MY GRANDPARENTS, PLUS SOME STRICT JULIE FANFIC!

 I'm really not sure what to write about my grandparents. They were incredibly warm and loving people and made me feel truly special. I have a very vague memory of them living in a different part of town when I was very young, but for the most part they lived a short walk of ten or fifteen minutes away, bearing in mind I was a child and my brother Jason is four years younger than me. This was a quiet rural town in the early nineties, I guess nobody thought twice about two kids walking around on their own. They probably should have; I remember a kid a couple of years older than me who was in my Scout troop for about two meetings with me, getting run over by an articulated truck. This was a good kid, before the marine took over and corrupted the whole thing! Another kid a couple of years younger than me had his nose broken by a bus. My brother and I were fine though.

Not that Gramps didn't worry! He had a police scanner that he could hardly make out, and if there were any reports of missing kids anywhere in the county we would get a call making sure we were okay! Actually, my favourite of Gramps' quirks involved the phone; he used to dial 1471 compulsively, with the phone on loudspeaker. A robotic woman's voice would tell you the last number to call you and when, something like "Telephone number oh five double five three, four seven two, eight six one called today at fifteen twenty-five hours. To return the call press 3. There is usually a charge for this service." Gramps would wait for the robot to finish speaking every time, and then thank it warmly. God knows what he'd have made of Siri or Alexa!

Nan was a proper old school housewife; she would spend hours in her tiny kitchen whilst Gramps kept us entertained playing blackjack and rummy. Never for anything more than bragging rights, though one or the other would slip me and my brother some pocket money once a week. Gramps would buy me The Beano every week as well. Nan would always have a Tupperware container full of what are undoubtedly the best fruit scones I've ever had, and she was a fantastic pasty maker, as all Cornish women should be!

My parents didn't like Gramps driving us anywhere because his eyesight was failing and his car didn't have seatbelts in the back. We'd often go around theirs with a video, usually something Mum and Dad had taped off the telly. I remember watching the Naked Gun trilogy a whole load of times and then being mortified watching them years later and understanding all the dirty jokes!

IS TODAY MY ROCK BOTTOM?

A fun quiz question for all you punk rockers out there: What do I have in common with the 6th album from Guttermouth?

The album in question

FEELING DOWN

 I don't have anything specific I want to write about today, I'm certainly not feeling creative enough or sexy enough to post anything particularly erotic. Maybe I'll dig something out of my e-mail outbox. I don't know. I don't like going more than a couple of days without posting anything because I know what I'm like; a couple of days without posting will turn into a week, and then a week into a couple of months, and before you know it I'll be a guy who used to write a blog.

My main news this week has been my Grandad, my mother's father and my only surviving grandparent, fell over one evening this week and had to go to hospital. He lives by himself in Wales, he called Mum's older sister in Bristol to tell her what had happened and she called my mum. He has three daughters and Mum lives the furthest from him, she's also the most sensible. She rang 999 and explained that he was alone, had heart problems and may have banged his head. This was 8pm. The paramedics came and took him off the floor at 2am! Grandad called a friend from church who sat with him all that time. He's okay, but rattled, and ready to accept that at 85 he may need a little more help than he used to!

Grandad's a real character; he'll take an interest in everything and everyone and find a story to tell out of any interaction. I think he had around 40 or 50 different jobs in his life time! Over the past couple of months he's taken to calling me on a Tuesday with two or three different stories from his life, asking me to guess which ones are true. They're always all obviously true, and I always guess that he's lying, saying things like "No, that can't have happened to you, you must have seen that in a sitcom" or "Maybe something like that happened to you, but that sounds too extraordinary, I think you're pulling my leg a little." He's always dead pleased to have fooled me!

Sometimes my Mum has heard these stories, sometimes she hasn't. It makes me wonder what anecdotes my parents have that I don't know about. I don't think he was an easy father to have, he has a very short temper and can be very stubborn. My dad refuses to speak to him after some row or other. Mum did a great job calling the hospital and the Red Cross and social services, and although he's gone home they're going to be checking up on him and offering him help. He needs it.

