Twins of... Uncomfortableness

This week, a couple of guys I think I mentioned very fleetingly a fair few posts ago, but never really went into detail on.

Outside of our core group of friends; me and my siblings, Wayne and Lisa, and my cousin Ian when school was off; their were a number of people who kind of came and went from our circle over the few years that we lived in Appleton Crescent. Two of the shorter lived additions to our posse were a pair of twins called M and R.

The twins moved in to a street near to us, which in itself made them kind of outsiders but we tolerated their presence, because that was the kind of tolerant people we were; sort of like a prototype for the Benetton campaign, or the multicultural society in microcosm. Anyway, they were a bit of a novelty, because they were being raised by a single parent; not in itself odd, round my way; but it was their DAD. Much consternation was to be found in our little mindheadscapethings as to how that had come to pass. Parents lived together for a while; maybe married, maybe not; one or the other would cheat and then the Dad would disappear from the kids lives altogether. That was the natural order, this whole set-up smacked of wrongness.

M&R's Dad did his best to fit in with the other single parents on the estate, soon settling into their patterns and routines and he quickly had staples like 'spending all the family allowance on booze and fags' and 'random bouts of frenzied violence' down to an art form. So I suppose you have to give him props for that, eh?

Joking aside, I'm sure the guy had his reasons for being how he was. Certainly, if you spent any amount of time with his kids you would get the definite feeling that some bad shit had happened in their family. I never got to the bottom of whether their mother had left them, or died, or was in prison, or what; I don't think it was a big secret, I just never bothered to ask; but things were obviously not right in their house. Trust me, I know a bit about things not being right in the home.

R was the main reason for this nagging feeling. M, for the most part, was a fairly happy-go-lucky chap, always ready with a quip and a smile, but R... R was a psycho.

Now, I know, I know, it's not generally a good idea to throw around terms likes psycho, or nutter, without knowing the background to the person's behaviour. But I'm not attempting to make a psychiatric diagnosis here; I'm using the term in it's commonly accepted form. i.e. The guy was unpredictable, violent, and scary as hell when he turned.

Also, limber. I remember one occasion when we were all hanging out on the waste ground 'playing football' (dossing around while a ball lay nearby, pointedly ignored like so much sick in the gutter, until a parent passed by and one of us made a desultory stab at maybe coming within a foot of it with a kick; WE ARE GETTING EXERCISE, SHEESH) when from out of nowhere we heard a scream. And it just kept going and going and going. It was R, and I shit you not he screamed, non-stop, as he ran all the way down the street, crossed the road, hurdled the barrier onto the wasteground, crested two mounds of rubble, ran a bit further and then leaped into the air and kicked his brother in the head. It would have been amazing, if it wasn't terrifying. I mean, I'd have been fucking knackered half way down the street.

Here's the thing though; after the kick had been delivered, he just... deflated. The screaming stopped and he just sort of sagged. Then he called M a dickhead and walked off, hands in pockets, looking about as dejected as I've ever seen a human being. The whole situation made me feel very uncomfortable, I'm not going to lie.

I have no great insight to end on here; M&R didn't live in our area very long, and when they left we never heard from them again, so I've no idea how their lives ended up. But they've stuck in my head, that incident (and one other) in particular, for 2 decades, and I often wonder how they got on. Sad fact is, I'd bet money on the police being involved.

That's it for this week. I'd say I hope you enjoyed it, but we all know that's a vain hope. I'm hoping to be back next week, but we'll see. Ta Ra for the noo then.

Happy Birthday To Me

At some point in the near future; and no, I'm not telling you when; I shall have a birthday. A fact which, when realised; I don't celebrate or even acknowledge my birthday, and haven't for a long while; prompted me to have a wander down memory lane and share with you all some memorable birthday moments from my childhood.

Except there doesn't seem to have been any.

I've wracked my brain, I really have, but with the exception of this story , I've got nothing. It seems my ambivalence toward birthdays was present and correct even from a very early age.

