When the clock came down (1987)

New Years eve in Shoreham-By-Sea, you may well think, ‘yeah, yeah, New Year anywhere, di da, di da, di da’, but not so. Shoreham’s not a big town, but it’s not small either. I mean, take the High Street, from the Footbridge at one end, to the Norfolk Bridge at the other, is about 2 or 3 hundred yards between, with eight pubs, and then about another dozen or so more within a five minute walk, but basically the High St always was, and still is, the drinking centre of Shoreham, and the Bridge pub at the end of the High St, next to the Norfolk Bridge, is one of the bigger of the main drag boozers. It’s a decent sized pub with rooms to let upstairs, so it’s laughingly called the Bridge Hotel, but the only time it’s ever been full was when the ‘old’ arched blue iron Norfolk Bridge was being knocked down, and the new featureless one being built in it’s place, so for 18 months, ‘Shepherds’ civil engineers and labour force stayed there and reinforced its right to be called an hotel. Outside the Bridge Hotel, separating the Bridge from the High St, is the three way roundabout, the other way being north, up to north Shoreham, and on towards the old Cement Works, Beeding, Bramber, and Steyning.

The roundabout itself was just a large flowerbed encircled by a pavement, and with an antiquated sign post, which used to have a big (by Shoreham’s standards) three sided clock at the top of it, each face meeting one part of the tri directional traffic. In each of the spaces between the off shooting roads, was a pub, to the South, the ‘Bridge‘, to the West, the ‘Kings Head’, and to the North, the real ale serving wine bar (now the Lazy Toad) which seemed to change name and owners every six months. Clearly you should be able to see how this area became the focal point come New Years eve.

Well, New Years eve of 1986/7, we’d ventured off mob handed from the Bridge, on the ritual pub crawl, mostly pool team players and girlfriends. The pool teams at the Bridge were its defining reason for us to be there, or at least, the reason usually put forward for the trip to the pub in the first place, Thursday nights for matches, and every other night for practice. The mix of personalities was a strange one too, Pscho-Billies, Mods, drips, squares, Heavy Metal heads, and a few unquantifiables, me included.

I think that was the year when we commandeered a Double Decker bus up by the railway station, to take us from the Buckingham pub, along to the Morning Star, a good twenty or thirty of us just jumped on board and pointed the way, the driver didn’t seem to mind though, and happily drove us the two hundred yards to our next port of call, no charge. The rest of the night, like so many New Years eve’s past, is not overly clear, until that is, the coming of ’That hour’. The race to the top of the clock is a time honoured event all over the country, the year before, I’d made it up there first, and this particular year I was keen to uphold my position. It seemed like the whole of Shoreham was out on the streets ready to cheer in the next year, and those of us who had taken it into our heads that we were going to climb the clock, were just waiting to get going. I couldn’t say what sort of a start anyone got, but I can tell you that after a mad scramble up and over the signposts, fifteen or so feet high I guess, with hazy memories of the other faces in the race, Stuart Bareham the only face I knew, I gained the top of the three sided clock first, with one arm clutching the far side of the beast, I tried to pull the rest of myself up and on to the top and claim my spot. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a wobble on the clock as I tried to pull myself up, undeterred by this, in my drunken keenness I tried again and hauled myself on to it for what turned out to be a very short lived triumph, because as I came up, it came down.

The falling I don’t remember at all, or at least nothing clear. I came to, laying on the flowerbed at the base, with a long coat spread over me, and looking up at the many faces peering back down at me, Alfie’s was the first one I recall seeing, our pool ‘Master’, grinning at me. As I stood up and looked around, with people asking if I was alright, I was surprised to see an ambulance parked up outside the Bridge, then a policeman came out from the throng of merrymakers and asked me if I was going to get in it, “no mate, I was thinking of having another beer actually”, but the copper basically put it to me that I could either get in the ambulance, or “come and answer a few questions down at the station”, “you know, come to think of it, maybe they should take a look at my back after all”, I quickly replied. This was a real pain, because we had a party arranged at our place that night, so how the hell could I get back again in any hurry from Worthing casualty on New Years eve, I couldn’t risk any more incidents with the Old Bill that year, so the ambulance was the only option.

