2009; an epilogue.

Where to start? The beginning of the year? Not for me, far too post-modern. I understand that this time of year does this to people, what with resolutions and all that, but I have found myself forced into a lot of reflection recently. When trying to take stock of a period of time, eternal during and fleeting ever since, it is fucking impossible to take an objective stance, weigh things up on either side and come to a rather diplomatic and utilitarian conclusion on whether you have achieved a single sodding thing, retained a scrap of knowledge or developed any further understanding of this near adult life that has been thrust upon you with little warning, just a few knowing smiles and a couple of patronising lectures. I may have lost some things and gained others, but these facts have very little relevance to how I feel this year has been for me.

February I returned to Haslemere, shortly afterwards I went to work at a hotel in the New Forest, it shall remain unnamed and unmentioned in this blog, I had fun but kicked myself in the balls shortly afterward.

Maybe I should just bring up some memories, like walking through Taunton late at night with Tom and doing an acapella rendition of Holy Roller Novocaine. Or maybe gigs in Leicester, memories of which are satisfyingly doused in beer and broken strings. Or maybe that bollockingly hot day that I decided to hitch-hike round the M25, nearly just to prove a point. Perhaps late night/early morning sessions at the 24 hour pool club, maybe the days spent camping in the summer after being kicked out. Possibly waking up on a cold sofa, breath steaming and the sounds of screaming from next door filling my slowly gathering consciousness. Countless mornings waking up in the double bed on Kings Road. Being more worried about A-level results day than I was the year my own came out. Pasta pesto. The den. The beautiful differences between Guildford's and Leicester's Job Centres, Vivaldi's Spring as the hold tone for the Department for Work and Pensions. Drinking red from the bottle on Southsea beach, drinking red from the bottle in Chiddingfold, drinking red from the bottle up Marley, drinking red from the bottle whilst watching the England game in Ross' room, for some reason I remember nothing about the match, something else big happened that day. That week just after my birthday in which I had the house to myself.

Change has been a big thing. There have been a few big alterations, maybe improvements, maybe damages, some left alone and some repaired. Being asked to leave the house was incredible, it brought out a trusty old defence mechanism, indifference. Indifference bordering on mania, perhaps. Indeed I felt alone, shit scared and foolish, but ultimately it felt like another episode in some teen drama that I found mildly engaging. It took only a short while in Leicester for me to realise that home would be the best place to be and that staying home was as important. Not that Leicester wasn't fun, it was fucking mental, but I don't do well cold and hungry.

There has been another change, I fear that if I dwell on it then I will have some rather cross sounding facebook status disguisedly addressed to me, so I won't even begin to vent any feelings on it. All I will say is that it was the first change of this sort I've ever had to go through, I may not have handled myself particularly well, during or shortly after the event, but ultimately, that is if it has reached an ultimatum, I feel that on this side of everything I have developed a much stronger sense of what I need and what I should do to get it, what I have and what I should do to keep it and what I've lost and what I should do to commemorate it.

The year has ended with a form of revolution, I try my best not to get involved with mainstream media politics and phone-in vote democracies, but the fact that Rage Against The Machine's Killing The Name ended up as Christmas number one in the charts is probably the most poetic form of counter attack to this relentless barrage of synthetic, over-produced, soulless tat to which we have been subjected over the past ten years that anybody could have ever dreamed of. I just hope that people realise why this has happened and don't try and turn one of the most politically tuned-in bands ever known into some gimmick for apathetic, lazy dislike for some bloke who has his trousers too high, a bad haircut and man boobs. Oh, and a shitload of cash.

This has been my year. I hope you enjoyed it and can work out if I did for me.

A brief summary of recent events

So I'm sitting down enjoying the company
Of my dear friend and partner in crime
Nothing serious just some football
Some music, maybe even a conversation about nothing real.
My phone rings and it's on of those moments,
One of those once in a lifetime things that
Happens every day, my heart skips like my
Dad's Smiths records, the girl I love ringing me.
I say hi she says this ain't working properly,
I say what do you mean I can hear you fine,
No problems with the signal at all maybe your
New phone is fucking up, what a waste of cash that turned out to be. She laughs as
If I'm joking but then she's not laughing she's
Crying and she's like no, we're not working, this
Can't work it has to end, I love you but
You're not what I need.

