ONWARDS AND DOWNWARDS!!!

the lads on the ward and i had had a bit of a silly competition; who would get the the most tablets at breakfast time? i had nine. how could i lose? of course i did i DID lose because the main contender had eleven. i had a squirt of insulin of the skin-poppin’ variety but that didn’t quite cut the mustard. have you ever been woken every hour, on the hour, to have holes made in you so that risible blood/glucose measurements could be taken? no? well take my tip - don’t get diabetic.

so i lost, yet again.

at three in the morning there is something so refreshing about being grabbed by a down’s syndrome guy who is proud of a poo. i don’t know whether he wanted me to take a picture of it but the least i could i could do was admire it. what a shame i had left my camera at home. when you have done a poo and want to share the exploit with a stranger at three in the morning there is something a bit trippy about it. when they are zipping up a dead man two beds down at the same time it adds that extra tang.

at times like this i wonder if i could be a RMN and i think that i might actually be good at it. i can see the difference between a successful poo and a dead man. but then i have to realise that i’m the patient on the ward on here and it’s just my weird self-esteem thing cutting in and that i’m just as much of a problem for the staff as poo-dude or dead-guy. i’m just weird-bloke with disturbed sleep patterns who is too clever for his own good. no, i’m not a consultant with a bow tie and not a young and fit man with a steth around his neck. so that’s another thing fucked.

as a ‘friend’ of mine in hove (he’d like to kill me but he owes me and i’m too big) used to say, “as one door closes, another one slams in your face". and there is truth in that for too many of us.

bear with me on this one… when i was small, maybe nine or so, we went to stay with some friends of my dad’s in farnham; lovely 60’s or so modern house with all open wooden stairways and wooden floors and a great tree-house all out in the woodland. i had a mamod model steam traction engine that worked off water (natch) and meths to get it going. it weighed quite a bit. we played with it a bit but then it was time for bed. i had to share a bed with R and how non-delightful it was when he tried to stick his cock up my arse as we could hear the grown-ups starting to row downstairs. those grown-ups had been drinking. the fight started and i saw R’s dad punch my dad in the face and my dad’s nose bleeding. the fight was about whether pissed-up R’s dad should have the car keys or not. R’s dad punched a hole in one of those silly. 60’s egg-box doors and i went to get my mamod traction engine and i wanted to drop it right onto his head and kill him. right over the trendy wooden flight of stairs and right onto his mad head. he had punched my dad and made him bleed. the only thing that i felt that i could hit him with was MY toy because it was mine. but of course i didn’t.

he took the keys and drove a triumph herald about half a mile up the road and into a tree; unfortunately not injuring himself too badly.

i saw him in france a few years later when i was a precocious teenager, he was trying to write a book about the maquis. i asked him what the first line of the book was and he said “the bare bulb hung low over the scrubbed wooden table".

what a load of shit.

i hate my parent’s generation, i hated that night, i hated the attempted sodomy off his weirdo son, i hated myself for not dropping my mamod steam engine off the stairs onto his pissed-up nut. i wish that he had hit the tree at 60 instead of 20 and i hated the ‘normality’ of the next day.

i hate everything. i hate myself and i hate everyone and everything except for a clutch of friends that i can hold hold dear. i hate farnham and i hate double-garages and i hate wealth and swimming pools and i hate everyone and everything that will do me down. i want a gun and i want to be invisible and i want everything to be pure and clear. i want the penknife that i lost in the bracken on that horrible weekend and i want…

…i want to stop drinking. i want a different life, the lives that other people have. i want to be well but i never shall be. i want never to have to take pills or inject myself again. you might think i’m whining and you would be right, but i am broken now and broken lives don’t come just out of nowhere, they come from things so deeply within that you can never, ever sort them. this is why i want to go to the windmill unit for treatment. this all needs to be sorted out but i know it never can be. i have seen too much for too long and i KNOW that my life has been easy but this is why i drink. i love being drunk rather than sober; i love being asleep and dreaming rather than awake.

YOU WHINING TOSSER

so i’ll meet this head on. i can not carry on like this. i understand why people take drugs, they take them because it’s better than being alive. but i will try. that’s all i can do.

