When you lie in bed at night watching roaches climb your wall, if you called your dad he could stop it all

I was just walking home from Eccles in the twilight of the setting sun, when it hit me with a sickening impact that by going to Art School, I'd sort of become McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Almost everybody I knew seemed to be like me, similar intelligence, similar inclinations, living in crappy shared flats or at their parents. Then as I got to know them I'd find out "oh, my dad owns one of the biggest haulage companies in Britain", "My family owns Boddington's brewers", "my family are millionaires, we own the biggest canning plant in Hong Kong", "My father is National Head of Security for ...", "We own ... a large Ironware and Fittings company".

They could afford to arse about, and could afford to fail, my friend John and I couldn't.

It was like the moment in "Cuckoo's Nest" when McMurphy realises that the rest of the inmates of the Nuthouse are voluntary in-patients, but he's stuck in there for real, and he isn't getting out.

It's 30 years later but it made me feel sick to my stomach.

Youth Unemployment

I've just been listening on the radio to someone from the Prince's Trust talking about youth unemployment. He was stressing how difficult it is for the unemployed young to get a foot on the job ladder, and how much simply coming from a poor background reduces one's opportunities in the job market - few contacts, no money to spare or borrow, no-one to emulate.

I was thinking that most of my - and J. G.s - problems are in the end down to us both having been from very poor families, and both of us having fallen off the world in 1981 and never really having got back on. Neither of us even had phones until 1985, and we both lived in places with limited opportunities, me in Salford, which was a by-word for poverty and unemployment, J.G. in Glossop, which is pleasant enough but on the edge of nowhere.

Our problems might have come and multiplied simply from those unfortunate starting conditions.

It's no consolation, we've still pretty much missed out on everything life should be, but perhaps it wasn't as much our fault as we usually think.

Viagra #3

Another little blue pill failed to have any significant effect.

The Ouroboros of Hate

Old ground mostly, from an email to a female friend:

Since talking with a neighbour on Thursday night, a pleasant old irish guy who was a professional footballer ruled out of his career by a severe injury , a self-described drunk and stinking of beer, I've been feeling ever more sad, to the point of choking up and crying again. He said of himself and a friend, who had asked him why they had failed to prosper while other friends made millions in the building industry and football "they took their chances, we didn't take ours"

I dreamt about my Mam last night, and had a conversation with her about what went wrong with me - almost the last thing she said to me in life was "you're as good as anyone here [the doctors and the nurses] I don't know what went wrong".

I found myself thinking of JS, and of other people I've known including you, and I remembered Melanie saying around 1991 that back at college she and you and Lorraine (and Lynn?) had discussed my unattractiveness and Melanie had mentioned it to her mum, and her mum had replied "you're wrong, he's the only attractive man amongst your friends, and you're all too immature to see past his baldness".

I thought of JS, how ordinary he was in looks (OK he had nice hair and could look quite sweet and boyish from one particular angle), how needy he often was in personality and yet how oddly confident he was, insofar as he threw himself into situations, and was convinced even at college that he was talented enough to hawk his writing and illustrations round London publishers. He found himself a crowd when he moved to London, he found himself a crowd in Tokyo. He made himself so attractive to women that he had two pretty wives, three children, and a very successful career.

I suspect if anything it's about being at ease with other people and feeling comfortable and unashamed around them, and so enjoying being with them.

There's a line in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (I shouldn't have to explain this to you, you should know it, given your age and art school background, but I suspect I do).

"Don't know what I want but I know how to get it"

I think that sums up most people, they don't know what they want but know how to get it. You've told me you thought you didn't want children, but it turned out that you did. You thought you didn't want to be bourgeois (I don't use that as a term of condemnation) but it turns out you did. You thought you wanted to teach the underclass illiterate (I know you did because it came up too much in your conversation over the last couple of years, even as a possible option for me) but found out you didn't.

I pretty much knew what I wanted but didn't know how to get it, or couldn't, or felt I couldn't, or all three.

JS knew both.

I know a guy, R, who has more or less got himself a PhD, two MScs, and several BScs, a property portfolio, a sometime job as a professional builder, and had long term relationships, largely, he's told me, because he didn't know what to do with his life.

Rh is strange, she claims to regret the only things that clearly make her happy, like her family, and claims to have always wanted and loved the job that plainly made her feel miserable and resentful, as if she doesn't know what she wants or wanted. But anyway, she knew how to get them.