Hit hard like a punch to the stomach from the bouncer
Outside your own gig who says nah you're not coming back
In if you leave you're like why and he says coz of the
Trackies and trainers mate so you say but mate this is
My gig, he asks if you're getting smart and as you shake
Your head he hits hard like a phone call out of the blue
From the only one you love telling you that it all
Has to end because you're two different people and
Other shit reasons like that. But you go to
Cover it up, drown it out in a sea of red wine and
You don't stop for a couple of days it gets worse and
No matter how much you try to distract yourself you
Can only think of her and how she knows you better than
You know yourself and now you know that you know
Nothing about her anymore so you ring her up and
Demand an explanation end up making it a lot worse
For both of you so then you drink some more wine.

A few days pass and you're beginning to get used
To the idea of not having that one person by
Your side and in your head and you start to think
That maybe all this isn't too bad after all I
Mean who gives a shit that I ain't been single since
I was fifteen and then you're sitting there drowning
Out the sounds of next-door hitting his wife with some
Music and filling your brain with useless knowledge about
Friends of friends of friends of friends and you see
You've got a message and you read it and it's her and
It all comes rushing back and you reach out to the
Nearest potential source of sympathy because all the
Wine's gone and it happens to be some girl from the past
Because funnily enough there's plenty of fish in
Your history because you haven't been exactly faithful
And this girl from the past says to you yeah it's
Shit but think back a year ago when you moved away
You told her it was fine you said it was working but
You still went off and acted like a complete and utter twat
And to be honest THAT is not what I call working
So yeah she still probably loves you but she's doing the
Right thing here, she doesn't want to betray you the way
You betrayed her so shut up and show her some
Fucking respect.

And I think yeah fair enough.

I've been working on a cocktail

Och aye. I have just this last hour returned from a rather entertaining and fun-filled couple of nights in London, it was fun and this is why...

Got there on Saturday afternoon, straight out of St. Pancras and into a Mexican fast food place to get a burrito, and everyone loves a burrito, and a mojito, I didn't actually have a mojito but everyone loves one. Later that night Trace Bish and I meandered on down to the Relentless Garage in Highbury to see some musically gifted fellows going by the name of Johnny Foreigner. There I just happened (as if completely by accident) to bump into one of the coolest, sexiest and darn-right talented people in existence. I apologised to Michael Winner and then instead met up with Tom which was a wholly disappointing affair laden with homoerotic undertones and awkward silences. Luckily for all of us Johnny Foreigner were pretty fucking tight (a good adjective when it comes to the analysis of live music) so we didn't have to fill said silences with anything but praise for the aforementioned band.

THEN ON SUNDAY I WENT ON AN ADVENTURE!!! Someone says to you, "hey, we're going to shootlondon today" and you automatically start thinking about either calling the police or buying the new grand theft auto game they're talking about, but no, shootlondon is something completely different, though it does include London and shooting. You're given a clue sheet containing five clues (funnily enough), the answers of which are locations in a set area of London, we were doing shootspitalfields, and Trace Bish knows everything about that area, so all we had to do was compensate for the complete lack of photographic ability that either of us had, let alone the cameras which were basic in comparison to the kit other people had brought with them, most of which looked like they could be easily utilised as heat-guided missile launchers. On top of the clues for locations, we also got given three words for inspiration for three more separate photos, so as well as trekking to Columbia Road, a Turkish bath house, an art gallery at no. 56 Artillery Lane, the Whitechapel art gallery and David "insert weirdly spelt surname that I can't quite remember here"'s Idea Store (a library), we had to photographically interpret "wireless", "chatterbox" and "read between the lines". Needless to say we didn't win any of the prizes, but a fun day was had by all.

Now I'm back in Leicester, feeling hungry and preparing my speech with which I will annihilate anyone who will listen at the Job Centre on Wednesday, silly bastard twatbusses still haven't got anywhere near giving me my constitutional right of £100 for the past two weeks, which makes me a particularly pissed-off benefit scrounger.

I have also made 200 flyers for our up and coming gig at Sumo in Leicester, and I know 200 is more than optimistic, but I like them, so I made lots. We were offered £2 for every flyer with Get-out Claws written on it as payment for the gig, but the entry fee was going to be £5 for our matey matey followers, so we got the price down to £3 for our friends and no payment for us. Because we're nice. Obviously.

Laters.