A fact which surprised me, if I'm being honest. While I haven't exactly given the subject a lot of thought in recent years, I certainly never had any kind of feeling of having missed out on this stuff as a child; in the long, long, looooong list of festering resentments that I harbour, this one doesn't feature.

The fact remains though, that for whatever reason, I have no memories of childhood birthdays other than the story linked above and a vague idea that the bike used so creatively by my mother in this post   was a birthday gift at some point, I genuinely can't dredge up any birthday memories at all.

It's possible that the events in question were so traumatic that I blacked them out. If that were the case it could even account for my current lack of any kind of excitement about the prospect of my 'big day'. On the other hand, and I'll concede that this may be the more likely scenario, it could just be that I'm getting old and my memory is shit.

Whichever is the case, it seems that all the good intentions I had when I sat down at the keyboard to type this post, of telling a heartwarming tale of familial affection and mercenary gift grabbing, have gone out the window. I have failed you, dear reader; you came here to be entertained and I give you nothing. Nothing! I can only throw myself at your mercy, and hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive a wretch like me.

Sayonara, and keep being awesome.

How Many Times?

How many times?

How many times, when you were a child, did you get chased from a field by an angry farmer in a pick up truck, brandishing a stick and calling you a 'fucking little bastard?'

How many times when you were a child did you make a rape joke about your neighbours daughter and get beaten bloody for it?*

How many times when you were a child did you get caught stealing a roll of heavy duty visqueen from a building site, backyard camp waterproofing for the use of, and get away with it by... swearing at the man and running away?

How many times when you were a child did you get your friend in trouble by loaning him your copy of the Predator novelisation?

How many times when you were a child did you hit a cricket ball, panic that it was heading toward a bathroom window on your neighbours house, gasp in disbelieving relief when it actually went through the *open* 'tiny little window thing above the main window' (technical term) and then burst out laughing when the neighbour came barrelling out angrily screaming about the mirror you just broke?

How many times when you were a child did you sit on another boys chest for longer than could ever be not awkward because you were in a fight and had overpowered him, were too scared to punch him, but too scared to let him up because you knew he would punch you?

How many times have you clicked on a blog link and realised that the person writing had nothing to say so just cobbled together a random selection of rubbish that were'nt good enough for posts of their own?

*The fact that I did not understand why I was being punished for that says a little something about the environment I was raised in. I'm convinced to this day that the severity of the punishment was down to my Mother overcompensating fro the fact that she didn't react when I made the joke, but rather had to be shamed into it by said neighbour.

Mob Justice

There isn't, when you get right down to it, a lot of humour in a discussion of child molestation and/or statutory rape. (Is statutory rape the name for it in the UK? Or do I watch too many American cop shows? You know what I mean, anyway.) With that in mind, this post will not, in all likelihood, be one of the wittier ones I've ever posted; if I can be said to have ever posted anything witty.

(I usually use real names on here, on the basis that *I* come off worse than anyone, so other people can't really complain. Not so here, for reasons which I should think would be obvious, so meet Ricardo.)


When I was a wee nipper my Mother was friendly (not like that, heads out of the gutter!) with a bloke called Ricardo. He wasn't a resident of the worlds friendliest street, like us, but he lived not far away and would often be at our house. The reason being that he was somewhat ostracised by the rest of the estate and we were the only people who didn't treat him like scum.

Personally I think that in his situation; not that I would ever be in his situation, I hasten to add; I would most likely have moved away and made a fresh start. For whatever reason; be it financial constraints, or the fact that he was born and raised in that area and didn't want to be chased off; he refused to leave.

So what was his situation? What was the reason for his being something of an outcast? Well, a few years earlier he had been convicted and sent to prison, albeit for a short sentence, for having sex with an under age girl. Boooo! Pervert! Paedo! Etc.

Here's the aspect of what he did; and bear with me here; that means I've always felt sorry for him. He was in his late teens, and the girl in question was 15. The relationship was a long one, to the extent that she was basically living in his house toward the end. Her parents were aware of, and approved of, the relationship. He was a regular drinking buddy of her father and brothers. Yes, he was breaking the law, and I'm not saying I approve of what was going on, but it was accepted by all involved.

