"An only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never"

My neighbour M is moving out today and I've been calculating in my head how long she's been here: her daughter M was in a push-chair when she moved in, so was probably around 2 years old, and M will be 20 on her birthday next Autumn, so M has been here about 18 years, which is to say 1993/1994,

In my subjective memory of my own life 1994 seems just a year or two ago, but my subjective memory of M when she first moved in suggests she arrived far more than 18 years ago, perhaps 40 years ago, but anyway a very long time ago.

Perhaps this is because I have a sense of the markers and developments and growth in her life, the different boyfriends, the various stages of M's childhood and teens, M's marriage, the birth and childhood of her second child J, and so on.

With myself there seems to have been only a long undifferentiated period of depressing unemployment, followed by a long depressing period in a tedious job I didn't like, with the deaths of my parents and the trouble with the scrotes being the only emotionally striking events.

It's as if my life ground to a crawl on leaving college and went into stasis from 1990 to my mother's death, and I've only recently been released from the Stasis Pod and my life has resumed. I think I now have only the everyday psychological problems that everyone has, and the psychological problems I did have were - rather bizarrely - problems that mostly came from my being persuaded to believe untruths about myself by my dad and by some teachers.

I feel despite this that my life has resumed too late, and I'm arriving at the party when I'm worn out and everybody else is going home, the music and dancing has stopped, and there's only a few dreggy near-empty bottles and some dry curled-up sandwiches at the Buffet.

I read a comment article in the Times the other week while waiting for my partner C in a Nero's near Albert Square. It was about the level of poverty and deprivation in Salford, and said that as bad as things here used to be, they are now far worse. The journalist said that the area of Salford I grew up and live in has for many decades consistently had some of the worst levels of poverty and deprivation in Britain and is presently the 3rd worst in the country. It's a sort of bleak consolation that it wasn't all my fault, and that mediocrities from more fortunate backgrounds (this means you Cameron and Clegg) did much better due to the usual and long-standing tendency of the middle and upper classes to hoard resources and opportunity for themselves.

There was a quotation in the article that sums up the problem we faced: "an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never"

That said, I can't say but I contributed to my own undermining and ill health.

I hope my old friend J can either win his former girlfriend back or leave thoughts of her behind and find a nice 35 year old, because I think there's still time and health enough for him to have something of a satisfying life.

Billie

Throwing out old newspapers and magazines this afternoon I found this photo of Billie from 1995. I've found her attractive since - oh - 1989 and never done a thing about it. As usual I believed I had nothing to offer. A nice normal intelligent working class woman, still bump into her most weeks. She's in a relationship of course - isn't every woman worth wanting?

Outgoing, funny, bright, ok face, good figure, really shapely waist, hips, bum, and thighs.

I put it here just to show I don't fancy extraordinary women, I fancy women who would be - would have been - in my league had I not made myself fat and ruined my health.

The Giantess Childbride

I've just been walking around Salford and onto the southern edge of Salford Shopping City (the Precinct, Ian, next to what used to be Woolworths) when I saw a very tall and sturdy young woman walking towards me wearing what I can best describe as a short grey sarong and white cotton blouse, with a huge red poppy in her hair just above her left ear. I think it was this way of dress plus her being quite heavily made up that stopped me from realising until it was too late to acknowledge her, that it was the Giantess Childbride. That and her presence on Salford Precinct of all places. God knows how many times I've talked to her and yet I've never found out her real name.

I turned round and started to catch up with her and then realised I would have to follow her past derelict crofts and empty carparks and streets and would end up looking like a rapist.

I know she used to live on Salford Quays, and she was walking in the right direction to get there, and the Metrolink is down for a month so she might just be walking home from work, wherever that is these days.

I've even had erotic dreams about her, in which she was called Mary-Jane, although being American she's just as likely to be called, oh, Madison, or Courtney, or Krystal, or something else laughable.

Not that it matters really, she was only in her twenties and she's married. At my age all the good ones are long married or in relationships, and all that's left are the female versions of me, the ill-favoured, the fat, the misfits, the hapless, the doomed.

I was about to type "where were all the tall women when I was her age?", and then realised what a dumb question that would be given what I've been writing about here lately.

The funny thing is that H has spoken to her, but won't remember her at all, because it was in a shop where the Giantess Childbride was working at the time.

Dirty Old Town

Salford. A shit hole, dirty like a tramp's unwiped arse.

Wish I hadn't been born here, wish I'd been able to find a way out.

Not a place to live in, a place to leave - so kudos to you, our Ian.

Former main industries - docks and prostitution

Present main industries - dealing, thieving, and signing on.

Function of Public Services - to facilitate jihad and divert resources from the indigenous poor to sleek greedy incomers.

Public Services controlled by: the usual coven of troskiist entryists and Gramscian Whores of the Caliphate.

The only help the Poor ever found was from themselves, and the Socialists destroyed that culture of mutual self-help and self-improvement more thoroughly than the Right ever did. The Right acted from self-interest and was happy to cream talent from the Poor, but bourgeois socialists simply stripped out mutuality, pride in self and culture, and aspiration, and replaced it with self-hate, "relevance", and dependency - dependency on an administration staffed and run by they themselves for their own resentful egomaniacal ends.

Bunch of turds.