Well, as I stepped into the back of the ‘ambo’, I was greeted by a blood strewn mess of a face looking sorry for himself, “Jesus mate, what the fuck happened to you?”, “you happened to me!” came the startling reply, apparently I’d slammed into him on my way down, but while I’d had a reasonable landing on the flowerbed, he’d gone on to smash his face into half the signposts during his descent to the floor, he was the eldest of the Davison brothers, and his old man was a copper too, talk about picking them!

Later that week I got a phone call from Frank Horsley, or ‘Scoop’ as we called him, the main Herald reporter, asking me if he could name me in the paper. “No mate!” was the swift reply, I’d already read in the Argus how councillors were estimating the repair costs at a few grand, the last thing I needed was them sending me the bill for it. So my anonimity was assured for the time being, other than the hordes of merry makers that were there that night and witnessed it first hand of course. No mobile phones in those days to capture the moment for posterity, which is a shame, I’m sure it would have made a popular view on youtube!!

That night marked the end of another little after hours custom of ours too, Saturday nights were Brighton nights, fleets of taxis outside the Bridge to cart us off into town, and one particular night, on our return back to Shoreham High St, we spotted a traffic bollard had been knocked off its island, so between us, we managed to scale the Clock and sit the bollard on top of it, with the white on blue arrow pointing down to the road. That made its way into the following weeks Shoreham Herald, with a front page picture I think, well that was that, for weeks after, we’d come back from Brighton after our Saturday night out, a dustbin one week, a traffic cone the next, all found there way to the top of the clock and into the Shoreham Herald. The blissful joys of drunken revelry.

Bin on the clock

A (Facebook) letter to a moron

Letter to a moron
01-11-09

For quite a while I’ve watched with mild amusement to cringing disbelief at some of the outpourings posted on facebook as people air the dirty laundry of their personal lives on this very public domain, played out like our very own soap opera. What often starts as a genuine broken heart, can so quickly turn into a battleground of hatred and spiteful vindictiveness through status updates and comments as each side seeks to make their point known to all, and, it would seem, the more vitriolic the abuse, the more illiterate the author appears to be, ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ are not the same bloody thing, yet you’d hardly know it as you scroll through the facebook status updates and comments. Funny how I managed to leave the education system without a single qualification to my name, but don’t struggle with my English, and yet some Uni graduates of today can’t even spell, but that’s another story.

Rarely does a week go by without one of these split relationships cyber warfare spilling on to the FB newsfeed, but recently I noticed one such situation take a rather more sinister turn when one of my friends was delivered an actual threat of violence from a moron yet to be named.

So, not knowing the name of this faceless bully, here’s an open letter to him, which may or may not reach him.

Dear Moron,
it’s sad enough when any relationship breaks down, and sadder still when nippers are involved, as one is here, without some unwanted malevolent halfwit sticking his oar in. What follows is pure supposition, not speculation, one can only assume, (as I will attempt to do from here on in),what that third party’s (you/ the moron), motives for this are, trying to worm your way into her knickers?, or in them already perhaps. Maybe while in her clutches, as you’re sweating and groaning over her, as she gently breathes her poison into your ears, infecting further your already warped mind while she has her legs wrapped around you, clenching you tighter to emphasise each vicious demand or invented truth, think then about when it’s your turn to be the object of that venom.

Think also, about when you’ve carried out your threats, you’re clearly not that bright, (though doubtless delude yourself that you are), so will be easy to find out about, and the army of friends you will have mightily pissed off. But I’m not interested in an eye for an eye, I’d want much more than that, by legal means. Lose your liberty so you can dwell over your shortcomings while in the company of like minded morons, with your face pressed against the cell walls while you’re being butt raped by a rather large inmate who likes to be called ‘Big Bubba’.

Think also about the person you’re threatening, I’ve never known him to take a swing in anger in all the years I’ve known him, he’s one of life’s comedians, a happy go lucky fella, entertaining company, and not a harmful bone in his body. So if you were to carry out these unwarranted threats, then you would be a bully too, which in turn means you would be a gutless coward, as all bullies are.

But really and truly, the most important factor has to be that there is a child involved, so leave it to the parents to sort out on their own, don’t try currying favour by dishing out malicious threats in return for sexual favours, or whatever else your reason is for getting involved in affairs that don’t concern you.

