Standing on a Beach

The first time I stood on a beach, and saw the sea, endless and magnificent. I was about seven, and it was like being smacked full in the face with a metaphysical, heavy-bottomed frying pan. I was on a day-trip to Blackpool, home of seaside rock and beachfront misery, and wasn't really expecting to have such a life-affirming epiphany. Mostly because I was only about seven. My life revolved around colouring-in and Vimto.

The steely, grey-cold plane of water, stretching into an infinity made me feel like I was standing on the edge of forever, staring into oblivion, facing down God*, and both growing in strength and shrivelling in fear simultaneously. It was a feeling such as the Romantics would later term The Sublime, but at that undeveloped age, with my small vocabulary and limited knowledge of classical French philosophy, I merely stared, and, pointing to the edge of the world, said to my mother, ‘There’s the sea’.

I was always perceptive.

I’ve loved beaches, and the sea, ever since.  They are reminder of the unfathomable possibilities of life on Earth, of the journeys we might take, the places we may visit.  The sea in particular invokes a sense of connectedness, as the water which leaves Blackpool is the water which laps the shores of Brighton, crashes into New York harbours, purrs around the sunny shores of South America and imprisons the convicts of Australia.  Staring at the sea is staring at the world, and remembering that we all live here, now, on this rock, at this time in the history of the universe, at this pinprick in the scope of existence.

And, while I genuinely love a sun-washed party-beach, fringed with ramshackle bars selling cheap unidentifiable booze and banging out soulless, plastic techno-pop, I’ve reached an age where the dark melancholy of Northern English beaches is coming into its own.

I took the old mother of earlier Blackpool fame to Formby beach for a Mother’s Day outing today. The sky was thickly grey, the sea  sheet of heavy black.  A cold nip needled the air, the sand was damp and chill. It was gothly lovely.  As when I was seven, the sensation of being strangled by the enormity of existence fizzed around, and the sea, the same sea I saw thirty five years ago, held all the above meaning, but more.

Because I realised that the seas had been there for billions of years, in one form or other, and probably would be for many to come. But the time here for me, for everyone else on that beach, in Formby, in Liverpool**, in the world, was very finite. And I realised that the attraction of the beach/sea combo is a paradoxical one – one of feeling connected to the universe, and one of knowing that our place in the universe is very, very temporary.

And it’s at these spots, reminders of our mortality, our worthlessness, that we choose to spend our free time, that we spend our hard-earned***money visiting.  We actively go out of our way to be reminded that we’re nothing and we’re going to die.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  Because if we realise we’ll eventually be gone, but the world will continue, and hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now, other little boys and girls will see the sea for the first time, and they, too, will marvel at the hugeness of everything, and feel the connectedness with all that lives on this planet, and all that has come and will come, maybe we’ll stop fucking up the planet and the people who live on it.

And if not? Well, the sea will surely survive.

*On which note, God, if you ever want a scrap, I’ll meet you on the grass down the bottom of the park. I’ve got a few bones to pick.

** To be fair, this particular detail didn't feel quite as serious. 

***Or stolen, inherited, found etc

Bang and Blame.

I was listening to Any Answers on Radio 4 earlier today, as I do occasionally when I want to feel intellectually superior to the general public. I'm not claiming actual superiority per se, just the ability to tell the difference between the joint which links the humerus and ulma, and the orifice from which faecal matter is passed.

I use this image as the phrase 'faecal matter' was one which leapt energetically to the forefront of my mind in reaction to the opinions of a handful of contributors.

In keeping with the current spirit of the age there was a barrage of attack, a sheetwind of accusations of Skullduggery, Shiftlessness and General Ne'er-Do-Wellery amongst the poorer members of society, who are actively evading bettering themselves. It was most informative.

Indeed, I was more than glad to be enlightened about the plethora of employment opportunities available out there. There are untold golden doors leading forth, and we should encourage people to snap up gleaming career-paths such as zero-hour contracts at Sports Direct (Alan Pardew's  current job, seemingly), or  low-effort, high-yield roles in the field of black-market organ 'donation'*.  

And to highlight the wonder of these career-opportunities, we must make the carrot shine by smacking the shit out of people with the pointy stick of not paying any kind of benefit to the unemployed.  How did I not see the simplicity of this logic before?