WAR

for fuck’s sake. 100,000 dead this time round so far. half of them women and children. let’s wave the flag, let’s use the rocket power. my country disgusts me and amerika disgusts me too. i wanted to drop a mamod traction on a drunken head because my dad had a nose-bleed for trying to stop an arsehole driving.

FORGIVE ME

you know what i’m like.

DEEP BREATH…

if god existed he would love you. i do.

X

IN SICKNESS AND IN (ILL) HEALTH. AND/OR, LOVE AND DEATH

how long ago it seems that i was rolling around in agony and calling upon god who does not exist to ease my pain. trouty says that i went in on tuesday morning on the 19th of october having prevaricated re ambulance calling because i didn’t want to waste anyones time. it was about 03:00 and i called an ambulance because i i feared that i was vomiting blood; it goes brown caused by stomach acids, luckily it wasn’t the bright red stuff. in the ambulance i vommed up a whole cardboard sickie-hat thing of blood and it scared the life out of me.

i am always honest with the medical profession because there is no point in being otherwise (except when it comes to sneaky choc-ices that are legitimate treats). there was a modicum of eyebrow raising when i declared my weekly alcohol units consumption but they couldn’t very well double as it as they might usually do to compensate for liars because that would mean that i was oliver reed or dead or both.

a lot of the time since then has been rather blurred. i had my first go on some morphine almost immediately and the pain goes and you feel warm and safer than before. you get asked questions, always the same ones by different people, and forms are filled in. the cardboard hat filled with brown blood is examined. you are told that you have a gastric bleed. you remember that this is what killed peter cook. you put on a back-to-front gown and lie on a trolley in a&e for about 10 hours. the exciting bit was a very attractive nurse stuck her finger up my arse which was very nice. i asked for some painkilllers to see what i might get. i had been vomming for hours (including in the doctors surgery during an appointment earlier and he had had a root through it earlier and there was no blood but somehow my heroic powers of wretching had ripped a hole in my insides and i was slowly filling up with blood).

good call - this time i got over 5mls of diamorphine (heroin) which was rather nice. i always think that when death may come a knocking or that you fear it will a touch of smack puts a rosier glow on things. the general concensus was that my hopeless mismanagement of my diabetes (more of this later) and my alcoholism meant that i should be tortured by ‘nil-by-mouth’. this means not anything goes down your gob, no steak and kidney pie, not even a sip of water. i had drip bags of saline to rehydrate me and all sorts but nothing in the mouth. so no painkiller tablets would be allowed. i had had a tap fitted to get the saline and vitamins in and also the next load of morphine that i managed to wheedle out of them.

i was assigned a bed in an acute ward and prepared for the delights of an endoscopy. honestly, you should hear how these consultants and the like describe surgical procedures to simpletons. no, that wasn’t fair of me. i had a chest x-ray (immediate thought ‘ this is where they discover cancer or tb’) and tried to get used to my surroundings as the pain and drugs wore off. i had an endoscopy ("this where we put a telescope into your tummy") which featured being sprayed in the gob with a chemical banana flavour thing and then getting whacked with sedatives through the tap in your arm. at one stage i had three lines going in; uncomfy.
i don’t remember anything about the endoscopy but do have a glimmer of pin-down when coming round from it all. i woke up back on the ward and trouty was there and she says that i pulled all the tubes and cables out of the life-support drippy things and i thought i was on a great big sailing ship, like the hms victory or something. i asked for some ‘pain-killers’ but as i was no longer on nil-by mouth all i got offered was two paracetamols. and they never arrived either.

what a swizz.

next i had to have and ultrasound on my liver to see how crap i have made it. foolishly they let me hold all my notes while i was queueing and i saw the photo of my internal bleed that they had taken. my insides resemble tripey dogfood with a big black toadstool of congealed blood in it.
the ultrasound doctor said that my liver and kidneys are the right shape with no lumps in but she couldn’t swear as to whether they actually work or not.