I hope this does reach you, and that you will have enough sense to see the light and drop the threats, but I’m not holding my breath. Of course it could just be that you’re full of hot air, which is not an unreasonable assumption, so I’ll finish with one of those classic FB status updates which so often follow a tirade aimed at some ‘ex’ or another,
“YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE”

Blog action day, climate change?

Blog action day

15-10-09

So, apparently it’s ‘blog action day’ all over the world on 15th October, an effort inspired by climate change campaigners to raise awareness of the ‘alleged’ impending doom befalling our supposedly stricken planet. I have to say, straight off the bat, I’ve long considered humans to be the worst disease this planet has to combat, so I’m tempted to view this whole climate change battle as more of a, ‘shit, what’s gonna happen to us’ debate really, while having the opinion that anything which wipes out the human race would, on the whole, be better for all other living creatures residing here.

The situation the human race now finds itself in is entirely man made, and while we’d all like to be able to point the finger, screaming with some kind of righteous indignation at the corporate super powers of industry, like British Petroleum, Tesco’s, Mac Donalds, Aviation industries, or even Starbucks, we conveniently neglect to mention that they’re all operated by human beings in the very ‘dog eat dog’ world of business.

So let’s consider that perhaps the millions of farm reared cattle can actually fart us out of existence, or that the billions of cars, trains, planes, motor bikes, and power stations will poison our air, land, and seas, so that the jet streams can then deliver these deadly toxins around the planet, or the Gulf stream ceases to flow, bringing on another ice age, maybe the opposite and global warming baking half of us to death in waves of ‘nucleur summers’. This planet has already had the global warming and ice age scenarios, before even we came along, and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll happen again, with or without our assistance.

One of the biggest problems we as a race have had to confront has been as a direct result of our so called ‘progress’. Going from a nomadic existence, where you lived off an area without decimating it, moving on to greener pastures, and allowing that area to recover, to a heavily populated city/town society based around industry and mass production to satiate all the needs of that ever increasing population.

Somewhere down the line it might occur to enough governments to send out the message not to have so many bloody children, and that some places on this planet were never supposed to have been populated in the first place. You can bet your boots that the nomadic African tribes, pre European interference, wouldn’t be hanging around during drought times, or floods. Much like the American plains Indians knew when to move on, and where best to go, before they were all but wiped out by the plague of Europeans ‘settling’ with their own style of population, shortly followed by industry. And think about the kind of people most likely to succeed in industry, opportunist, cut throat, self serving, and mainly avaricious

I don’t consider myself to be the problem, but I can’t escape the fact that, as a human being, I’m at least a part of it, so ought to try in my own way to limit what damage I do during my time here. And if that alone was the message for others, to just ‘do what you can’, then those that follow that way of thinking could at least sleep with a slightly easier conscience, whether it made a difference or not.

As it happens I have a ‘rant’ I’d written about this subject a few years back, so here it is below:-

Pay the price (written 02-11-2K)

Global warming’s cast its vote
So ditch the car and get a boat
Heed the warnings, read the signs
Of Mother earths new worry lines

Petty quarrels, status quo
You just won’t let your comforts go
Mudslides, floods, trees on the line
See it now, things aint just fine

Cars and chimneys billow smoke
And make this ailing planet choke
Then think about when we’re not here
As earth recovers year by year

From the human made disease
Which poisons air, and land, and seas
We’re the ones earth doesn’t need
Our self indulgent endless greed

We’ve turned into a selfish race
The natives now all but replaced
Once knew nomads how to live
And how much Mother earth could give

Take for need and not for greed
Reap then sow another seed
We’ve had our time but if we’ve failed
Get ready next to learn to SAIL

Furies

07-10-09

My year, as anyone following this blog will know, has been lurching from one potential disaster to another, with actual nightmares, lucky near misses, occasional beacons of light, and wet fish slaps in the face followed by Monty Python size boots stamping me into the dirt.

