubbed my cigarette out on the saucer I used as an ashtray and picked up my five year old's book, smiling as I read the opening lines...

"Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump bump bump,

 on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin"

J2H.

* Absolute nonsense. 

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.