This blog almost seems fated to be written at this precise moment. I’ve been meaning to blog for a while but I haven’t been in the mood. I’ve never been sure of what mood I needed to be in but I’ve always known when I wasn’t in the mood, which has been pretty much every day since I last blogged!
Anyway, after clicking ‘new post’ and waiting for the WYSIWYG display to load, the music changed and on came The Rolling Stones with Let’s Spend The Night Together, I smiled to myself because I was going to mention Jagger in this blog, if his ears were burning he sent an appropriate message to tell me he agreed with my choice of action.
It’s now been two years since I finished seeing a psychiatrist, a lot has happened between now and then. Some good, some bad, some just the same. I sometimes wish I could go back and have another couple of sessions to discuss what I think I’ve discovered about myself and to maybe get another opinion of what i think, just to reassure me that I’m on the right track. I guess I still have that fear of failure to get over but knowing the disease is half the battle in treating it so as long as I remind myself of that every now and then I’m sure I’ll be fine.
The reason I was going to mention Jagger in this blog was the result of an article I read which reported that he has given up writing his autobiography because he’s sick of talking about the past. Seemingly in refreshing his memory on his past he and his old cronies started re-living yesteryear and it all got too much for him. I know how he feels. I too am sick of talking about the past. I’m tired of analysing my past in order to predict the future. There’s no point moping over lost time and lost opportunities, no point wondering “what if?” get on with today and tomorrow will take care of itself…well, something like that.
It’s funny, a friend said to me this week, when I was bemoaning the life of a singleton, “You know why the grass is greener on the other side? It’s cos there is more shit there!” It’s so very fucking true and it’s always been that fear of the shit that might be there that I never dared cross that line to the other side. I never had to worry about the shit because I avoided situations where I could experience being in it, I just wallowed in my own inner shit instead. Let me tell you, after a while, even your own shit stinks! So, given that we will always be stuck in shit we just have to worry about the depth and I’m aiming for just above the ankles, any higher and then you wouldn’t see my Felix tattoo and that just wouldn’t be right! Anyway, cutting through my poetic waffle, I’m saying I’d much rather embrace someone else’s shit than sticking with my own. I’m under no illusion that its all sweetness and light, I grew up living with my grandmother until I was 13 then lived with my mother, I’ve seen screwed up relationships in action. I’ve also seen how not all of them are failures. When people love each other it really does overcome all and I don’t intend falling in love with someone I wasn’t prepared to fight to keep. My I have high aspirations, but why not? Sure I could fuck around but I’ve never really wanted to, that doesn’t make me a bad person, does it? I’ve just wanted to have something worthwhile, I’ve always thought there should be some connection other than lust. I should have accepted that often there isn’t, I get it now, 17 years later. But better late than never, as the old cliché goes.
People outside London will probably not be aware of the weekday hell that Londoners endure when the sun starts to go down, because late afternoon sees the streets lined with the ‘free’ London newspapers. I’ve mentioned already what it’s like, an LSD trip throwing you into the middle of a Jet Set Willy level on the ZX Spectrum. Your mission is to get from the office to the tube station, a journey of no more than 6 minutes at a leisurely pace but after 4pm you can expect the journey to take 15minutes as you dodge packs of foreign tourists who meander all over the road at a pace of 0.25 mph and yet still manage to do emergency stops. Mingling amongst them will be the odd Big Issue seller, if you’re lucky it’ll be the drunk one offering to marry you if you don’t buy a copy.
Now, just to make the journey extra long you have another breed of tourist, the gormless ones whose ideal of a good time out in London is to stand around and watch a drunk art student, covered in body paint and pretending to be a statue until someone walks passed, then they ‘come to life’ resulting in much hilarity. ha-ha, very fucking funny. Why not go and do that somewhere where it doesn’t impact on people trying to get home after a hard day at work? Knock yourself out wasting time looking at people ‘charm’ a few quid out of your pocket, if you are willing to give these shysters money you have no excuse for refusing to buy a copy of big issue; big issue sellers are at least more entertaining! Anyway, these tourists mix with the general tourists, big issue sellers and the ‘chuggers’; those earnest uni drop outs and ‘gap yearers’ desperately trying to emotionally blackmail you into signing a direct debit mandate for £12pm to one of the big named charities who can afford to pay agencies the money that allows the guys in the street to earn £10ph. Yes, when you consider the agency will charge Oxfam and the like around 60% of the workers rate you can see it’s big money, little of which goes to the people who need it. the sad reality is that as only the big charities can afford to spend all this money trying to recruit supporters, the smaller charities lose supporters and the bigger ones don’t really make any more money as the increased admin costs and the investment in recruiting the donors who cancel their direct debit mandates within a year is wipes out the £12pm. As usual the only real winners are the middle men, exploiting both the workers who just need cash and the charities, who just need cash…you could just call it justice I suppose?!