A brief summary:- first four months, only 6 days of work, then beloved Uncle David passed away, family pet, Aero, put down riddled with cancer, dick head runs into the back of my van on the way to work, nail gun explodes, lend ten grand to a mate only for the bank to close his business down as soon as he put the money in his business account, book contract terminated, which had cost me £11,5000 to make happen in the first place, being made to constantly wait for money I’d earned to be paid, and now the latest knife in the throat, I’ve just been summoned with a court order to pay over a grand to the twat that ran into the back of my van back in April. Suffice to say I’ve been dribbling with fury just lately, my head’s a shed, and not a well kept, everything in its place, shed, but more of a, where the bloody hell is anything, type shed, like my life currently, a bloody awful mess.

It aint meant to be like this, but I’ve been working on turning things around, in my head at least. If you tell yourself you don’t actually need something, you can put it behind you and focus ahead, don’t get me wrong, you can’t bring back the dead, but you can be happy you knew them and remember all the good stuff. With the book, well, I made it happen, and now it’s generating funds for the RNLI, and the hospitals League of Friends shops too, plus it’s being read which is the main purpose of any book I guess. Money I’m owed, no point worrying about this, just do what you can, keep on the right side of those that owe you, don’t want to get there backs up and make it easy for them to fuck you off because you’re not mates any more, make them feel bad that they’re doing it to an actual friend, one that showed enough trust in them to wait for what’s owed.

I’ve got my health, though I don’t think I’d want to see my blood pressure right now, as usual I have no ‘involvement’, but have had glimpses of potential on the odd occasion, so trust that situation at least has possibilities and keep faith that I’m not some wasp chewing bulldog that frightens them off at first sight. And I have this blog, which is my vent from which I may spew my steam. Basically, however shyte life appears to be, if you can sit back and take stock for long enough, you’ll calm down and begin to see, what our dickhead politicians might call, ‘the green shoots of recovery’, or even better, the things that are already around you that make you smile everyday. I wasn’t expecting this last paragraph when I started typing, having had no intention of allowing the current ‘mild hump’ I’ve had to escape anytime soon.

All events referred to in this blog have been blogged about earlier, so can be referenced below this one somewhere. Presently laid low by a dreaded lurgy too, but there has been one completely unexpected, and pleasant surprise today, www.wolf-e-boy.com got a new record of 535 hits yesterday!, I don’t get any revenue for that, but it’s nice to see it attracting a decent amount of attention anyway

Mugged again

Once more I’ve been made a mug of by someone who’s supposed to be a friend, after over two years of patience, waiting for money owed, now apparently I’m the nuisance for wanting the money that I earned, but he spent on holidays for his family. And because he’s now supposedly skint, while I’m not, I should show some understanding for him spending money that was never his to spend in the first place.

This isn’t an uncommon scenario for us self employed workers, you soon discover that there are plenty of people out there that will consider you a nuisance for wanting what is actually yours, as if we ought to be grateful for the underpaid amount they coughed up late, and consider ourselves lucky we got anything at all. While then enduring their irritation as we have the audacity to want paying for services rendered. It’s bad enough when it’s a customer trying to stiff you, but it’s a fuck sight worse when it’s for someone who’s been paid for your work and then keeps it for themselves.

So after having my texts and phone calls illicit no response for weeks on end, (two years down the line mind you), I decided to text him and suggest that perhaps I should call his wife instead if he didn’t want to respond to my messages or calls, and bingo, surprise, surprise, I get a message, which reads-

“I’m not ignoring u and u can ask (his wife) she hasn’t got any money. I’m skint your not so give me a break u will get it probably in instalments. I would appreciate a little understanding and trust. I have had a bad year and will get it to u. cheers”

I’d say having waited two years for money he’d already been paid, for work I’d done, was pretty understanding, and showed a fair degree of trust too. As for being skint, well maybe don’t have two or three family holidays abroad a year, send your kids to private school, and drive flash 4 by 4 motors, while owing people money might be an idea. And having a bad year, yep, I tick that box too, but because I don’t spend what I can’t afford to, I’m not skint, so according to you mate I should help look after you. Remember, you’ve already spent what wasn’t yours to spend, and yes, you were ignoring me, for ages. So I replied by text-

“All you had to do was not ignore me (name), and not spend other blokes wages in the first place!”

