Friday came and went and nothing of any note happened, I went to bed early. Pretty much the same happened on Saturday even though it was St Patricks day. Thats her in the photo. As it was Mothering Sunday the following day I was going to take mum out but the place she wanted to go to was on a road that was closed due to the high winds and an unusually high incoming tide. The BBC had forecast snow so I battened down the hatches turned the heating up and prepared to stay in. My mate "The Beast" turned up at about 7-30 with the intention of staying for an hour or so. I have known the Beast since 1994 and we got together through our mutual interest in the live music scene.
During an evening of talking bollox and drinking, we discussed the education system, apprenticeships and carreers officers. There are many things schools dont inform you of when your about to leave. Many of them are the type of job you wont be able to get until your too old and you discover them by accident. For example no school carreers officer ever told me that it was possible to make money from taking photographs of naked or semi naked women and yet all the red mast newspapers in the UK have a scantily clad model on page three. Some one makes a living from taking those photos, why didnt they tell us that at school? No one told us about porn films either. The list goes on and I realised what Pink Floyds another brick in the wall was all about. School wanted to churn out bricklayers tradesmen, people to work in factories and shipyards. Put babies in at one end and churn out automatons at the other. God forbid that they should ever guide some one into a job they might like. It was almost Aldous Huxley and Brave New World.
So the Beast and myself sat down and thought about all the ways we could make some money. Ambergris if you didnt know is whale vomit and worth a fortune to perfume makers. So all we needed was a preganant whale with swollen fins and morning sickness and Bobs your uncle. There are a couple of drawbacks to this plan and the first is getting hold of a pregnant whale and a fishbowl big enough to keep it in. You cant actually buy either at the local pet shop so that idea was scrubbed and we had another beer. Being in a band and managing one was something we had already tried and we knew that didnt work either. Running a bar was also out of the question, we would both be dead of cirrhosis within a year or two. So we had another beer…………
It was going quite well and we had come up with some novel ways to make money only to discard them when we had given it some thought. Then disaster struck and the beer ran out. The hour had turned into five. Where had the time gone? I rang him a taxi at around 1am. I guess his wife wont be speaking to me for a few months. I had had a great night and, as we discovered, the difference between madness and genuis is only borderline.