Britain's soft-touch, over-indulgence of the feckless layabout class does nothing other than to encourage people to stay out of work, breeding like jack-rabbits, smoking like laboratory beagles and laughing at Ordinary, Hard-Working Families, all while watching Jeremy Kyle  and Bid-Up TV on their 52" Plasma flatscreens. It cannot continue.

Equally, I was beyond grateful for the enlightening fact that if we provide Child-Benefit for single-mothers with more than three offspring, we are only encouraging 'them' to keep popping the little buggers out.  I don't know why I had never thought of it, but the solution to this problem was there, as clear as day, dancing a little jig of revelation in front of my stupid, complacent face: don't support anyone with four** kids. Let the little fuckers starve. That'll teach  them to be born.

I used to think opinions like these belonged to a minority of insaners.  Worryingly, I'm coming into contact with them more and more frequently.  Speaking to an elderly relative recently I was moderately shocked*** that she was banging on about Romany coming over here like cockroaches, laying eggs, committing crime and depriving our own criminal lads of thievery opportunities in their own country. What's the world coming to when you can't mug old ladies in your own backyard because some benefit-claiming, Polish-Speaking Bulgarian Gypsy has already stolen all their stuff for scrap?

It is dishearteningly true that, as a teacher, I come into contact with this level of ill-conceived crazy on an almost hourly basis. Most popular questions of late have been 'Why are we giving benefits to illegal immigrants?' and 'Why can't we celebrate Easter any more?'.  Usually in the classroom, although sometimes in the staffroom.

I do try point out that if anyone is here illegally, it's unlikely they're registered to receive state help. And,if you want to celebrate a festival which commemorates some dude getting nailed to planks two-thousand years ago, then not only are you free to do so, but you've got a four-day weekend over which to do it.  Stuff yourself with chocolate for Jesus. 

Unfortunately, by this point, the other member of the conversation is usually staring into the distance, dreaming a world in which there are no poor, no strugglers, no dissenters, no rabble-rousers, no foreigners, no one in need of help, no-one angry at injustice. A world of beige Swastikas.

There is definite social-shift towards more right-wing attitudes riding the Zeitgeist.  I suspect it goes in cycles, as people grow dissatisfied with one general hue of the political-attitudes spectrum, there is a slide along to the other side, and then, after some time down that end, vice-versa.

I'm hoping that we're as far towards the right as we're going to get, and that people will start to question the course of the National Conversation, in much the same way that people are beginning to question the coll quotient of beards. They are not actually cool, but they are one-step away from living in the woods and shagging goats to assert some sort of misguided masculinity.

And I hope we are not on a slide towards further blame and accusation against those most in need. I hope this because, today, I read about the detrimental impact of zero-hours on the psychological well-being of those who are on them. I read about the rise in the need for food-banks in the sixth-richest country in the world.

I also read that Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles (Or is she Camiila Windsor now? I have no idea how the apportioning of names works in those levels of the German Nobility) charged the taxpayer £30,000 for a plane from Windsor to Scotland, for a personal trip. Because Lord Ears 'is always on duty'. I also read that the average annual salary for the CEOs of the top 100 companies in Britain is £4.4m.

And I wonder how, when we live a society like that, where the rich are, in the words of the song, getting richer, and the poor, in the words of another song, are getting rained on from a great height, that people don't look up to see why they're actually getting shafted, but look across, or look down, and see blame where there should be human solidarity.

Any answers?

* The latter was implied, rather than explicitly stated. I was listening to Radio Four, after all. Not BBC London.

** This may seem like an arbitrary number. It's not of course. Any less, and we'd be no better than those there Chinese communists. And besides, we need to keep breeding so we don't get outbred by them there Muslims, innit?

***Moderately . There does seem to be a correlation between ageing and being the Daily Mail in human form. 

In Defence of Shakespeare

It may seem a wee hubristic for me to assume that Shakespeare needs defending, given that he's outsold me by about a gazillion to one, but following a few conversations recently, I feel I need to grab a Stetson, pull on my boots, and get on my high horse.