To which he came back with-

“You entitled to your opinion. I have been bumped for 12 grand mate so I owing u three days out of a whole years work is not bad considering”

How many of you would be happy for the person you’ve been working for to say, “ok, you’ve worked for a long while for me, so I’m gonna hold back a few days pay for a couple of years so the wife and kids can live above the normal standard”

This is someone I like, (which is why no names), but I choose my own charities, I don’t want them chosen on my behalf. I know I’ll be lucky if I see any of the money now, which is why I’m pissed off enough to write this blog after over two years of having been mugged off. But this isn’t a lone incident, so when you read about rogue builders, remember there are rogue clients too, (customers and companies alike), who want something for nothing.

Flash Forward

Flash forward

I’ve never written a review before, so for this blog, I thought I’d give one a go, as a result of being so impressed by the first episode of Flash forward last night. The premise needs to be taken with a hefty dose of salt, but if Lost could get away with churning out such a long series while stuck on an island, this at least has the benefit of being global.

It begins by showing a variety of different characters, loosely connected by events later, going about their daily business. FBI agents chasing terrorists, a young Doctor contemplating suicide, (with gun to throat), on Venice pier in LA, one of the FBI agents’ (Joseph Fiennes), baby sitter shagging her boyfriend while baby sitting, and then black out, followed by ‘cut to’ shots, fade in and outs, blurred shots, and general mayhem as everyone, (or so it seems), in the world passes out for two minutes and 17 seconds. As they come to, you can use your imagination to figure out what kind of chaos would ensue were such an event to occur, cars and planes figuring prominently, like 9/11 one hundred thousand times over.

And here’s where the fun starts, as one by one, they realise they’ve had what looks like a glimpse of their own futures, more specifically, at a set date in time 6 months hence, April 29/30th at 10 o clock on the 30th LA time, and everywhere else at their coordinating times around the world. So this is where it gets interesting, as people find things out they may not have wanted to either know or believe, and it isn’t too long before the first signs of proof start showing up, thus putting wind well and truly up some of the characters, whilst for some it was taken as a life affirming sign from that fictitious father of the beardy geezer who has his birthday on the 25th December.

As the characters search for answers, the viewers are dropped little visual clues which inter connect various ‘Flash forwards’, confirming these are not random visions or dreams, but seemingly actual life experiences which just haven’t happened yet. This series looks like a good one for those out there that like to let their imagination go with things, and right at the end of episode one, pan over to a sports stadium with the whole crowd passed out, only to spot a lone figure in long coat walking calmly along and out of one of the exits. Who will this person turn out to be?

The pace, film work, and screen play, are of a high calibre judging by episode one, if it carries on ticking the boxes like that throughout then I’ll be glued to it for the next 21 episodes, check it out.

Many Gits

Many Gits

Lazy Git first, no excuses, but I just seem to be the laziest git when it comes to motivational things, fine when I get started, (well sometimes anyway), but the flimsiest of reasons and I’m procrastinating again. And writing gets the worst end of my laziness, can’t remember the last time I blogged, could check I suppose, but I’m here now and can’t be bothered, Lazy Git.

Work this year has been a bit disastrous, weaving between bugger all and a faint trickle, forced to take on the little tasks I hate the most, but chipping away at those slowly, (rather too slowly, Lazy Git). And in between putting everything else off, I’ve actually managed to get something worthwhile moving with the book, Bangkok to BC, now being punted around town in the pubs, and Carats café over the lock gates on Southwick beach, all for just a donation to the RNLI. So if any of you reading this would like a copy, then get your selves down to either the Bridge, Waterside, or Buckingham Arms pubs in Shoreham By Sea.

We had a Shoreham Herald photo shoot yesterday, myself and two of Shoreham’s Lifeboat crew, Ben Coe, and Dave Tanner, outside the Waterside pub on Shoreham Beach, so hopefully that will raise awareness and shift copies, thus filling the RNLI coffers a little more. It all went well, but unfortunately put me a tad behind for our Waltons with swearing Monday night dinner, and as a result I was transformed into the Stressed Git mode, and in no short amount of time, Stroppy Git, and almost Ramsey style ‘F’ word lunacy, in fact a fekkin eejot, but I survived, dribbling, deranged mess though I may have appeared. Everyone politely claimed it was all fine, perhaps worried I might otherwise go and boil the goldfish by sticking my overheated head in the pond to cool down.