there were were some great people on the ward. because i was the most ambulent after they let me stop dragging drips round on a trolley whenever i went to the bog. i used to do little bits of shopping for them down at the paper shop. it was good to get around but i was so stuffed with diazepam to stop me fitting for want of a drink that i used to bounce off walls and fall over and stuff. but here’s to the bonny boys; christian dave, paul, alan(who, when eating his dinner, told me that they had said to him that if he had the chicken casserole he could have burger too but he didn’t like the burger. i suspect it was because the burger was bread pudding and custard). here’s to bri who is seriously unwell and here is to the bloke who died last night. he was in the bed next to paul and i was on the other bed next to paul and we whispered to each other as the body bag got zipped up and matey got taken away to a fridge. we never got to know his name. i woke up at 6 this morning, there was already someone else in that corner bed.

the whole hospital seem hell-bent on destroying my diabetic regime. it seems thst they don’t understand the ‘the thirst principle of one meal a day and loads of swig’. ho hum.

so that was the death - what of the love? trouty came to see me every day. it meant a great deal but i won’t go on. those of you that know her know what she’s like. and if you don’t know her you really should. my thanks and respect to her. i used to think that there wasn’t enough love in this world but it’s there; hiding.

my love too to the wonderful staff at st peter’s hospital.

and a kind of love too to the peel family. r.i.p. john. sleep well, mate.

UPON HAVING A POISONOUS TONGUE

i thought that it might be a good idea to get this out of the way when i have only drunk 2.5 ltres of cider so far today.

i had planned to do a blog about little bastards and how they all seem to have adhd and be allergic to peanuts. it would be so good if you could ward off scummers just by flicking peanut butter at them. it would be great if they died in front of you all sizzled up like a slug with salt on.

but then i thought about how i have upset people recently, people that i do like to think of as friends. i wondered if they would like to flick me with peanut butter and watch me die. of course they would not but i have hurt them and i feel sad about that.

you might notice that i do not feel sorry. this is because i cannot feel sorry for anything that i write or say because, repulsive as it might sound, i mean it at the time. i really do mean whatever i say. this is a bit frightening because i spend most of my time drunk and i say things that a sober man might not. i am aware that going off on one in a pub might end up with me having my lights punched out but it hasn’t happened yet although i did get a right smack in the gob in about 1994 but that wasn’t really my fault.

the point i’m trying to make is that i say whatever is in my head at the time. it may well not be the same tomorrow but you can always rely on me to give my honest opinion at the time. i also like to make what i think are funny jokes. sometimes they are funny, that’s true, but sometimes they are a bit cruel and they only get published because i’m pissed.

so, take me or leave me. you don’t have to read this stuff you know. bear in mind that i always say what i think and i don’t have to try to entertain. if i want to rant then i will rant. and bear in mind that sometimes i will try to sound clever or funny but it just won’t work because of drink or perhaps because i’m an arsehole. you can’t say fairer than that.

I AM AN ARSEHOLE
not all the time but sometimes i am. i never want to offend but sometimes it happens. let it go; ignore me. if i’ve upset you, you could try flicking me with peanut butter. or just have a laugh.

this world and life is so rubbish that all there is to do is laugh. forgive me if sometimes i make people cry instead of laughing. sometimes i feel like crying all day.

cheerio.

THE DAY THAT THE TOILET EXPLODED

was, unfortunately, today. let me explain…

on boats you basically have two lavatorial systems, the poshest one is a pump-out system that costs between 7 and 15 quids to have your ordure removed from a holding tank. a lot of people, including me, have a ‘porta potti’ which is basically shitting into a bucket with some chemicals in and some blue stuff to make it look a bit nicer. eventually the bottom container fills up and you have to do something about it. it can cost 2 quids to do an elsan dump but it can be free. i like free. my bog has a sort of handle bog opening thing on it so that you can sit down and read exchange and mart or last wednesday’s paper for a bit and then you open the hatch like a hangman and things disappear into the cavernous depths.

now, today i thought i should take the opportunity of a free elsan dump and i thought i should look into the bog to see how full it was. i pulled the handle so that i could look inside…

you know that face that oliver hardy makes when he looks to camera after something unpleasant has happened to him? he looks pained and kind of resigned to his fate. often there will be paint on his face or a last brick lands on his head. remember? that’s the look. and that’s the look that i gave to a non-existent camera when the bog exploded. all i did was pull the handle open but it must have been filled up with some kind of poo-gas (probably caused by trouty) and i wound up with a face spattered with blue coloured shit.