I  was talking to a relative this weekend, and as invariably happens when you're a teacher, everyone who ever went to school* has  an opinion with what's wrong with education, and how it can be fixed. ***

The relative's current bugbear was Shakespeare. For those not aware, it is legally compulsory to teach Shakespeare in English secondary  schools.  This was the initial complaint, and it is one I can somewhat sympathise with. If Shakespeare's works are so good, why do they have to be compulsory? The sad answer, however,  is because Shakespeare is also difficult, and if it didn't have to be there, it'd be wiped off many a school curriculum faster than the smile of Phil Jones's face at the end of the 2011/2012 season.

This semi-reasonable point was swiftly followed by the unforgivably irrelevant.

'They don't even think Shakespeare wrote his plays, so why is everyone so Wow! about it?'

Apart from the issues of Who The Fuck Are 'They'? and Who The Fuck Is 'Everyone', this is a statement which bores to the core of the fabric of my being.  I shit you not.

There are bonds of family and kinship that provoke an inherent abhorrence against reckless, unbridled violence towards the members of your nearest and dearest. I was tempted to put them aside.

My main problem with this witless vacuity is that it seems pretty clear to me that it was rampant class prejudice which  lead to this cock-arsed idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written his plays, because he wasn't spat out of one of England's public schools, wasn't a member of the nobility. He wasn't, in short, the inbred offspring of two fat-necked chinless land-owning cousins from the shires, but was, instead,  the son of a glove-maker from the Midlands.

The other important things about this is that it is matters even less than William Hague's empty whinges in the  vague direction of Putin's embryonic invasion of Ukraine, while simultaneously the British government aren't prepared to sacrifice all that lovely Russian loot by imposing any kind of sanction.  It doesn't matter who wrote the plays and poems. When we talk about 'Shakespeare' we're talking about a body of work,  not a body of man.  Shakespeare is important in the words that exist, not in The Life and Times of a Glove-Making Yokel****.

And Shakespeare, the body of work, is brilliant. I fell in love with Macbeth (the play) at school, when I fell in love with Lady Macbeth  (the character, worryingly).  Like most snotty reactionaries I then drove my cultural tanks onto the lawns of The Bard, and started firing rounds of accusation. Mostly that Shakespeare  was a fuck-arse verbose wanker. I was always charmingly eloquent.

But I refound my love, and now try to pass it on, and to kindle at least a slice of that  love in my young charges, my Shakespeare padawans.

I gave a slightly less antagonistic version of the above in response to the unnamed relative.  The next ball in this game of Ignorance Tennis was a cracker:

'I bet if Shakespeare came back he'd be like 'That's not what I meant' to all these university professors who write about him.'

This is, to me, the equivalent of wearing a t-shirt which says  'I am a fucking moron, stab me'. No-one ever says to kids doing doughnuts in a Ford Escort round Aldi carparks, 'That's not what Henry Ford had in mind.'

In fact, if Shakespeare came back from that undiscover'd country from which no traveller doth return, and started bitching about how his writings were being misinterpreted, I'd tell him to sling his hook, encounter the darkness as a bride, and fuck off back to Deadland.  I'm no more interested in what he's got to say about his writing than wondering whether Yaya's Toure's equaliser in the Capital One Cup was deliberate or not. It was a thing of beauty. That is enough.

Shakespeare is divisive. But Shakespeare is complex. For every over-wrought, long-winded phrase, there's a finely-balanced, killer phrase which can encapsulate  tomes of philosophical weight in a few words. There are the famous ones: To be or not to be - the futility of existence, and the paradox of life, in six words. The beautiful ones: A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet - the arbitrary relationship between language and existence.

 And, of course, the lesser known gems: It's a game of two halves, and it's not over till Nasri says it's over.

Well done City, cheers Shakey.  

* Everyone **

** Of course, there are people who don't have the luck of access to education. I don't meet these people, unfortunately.

*** I hate to break this to you, but most of you are wrong. No offence, that's just the way it is. Live with it.

****Actually, his old man seems to be have been a pretty well-off small business older. Shakespeare is no more a yokel than Lily Allen, Damon All-Bran and Jamie Oliver are cockneys. 

Gerrorrff Moi Lahnd.