All of that I put down to the copious amounts necked over the weekend, Drunken Git, which always puts a demented twist to my outlook, at least until Tuesday, by which time the poison has been driven out and sense returns along with a degree of feeling human again. Also swimming a kilometre each morning goes some way to sorting me out, me and the Old Man have been back on that for a month now after a five year absence, Fit Git, (ISH!), and Old Git (not bad for 82).

I’ve also been made aware that old mates are checking up on this site from afar, and not impressed that I’ve been in Lazy Git mode for so long. Shirl, in Spain, Ben, in Oz, Nick, in not so far away Goring, plus a few gentle prods while out in town. That’s the problem with aspiring to be thought of as a writer, people expect to see something they can read every now and again, this is where Pressured Git starts to feel hemmed in just before transforming back into Lazy Git.

Well Lazy Git is about to be tested, because a couple of potential loft conversions have just appeared over the horizon, so me and Beau will be in ‘price mode’, which means lots of poring over drawings, making cutting lists, getting prices, organising trades, and then just hoping our prices are acceptable so that the work wasn’t for nought!! And of course should we get the jobs, then it’s full on Grafting Git mode for the short term foreseeable future, which I love, and can’t wait to get back into, (hopefully!!).

Right now I seem to have achieved calmness, so perhaps Contented Git is the current mode, just had an FB message from one of my old ‘Homies’ Row, his world seems to be coming good for him and his little fella, so, “word up to you nigga n your fellow ‘hoodsters’ from the Southwick ghettoes, keepin’ it real”.

I know there were other things I wanted to tackle in this blog, but this’ll do for a start to get back in the swing, but Hi to all of you that do bother to read these scribes, be you on FB, Twitter, or following me on wolf-e-boy.com . Please donate for a book, or get someone else to, the RNLI is a great cause, especially for us beach dwellers.

Blogging off

Git

P.S:- on the off chance that a certain person (N) is reading this, please do get in touch.

Low life LLoyds, a bank that deserved to go bust

I don’t know about you lot, but I don’t generally look at the news and expect it to have much of an effect on me at a personal level, I mean, Swine flu is all over the place in the media, and I realise a few months down the line I will have an increased likelihood of contracting it, possibly, but I’m not losing sleep over it, yet. Banks, well they’ve been largely bailed out by public funds after years of greed finally caught up with them, but not really affecting me unduly, not directly anyway, til now!

 

I like to think I’d help someone if I could, a little job here or there, an errand, lend a few bob, or just be there at some point. So when my mate of 30 odd years tells me his bank wouldn’t lend him money to keep his business going, I didn’t think too long before offering to help him out, to the tune of ten grand. Now first off, when it comes to money, never, ever, follow my lead, if you’ve read my Scam page you’ll know that my bro Stig labelled me a liability from a young age regarding my ability, or lack of it, to hang on to money. Then came my first house purchase in 1988, put £20,000 worth of work into it just as the property market crashed, and have it valued 18 months later at £5,000 less than we’d paid for it, then 13 years later, with the house finished to perfection, manage to sell it just before the biggest price hike in history. With what I’d made I decided to invest some in an ISA before I shot off travelling the world, only for the investment markets to crash at the same time. It’s fairly safe to say me and money are not really destined to spend much time together.

 

Well the latest kick in the teeth has, indirectly, come from my mates bank, Lloyds, he paid the money I loaned him into his business account, and they promptly said thanks very much and closed his account on the spot, putting him out of business. Bear in mind this is a bank which has been bailed out to an unbelievable level by public funds, and expressly on the condition that they free up lending, especially to small business, to help get the economy going again. I’m currently a mixture of, seething with anger, and sick to my stomach as I take this all in. I’ve known Eddie all his working life, he’s never been anything other than a hard working earner, and an excellent kitchen fitter. So when he set up his own company it made perfect sense, even in the current climate he still had over £60,000 worth of work on his books, but as with many small businesses, struggled with cash flow, the bank wouldn’t lend, ok, they don’t know him personally, I can kind of see that. But when they see him inject £10,000 into his bank account, surely that’s a fairly decent sign that he’s prepared to back himself, or someone is at least. All I can think is how Lloyds spineless bankers have no right to have been saved, they as a business were entirely responsible for their own downfall, but do they extend the same assistance, that they clearly never deserved, to a small business that, though struggling in the short term, at least produce something, give something to the community, and most importantly have orders on the books, no they don’t !!, and I can’t properly express how I feel towards them.

