Ode to Summer

Summer Fields

The midge hums languidly in the thick still air, the gossamer dance of the butterfly brushes a delicate vitality across the sun-warmed meadows, afar the azure sky envelopes the rolling hills which surround, and I, in my commune with nature, try desperately to ignore all of the above as I wrestle with the twin desires of wanting to stay asleep in my increasingly stifling tent, and the piercing need to relieve my body of the previous evening’s lager consumption.  The eternal struggle of the summer camper.

The summer holidays are upon us, which means it’s time to break open the tents, switch to a diet of food that can be cooked on a one-ring gas burner, and develop a tolerance for warm beer. It’s time for tents.

I love camping. Having been brought up on a council estate in Manchester, my earliest experiences with the countryside were climbing one of the three trees within a twenty minute walk of the flats we lived in, or watching Last of the Summer Wine.

 Even now, separated from those flats by twenty-three years,two-hundred miles and several years of tertiary education,  the life pastoral brings to mind images of old men in shopping trolleys and tweed acting irresponsibly against the verdant stone-walled backdrop of the Yorkshire Dales.  What japes!

I’ve tried to develop a more mature connection with the great outdoors.  When we moved from the flats, we moved next to Southern Cemetery in Manchester, famous for being a haunt of Morrissey and for being utterly massive.  I discovered that if I spent my Sunday mornings reading Thomas Hardy whilst listening to The Archers on my Walkman, and wandered far enough into the cemetery, I could easily be ensconced in a tranquil English country village, albeit with neighbours slightly more lifeless than the real thing.

 Coincidentally, it was around this time my five-year stint as a Goth started,

There is something magical about the British Countryside.  Like the fact that you may seem to be so utterly removed from civilisation that you might be a Hobbit, but if you look closely enough, you’re never more than half an hour from a pub.

Although it seems the nearest purveyors of Philip Morris’s finest tobacco products are never where locals say they are, and are always closed. Almost as if everything has been carefully set up to to piss me off. Beer needs fags, as surely as toast needs Marmite, and Lucifer needs The Murdochs.

But the hard truth about the country, for a city dweller such as myself, is that it’s mostly an excuse to drink with a vague sense that because you’re out in the country, where the air is fresh with cut grass, cow farts and industrial grade pestkiller, that you are somehow a sophisticated drinker.

 The life rural provides a perfect cover for the dedicated boozer who wishes to avert the sneers of the world.  It is a world where ‘I’m on holiday’ is a reasoned excuse for sitting a chair all day imbibing cans of Kronenburg and staring at grass.

Bizarrely, when you try to recreate this in this city, and sit on a park bench with a plastic bag full of beer and stare into space, people tend to stare at you, and not in look-there’s-a-film-star way, but in more of a look-there’s-a-traffic-accident way. And so, it’s a country life for me.

Until, of course, I start to miss the telly.

The Slug of Waking

I don’t remember having a hangover before I was twenty-one.  I think of that period now as a kind of Golden Age, full only of actions with no consequences.  I drank a lot, I recall that, and being a heavy sleeper probably slept through any inclination of a hangover my body and soul had. 

My first hangover, when it came, arrived with a clashing blaze of lights-a-flashing, knives-out, take-no-prisoners glory, and left me properly fucked over.  It happened when I was at university, and somehow made my way though a bottle of Morrison’s Gin one misty October evening.  It was a Wednesday, and I was at my girlfriend’s flat, and half in love with her flatmate, which could explain the need to drink so much. Along with the rainy Wednesday. More likely is that I drank the bottle because I had it, and I like the taste of Gin and Tonic, and because I was well ‘ard when it came to drinking. If there is one thing I could do to Olympic Standard, it was get pissed, and I practised it with the verve of an Olympian.

However, once we hit the pub I realised I was too shitfaced to be in a public place out, staggered home and passed out. Initially on the loo, and then on my girlfriend’s bedroom floor. 

Bang! Like a diamond bullet straight through my forehead, it hit me. At about six in the morning I jolted awake with a sensation I can only describe as arse-splittingly awful.  My head felt like an army of little tin men were dancing the dance of the seven swords, I felt both frozen and sweatingly clammy, and even moving my eyes resulted in undulations of nausea from all corners of my being, centring on a ready-to-retch stomach. 

I was so in shock, I dragged my sorry carcass to the kitchen and wrote a letter to my mother describing the foulness, partly to distract myself and partly because I wanted sympathy and no-one else was awake.  I bet that made fun reading.