Then they broke up. You can see where this is going, right?

Suddenly she and her parents were crying all sorts of foul, he was under investigation by the police, and his friends and neighbours; who had known him for years and were fully aware of the relationship in question; were disowning him.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, this is all his version of events, right? And of course he's going to skew things in his favour. Well, yes, he was the one who told me the story. But all the neighbours who remembered the situation confirmed it. No-one denied that what he was saying was true, no-one denied that they had been perfectly fine with it when it was happening, but still they all refused to have anything to do with him. Because he was a paedo and a perv.

How many of the people on that estate were throwing abuse at him because they genuinely believed he had done something wrong? And how many were doing it because of a knee jerk 'he shagged a kid!!!' response to an emotive legal term? Worse yet, how  many were using the fact that others were doing that as an excuse to do the same; we can treat this guy like shit, so we will treat him like shit?

Here's the thing; I absolutely don't think he was entirely without blame. If nothing else, he was stupid. But anyone who thinks that teenagers on either side of the age of consent don't have sexual relationships has got their head buried in the sand. And anyone who thinks that such relationships should lead to prison sentences and a lifetime of abuse, is no friend of mine.

Had I been a few years older I would perhaps (definitely would) have pointed out that this made them, not to put too fine a point on it, a pack of hypocrites. I didn't though, because I was young, scared of most of these people, and didn't know what hypocrite meant.

 Of course, I wasn't a few years older. I was a little kid, and I was slightly bemused by the whole affair. In fact, I should think that it's only because of what happened a few years later that the incident has stuck in my memory at all.

But that's a story for another day.

Yes, I bet you thought I had a point to make or that the story was building to some kind of redemptive crescendo, with him being accepted back into society. Fools! Considering the kind of estate we were living on you're lucky I'm not telling you about him being beaten into a coma and his house burned down. No, I just wanted to bring Ricardo up whilst I was writing about this particular time in my life, so he didn't come out of nowhere when his true place in my tale is revealed. It's no happier for him than this part was.

Stay tuned folks.

Hairy man child

A discussion of nicknames. Knicknames? No, definitely nicknames. I think.

The first nickname I ever had was the traditional in my family 'tut', given to the oldest son of the oldest son etc. I was Tut, my Dad was Tut, Grandad Bully was Tut... I don't know how the name got started and no-one in my family could tell me either, but one thing I do know is that I never really took to it. In fact, to be honest, whenever anyone referred to me by that name it always felt; and I'm aware that this is yet another symptom of my burgeoning paranoia; like they were doing so in a condescending fashion, sniggering at me.

 I don't know why I felt that way about the name, but I did. Maybe I felt I wasn't worthy of it, or on the other hand, maybe I felt that I didn't want to be associated with that lineage. The 2nd is more likely.

So the first nickname I had that I actually felt that I could embrace, and didn't feel like a closet insult, was the one I got when I was about 10. It reflected an aspect of my personality rather than a quirk of my birth and it was given to me by someone I liked and looked up to. I felt like I'd arrived.

The name in question was Professor. It started out as Mad Professor but was cut back to just Professor after a while, presumably for fear of being deemed offensive to those suffering mental health problems. I'm just guessing there, I never asked the question.

Anyway, the name was given to me by a lad called Lee, the older brother of a girl called Aisha (spelling questionable), whose name I was never sure how to pronounce and it would wind her up something rotten; she insisted it was like Asia but with a 'sh' sound instead of 's', so Ashia. Which looks all wrong written down and doesn't really trip off the tongue when you speak it either. But that's by the by.

My mother became friends with Lee's mother when she moved into our street. For some reason that I never quite got to the bottom of, and wasn't really any of my business anyway, Lee and sis didn't live with their mother, or their father for that matter, but rather with their grandparents, and would only visit some weekends and school holidays, so it was a while before we met them and when we did, it was mostly Aisha?? that we had dealings with because Lee was a few years older than us, and therefore outside our circle.

Except when he was in the house when we were hanging out there, which was often because they had a NES, and were therefore cool as fuck.