 

I wanted to have an upbeat blog this time, but I can’t find it in me for this one.

If you’re reading this, please forward it and let as many others know as possible just what these low life invertebrate bankers are doing to small business, because you can be sure this isn’t an isolated case.

 

As a result of their actions, Eddie is now unemployed with a wife and three children to feed, and a perfectly decent business flushed down the toilet for no good reason, as well as the £10,000 that Lloyds just hoovered up rather than have a bit of patience with a small business and help it see out the current economical turmoil.

MP’s expenses, hospital hygiene standards, education standards, global recession, Absent Elk.

Oh what a time of it for the press right now! How do you get your heads round it all?

MP’s, most of whom the public have long since lost what little faith we ever had in them in the first place, now seem to have sealed their own fate with their grubby fat fingers trapped firmly in the closing till of the taxpayer funded coffers. But somewhere down the line they must have been encouraged to believe this was their right, perhaps to make up for, what they consider to be, their woefully inadequate wage of just over £64,000! With the expenses limit of around £22,000 per year bringing their wage up to £86,000 ish, nice work(?) if you can get it, no wonder they tried to stop these records from reaching the electorates eyes. They also get to vote on their own wages, always upwards, never the reverse, (remember Gordon Brown tried to get the House to accept a wage freeze, they voted him down), whilst informing all other public bodies to display restraint, police, teachers, nurses, all of whom are of far more use to us than any politician. Yet all these professions are also poisoned by the interference of the political class.

I see it as no coincidence that since tuition fees for universities were introduced, the education system has been continually dumbed down year on year, ever more pupils achieving the highest grades possible in the new system, (while still managing to leave only semi literate in many cases), so that even more ‘customers’ can be accepted into the cash cow of university life, this is trying to follow the US system of ‘everything must pay for itself’, lower the quality, increase the revenue. Bear in mind that the tuition fees were introduced by a house full of MP’s that had available to them, an entirely free higher education at their disposal. And so this week some bright spark speaks up and mentions that the quality of education in this country has declined in recent years, NO SHIT SHERLOCK! But it makes money now though, eh Gordon!

Apparently now in the USA, they’re using our Health service as a stick to beat Obama with as he seeks to extend their own free health care to the many that can’t afford health insurance. Well the only reason our NHS is going to shit is, once again, because of political interference, and actually trying to copy the morally bankrupt American system. Since the Tories, first under Thatcher, then Major, and later by the most Tory of all, Blair, we have seen millions pumped into administration, managers, trusts, outsourcing, and worst of all, think tanks and consultants, all in an effort to push the NHS in to private hands eventually, nothing whatsoever to do with improving the system for the public (and therefore owners), and everything to do with palming off one more public expense. One more family heirloom hawked down at the pawnbrokers.

And let’s not forget the ‘Bankers’, for want of a better word. It’s always bemused me that, while I couldn’t get a loan because I don’t have a debt history, someone who, clearly has plenty of it, can. So a bad risk is their best bet? Sub Prime, you’ve all heard of it, but how many of us really know what it means?, well apparently it means you fall below the normal criteria for someone who should normally be lent money to, or as one pundit succinctly put it, ‘as long as they’ve got a pulse, give em a loan’. Then they wrap up this loan in unintelligible jargon, stick it with other, above board, deals, and whack a ‘triple A’ grading on it ready to sell to the markets as a no lose money maker, all on the premise that house prices would never go down, except, get this, THEY DO! And now the very same people that presided over this fiasco expect us to believe they have a clue as to how we should get out of it. Borrow and spend got us into this shit, so guess what their idea for getting us out of it is? Borrow and spend more! If you’d tried to write this as a political satire just a couple of years back, people would have rolled in the aisles, while saying ‘great writing, but that could never happen’, well it did, and all under the careful guidance of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Nice legacy!