I've been for a pleasant afternoon amble in the Surrey countryside today, partly to clear out the Christmas Cobwebs, partly because tomorrow is Return to Work Monday - the double misery of a Monday and the end to the holidays. Factor in the the fact that it is January - the waking hangover of the calendar year - and you have a Holy Trinity of abject Misery.

Luckily, it was a head-clearer of a day.  No pesky distractions such as sunshine or dry, unsodden paths were to to be found anywhere. In fact, the majority of the paths seemed, like the earth itself, to have started commemorating the centenary of the First World War by emulating the conditions of the trenches of Flanders Field. Or maybe it was nature's protest about Michael Gove's jingoistic rewriting of the catalysts and conditions of that same war. Even the ground weeps when he speaks.

Regardless, there were paths, and they afforded a pleasant afternoon under grey, open skies, along the skeletal fingers of winterdead trees. Surrey is an opinion-splitter for me, as a place to walk. It is very pretty, and generally a gentle amble rather than a Let's-All-Go-To-Mount-Doom epic mountain trek.  Quaint, rather than rugged. A nice place for a nice, easy, Sunday stroll. 

The maggot in the ointment amongst this twee world of stone cottages and red telephone boxes is the level of  ostentation and suspicion inherent in the local folk.  The county reeks of money and isolationism. Whether in the array of superbly expensive vehicles in the drives of cottages which once would have been peopled by rural workers, but are now peopled by balding, middle-aged City workers, aiming to live a little slice of Ambridge. Whether in the looks of You're-Not-From-Round-Here in the dead eyes of every waxed-jacket, tweed-cap wearing would-be Lord of the Manor you pass. Whether in the huge barn conversions whacked in the middle of fields, where the established rights-of-way are often blocked , sometimes hidden, sometimes invisible.

These sweeping strokes of my digital pen are obviously not true of all. There are many paths which are well-maintained, many styles which function. But often you are made to feel as if you are trespassing, and that the gentrified version of Farmer Palmer will be lurking with intent behind every shadowy yew.

When I was younger I often heard the phrase 'Property is Theft'. It stuck me as slightly odd, because I definitely had not stolen any of my Star Wars figures or Action Men, and I clearly remember my mum actually paying for my bike. As I grew, I began to see that there was truth in this. 

Noone actually has a right to ownership of any land. We're all born on the planet, and it was here long before we were, and will be long after we've wiped ourselves out by not looking after it properly. Over the millennia groups of people staked a claim to areas of land, because that's where they and their ancestors lived,  and they were harder than you, so fuck off. Or, groups of people nicked land, because they were harder than you, and had bigger spears, or brighter flags. Most property has been thieved. At best, we can call ourselves custodians. In most cases, we're really borrowers. But in many cases, it is outright stealing. And stealing is wrong, as the Catholic Church of my childhood told me daily, from atop a chryselephatine altar.

But my bugbear today isn't those group land-grabs. That's a much wider field than I'm prepared to cross*. It's when individuals hog land. 

In Britain, we have a hard-fought-and-won right to use established rights of way. Paths, ancient and modern, which have been used regularly,can be deemed an established route open to all.  It is, for many, the only way that they are able to explore the wet, dank beauty of the British countryside.

And now, enter stage right (of course), Owen Paterson, an environment secretary so hostile to the environment that he is less suited to his role than Fred West's Babysitting Service or Jesus Christ's School of Revenge.

Mr Paterson wants land-thieves (or landowners, if you prefer), to be able to ignore these rights-of-way. That's Owen Paterson, who lives in a massive house, on a massive hill, in a massive field, surrounded by a massive wall, in the Shropshire Countryside. I'm not saying there's a conflict of interest, in the same way I wouldn't say David Cameron isn't trustworthy. It'd be like pointing up and shouting, 'Look - the sky!'.

Supporting climate-change-denying, badger-baiting, fracking-supporting Mr Paterson is popular television gobshite and all-round turdblood, Jeremy Clarckson. A man whom I would tire of slapping, but it would be a physical tiring rather than an emotional one. I reckon I could go at him for a good fifteen and half hours before my arms would ache too much though. Then I'd run him over with a pink Fiat Punto, bundle him the boot of a pink Fiat Uno, and drive it into the sea, condemning him to a perpetual burial in a car he would no doubt claim is driven by someone black, lesbian, midget, Guardian-reading, and all those other eighties-right-wing-cliches-about-left-wingers. 