9 THINGS I'D POST ON TWITTER, IF I STILL USED TWITTER, VOLUME FIVE

I know it's been around forever, but is the name of the show The Amazing Race supposed to be a play on the song Amazing Grace? And is it a show about white people?

This Is Us, This Is My House, This Is A Robbery... How about This Is An Entertaining TV Show, huh folks? #IsThisThingOn?

One in three teachers plan to quit, says National Education Union survey. I guess the other two lack ambition?

Idea for a cooking show: Ordinary people are given a year to learn how to make one simple dish, stuff like burger, fries and coleslaw; eggs, bacon and toast; jacket potato with cheese and butter. They can spend the year researching and travelling and sampling the world's best ingredients. Whoever does best wins $1,000,000, the show is called million dollar meal!

Tonight on Apple TV: A very special episode of Doug Unplugs find Doug put in a difficult position when his best friend Emma needs life support.

I'd love to see a map of Britain coloured by what percentage of teenagers in each area know how to fuck a sheep. Is it something that all kids learn or is it just those in the rural areas? Who's looking into how that knowledge is spread?

I'm enjoying the reboot of Kung Fu. It's good to see a woman in a role that would traditionally have gone to a panda.

Can't believe HBO gave Mark Wahlberg a documentary about his business dealings, and not his teenage years as a violent racist PCP addled bully and thug who was convicted for attempted murder but only spent 45 days in jail after being given a two-year sentence, asking some of his former victims how they feel about him becoming the world's highest paid movie star. That I'd watch.

Whoever coined the phrase "nursing a drink" obviously never spent a night out with actual nurses.

RIP D OF E, BUT WHAT'S IT GOT TO DO WITH ME? PART TWO

Hey there! Regular Functionistas will know that I don’t really make an effort to maintain relationships. My life can be pretty much divided into a series of chapters, and as I move from one stage to the next I pretty much refrain from looking back. I don’t know what happened to anyone I talk about in today’s post after I turned nineteen; I saw some of the guys at a house party/sleepover thrown by another friend during the holidays of my first year of university. I hope they’re all doing well and that life hasn’t been too hard on them.

That being said, after writing yesterday’s post I got to thinking about the worst kids from my Scout troop. I can’t remember the surname of the marine so can’t look up his son. I do remember the name of the cub leader’s son; and was not surprised to learn he’s been given at least four jail sentences, maybe more. He’s been found guilty of drug dealing, robbery, assault, criminal damage and behaving in a racially motivated manner. I was surprised to read his older brother, also in my scout troop and one of the nicer ones, was also sentenced to prison. This was a couple of years ago, he was the same age as I am now. His story sounds weirdly similar to mine, except he was addicted to drugs rather than suffering a physical ailment.

It sounds like he screwed up bad at some point but was given a second chance, working a respectable job for a celebrity chef, but when he was sentenced it said he had no fixed abode, like me, that he’d committed a number of petty thefts, like me, and that he stole mainly from the Co-op, like me! The main difference was that he’s been seen in court more than fifty times and that he was found guilty and sentenced.

This maybe lets you know the sort of shit I was used to dealing with at secondary school and in my extra curricular activities. There really wasn’t anywhere for kids to hang out and be kids - no cinema, skate park, fast food outlets, shopping centre… anywhere normal teens go to socialise. When I started travelling to VIth form I originally kept myself to myself, spending free time in the excellent library. It didn’t take long before I started making friends in class and then being invited to go hang out at the bowling alley, the shops or the local park. It was genuinely a nice surprise to find that I liked just about everyone I met at VIth form and was well liked in return. This was true in my various classes and at DofE, where I didn’t know anyone but found myself in a group of five, ready to fulfil the Expedition requirements of the Gold award.