Back in LE2

So, set the scene, I'm on a moth-eaten, stinking saggy excuse for a sofa, also known as my bed, in the living room of my friends' house (friends brushed over, will return to them later on). Due to the lack of central heating, double glazing and/or fireplace, I'm fucking cold; two t-shirts, two sweatshirts, jogging bottoms and a duvet don't seem to cut it this far into the arctic circle. I have just embarked upon the caffeinated voyage of my fourth cup of coffee in the space of an hour and crave a cigarette more than Graham Norton craves cock up his irritating arsehole. He is quite obviously a taker. To my right there is a 3/4 sized nylon strung "classical" guitar that has this rather unique buzz to the G-string, adding to it an ineptitude deserving of a witty comment. In front of me there is a TV, the screen no bigger than 12", that shows three channels, four if the wind direction is exactly south-easterly and the moon is gibbous. There are various scraps of paper on the floor, on one is a draft sketch for a flyer for my band, another is merely a letter consisting of broken promises from the sodding department if sodding work and sodding pensions (their hold-tone is Vivaldi's "Spring" if you had ever wondered, I know that music off by heart, as do quite a few others my age according to the news).

I like to draw up contrasts between this town and the one I left behind, namely Haslemere, to distract me from the cold. Haslemere doesn't even contain the only nice thing it ever brought forth to me anymore, my dearest darling dollface Rebecca's now at Oxford, being clever and complaining about having to lug a WHOLE SUITCASE of books up there. She seems to think that I have this pre-conceived opinion of what everyone she meets there will be like, which is completely and utterly correct, and though I know this is neither mature or reasonable, I doubt the elitist cunts will give a fuck. But anyway, Haslemere, hmmm, news from there is that my step-father managed to smash up my Mother's car in a particularly spectacular fashion. Don't see him getting kicked out, all I can say is that he's lucky he didn't smoke a cigarette out of his bedroom window, or perhaps help himself to a bottle of Hardy's, he's lucky he just caused several thousand pounds' worth of damage to a poor woman's car, namely the only thing of value that she owns outright that doesn't sit round the fourth finger of her left hand.

I'm in a rock'n'roll band, one that plays gigs and everything, and I fucking love it. We've got ourselves supporting Glen Matlock of Sex Pistols semi-fame, and various other gigs around Leicester, and to be quite honest it's the only thing I'm enjoying doing at the moment, probably because it is the only thing I'm actually doing at all, apart from waiting in vain for my JSA to come through and trying to blag cigarettes off of complete strangers. Maybe I should busk.

I can hear some nice chaps outside kicking over wheelie bins and banging on peoples' windows, reminds you how thin the walls are. Today I had to listen to the next door neighbour screaming at his wife for two fucking hours, and when you start hearing dull thuds and muffled cries you find yourself stuck between ringing the police or turning the music up. I'm not going to divulge which option I chose, it'd just bring judgement, I'm only dropping it in here because I'm setting a scene.

I spoke to my Dad today, an occurrence none too common. I'm not sure whether it's the tell-tale signs of an impending mid-life crisis or just the fact that he, all of a sudden, likes rap and hip-hop, but he's off to see Dizzee Rascal next week, he's clearly gone bonkers. Yes, I really did just put that, and without the slightest hint of irony.

Well I'm sure anybody who bothered reading this will feel enriched by now, their thirst for inane knowledge about my shambolic existence satiated, who knows, maybe even a comment will come forth, something encouraging from Tom? Perhaps something witty from Ken? Who knows, maybe even something admirably bitchy from Henry that I'll resent but only because I'll wish I'd thought of it? Whatever, it's got me through an hour or so of caffeine shakes, now comes exhaustion and Miles Davis.

An apology

For a largely ignored and neglected blog, this has now managed to upset its fair share of people, and not people that I would ever want to upset in my life. I was recently presented with a great opportunity to gain experience in a specific sector of employment, and for this I am incredibly grateful, I was looked after, made to feel welcome and taught an awful lot by a group of generous and understanding people. Previous words published on this blog have shown me to have differing views than those I have just stated, they were offensive, disrespectful and untrue in a lot of ways, small feelings of frustration and isolation led me to write them but now I realise that I was a complete and utter bastard for doing so.

So basically, to anyone who may read this, I'm really sorry, and that's not the kind of apology said just to get me out of trouble, it's a genuine and sincere apology. 