His support for this would be enough, in itself, to for me take up an opposing view, as the odds on such a view making sense would be phenomenally high. I have yet to hear him utter anything that doesn't make me dream of slow-murder.  Coupled with Paterson's support, I'm waving the flag before even reading the minutiae of the proposal. After reading the minutiae, I'm loading the metaphorical cannons.

This government is on an ideological crusade. And crusade is an apt word, because it is to the time of The Crusades that they wish to return. Paterson wants to play the feudal overlord, and if there's one thing feudal overlords hate, it's groups of oiks tramping over their land, arguing about which path to take. 

Remember, if it weren't for the dedication of walkers past, Sauron would have won. Don't let these dark lords get away with it. 

Walk, hassle MPs, don't buy anything endorsed by Clarkson. Get out into the country. Remind the 1% that the 99% are here, and won't go down with out a fight. Or a firm stroll, at least.

*Boom Boom

The Spirit of Christmas

It is ten forty-five p.m, 24 December 2013. In the Chemist household, this points in one direction. Not, as the end of the previous sentence suggests, to an evening of shite, shallow pop, but to the yearly family visit eglise-wards.  We’re off to church.

It has been a family tradition, since before I became aware, that we drag ourselves away from the world of secular pleasures and go and pay our dues to the Baby J, the donkeys and all the pretty little blonde angels.  

I’m from a Catholic household, and was an unblinking believer for the first sixteen years of my life. This meant that Christmas meant something of actual importance. It was a reminder and celebration of the wond’rous joy of the dawning of a new world. Unlike Easter, which, while being the bigger miracle, was an unending guilt trip of biblical proportions.  Easter is shit.

Even though I had God removed from my life by sustained thought, and, ironically, an epiphany, the remnants of this period are deeply ingrained into the deepest trenches of my psyche.  Christmas is more than an excuse to get wasted without being judged, to stay in bed until early evening, to have port and stilton for breakfast. These are, indeed, parts of the wonder of the Yuletide period, but the whole is greater than the parts.

I first got into the family Midnight Mass at the age of eight, when I discovered that I would be allowed to open my presents on return from the slowest hour-and-a-half of my life, rather than having to wait until the morning.  When you’re waiting for a lightsaber and laser-rifle, those hours matter.  It’s the difference between a life of freedom or a life of alien-overlorded servitude.

And, as I imagine most children find, it was chore.  A big, fat steaming Christmas chore, to which I was bonded. As the years passed, the ways to pass time changed. For a few years, I’d translate the Latin verses into English for the duration.  Hitting my early twenties, I’d spend the dripping minutes of boredom checking out the talent from a fog of festive spirits. A phase which lasted pretty much the rest of the decade, with various degrees of disorientation, and talent.

I never pulled at church. I clearly wasn't working the room well enough.

I must’ve seemed somewhat responsible in my late twenties, because the Priest’s little helper, lighting his way with a red nose to put Sid James to shame, and with a face of thread-veins like a map of the Nile, asked me to take charge of the collection plate.  Feeling grown-up, I agreed. Feeling shitfaced, I dropped it. I have not been asked again.

Two years ago, Mario Balotelli was at the same church as me. I asked him to make sure we won our game on Boxing Day. We lost. Mario, you owe me a Christmas present.

The last few years I've been on driving duty, so Christmas Eve’s excuse for getting ripped off my tits has gone the way of the dodo. Or Dodi, for those with a royalist streak.

Now, I sit still, sing, and think about the beauty of the occasion, and consider the communal  coming together in midwinter which has been a feature of European life for millennia. In the calm sobriety, in my concrete belief in no unearthly being* , I remember that we are all here, now, at this point in time and space. That we have all sprung from one chance mutation somewhere in Africa eons ago. I remember that many have come before, and many will come after. Hundreds of thousands of years have seen billions of lives, loves, losses.  We have shared stories, we have risen and fallen, grown and shrivelled.

And I remember that, today, globally, more than ever, we share histories, cultures, ye traditional hopes and fears.