There was me, Joey, Johnno, Trudge and Bowser. Joey was a farmer’s son. He was originally from out of county but spoke with a broad local accent. The last time I saw him was at that house party; his presence there was awkward as he had lost his job when his employers found images of underage girls on his laptop. He said he was innocent but restored the computer to factory settings and wrote over the hard drive before handing it back. Johnno went to a local secondary school and was pretty popular outside the club, he had a really easy going nature that made him easy to get along with. Trudge was a year older than us and had a mischievous streak; like me he made a lot of jokes and knew just how far to take things without getting into trouble. He flirted a lot with one of the supervisors; a girl named Jess that could only have been a couple of years older than us. Finally there was Bowser, another local boy I’ve mentioned before. He went do a different local school than Johnno and did know plenty of people there, but we had to form groups between four and seven people and people who knew him better than us knew not to take him! He was a nice kid but awkward; he always looked kind of greasy and wore an Iron Maiden t-shirt and a leather jacket. He was too earnest for his own good and made a lot of bold declarations, two qualities sure to make you the butt of the joke when you’re dealing with bored teenage boys. I remember when Pope John-Paul II died Bowser said that John-Paul was one of the most common names for a pope. My friend Squelch immediately pointed out he was only the second one.

RIP D OF E, BUT WHAT'S IT GOT TO DO WITH ME? PART ONE

In case you missed it, Prince Philip died on the Friday of last week. I found out when my parents rang me and Mum asked me to phone her dad, saying he was pretty broken up about Philip dying. If I'd cared at all it would have been an awkward way to break the news to me!  I gave Grandad a ring and he told me he was sad because the late Duke of Edinburgh was just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday and it was a shame to see someone fall a couple of inches short of finishing a hundred yard race. The way I see it, ninety-nine years of unimaginable unearned wealth and luxury is a good consolation prize!

The idea of royalty doesn't sit right with me. I don't like wealth hoarding in general and I'm a big fan of viewing things from a Rawlsian perspective; imagining you were setting the practice up as if it were new. You do it blindly, not knowing which side of the equation you’d land. If you were setting society up as if it were new, would you have one random family living in a series of lavishly decorated palaces, and have all the other members of society pay for them to be waited on? I suspect you wouldn’t. We’re often told here that the royal family generate more income through tourism and media interest and the like than we spend on them, but I have a feeling that it’s in the interest of those conducting the studies to conclude that! I certainly think we could find a better return on investment.

I wonder if attitudes towards the royal family as a whole have changed over the last couple of decades or whether Philip just wasn’t as popular as Diana or the Queen Mother. I remember thinking it was insane how many regular people paid to have flowers sent to their respective graves, or that common people with no connection to the Queen Mother were queuing up for seven hours in order to pay their respects to her corpse! Madness. I’ve studied management science, and can tell you a better solution would have been to respectfully wheel her corpse past the mourners on a guerney. Poor Philip, on the other hand, had 109,000 people complain to the BBC when they stopped scheduled programming for blanket coverage of the old codger!

I’m aware this is even more tangential and freeform than usual; but I just realised that has to be short for “coffin dodger,” right? I’m not looking it up, I’d rather believe that to be true than to be disappointed! Ha! It’s great when words surprise you like that; I remember a couple of years ago I found out that scumbag literally meant condom! I don’t think many people realise that when they use it as an insult, and I’ve certainly never heard an actual condom described that way. I also heard that the phrase “good egg” has a racist etymology, which kind of fits in with the sort of Hoorah Henrys I think of using the phrase, though I’ve also read this may not be true. It’s not a phrase I ever used anyway!

Anyway, they broke open the liquor cabinet here at the home yesterday and we all got to toast Prince Philip on the day of his funeral. They do drinks on special occasions; Christmas, Easter, St Patrick’s Day and the like. I always have a whiskey and they always mix it with ginger ale; it doesn’t taste great but I can certainly feel the effects for an hour or so! They always serve up the drinks at around 3pm; there's something nice about institutional day drinking! I suspect the carers may have helped themselves to some because they never got round to washing me yesterday, and they forgot to bring me my dinner! When one of the staff did bring it to me all the excess dinner had been thrown away so I had a couple of ham sandwiches instead. She had the audacity to ask if I’d had dinner and forgotten about it! The nerve! Hopefully it won’t be too long before we can order in delivery. When I first arrived here I used to look at JustEat the same way I imagine other people would look at porn, imagining I was getting to eat the curries and pizzas I was reading about! I’m getting hungry writing this!