Just Look At It. Pure Nostalgia

 If it was sunny, it was Wayne and Lisa's tents, if it was a rainy day it was Aisha's NES. That was the status quo for a long time.

I looked up to Lee in the same way the rest of them looked up to me; the poor, blind, ignorant fools; which is to say that because he was older he was automatically cooler. Except he reallywas, because while I had little choice in the matter; often being under strict instructions to 'look after' the younger ones; he could have ignored us totally if he'd wanted. Instead, he... tolerated us, I guess.

So why did Lee christen me Mad Professor? Well, it was a combination of 2 things; firstly, I wore glasses, and secondly, I insisted on reading the instruction booklet of a game, cover to cover, before I ever picked up a controller. A speccy who reads? What else was I going to be called?


The name never really caught on, to be honest, but it served the very useful purpose of supplanting Tut for long enough for people to get out of the habit of using it. Since then? I haven't ever really had a nickname. Oh, there has been the traditional 'stick a y on the end of his surname' but in my eyes, calling me Finchy isn't so much giving me a nickname as it is acknowledging that you can't be bothered to come up with one.

In recent years, a customer at my place of work has come up with the somewhat unique, Ewok. Because of my habit of going 6 months or more without a haircut, and therefore, on occasion being slightly hirsute, he thought it would be funny. and to be fair to him, it is. But where the true genius lies is in the fact that once again, just like with the Professor tag, it's actually a contraction of a longer name, which was; wait for it, you'll like this; Ewok, son of Bungle. Son of Bungle! How good is that? So obvious in hindsight, but who makes that connection? An Ewok. And Bungle. Genius.

That name hasn't really caught on either, and it's only that one guy who uses it. But still, what a fucking cool name. Ewok, Son of Bungle. You've gotta give the guy credit for that.

Look At Me!

Not a lot of content on here the last few weeks, for which I can only apologise. Whiny self pity got the better of me and I only like to talk about whiny self pitying things on here when I've had a while to get over it and can mock myself. So look forward to the story of the last few weeks some time in 2015.

I felt a little bad about the lack of content and decided that I would do a proper epic post this week, with much wailing, gnashing of teeth and searing insights into my psyche. Then I decided I couldn't be bothered, and I OWE YOU NOTHING! NOTHING, DO YOU HEAR?!? So instead I thought I'd take this opportunity to pimp yet another new online project of mine that I shall no doubt neglect just like this here blog.

Youtube. That's a thing. A thing which I don't really understand and which intimidates me slightly, in that 'the world is very big and a lot of people live in it and every single one of them is funnier, more talented and better looking than me' sort of way. So naturally, I've decided to give it a go.

I've got videos on my youtube channel already, but the bulk of them are on there because posting to youtube and then embedding the vid in my blog post was the only way I could figure out how to put videos on my blog. I'm sure there's a more direct way, but I'm a dunce, so...

I also did a series of really really badly shot, badly edited, stream of consciousness drivel videos called 'Watch A Shit Show For A Month' a while back. I think 3 people watched, which was 3 more than they deserved, and I never did a second month (although I will, when I get around to it).

What I've decided to do now though, is to branch out a little from talking about the TV, because I'm more than that, damn it! I'm going to talk about...er...the thing...and that stuff...er... Well, to be honest I don't know what I'm going to talk about but I'm sure stuff will present itself. You see, I'm going to 'vlog'.

Now, I'm well aware that 'vlogging' (and yes I am going to punctuate it in that way every time I use it because IT'S A FUCKING RIDICULOUS WORD) is something more often associated with the young, but what the hell, I was young once, right? And we didn't have youtube back then. So I'm protesting that the yoof shouldn't get all the good stuff. That's what it is, yeah.

Anyway, I'm daring to dream that people might actually watch but even if they don't, what the hell, I'm having a bit of a laugh, so I'm happy. The introductory video went up yesterday, and you can watch it here, if you so desire; feel free to leave a comment, either here or, you know, on the video, which probably makes more sense, and let me know what you think, even if you just say "It's shit and you're embarrassing yourself."