And for that, even if the rest of the year you’re an absolute fucking nonce, remember - we all are human. We share that. We are none of us islands. At best, be loving, caring, considerate. At worst, don’t be a dickhead.  It’ll be the 27^th soon, the peace and goodwill will all be over, and people will expect to get shafted. For the next two days, no one wants to be fucked over.

Make Christmas mean something. Make it mean people.

Happy Christmas to you all.**

* Not including Roger from American Dad

** Apart, of course, from David Cameron, Gideon Osbourne, Michael Gove and all the other devils of spiteful hate. Even I don’t feel that festive. 

Giant Douche or Shit Sandwich?

Russell Brand has been making headlines recently for things other than bullying Spanish waiters and marrying plastic popstars. The would-be pirate took up his mantle of the people's poet from its previous holder, Rick from The Young Ones. On Newsnight he informed Paxman why he'd never voted, and why apathy is the only sensible choice - because politics is a two-horse race, and the two horses are being ridden by very similar jockeys who shout at each other whilst riding for the same stables. Or something along those lines.

I've never liked Brand. Not for any good reason, but because I think he'd make a shit pirate, and he made a shit Arthur.  The cinematic equivalent of pissing on a sleeping Dudley Moore's face.  An unforgivable crime against art, humanity, the environment and alcoholics.

But he struck a raw nerve with this pontification. Paxman gave him a mild grilling, like the shit final flames of a  4a.m. kebab shop heater on the last flaccid slices of purple donner, only to come out in semi-support a few days later.  Many people have liked the clip on Facebook, some have declared him a political genius, and I've even found myself agreeing with him, as his latest crusade to be a pantomime Jesus coincided with my own falling out with my party.

It will come as little surprise that I am, and always have, been a Labour voter.  They're noticeably a little more centre than myself, but even in a two horse race you need to bet on something if you want to get anything out of it. However, the appointment of Tristam Hunt to Shadow Education, and Rachel Reeves to Work and Pensions was a Bridge over the River Kwai too Far, or somesuch.  One Step Beyond. The straw that ...you get the picture. I don't like them. 

Hunt is a TV historian whose education credentials are the same as everyone else's - he once went to school.  His first pronouncement was to offer support for Free Schools while insisting he didn't support Free Schools.

Reeves' moment of glory was facing up to Ian Duncan Smith, flexing her right-of-centre muscles, while laughing at his attempts to dismantle the Social Security system, and promising that when she got into power she'd fuck up anyone who even thought the words ' Jobseeker's Allowance' .  If he thought he was hard, she'd come over there, shove his namby-pamby policies up his lily-white arse, and then go and personally kill anyone with a hint of disability. With her bare hands, while whistling the Dead Kennedy's ' Kill the Poor'.

At least, that's how I remember it.

I resigned my membership shortly after this, and decided I couldn't vote for a party which had these two fucksticks on their front bench. If it was my party, I'd take them to a forest, break their ankles and leave them for bears.

This resolve has lasted about three weeks. Disgusted as I am with these two wanktards, the opposite is unbearable.  In the last week alone Cameron has let his fat mates know that austerity is here to stay.  Dressed in white tie, at a five-course meal with the Lord Mayor of London,  sat atop a throne of gold carried on the back of a tortoise made of fifty-pound notes*, he set out his plans to keep the rest of the country on the bones of its arse.

At the same time, Gove has written to the teaching unions, stating that he is prepared to enter talks. Talks about how his plans are going to go ahead without any negotiation, and that the talks must include not only the two unions which represent 95% of teachers, but some other pissy little associations for teachers who are too well-paid, or too right wing, to be part of a union, but daren't leave themselves vulnerable to being fucked over in one of the myriad ways a teacher can be fucked over.

There are six of these cop-out groups, representing under 5% of teaching staff. They can have their own meeting with Gove. They don't strike, they don't stand for anything . They just enjoy the benefits the other two unions have won for them over the last century. Parasites.

Meanwhile, Ian Duncan Smith continues his crusades to eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor. Fringe Tories propose killing disabled children to save money**.  Nick Clegg continues to live.

So, even though the two options are similar, they're not the same. In the middle, it may be a bit Animal Farm - you look at one, you look at the other, and you can't tell the difference. But move away from the centre fence, and the differences show.