MOXIE, REPRESNTATION AND THE RISE OF JOSIE TOTAH

I saw Netflix feminism 101 movie Moxie a couple of weeks ago, and found it enjoyable, though lighter on the laughs than you might expect from a film directed by Any Poehler. It does have plenty of heart and as well as trying to pass on the riot grrrl torch to a new generation it has a solid message promoting empathy and pointing out injustice. I've studied philosophy and sociology, and really don't understand why anyone would rationally be anti-feminist. Like, I get why you wouldn't march for it, or make it one of your core values; I can identify with being lazy and self-interested or just having no time or not giving a fuck. I get that. But all feminism really boils down to is giving women a fair shake and ensuring they are afforded the same opportunities as men. It's not a zero-sum game; making things better for women doesn't mean making things worse for men. To actively oppose feminism as a concept seems insane to me.

I'm going to lay some major plot points for Moxie, but it's not the sort of film that relies on big twists or action set pieces, its power comes from the charming performances and the realistic dialogue. The film focuses on a white girl named Vivian who is used to just standing by and keeping her head down when the boys in the school act like immature assholes and misogynists, going so far as to tell new black girl Lucy to just avoid antagonizing popular athlete Mitchell after she sees Mitchell take Lucy's drink from a vending machine, open it up and spit in it. Lucy tells Vivian her reluctance to speak up is part of the problem and encourages her to toughen up.

Oh no, did the tampon store close early?

Mitchell is a great villain, he's smart enough to avoid getting noticed by the teachers, framing his shooting down Lucy in class as lively debate, using social media to attack the girls anonymously outside of school, and endearing himself to the school by being a great athlete. He knows how to work the faculty; represented by Principal Shelley and by English teacher Mr Davis. His reluctance to weigh in clearly comes from a desire to keep his job and the fact that it's hard enough getting a bunch of teenagers to critically analyse The Great Gatsby without carving out time to engage in a battle of the sexes. When Lucy questions why they're supposed to read another book written by a straight white male and Mitchell defends it as an American classic it's easy to see why the teacher sides with Mitchell. Ike Barinholtz nails the character's frustrated adherence to the status quo, he probably didn't have much say in the curriculum and just wants to get through the day. It's not even apathy, he has limited time to do a thankless job.

STRICT JULIE'S FINAL ANAL DISCIPLINE AND HUMILIATION!

Earlier today my close personal friend, the sophisticate, wordsmith and trainee streetwalker Julie, of Strict Julie Spanks, commented on Sunday's alternate ending to the final chapter in her anal training trilogy. I posted it hoping to both whet her appetite and get a little rise out of her. I know how much she disliked the ending to my original story in which she asked her sister for help with marital arts, calling it "stoopid" publicly in my comment section and complaining about it to me via e-mail when I first sent it to her:

Very exciting! I enjoyed your story greatly (except for the 'ending" ☹️).

Though I think further sessions with Sue are called for, not just one and done.

I can imagine the txting and the blushing that results.

This was the sort of positive feedback I used to get from her, early on. Within a fortnight of swapping e-mails and starting my blog she announced her intentions of showing me off to the world. I'd never been so flattered! She sent me the following e-mail:

I want to create a post sending my readers over to your blog soon.

Is it ok if I use the (lightly edited) below story as a bit of an extra?

I knew exactly what would be lightly edited out first! Fair enough, I'd written it as a kind of joke, hanging a lampshade on the fact that I couldn't think of a particularly satisfying ending. I wrote her a sequel with a much stronger, sexier ending that had a little meta reference to the real Julie's dissatisfaction.

I had an idea in my head of how the second chapter would play out, but abandoned that when Julie was rather rude to me when we were discussing her real world punishment. That left me with an overabundance of sexy ideas to use in the final chapter. A further e-mail left me with a great idea on how to conclude my little trilogy. I had been planning on doubling down with another fantastical discovery, more ridiculous than the first. The ending was so ostentatious and absurd that I had trouble writing it, as I was convulsing with laughter and grinning so broadly I couldn't focus on the screen.

It's a good thing I write for my own amusement, because I found Julie's response to be disgusting, reeking of naked entitlement:

This new ending sounds about right. It's sort of what I expect from life, care home boy.

