Think

This close to shoving the radio in the bin. I haven't had a telly for ten years or more.

All I have heard today is bollocks about mental Halloween costumes.

I know nothing of mental illness. I don't know what it is nor what defines it. I suspect it is "not normal", and I'd like to see what "normal" is. I know I'm desperately pissed off by politics, and people who seem to think that one or other camp of politics is good/bad, etc. So I live outside it.

I have two friends who are mentally ill, as in the definition of mentally ill that someone decided is not normal.

One is psychotic. I don't know what that means. All I know is that the idiot stayed at my gaff for a week and we had loads of fun and nobody got killed.

The other has PTSD which is because the cunt was sent to shoot brown folk somewhere foreign and I know that would do my head in too.

So, the psychotic (whatever that is) one gets grassed up by do-gooders and all they need is leaving alone to get on.

The PTSD one is a complete cunt but doesn't do stuff I wouldn't do. He's fucking sound. And bright too.

However, the people that do the grassing up are control freaks, tossers, and the kind of people who advocate stuff like gay marriage, which I think is more bonkers than the other folk, because I really don't think that an alternative to a nice wet pussy is a teenage boy's bottom.

So. That's what I think.

I don't care what you think. Just don't tell me what I should think.

I might buy one of those "mental" costumes. It's either going to be jeans and a t-shirt or jeans and a t-shirt. That's all I ever see the real nutjobs in.

Bye.

Mobility

This is about Social Mobility.

I have no idea what it means but I think, from listening to the short-arsed sponging twat Blears earlier, it means this:

Folk from "lower class" (her words) backgrounds do not have the same start in life as those from "middle class" (again, her words) backgrounds.

And to that, I say, "THAT'S BOLLOCKS."

Read my blog. I wasn't born with a silver spoon. We had no silver, not even pewter, nor even a pot in which to piss. I learnt to eat fast so I got most. I now eat incredibly slowly.

My old man, who is ace, had about 47265 jobs before I got to secondary school. I passed the 11+, which was a stupid thing designed to put the non-thick in a different place from the thick. They must have got the results mixed up. So, anyway, I went to "public" skool, because there wasn't a "normal" "grammar" skool anywhere near. I was there six months. I was expelled for setting fire to a prefect. Stupid me, fancy picking one who was going to grass me up.

Having been thrown out, my old man winged his way into a job by bullshit and nadgering his way in. He bought the first house we "owned" (banks owned it). I was, and still am, a cunt. I took O levels, most of which I failed with flying colours, then A levels (same as), passed music brilliantly, failed the rest. It was the worst skool in the country bar none. Ben Elton went to it. Wanker.

I went for a job and got it because I am full of shit, and set fire to the governor's Jag in the first week. By dint of having bollocks the size of coconuts and blaming some other poor sod, I was kept on.

I knew already that there were more people than jobs. I didn't want to end up like I used to be. So I licked arse, sucked cock, and generally, when asked to jump, asked "how high, Sir?"

And now, DESPITE fucking job agents, I'm doing pretty well.

I still lick arse. I still suck cock. And I see people, daily, who don't, and who don't last.

NO politician put me where I am, nor could they.

YOU make of life what YOU want to make of it. I'm not bright. I'm not even cunning, like a fox who's been to the University of Cunning, Cunningsville. I've just been where I don't want to be, and I ain't going there again.

So, Hazel, fuck off.

Dinners

This is about School Dinners.

When I were a lad, we were skint. Proper skint. My old man, who is the most awesome bloke on the planet, left the RAF to bail out his old man's butchery business. Didn't work. Both of them went bankrupt.

My grandad did well originally, self-made man, had a factory. The government compulsorily purchased it in the war. Well, I say purchased, gave him fuck all for it, knocked it down, used it as a tank park to protect the South-West entrances to the UK, which nobody ever invaded, and without as much as a "fuck you" reduced him to a potless wreck.

Anyway. my old man did OK in the end. Through lashings of bullshit and winging it.

In the meantime, we had the dinner tickets, so we had a different colour ticket from the folk that could afford it. Ours were beige.

One day in the dinner queue, a chap who turned out to be head boy later on had forgotten his ticket. I lent him one of my dinner tickets.

"Oh, no," said Mick (for that was his name), "you don't want to get into that kind of thing." So he went without dinner. I sneaked some chips out for him in a serviette after.