Anyway, in amongst this lot are the free papers. Which are really just regurgitations of the free morning papers and the previous nights evening paper. you suddenly find yourself reading the same stories over a 3 or 4 day period in each of the rags. Actually, I flatter them by calling them stories. the journalism is amongst the sloppiest I’ve ever encountered. It often looks like they entrusted the editorial role to Microsoft’s spell checker, with the grammar options set to stun.
So, often in these rags I keep reading articles on celebs bitching about celebs, yes it’s supposedly a news paper but no one seems to have pointed a journalist in the direction of a dictionary which would highlight that ‘news’ does not mean ‘gossip’. But anyway, I see often the names Lilly Allen and Peaches Geldof crop up together with Pete Doherty. Doherty you can excuse because he’s just a junkie who is so off his face he has no real perception of reality. he’s living in his head and not in the world that you and I inhabit. Trust this country to glorify this ‘underdog’ If he weren’t in a band and instead resided on a council estate living on JSA we’d look in the other direction if he passed us on the street.
The other two however, where do I begin?! I read that Lilly Allen was pretty upset that people weren’t taking her music seriously in America and that was why she cut short her tour, in order to rush back and record her new album, which she says is going to be even better than her début. I have an admission to make. I downloaded Lilly Allen’s album when she had that catchy song ‘Smile’ in the charts, it was getting lots of airplay on Terry Wogan’s show so I figured it must be cross generational stuff. You know why it appealed to us oldies? Because we’d appreciate the Casio keyboard soundtrack! Lilly, darling, I hate to break it to you but your début album is fucking awful. So i firmly believe that your new album will be better because I doubt it could get worse, unless the casio’s batteries have run out and you end up with a xylophone!! Gawd bless you gal, you’re living your 15minutes of fame but please don’t get delusional and believe you actually posses any fucking talent, if you do it’s only that you’ve milked the gravy train for as long as you have. So don’t be a sore loser, enjoy the ride, if you have any sense you’ll have saved some of the money you’ve earned, if you’ve been the stupid idiot that I suspect you’ll have blown it. ha-ha nice one!
And from one useless waste of breath to another, Peaches Geldof. I’ve read a few articles in which Peaches slags off Victoria ‘Posh’ Beckham for being a bit of a nonentity. Am I alone in finding this hilarious?! I mean just who the fuck IS Peaches Geldof? I mean, taking a stab in the dark here but I’m guessing she’s the offspring of Bob ‘boomtown rat’ Geldof. Now i dunno here, but I’m thinking in the blue corner we have Mrs Beckham a girl who also managed to live her 15 minutes of fame and became a ‘star’ she snagged herself a trophy husband and enjoys living the Ken and Barbie life. Yes, pretty safe to say she’s famous for not a lot, famous for being famous I guess. Now, over in the red corner we have Miss Geldof, famous for… errr… famous for being the daughter of Mr Geldof, who was famous for… errr… not liking Monday’s?! Yup! that’s her famous for NOT being all that famous. So by her own reckoning I can comfortably say she is a talentless loser, desperate for attention and the only way she knows how to do that is by emulating her obnoxious, loud mouthed and equally talentless father. And I can say that safe in the knowledge that I too am a talentless loser who would love to get my 15mins of fame so I could meet Paris Hilton. I would really, really like to have sex with Paris Hilton. I don’t know why but there is something about her that just oozes sex appeal. Maybe seeing another psychiatrist isn’t such a bad idea after all?! ;-)
So, anyone up for roller blading? I think I’m going to take it up as my summer activity, a healthy mix of exercise and social interaction. Can’t be wrong huh? Who’s with me?
Well, it only seems fair to finish with the song that started this entry. ladies and gentlemen I give you the stones who roll requesting that they be allowed to spend the night together
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