It's no secret to readers of her blog that Julie is loaded; her family has a second home, she and her husband pay for maids, personal trainers and high end sex workers. She just wrote about how she had her husband fuck her on a bed covered with five grand in cash. Little clues like that! Fair enough, she got an education, worked hard, married well, she has no dependants, more power to her! It doesn't mean she shouldn't be grateful, and certainly doesn't give her the right to take pot shots at those less fortunate.

I HATE A CARE HOME CLEANER, AND WHO READS THIS SHIT ANYWAY?

Hey-o Mal-Pals! I don't have a whole lot to say, though there have been a few happy developments since I last posted! I have just started on the final chapter of the Julie and Sue adventure, but it is slow going. I have other pursuits these days! I originally intended to annoy her with another silly ending, but have thought of a strong conclusion that I hope will illicit a better reaction. I'll write the original ending at the end of this, because it's too good to stay in my head, and that's what this blog is for. But before that I should fill you in on what's occupying my time! This really will be a checklist of things going on with me rather than anything with a point, more a journal entry than an article. I hope that's okay!

First off, my Reddit game is stronger than ever. I had a frank conversation with Babycakes, letting her know that I enjoyed playing with her but she was so submissive and amenable that I was struggling to know what she wanted or whether she was truly enjoying any given move I made or if she was just placating me. We shared some truths about ourselves and now we're closer than ever and both getting something out of it. She's very smart and will now let me know when something's bothering her whilst still staying in character. We had this exchange earlier, set in a Chinese restaurant, that I enjoyed very much:

Me: It's very satisfying watching you tuck in! You seem to be wearing a good deal of it too! And there's some on the table and the floor... My first idea was to bring home a large set meal, but this was so much better, someone else can deal with some of your mess for once!

Her: I’m sure I can help with some of that, Daddy. I put it there, I can do a second pass at getting it inside me.

I imagine you'll do okay slurping errant noodles off the table and sucking sauce out of your hair, but people will probably object to you getting on all fours and eating rice off the carpet, wiggling your diapered bottom in the air. I would like the option to bring you back, so don't get us kicked out! Or worse! Do you know what happens to bad Chinese boys and girls?

There’s an interesting question. Are we talking the majority Han, or oppressed minorities such as Tibetans or Uighurs? The big cities such as Shanghai or Beijing or the various provinces? Big place, China. Hugely diverse population, with a whole range of different traditions. So, yes, lots of things, but which specific bad things would require a finer brush than one that paints all 1.4 billion at once, to say nothing of the half a billion expatriates.

I’ll try not to get us thrown out, Daddy.

I certainly hope you're not implying I was about to be racist, or to over-generalize! I like to think I'm fairly liberal and forward thinking! I know I was a little silly pretending not to recognise your foreign words earlier, but that was self depreciation rather than homophobia. And you obviously know a lot more than I do about Chinese culture, I wouldn't want to offend you!

Oh, not in the slightest, Daddy. I’m extremely hard to offend, though we do share outlook and intent. Though my backside may indeed be the most offensive thing in the room. I can’t really tell. I’ll get on with the eating. Table scraps fine, floor a no go.

And I'll make a second trip to the buffet. I was going to say they have to report to Hunan resources.

9 THINGS I'D POST ON TWITTER, IF I STILL USED TWITTER, VOLUME FOUR

TV pitch: A show exactly like Prank Encounters, but it isn't revealed that the regular folk have been pranked. Six months later two Men In Black figures show up, take the prank victims to a detention centre and interrogate them, asking what they remember happening, if they stayed in contact with the other victim, if they sought counselling, etc. Only then does the kid from Stranger Things reveal they're on his prank show.

Never got why it's the norm for game show hosts to ask how the contestants would spend the money if they won; it's so patronising and rarely interesting. Imagine if your boss asked you how you were planning on spending your paycheck. It would be weird!

My great-grandfather was a proud Cornish miner, like many were around these parts, and actually invented strip-mining. Obviously it was a little different to how it's done today, when he did it whoever was last to fill up a bucket with tin had to take off an item of clothing.