ah well, hope it made you laugh.

i spent most of the day asleep, i have not been at all well of late. i’m going to the doctor on monday evening but in the meanwhile i have been diagnosing myself. it’s bad knowing a little bit about medicine; that way lies madness. i’m now convinced that i have testicular cancer, need both my legs amputated and that peripheral neuropathy and rheumatoid arthritis is what’s wrong with my hands.

when i wasn’t asleep i thought about the true fact that fergie, the duchess of pork, is going to strip off for a calendar for charity kind of thing. apparently it will be done in a ‘tasteful’ way. how rubbish is that?! i would prefer it was done in a DIStasteful way. these so-called celebrities just don’t go the whole way for raising money for charity. i would gladly pay a pound for a calendar featuring twelve close-up shots of celebrity genitalias and if they were ‘open’ shots instead of just ‘kebab’ i might even go up to two quids.

here’s my list for my celebrity fanny close-up calendar:

january:
let’s open the year with a flying start; what could be better then penny smith off the telly?

february:
although it’s not nearly autumn let’s remind ourselves that the year will soon be over. that’s the reason i propose the mature fanny of valerie singleton for this month’s vulval depiction.

march:
sounds a bit like archer, so what about mary archer who’s married to that prick? mmmm, i wouldn’t mind having a good look at that one.

april:
spring is in the air so how about having a look at the queen’s fanny? come on, it’s for charity you stingy old bitch! oi, your maj, show us your vag!

may:
now is the time of year when everything is thrusting into life just like i would be if i had a gynae close-up of that bird who used to be tracy barlow on coronation street. not the new one though, the proper old one who went up to her bedroom to listen to records and didn’t come down again for about seven years.

june:
this is really the month for gardeners and so i would like to see the snatch of charlie dimmock and perhaps alan titchmarsh in the frame sniffing her ginger pubes for added perviness.

july:
now, the hamiltons do anything for money but what about them doing something for other folk for a change? what could make summer better than a snap of mrs in the doggy style position with mr holding the doors open to display that wonderful interior?

august:
ulrika in close up. yes, that’s right, now YOU could be the judge. is it still juicily knobbable or is it all leathery and clapped-out? the decision is yours.

september:
all the birds out of the corrs, not the bloke, although he can join in if he wants to. i’m not a sexist but it would make my celebrity fanny charity calendar look a bit daft if it was full of pictures of knobs!

october:
i picture a fanny poking out of a drift of autumnal leaves? zoe ball’s perhaps?

november:
anne diamond.

december:
i said up there that i’m not a sexist and to prove that i’m not would be the december page. that’s right! my genitalia in gorgeous close up detail! could anything be more christmassy? what a perfect way to end the year!

g’night all.

ENBLOGGIFICATIONAL DIFFICULTUDINOUSNESS

i went into one yesterday. i really did. i ranted and i raved. it was all about a little tiny bit in the times. a little tiny, weeny bit of a thing that made me go stark, staring bonkers. here it is:

“PALESTINIAN CHILDREN KILLED
more than 90 palestinians, including 20 children, died during an israeli incursion into gaza, intended to prevent militants from firing qassam rockets into israel. the country’s security cabinet approved operation ‘days of penitence’ after two israeli chldren were killed by rocket fire.”

go on, read it again.

now read it again. and read it again. a little bit in the times about two square inches at the most. and all that this horror gets is the tiniest of paragraphs. i went mad. poor old trouty has to put up with me when i kick off and it’s not very fair on her but what else can i do except go raving mad?

we live in a country that is a load of old shit and being run by a war criminal. he sucks up to another war criminal, licks his arse crack, and we pay for all this. and all this horror is being done in our name - we are killing children.

so what to do?

there is no point in me sitting on a boat in the middle of nowhere because it’s the only place that’s safe any more. there is no point in me shouting at trouty in the middle of the night because it’s not her fault at all but it all makes me so mad.

what i say is RISE UP AND PASS ME THE AK47. do we all have to dress up like batman and make a fucking nuisance of ourselves? where will it all end? how many thousands of people will ‘we’ have to kill? i love being english and i hate it too.

one day a screaming wind will come and then we shall all be sorry, not for what we have done but because we have been caught out and that will be the true sorrow, the sorrow of realising that what goes around comes around.

ah, forgive me for going on. i just don’t want to be taken for a murderer. i don’t really care how much bliar pays for his fab new house or how fab it is, i’d just rather that he didn’t go round killing children or anyone really and doing it in my name. if only i had the guts to DO something about it. my beautiful son had the nuts to lead an anti-war protest through brighton and good for him. perhaps i should look to him for an example because i really can’t go on like this being all stroppy and going on and on…

england kills people - it just ain’t on.

in the meantime, i love you. i really do.
cheerio.