Next week, if I'm here at all, it'll be a proper post with a tale of my mis-spent youth. Honest, Guv.

Hardened Criminal Part 2

I'm writing this blog post on a Sunday. It's for posting on a Monday but it's being written on a Sunday. I just thought I'd let you know that, so you can attempt to figure out, while you read it, why I felt the need to point it out. It must be relevant to the post in some way right? Ooh, mysterious...

I'm a little lost off with where I am in my life story at the minute, what with diversions to talk about all the women I perv o... I mean talk to, on twitter and to have a bit of a dig at my libelous brother and of course jumping ahead to the days of bicycle beatings, but I'm gonna try to get things back on track this week. Maybe.

Lots of members of my family are criminals. Reformed criminals, to be fair, but at the time that I'm writing about now, that part hadn't happened yet. As a result, it was something of a foregone conclusion that I too would enter the family business of taking what belonged to other people and making it mine, whether they liked it or not. I think there's a name for that, but I can't quite think of it.

Now, I'd like to tell you that the thought made me distraught, and that I tried everything in my power to avoid the icy grip of a life of crime, but that my familial connections made it impossible and I was dragged back every time I tried to crawl away. I'd like to tell you that, but I can't. I didn't resist. It didn't even occur to me to resist. This is just what people in my family did.

A couple of minor shoplifting occurrences and the taking of a bottle of tippex from the receptionists desk at the opticians; I was quite proud of getting away with that one; were my only offences until the day one of my Uncles, who shall remain nameless so as not to incriminate the, er, guilty, decided that the time was ripe for me to go on my first burglary. Exciting stuff!

The allotted night didst swift arrive, and we set off, clad all in black, to the local comprehensive school. I'd been there often, because we would sometimes kick a ball around on their fields at the weekends, and cutting through their grounds was a good shortcut to the river on a hot day. I had never actually been inside though. Until now. My little heart was all aflutter on the way there; even the torrential rain couldn't dampen my spirits. 

Unc insisted on going the long way around and approaching from the woods, which I felt was a bit of a waste of time but what did I know, I was 10. Still though, it was a bloody long walk.  Anyway, we came up on the school, he did something very clever to a window and hey presto, we were in. At which point he lay on his belly on the floor and slithered away like a snake. Which made me laugh.

See, I'm not an expert on these things but I'm pretty certain he may have been watching a few too many movies. It was a school for crying out loud. What kind of security system did he think we were dealing with here?

But anyway... We were in a large kitchen with loads of desks in the middle. I assumed it was for cookery classes but I learned later that that was a gross inaccuracy; it was a Home Economics/Food Technologies lab. Shows what I know.

The whole thing was destined to go tits up, of course, because I was involved so how could it not? Alarms went off and we were out of there, except he was damned if he was going empty handed so he waited until I was out then threw a microwave out to me. Which I dropped.

Then he was out and we were running; with him carrying the microwave because he didn't trust me; and we get... to the corner of the fence, whereupon I slip on my arse in the mud and can't get up. (See, cos I said earlier there was rain? That's foreshadowing and shit, that is.)

I manage to pick myself up eventually and we head into the woods. We hide the microwave for retrieval the next day, because he doesn't want to be seen on the streets with it, and then we head home. The long way around, of course.

The odd thing about the whole incident is that on the night in question my Unc was stressed, angry, blaming me for screwing up and panicking like a motherfunter. Yet, within days, the story was that he had deliberately set the alarms off and made a hash of things, in order to 'scare me straight'. Ha, nice cover job son, but I know the truth!

We went back and got the microwave the next day. It didn't work. A damning indictment of our schools funding? Or because I dropped it in a puddle? YOU decide!

So there you go, the night that my criminal career escalated, and pretty much peaked. I'm not saying that was the last time I ever nicked anything, but it was all petty rubbish and it didn't last long.

Oh, and if you're wondering, the reason I mentioned writing this on Sunday to post on Monday and asked you to figure out why it was relevant was... to see if you would try to work out why it was relevant as you read the post. Did you? Go on, tell me you did.