Wrote a song today, doesn't take a genius to work out what it's about

Black eyes melting in a spring time lullaby,
Sunshine ripping your eyes in two.
You’d better shut your mouth and shut your heart
In the company of those you thought you knew.
Pale smile falling like moon light too bright,
Tonight is going to end some time, people say it’s soon.
Are they blackbird choruses? People say of course it is
But I’ve always had a feeling what you say aint what you do.

Nicotine figurines of people that I’ve never seen,
People that I know you wouldn’t give a second glance.
Cut pay holiday and things I never meant to say
And other things I would if only given half the chance.
Sun and rain are all the same when feelings that I’m meant to tame
Catch on me like fire and burn through into my heart,
‘Bout love and fear I’ll say my dear, don’t believe all you hear,
Either one is strong enough to tear us far apart.

Black eyes glistening, you look as though you’re listening,
You look as thought you’re hearing every word I say.
Thin smile on your lips, remains of last night’s fish and chips,
Save it for the altar honey, things have been too much today.
Windows steaming up with fairytales you’re dreaming up
Of Frenchmen and philosophies and little rich boys dropping T’s.
Oh what a calamity when this is your reality
You’re shrouding all your memories, you’re haunting all my hopes and dreams.

One more chance to make this happen,
People said it never would.
One more chance to make this happen
Darling trust me I know I should know better.

A Return

My boxing day hangover has gone, I'm refreshed, ready to go, bounce around in a field for a bit, do something worthwhile, perhaps eat a salad, rescue a bear, buy a big issue, stop smoking, choose life and become an all round good citizen of the world. Ahem, to my right, 20 boxes of Saudi Marlboro Reds, made in Germany, bought for £5, street value, £100. All for me. To my left, cigarette butts floating in remainder of sweet and sour sauce from two nights ago, chicken balls are nowhere to be seen. At me feet, laying on its side atop a mound of mismatched socks and lecture notes is a half empty (definitely half empty) bottle of Sainsbury's basics (they don't even give a capital B, they really do cut down on the quality) cider. Yum. Behind me, my sink, four, five, no that's the other end of that one, oh yes, four empty (or not full) cans of Carlsberg. Above the sink, a mirror, oh dear lord.

And that's how cool I am, well, I say me, the new me, the one who I think is a twat, nowhere near as cool as the me me, or the not me but actually me me, or the not quite not me but potentially not not me me. I don't expect you to understand. I expect I don't expect me to understand.

Wasn't Christmas amazing??? I don't think anybody noticed it, it sort of slipped past undetected on the radar amidst the interference of our collective impending financial and emotional meltdown. Happy Christmas, where's my Prozac??

My little sister got a Nintendo DS gizmo whotsit bobbin jobby for Christmas, enabling her to "interact" with pet animals, dogs, cats, hamsters, gimps, you name it. She got excited at being able to feed, play with and, most importantly, clean a pet hamster. Twilight (hasty introduction of simple character: a hamster, real, Roz's Christmas present last year) sat looking on, weeping her small hamster tears, one by one, into stale food, unchanged since Halloween.

I got things, music-ish things, Kings of Leon tickets, Fratelli's tickets, iTunes vouchers (redeemed so far by Johnny Foreigner, MGMT and, unfortunately, Alphabeat) and a guitar amp made from a cigarette box. Been banging on music for a while now, going with it as well, set up a band, a real, recording, performing, pouting band, beautiful. We're called Get-out Claws (though Vicus didn't really like it, I failed to take heed to his advice and alternatively think inproportionately i.e. he doesn't like it therefore it is a rockin' and a rollin') and we're a two piece. I'm not going to plug it, apparently that annoys people (you know who YOU are), but we're on myspace at www.myspace.com/getoutclawsmusic so if you want to hear what it's really like being a fairly unimaginative post-disaffected youth of the future, check us out.

That's all really, oh, apart from my mother instilling in me a rampaging love for Pernod (preferably mixed with Babysham).......I just read that back and noticed how gay it sounded, hmmm, should address that. We burned a copy of Wuthering Heights the other night for my friend's art project, I have been asked to act in a friend's short film for his film and photography type course and MY BAND'S MYSPACE IS WWW.MYSPACE.COM/GETOUTCLAWSMUSIC

Thanks.