LIGHT RELIEF

i just got back off the boat and i’m trying to catch up. i’ll try not to upset everyone, i thought, even though there is plenty to go on about. so i will say nothing for once and just present a short story that i wrote a while ago. i hope that you like it…

THE BLACK MUSEUM

Showman or conman?

Bernard looked into his mirrors, left then right, as the hazard lights ticked.

Conman or showman? he pondered, reversing his caravan into the allocated spot. Bit of both, he decided. Bit of both.

Early retirement had been a Godsend for Bernard. Engineering had been an enjoyable career and had paid for his little flat and his Land Rover. Bernard was comfortable. His pensioned time and skill with his hands were now devoted to am-dram, gardening and, above all else, his Black Museum. Not the official one at Scotland Yard. No, Bernard’s Black Museum, the one reversing behind him, was thoroughly home-made.

As the other stallholders organised their pitches and car-boots, Bernard unhitched the caravan. As trestle-tables blossomed in the early morning sun, Bernard, inside his caravan, arranged his bogus bits and bobs. As others laid out their sandwich-toasters, vases and old LPs he unrolled his sign and hung it next to the door.

BLACK MUSEUM - ADMISSION £1

Bernard knew that the most mundane articles acquired dreadful menace when seen in the right light. A gents’ umbrella was an everyday item, but an umbrella with a hole bored in the ferrule and a trigger mechanism with sinister gas canister became an assasin’s deadly brolly! Everyone knew the story, so the details that Bernard typed out on white card using a manual typewriter for Cold War effect left gaps to be filled in by the imaginings of his paying guests.

Bernard invented crimes and criminals, murders and murderers. He displayed a pair of old spectacles next to a photograph of Dr Crippen that he had cut from a library book. The typed card didn’t actually say these were Crippen’s glasses; the punters filled in the blanks for themselves.

He whistled happily as he propped little cards up alongside the knives and razors, the bottles and bludgeons, that ranged along velvet covered shelves in his converted caravan. Bernard was excited, he couldn’t wait to get his latest creation, a death mask, unpacked. So keen was Bernard to have it on display he hadn’t yet typed up any details.

His friend, Ken, had moaned and groaned. He hadn’t wanted to put his face in the box to make the mould, but Bernard had told him that he couldn’t do all this by himself and besides, Ken’s hairline was helpfully receding. Eventually, Ken had lowered his face into seed-tray full of sand; a towrope, wrapped in a soggy wet rag, held just under his jawline. With the damp sand tamped down, Bernard had gently pulled his friend’s face clear before pouring in the plaster. It had taken days to dry in the airing cupboard but now, brushed up and waxed, it looked like marble. Bernard took the mask from its box and placed it gently on the foldaway table. Against the black velvet, under Calor-gaslight in the curtained caravan, it looked fantastic. Bernard could hardly wait to invent a new identity for his new murderer.

Business soon picked up. Two or three stall holders from the Car Boot, whiling away the time before their junk was sold, and then the public turning up in their droves.
Plain clothed PC Mason, ostensibly checking stalls for stolen goods but really killing time before the Police Station canteen opened, asked about the hanged man’s death mask.
‘Lewis Thwaite. the Kentish Town poisoner, hanged in 1933′, improvised Bernard at the time.
‘Load of old bollocks’, said PC Mason to his fried egg ten minutes after.

Midmorning, two old ladies climbed the single step and came in.
‘Eeugh’, they both agreed when they saw a piece of striped curtain material that had been spattered with Cardinal tile-polish and juxtaposed with a photocopied picture of a woman in Victorian dress and labelled ‘Whitechapel - 1888′.