On a lighter note, Absent Elk, our Shoreham boys, (plus Elk), have their single, ‘Sun and Water’ released this week, available to download on itunes for 59p, so please get downloading and help the lads get off the ground. They’ve toured with the Script, Hoosiers, Das Pop, and Girls Aloud, all around Britain this year and last, with their own tour coming up, so let’s get Shoreham on the map and see if we can’t get them up the charts and on to the national radio airwaves!

The Dream is over

10-05-2009

 

This weeks post has been really quite upbeat, two certificates, one a death certificate which cleared up the long running mystery re- one of my Great Grandma’s, father, the other a marriage certificate which just firmed up what I already knew re-  one of my Great Great Grandpa’s sons. The family tree business is a continuing detective story, and as I’ve found, very addictive, so far I’ve turned up a long lost half brother of my dear old Pa, traced the family back to Holland in 1752, with the strong likelihood they were part of a Jewish Diaspora from Spain, (yet to be properly confirmed), and even linked us to a famous author that shares the same name as my eldest brother, David Ramus. Even with the coincidence that where our family paths meet up, it’s with Symon Ramos 1789-1846 (Amsterdam, our ancestor), and brother David Ramos 1782-1862 (Amsterdam, the famous authors ancestor), the names of my eldest and youngest brothers.

 

Of course life aint always peaches and cream, so the National Insurance bill, followed by the accountants reminder that last years tax bill is ‘in the post’ brought me squarely back down to earth. I also had a call from an ambulance chaser telling me I could claim up to three grand for that shunt I got on my way to work a couple of weeks back, scumbags, that’s just one of the many things going wrong in this country, following the American way of the ‘blame culture’, ‘where there’s blame, there’s a claim’, what an absolute rubbish way to think, but don’t get me started on that right now.

 

Joanna Lumley, old ‘Comely Lumley’ is about to find out who the real actors are, these politicians ‘acting’ as our representatives are often much like my nephew Reggie, just saying what they think you want to hear, without even the remotest intention of doing what they were elected to do in the first place, but Reggie’s only 16, you expect it of a teenager. So she had a meeting with Brown, who, less of a snake than his predecessor Blair (the anagrammatical B(illy) Liar) , still had enough in his slippery repertoire to mesmerise her into believing his bullshit in the hope of assisting him to weather his latest media shitstorm. We’ll see how that one runs in the weeks to come.

 

And now to the sad business of my glorious failure in the literary world. A few years back, fed up with the whole ‘rat race’ business of life in this country, I sold my house and buggered off around the world, keeping a journal of the experiences as I travelled.

After I arrived I started typing it up on the computer, and with a few other bits of writing, set up a website to stick it all on, there was born www.wolf-e-boy.com , which I thought was fine.

 

Well the site soon started getting thousands of hits a month, and encouraged me enough to think the journal might even be worth publishing, which I eventually went ahead with through The Book Guild publishers. It’s very hard to say from my point of view whether it was a sane or worthy thing to do, (it cost me £11,500 over two years to make it happen), but I do look back and wonder at the wisdom of it. But that said, it looks fine from the outside, a handful of people have told me they liked it, and it is quite a nice feeling to think I’ve done it, however badly received it’s been, sales wise.

The dreaded letter from the publishers hit the doormat this week, telling me that ‘as two years have passed since the publication of the above book’, ‘the contract between us is now terminated’, so I have the ignominy of 400 books being returned to my doorstep, (for which I also have to pay carriage on all but 50), I just became a real life Alan Partridge. It never really got any decent promotion, but of the 130 copies that were sold, 30 were returned, so I have to be a realist and accept it wasn’t good enough to make it, which the pessimist in me always suspected, but the optimist and dreamer that I am, decided to plough on regardless. Overall I’m quite happy to be honest, I’ll have 400 copies of my book to either give away, or sell cheaply, but no longer keep looking at the Amazon for my latest kick in the teeth by the literary ratings world.

If you are going to fail, then why not fail gloriously, for now I’ll stick to short froms of writing such as this blog, which is better for me anyway, as I’m a lazy git all told, and a master of unfinished business, so even when I have what I consider to be great ideas, I rarely see them through, a blog can finish wheresoever I want it to. Right here, right now!