Most people seem to get the things I wanted by accident and lack of thought, like our Jess, unmarried and expecting a baby at 19, when she was such a bright ambitious child, or my neighbour L, five kids with three dads, a gran and not yet 40, and yet not stupid or lazy, or even promiscuous, my cousin J's ex-husband, who falls in to affair after affair, is paying alimony to two ex-wives, and is now two-timing his present partner.

People seem to be unable to avoid getting the things I wasn't able even to get started on but ached for.

I get trapped in this mental loop of hate. I find myself thinking "I'm better than most people, so I should at least have what they have, so there's something wrong with me, I can't get what these people have, even though I long for it, so I'm less than these people, but they're stupid and thoughtless so I'm better than these people, so I should at least have what they, have so there's something wrong with me, so..." ad infinitum. I have these flashes of blazing white anger where I don't know whether to kill myself or gun down everybody on the Precinct.

I knew what I wanted from my early teens. I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to have a wife and be married, I desperately longed for children, and had no idea what to do to get any of them, and got none of them, even the basic things most people, even the thick ugly manage, a partner and children, which I consider the core of a life lived.

I needed to be amongst people like me, to learn from them, to learn social skills, and life skills, and career paths, and options, and apart from those few years at college, which I consider the only even half-happy time of my adult life, I've been on my own since puberty, pretty much at the bottom of the societal pile.

Having worked with doctors and medical students for ten years, I know they're mostly not extraordinarily bright, but are overwhelmingly middle-class.

Is it any wonder I'm unhappy?

This "mental health worker" said the other week "from the thought diaries I asked you to compile, the underlying things that make you depressed come down to the same very few themes".

It occurred to me only the other day that she thinks that I'm vaguely depressed in mood, that this is some kind of passing mood disorder rather than what I believe it is, a reactive depression that has become long-standing because I have a small core of big problems that are long-standing, and some of them are due to that cliché "circumstances beyond my control", such as that very rare thing, being an unrecognised gifted child brought up in real poverty.

And more than anything that I'm probably past getting anything I wanted and valued. I'm old without ever having been truly young.

International Summat

Some Pacifismists - move along, nothing of interest here

I went for my daily long walk this afternoon, doing my bit for my health and for national security. Afterwards I got bus home. There was a contingent of unconvincing middle-aged docker-in-a-frock trannies on the bus, bad orthodox-jewish granny wigs, dull mumsy clothes, brow-ridges like neanderthals, and hands like bunches of flesh-coloured bananas.

God knows where they were all going in the middle of the day.

I must go now as I am knackered from doing my duty going on the look-out for these international terrorismists. The Guvermint has raised the threat level from them to "Severe" and told us to be extra aware. I only wish the Guvermint had told me what they look like, as earlier this afternoon I kicked in two hari krishnas and a nigerian quaker who later managed to persuade me through the bloodied stumps of their teeth that they were international pacifismists, and now I feel bad.


Rab Martellus
Hammer of International Terrorismistism
or summat

They Took Their Chances

Listening to an item on the Radio about the surprise chart success of a collection of Waltz music, I remembered refusing Heather a waltz at the Arts Ball 30 years ago, and I then remembered missed or refused opportunities one after another until I was weeping at how I'd wasted my chances.

I was talking to a self-described drunk last night, an irish man of about 65 who was telling me he played in the same youth team as George Best and was a good professional footballer for a while until he was badly injured and had to give it up.

He said "I've a few friends who've made their millions and others who are like me - one of my mates was saying how come they're millionaires, we come from the same place, and I said to him there's no use worrying now - all it is is they took their chances and we didn't".

I found myself thinking, given the almost overwhelming strength of my sex drive for most of my adult life, and how much I longed for success, given how powerful the drive, how much stronger must my inhibition have been.

Like Father, Like Son

For some unfathomable reason I've just remembered that in my 20s I used to have a persistent feeling that because my father was 32 when he had me, I had until I was 32 to find a woman, career, have children, and such.

In reality, in the months leading up to my 32nd birthday - the months of my gestation - I fell apart and have stayed fallen apart for the following two decades until now.

I wonder if I felt that I had failed to fit what I expected was his pattern of what my life should be and believed that from that time forward I had demonstrably utterly failed at life.