The reason for this reminiscence is that I’ve had two headsplitters this week, and have struggled. The curse of work, and the fact that my body is past its regenerative stage, mean that hangovers, for some time, have not been a bastard inconvenience which can be fixed with Lucozade and Pot Noodle, but have become bewilderingly debilitating. It’s all part of the great dance of life, when the closing time which once meant All Back To Mine means I’m Going Back to Mine, and Back to Sleep; when the earliest time I’ll consider starting on the booze is five in the afternoon, not when I wake and discover a can of Stella under my pillow; when drinking is mostly sociable rather than an experiment in how much mind and body can take.

The long and the short of it is, I’m feeling my age, and none more so than where booze is involved. Every sup of every pint is a fizzy reminder of my mortality, and there’s nothing I loathe more than thinking about the terminal nature of existence. There is, of course, only one solution to over-thinking, which is over-drinking.  I’m going to crack open a beer or eight, and slip into the swirling amber sphere of aging drunkenness. And the hangover – well, tomorrow is another day, and we’ll throw up on that bridge when we come to it.

diatribe

I’m not for one for kicking people when they’re down, but I’m more than happy to kick someone who should be down, but who, like a Wobbly-Weevil, won’t get their backsides prostrate and eat the dirt that they deserve.

I’d like to start by apologising to Rebekah Brooks for claiming that under her watchful eye The News of the Screws has implied that Milly Dowler had faked her disappearance.  It seems I had misread something, and I hold my hands up for my sloppy research.  I would like to point out that I don’t, however, have available the kind of resources that would allow me to pay people to do things like check my facts, or hack phones to verify my sources. 

So, Ms Brooks, please accept my apology in good faith.  I was wrong about that.  And in the interest on clearing the air, maybe you should come clean on a few things too.

 I wouldn’t say you were a bare-faced liar, or a deceitful vinegary harridan, mostly for legal reasons, but also because it doesn’t really need to be said.  No-one ever refers to ‘The mass-murderer Hitler’, do they? It’s understood in the name alone, and would be a bit of an understatement. Just as it would be an understatement to say I wouldn’t piss on you even if I’d set you on fire.  Unless my urine was, due to a rare urological condition, made of petrol. Then I’d piss myself dry.

But there is a point I feel compelled to raise. Why won’t you fuck off? What’s wrong with you? Surely you must realise that, Kerry Katonia aside, you’re currently the most reviled woman in Britain. And we only don’t like Kerry out of habit. 

I’m not one to have sympathy for News of the Screws journalists, but it defies logic that they’re being sacrificed to save your freckled, prone-to-sunburn arse. Are you some kind of soulless demon of shit, who must have her tribute of victims to feed your power? Have you got photos of Rupe fingering baby koalas? I understand why Gadafi is so desperate to cling to power, like a teenager who won’t burn the photo of their first love. Even after that love has broken your heart by shagging your best mate in a Tesco car park under the influence of a can of Stella and half a bottle of Kalashnikov vodka. For example.

I also note that the web-domain-name thesunonsunday.com was registered last week.  I may not be Sherlock Fucking Holmes, but it doesn’t take a sociopathic fictional detective to smell something fishy.  Following your lead, Charles Manson would have done himself a massive favour to public disband The Manson Family, and two weeks later start up The Chas Manson All-Stars.

I think what I essentially want say is this:  Please go away and die. It’d make a lot of people very happy. And David Cameron very sad. Which can only be a good thing.

News of the Screws

At the bottom of Dante’s Hell, you will find Judas Iscariot, encased in ice, alive, aware and in agony, for eternity. His punishment for the greatest of crimes, being ginger.  Although the book claims it’s because he fancied his mate, and being unashamed of his sexuality, kissed said mate in public.  Bizzarely, it was his mate the Romans chose to do over.  I guess the Greek influence made them tolerant of all lifestyles and sexualities, as long as you weren’t named after the eighties Spanish Football player , Jesús María Satrústegui.

I’ve always thought Judas was hard done by.  If God knows everything, then s/he surely knows that Judas was going to betray him. In fact, you could say God created Judas to betray him. In which case, Judas is just enacting God’s wishes, and is nothing more than a stooge. If God is the mastermind behind his own betrayal, it should be him down there, freezing his divine testes off, living the life of giant, flavourless Calypso.  Judas Iscariot is innocent. Free the Nazareth One.

Anyway, it’s time to chisel open the gates of Hell, and fit an extension.  There’s a new player in town, who makes Judas (but really Evil God) look like a Care Bear. One of the cute ones, like Rainbow Bear, not the shit ones, like Turdfuck Bear.  I speak, of course, of any motherfucker connected with the News of the World.