‘Oooh, that still sends shivers down my spine’, said Mavis on seeing a piano-wire garrotte; allegedly the property of a non-existent wife-killer. Nor did she truly remember the wooden-handled screwdriver, with which the fictitious ‘Beast of Barnsley’ hadn’t really dispatched seven children. When not on display, the screwdriver lived in Bernard’s toolbox.
Then the two old ladies saw the death mask.
‘Now he’ said Mavis, ‘looks just like that Barry Prior from the hardware shop’.
‘The death mask…’ intoned the hovering Bernard, ‘…of a murderer. See here, where the hangman’s noose marked his neck’. He was specially proud of this piece of the modelling. Adjusting his half-moon specs, worn for effect, he continued, ‘His name was, erm, Harry Dyer, and he was hanged in 1893 for the Hardware Shop Horror of Kentish Town’.

‘Poison’, said Bernard. ‘And a chisel’, he added, in a hollow, morbid tone. His extemporising had the desired effect.

‘Oh my good God’ said Mavis to Joyce.

Bernard watched the two ladies cross the car park in the direction of the town centre as he took pound coins from a Dad and two sons. Business was now brisk; he would make a packet today even after paying for his sales pitch and diesel. He showed the three new customers around. This time the death mask’s name was Hubert Grove (the name of a street where Bernard had once lived). Hubert Grove had stabbed a man, using an old knife that Bernard had dug up at the allotments. In Bernard’s experience the boys liked to see a murder weapon.

It was unfortunate for Bernard that he had lazily introduced the mask to Mavis as Harry Dyer from the Hardware Shop of Horror. He should have invented somethinig instead of recycling what Mavis had said. As made-up murderers go, there was nothing wrong with Lewis Thwaite, Hubert Grove or, indeed Harry Dyer. What was unfortunate was that Barry Prior, in his hardware shop, sold Mavis a new ironing-board cover when she came in later that day. When Mavis, in breathless tones, told Barry Prior - from the town’s hardware shop of no horror at all - that there was a man in the car park in a Black Magic tent and that he had a statue of Barry Prior from the hardware shop and that the man had said B.P.F.T.H.S. had killed seven children with a chisel F.T.H.S. and he was going to be hanged for it, Barry Prior from the hardware shop became very angry indeed. He had his good name to think of.

Bernard had made quite a bit of money that day. Time to call it a day. As he rolled up the sign, he heard a small cough behind him. Who was this wearing a brown overall ? It looked a bit like Ken, but it wasn’t Ken, it was Barry Prior from the hardware shop.

‘I want a word with you’. said Barry, barging his way in.

‘Admission’s a pound’ said Bernard, holding out his hand, but Barry was already bent over the mask as if seeing his reflection in a pool. He picked it up, staring at the dead face. A red mist of confused rage had descended over Barry’s vision like a spattered veil of Cardinal tile-polish and, before he knew it, he hit Bernard with the mask. The first blow hit Bernard in the mouth and broke two of his teeth. The second time he was hit, Bernard died.

Pieces of mask dropping from his fingers, and with shoulders slumped, Barry Prior breathed heavily. When he’d stopped shuddering he took off his brown overall and folded it inside out. Nobody saw him leave the caravan. When he got home, Barry Prior’s old Mum was concerned about the thick, dark stain on his brown shopcoat.

‘Cardinal tile polish’, said Barry.

A year later, after all the fuss had died down, PC Mason was given the unenviable job of restoring order to the Police Station’s chaotic property cupboard.

Sergeant Harper had been quite clear, ‘I don’t care how - just get rid of it’, he had ordered, eyeing the bags of unclaimed ,unwanted property and sealed evidence bags.

The mask, the murder weapon in the still unsolved case of Bernard’s death, looked simply horrific; bloodstained pieces collected and glued together by a Scenes of Crime Officer. As he handled the dreadful thing, polythene wrapper crackling, a crafty smile crept over PC Mason’s face. Along with all the other junk - only fit for a Car Boot Sale, really - the mask could easily be lost in the internal mail system. He wrapped it in protective cardboard and then addressed the parcel - “New Scotland Yard: Attention of The Black Museum".

copywright j d windsor 2002

hope you liked it; love and luck to you all.
g’night.