TV pitch: A show exactly like Prank Encounters, except the prank isn't revealed until the stooges have worked at their pointless jobs for months, becoming close to the actors and thinking they're learning valuable job skills. One day their office or factory or whatever is attacked by chupacabras or creatures from the black lagoon, and the kid from Stranger Things reveals they've wasted weeks of their lives doing meaningless menial labour.

Just started watching The Handmaid's Tale and it's pretty rough. It did occur to me, and I'm aware that I'm courting controversy here, but it might actually be a pretty good set up for some of the men?

Is anyone else pretentious enough to pronounce "blogspot" to rhyme with "blog slow," dropping the t like the French do? Or are JK Rowling and I the only two assholes that do that?

TV pitch: A show exactly like Prank Encounters, only you focus on one guy for the whole season. The first episode he's scared out of his mind, but he becomes more and more annoyed when every time he goes for a job interview the kid from Stranger Things tries to convince him something paranormal is going on. He tries to file a restraining order but the court is attacked by yetis. The kid from Stranger Things reveals he's being pranked once again.

The best part of being a rockstar has to be the rider; imagine if every time you showed up for work they had to give you a bottle of Talisker and a dozen devilled eggs. Keep the sex and drugs, I'd do it for the sausage rolls.

TV pitch: A show exactly like Prank Encounters, but the kid from Stranger Things books paranormal investigators to explore offices, factories etc. When they turn up it's just a bunch of actors pretending to work regular jobs.

STRICT JULIE HUMILIATED ONCE MORE!

Hello Functionistas! My last blog post has already become my most popular one to date, thanks to a link from my friend and muse, Julie of Strict Julie Spanks. It's funny how more people read that story rather than the first post she linked to, I imagine it's because the first time round after the link she posted one of my stories as well as a graphic depiction of how she LARPed it with multiple sex toys, whilst this time she presented it as an alternative to hearing her prattle on about her philosophy on political analysis. Walter Cronkite never uploaded photos of himself naked jerking off, we don't need you trying to wrap your head around current affairs. Everyone stay in your lanes!

I'm kidding, of course. For what it's worth I found I've had some formal education in the philosophy of politics, though not in politics itself, and thought her opinions were common sense and apolitical, preaching scepticism as a general sensible approach, which is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Of course the comments immediately turned into a nest of vipers, with some opining that republicans lie more than democrats and others saying that democrats aren't called on for lying when they should be, or are confusing lying with figurative speaking and hyperbole. Oh well, can't blame a girl for trying!

Despite my joking I do like to know a bit about the deviants who write the blogs I follow! It's more interesting to me that these are real people with full lives rather than flimsy characters in a story. That said, if stories are what you're after I should mention that all my Strict Julie Fanfiction has been tagged as such, and that anything I've scribbled down that you might find titillating has been labelled "Pure Filth."

STRICT JULIE HUMILIATED BY HUSBAND

Hello Mal-Pals! Thank you for sticking with me through the last few dark posts; as promised today's post is a lot more light hearted!

It did occur to me that I never explained where things sit legally between myself and my old landlord, who I still have never met, or what happened to all my old stuff. This is because I don't know. I was told by my housing officer that the council are supposed to keep the items I left behind in storage, though I assume if that happened I'd have been told about it by now. The contact details I gave my landlord and my estate agent were for a mobile phone number I don't use any more and a Hotmail account I stopped checking around the time I stopped opening my mail in my old flat, probably earlier. I'm not interested in reopening that wound. I'm a different person now.

I've been feeling a little rough the past few days; I suspect recalling my past has used a lot of my energy! I've been sleeping a lot, but only that sort of shallow sleep that offers no real sustenance. This morning I don't recall being given my morning morphine pills, and didn't take them until the nurse came round with my other morning drugs a couple of hours later. This is good because it means I was properly sleeping for once! When they woke me up for breakfast I was having a bona fide dream, which means I was sleeping deeply enough for this to happen, which is excellent! I never remember my dreams unless I am disturbed from them.