The thing is, dickbags, no-one takes your paper seriously. No-one reads it to find out what is going on in the world.  I suspect people don’t really believe it’s true. Given these circumstances, you could make shit up, and no-one would judge you for it. Unless you were sued, then obviously a judge would judge you for it. But I digress. Possibly to the detriment of my own argument. Ignore the last two sentences.

Given that no-one expects, you could have saved yourself embarrassment, legal action and an unstoppable descent into moral turpitude if you’d just fabricated stories about people, rather than hacking the mobile phone of a murdered schoolgirl. Then deleting her messages. Then writing about her messages. Then suggesting she’d faked her own death. Just to sell some shitty newspapers no-one this side of a 60+ IQ score cares about anyway.

And so, it is with great pleasure I declare the News of the World Tenth Memorial Circle of Hell open, where any arsewince who has ever written for the paper will spend eternity being hacked open by a gang of mobile phone-shaped demons.  While being forced to read, in their own piss-excuse for a paper, how their loved ones have all been sleeping with a bunch of Nazi Fugitives, their own mothers, and John Terry.

Fake Western

Two-Eyed Jake stared down the barrel of his rusted six-gun. One pull on the trigger and all his worries would be gone. His twin brother, the scourge of his years, would be dead. Stone dead. He took a slow breath, stepped out and drew back his finger. The gun resisted momentarily, the barrel creaked, and then, suddenly, there was window-shattering crack as the bullet entered the chamber, the hammer hit the casing and the gun exploded in Jake’s hand, leaving a bleeding stump and a shattered bone.  As he lay in the dust, the midday sun cooking his blood, he cursed God, he cursed his brother and he cursed Samuel Fucking Colt. Then died, a two-eyed, one-handed failed fratricide.

I've been to paradise, but I've never been to me

Saturday night and I’m home alone.  The evening yawns before me like a cavernous gap of desperate emptiness waiting to be filled.  Time was, finding myself in such a situation would inevitably lead to a gnawing despair,  to the sense that there was a world of excitement and fun.  A world of people who lived in adverts and tasted of heaven. I was Home Alone, and they were out there, alive and fragrant.  For some reason, I always imagined they were fragrant. I suspect if imagined these happy peole were smelly, I probably wouldn’t have felt I was missing something. However, I digress.

I was in solitude, a sad doe-eyed loner. In my late twenties, there were a handful of nights I spent Saturday night alone, just me, a couple of bottle of Bulgarian red and a packet of fags on a hot date with Radiohead and Suede CDs. I don’t think I spent more than one Saturday night alone between the ages of seventeen and twenty five ( and that one night was an anomaly, and another story) , so when I hit a run of them, I really was in a state of mental disrepair. 

Sometimes it happened because by cause I’d forgotten to arrange something to do, and would wake up in the Saturday morning fug, say hello to the day, and realise I’d got nothing on, and could get hold of no one. One of the drawbacks of living in London is that almost nothing is done last minute. The distances involved to meet anyone, whether a close friend or pissed acquaintance, is such that often weeks of planning are required.  Going to the pub becomes the social equivalent of the storming of Omaha beach, and for a disorganised feckless little ne’er-do-well such as myself, unless someone else was doing the organising, I’d often be scrabbling round on a Thursday for something to do Saturday, hoping that my equally disorganised friends had not got themselves anything to do. Fortunately, this was mostly the case.  However, those few weeks when I was alone were desparate and depressing.  I felt like I’d hit the end of the line of the one-way train to solitude, and I was neve coming back.

Obviously I was over-reacting slightly.  My essential point, however is that I hated spending Saturday nights alone, and if I’d been offered a party in exchange for a kidney I would have given it serious though. And after the first bottle of Bulgarian, as The Bends was drawing to a close, I’d have convinced myself that one kidney was enough, and two was being greedy.

I mention all this as a contrast to my present situation. It’s Saturday night, and not only am I spending the night alone, I have chosen to do so, and am looking forward to it with some relish.  I want to watch some Teev and Deev.  I have books to read, an X Box to play.  A hot bath and cup of Hot Chocolate. Maybe smoke a few fags.  My guitar is waving at me as I write this too, reminding me it has not been played for some days.  I know there is a world of fragrant people out there, I walked past most of them when I popped out to buy some milk half an hour ago. But I am no longer the social junkie of my youth.  Now I’m older, and I know people smell, and the pub will still be there tomorrow, and next week, I embrace the inner loner. Sometimes, you need to stop the world, get off, and gather yourself.

Besides, I’ve not had a night in since Monday, and both my kidneys hurt. Thank fuck I’ve got them both to share the burden. 

Tennis

Maria Sharapova owes me ten-pounds-fifty