So I'm voting. Because the people who are likely to have enough of a conscience to abstain on principle are also the people who would be more likely to vote Labour. The natural principles of a Tory don't stretch that far. And the thought of another four years of this gaggle of amateur-night ideologues is too much to consider.

We're never going to revolt, it's not in our cultural  DNA. We'll grumble, abstain, maybe even actually go to the polls to write 'none of these dickheads'. But we won't be out in the streets, shaking pitchforks, stringing the Bullingdon Boys up from a Downing Street lamppost.  So until the day comes that the people of Britain have their own Odessa Steps moments, I'm going to use the only weapon I can use legally.

I'm voting Labour.

Hopefully Reeves and Hunt will choked on their stupidity by then . If you haven't got hope, you haven't got anything.

* I made that bit up. But for a second, you believed it, didn't you.  Because you can see him doing it, can't you.

** I didn't make that up, shockingly. 

Sunday Evening, the Halloween of the Week.

I had a good holiday this summer.  It ticked many boxes: it was long, there was tasty food, and it was almost as geographically as far away from my place of work as it is possible to get, at least for the first three weeks.

I needed this break, not so much because I was in the midst  of an end-of-school-year burn out as because I was in the midst of a very-real-danger-of-punching-someone-I work-with crisis. It would not have been a good move, professionally. Personally, I can't really judge. Violence is never the answer, but sometimes you don't want answers,  you just want to smash things up.

I've been back home for over a week, and the greater part of the bile has subsided. And I've been back at work for a week, with very little incidence of any all-consuming rage. The break done me good, and no doubt about that.

But tonight, I'm feeling resentful. Not for any specific reason, but because I had become used to waking up, musing the world over for a couple of minutes, and going back to sleep. I'd become used to my biggest decision being what's for lunch, what's for dinner, and occasionally, what's for second dinner.  In essence, I'd become very much used to doing what the fuck I want, when I want.  

Fortunately, I usually quite enjoy my job, and it is something I want to do.  Tonight, it's not actually work that's irritating my psyche with the itching powder of life. It's what work means for my Sundays.

I recall fondly the days when Sunday was still a day of the weekend, when Sunday was another pub day. Admittedly, a slightly quieter, more pipe-and-slippers pub day than a let's-blow-up-the-world pub day, but a day for setting up shop in a boozy establishment, and wringing the last few hours of life out of the dying embers  of the weekend's fire.  Things would happen on Sundays.  Quiet things, slow studied, slightly unsteady things, but things nonetheless.

But being a teacher, that's not an option I have. Monday's are never a slow slide into the working week, but an early morning slap in the face with a spiked glove of awakening. Monday requires alertness, preparation, pep and zest. It does not forgive the groggy hangover, nor make allowances for the fuzzy head. Monday fucks you up.

Sunday evenings are now a bit of a graveyard of a time.  It often feels like the gateway between this world and the next has thinned,  and not just because of the living dead who often inhabit it - Last of the Summer Wine, Downton Abbey , Antiques Roadshow and their ilk. I'd bet, statistically, more aged folk slip their mortal chains on a Sunday night, home, alone, weighed down by the decades of Sunday night wistful misery. All just to avoid seeing in another Monday.  I'd imagine Sunday night is suicide night, for those with suicidal tendencies.  Conversely, I can't image it being music night, for those with Suicidal Tendencies.

It is a morose evening. I've accepted this, and developed a range of strategies to impede its grey grip on life. Hot Chocolate with a nip of whisky. Long baths, Radio 3 and a good book. Shooting people in the head for gleeful pleasure on Call of Duty. They pass the time, they keep the ghosts at bay.

But the ghosts of the holiday are powerful, and there remains  a yearning for a couple of Sunday night pints,  maybe a cheeky whisky or three, and a handful of fags. The summer is dying, and it should mourned in the appropriate manner.  However, being the responsible adult I never asked to be, I shall resist. 

Resist the pub anyway.

Q.I. is on TV. There are a few beers in the fridge. I'll keep those ghosts alive, drink to the dying season, to the fading traces of the holiday, to the memories of a lie-in.

After all, Monday is another day.