Anyway. MANY years later I went to a school reunion. Mick (now Michael) made a beeline for me. I asked how he was doing, because he was DEAD CLEVER at school. I said "I bet you went to Oxford or Cambridge." He told me that he'd been to both, did some bollocksy politics thing, and had a life-changing thingy one day. Apparently he realised it was all shite and remembered the poor boy (nobody ;loves him) from a poor family (sharing his wife for some pork sausages, Bizmillah) who'd offered his dinner ticket one day, and he jacked it all in, and joined a Jesus Commune in Northampton where they make sandwiches to sell to local shops to make ends meet.

So there you go. Weird story but all true.

Pink custard.

Balls

I'be been listening to Mr Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, on economics.

I have to conclude he's got a point.

Let a and b be equal numbers, such as a trillion pounds.

a=b

Multiply by a:

a²=ab

Subtract b²:

a²-b²=ab-b²

Factor:

(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b)

Divide by (a-b):

a+b=b

As a=b, substitute:

b+b=b

Combine:

2b=b

Divide by b:

2=1

And that is why economics is Balls.

Nokia

I see Nokia have been taken over.

Shame. Nokia made the best phones ever. Unfortunately people wouldn't buy a phone unless it had a GPS, touch screen, accelerometer, stereo speakers, toaster and an app to flash their tits at someone built-in, with the option to play Angry Birds and flatten the batteries in half a day.

So Nokia tried to keep up with pathetic half-baked phones that also did a bit of that. That's why they're fucked.

And now I can't buy a phone which works like a phone, gets a signal anywhere, is virtually waterproof, unbreakable, lasts for ten days on one charge, and goes da-da-da-da da-da-da-da da-da-da-da daaaa so I think it's mine ringing when the pictures is about to start.

You bastards.

Piece

A new piece.

Nocti

I went to a restaurant in Berlin with some folk.

It is called Nocti Vagus. It is (apparently) Latin and means "dark wanderer".

It is the second most bizarre thing I've ever done, most of the things I do most people find bizarre, and the most bizarre thing is top secret.

It is dark. Not dark as in nighttime dark, not dark as in shut your eyes dark, not even dark as in Darth Vader's helmet after filling the coal bunker dark. It's dark. Dark as in there is absolutely no light at all. You have to go through a delighting chamber to get in so there is never any light. If you have a phone you have to turn it off, not just put it on silent. No lighters. No luminous watches.

It's dark. You don't get accustomed to the darkness, there isn't a chink of light. After not long you either panic and leave, or shut your eyes because they're totally redundant.

I chose the "surprise" menu. They don't tell you what it will be, nor do they tell you what you had afterwards.

So. You go into the delighting chamber. The door closes. The inner door opens and the waitress, Sylvia, says hello. You put your hand on her shoulder, everyone else puts their hands on yours, and so on, like a dark conga. And she "shows" you to your table.

She gets you as far as the chair and you're on your own. You fall over, drop most of the cutlery on the floor, and listen to the sound of glasses and bottles falling off the table onto the floor. Sylvia arrives with a basket of bread with a bowl of dip in it. You have to guess where she's put it. You pour wine by either putting your fingers inside the glass and waiting until they get wet, whilst listening to the other guests go "bollocks" as they tip it straight into their laps, or you do what I did and neck a load from the bottle before passing it on.

The food arrives. You poke it with a fork, then bring the empty fork to your mouth a few times before shoving your hand in it to try to feel what it is. Nobody can see you so you either grab a handful of it and nom it, or starve.

You chat. Mainly about it being dark. I asked Sylvia how she manages. She said she found it weird at first but got used to it after only a week or so.

Starter was probably sauerkraut with some gubbins. Main course, I call "Steak a la Main et les Doigts". Pudding had jelly in it, and sorbet, and ice cream, and that shirt is going straight in the bin.

When she offered coffee I chickened out and went back to the bar. You go into the delighting chamber, she closes the inner door, opens the outer one, and you are in dim light.

You then see Sylvia for the first time. "Hello, Sylvia!" I say. "Bugger me, you're blind!" You can tell blind people usually, their eyes are sort of not seeing, kind of thing.

Sylvia informs me that she isn't quite blind. She can see some shapes. And that's why she got used to it after a week. I never would. Some of the waiting staff are totally blind, some not quite. I was totally reliant on blind people for a couple of hours. And she was serving 31 other people in there as well, I found out later. Humbling.

Next time you see a blind person, spare a thought. Maybe offer to help them across the road? You've got a hell of an advantage.