This morning's dream was like almost all of my dreams; I was arguing with my brother. The weird thing was I wasn't bedbound but was suffering with a bad back and sore joints. I was watching TV in the living room of our old house. Outside it was tipping down with rain. My brother was trying to force me to go outside and fix the guttering. So many of my dreams are like this, and I often wake up agitated if I remember them, as if I have genuinely been arguing all night. There are some deep psychic scars left from when my brother was a teen up until his mid-twenties; he used to bully me and my mother, arguing about anything and everything. Things are much better today; finding a nice fiancee and a job with real responsibilities has been good for him, as has dealing with his fiancee's family, who sound very difficult in their own way!

MY LIFE AS A WASTREL, PART 3 - MY OVERDOSE AND MY SALVATION

If you read my last two posts you'll know how I came to be squatting in a flat and barely holding down a job. I had some money coming in via benefits but not enough to pay my rent or to live off of. It was clearly an untenable situation. This is how I overcame those circumstances, but things got a lot worse before they got better. I'm not a fan of the phrase "trigger warning," but I will let you know that I will soon be talking frankly about how I tried to kill myself. If that's going to bother you, maybe skip this post! My next one will be a lot more light hearted, I promise you!

Keep your arms inside the boat, there are rough waters ahead!

I had no idea how I was going to survive and had basically given up on looking after myself or the flat. It was ludicrous. When I decided not to give any more money to my landlord I suddenly had a lot more money to spend on alcohol. My drink of choice was co-op own brand vodka; as a member I got 5% of the cost of own brand products credited to my account, so for every twenty bottles I drank I got one free! My work was meaning less to me, and when they finally got around to refurbishing they installed wet-cleaning machines instead of a dry-cleaning one, meaning my experience and expertise now counted for fuck all. I had no home, no value, no future. I couldn't see a reason to keep my life.

My only concern was my parents; obviously they would be upset. I didn't want to kill myself too close to either of their birthdays, or my brother's. Similarly, I had to avoid Mother's Day, Father's Day and, because of the year, the football World Cup. I didn't want any of those events to be linked with my death. I settled for a date in May, and for a free weeks I lived like nothing mattered. This is when I started shoplifting and stealing from work. I took out multiple payday loans I had no intention of paying back. I might have had another credit card as well? I drank like it was my job, and would call in sick to my actual job when I just couldn't be bothered with it.

MY LIFE AS A WASTREL, PART 2 - HOW I KEPT OFF THE STREETS

The thing about having no money is that it means different things to different people. I got to the point where my income from my job wasn't covering my rent; due to a fire at my place of employment there wasn't enough work to keep me paid in full, and when there finally was work my health had taken enough of a hit that I couldn't do my physically demanding job. I had a letter telling me I was expected to vacate the flat I was renting; I ignored it and decided the best course of action would simply be to stop opening my mail. So although I had no legal place to live I had a roof over my head and some income; all I had to do was live in constant fear of being turfed out on to the streets.

There was some outrage a couple of years ago when a clip from a 2003 documentary called Born Rich was shown on a couple of late night shows. In the clip Ivanka Trump recalls how her father pointed at a homeless guy outside of Trump Tower and told her that the homeless guy was eight billion dollars richer than he was after one of his many business disasters. People took umbrage at the tone deaf nature of the comment, but to me Donald's point is that he has the support network and assets in place that allow him to screw around as much as he wants without having to worry about missing a meal or sleeping outdoors. He was a conman that sold himself on being a great businessman despite having six different companies file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He shouldn't be trusted to run a church tombola, let alone the world's largest economy. But he illustrates my point that having no money doesn't necessarily stop you living comfortably.

I got my notice to evict in February 2018, I took this as a signal to stop paying any rent. The few months before that were very tight financially. My laptop, a few years old, broke in November 2017 and I didn't have the money to replace it. I didn't have a TV so I would sit in my kitchen and read, if I could focus on a book without anxiety making my mind wander. I soon found this hard and took instead to downloading podcasts on to my mp3 player at work and listening to them in my flat whilst filling out a couple of nonogram magazines I had bought months earlier but never finished. Nonograms are a sort of logic puzzle, you shade in squares on a grid and a picture forms. I still do several a day using an app; by hand they take a lot of time and concentration. Here's a completed one that would have taken about three or four hours with the app; hand shading each relevant square would obviously take a lot longer:

Laugh it up, Chuckles!