Author: Smokehouse

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.

 

Well not much happened on Thursday. I went to work came home ate, fell asleep on the couch, woke up in time to see the cricket and then went to bed. Pretty much the same happened on Friday except I got an email from a guy I met in Greece. My other friend the Traveller and me stayed at his place for a few days when we were there a few years ago. I will call him the Greek although he is English but he has been living In Molai for 40 years. The Greek has been trying to set his own business up for a long time and works incredibly long hours and never misses any opportunity to promote himself and the business. He has never got rich in spite of his efforts and long hours. He has tried to persuade me on many times to become an agent selling water filters one year to biological waste disposal units the next. Well I got this email asking about vibrators and did I have any information on them? I gladly sent off as many URL’s as I could shaking my head and shuddering at what venture he had come up with this time but wishing him the best of luck with it.

I wish I could say that hard work and long hours pay off but it doesn’t in the vast majority of cases, Sadly, it’s down to luck. Just ask any miner who had to work 12 and 16 hour shifts when there were still coalmines in the UK. Its not about how hard or how long you work. If this were true then any one who worked over 12 hours a day for a sustained period of time would be rich. People who say you make your own luck have got it wrong. If this was true we could all envisage the winning numbers on the next lottery or the finishing horse in the next big race. This actually got me thinking about the unfairness of life.

My mate the tiler used to breed budgies and two of his best budgies were a Mr Grey and Mr Purple. Mr Grey was a real character and after being chosen to breed with a hen he would do his courtship dance, get down to the bristles, shoot his load and be banging his beak on the breeding cage to get out and onto the next one. He really was one of the boys, get the job done and then out with the lads. Thinks of James Dean or Marlon Brando in the wild one and you get the picture. A real tearaway and the sort that made hens go weak at the knees.

Mr Purple was also a great breeder but totally different. He would woo his hens and stay with them after the eggs had hatched and help the hen to feed the chicks. You could almost imagine him planning what school they would go to when they had feathers and what occupation they would have and be discussing pension plans for them with the hen. Mr Purple would breed with any hen he was put in with and some were downright ugly, even MR grey would take one look and turn his beak up at these, but Mr Purple woo’d them into submission, got on with the job and stayed with them to the end. In short he was the kind of budgie most hens would be proud to take home to mum and dad, unlike Mr Grey. Think of David Niven or Carey Grant and you get the picture.

Unfortunately it was later discovered that Mr Purple had a genetic defect. He had French moult and this made all the feather of the chicks he had sired fall out and they could not fly. He was ok and did not suffer but it meant he could never be used as breeding bird again. To avoid infection of the rest of the flock he was sold, probably to some little grey haired old lady who would keep him in a small cage and call him Joey. Sadly it was a really undignified end for such Herculean efforts.

Whatever the Greek is up to now I wish him the best but cant help feeling that he will end up like Mr Purple and maybe even myself scratching around and wondering why we never got the breaks and only bad luck in spite of our best endeavours

 

Yesterday was quite a good day, I got up early with no hangover and the sun was shining. After breakfast I said good bye to my friend the traveller with a view to hooking up with him in a few weeks. I managed to get to the shops, put a few wash loads on and for the first time this year I got the lawnmower out and cut the lawns back and front. I also made several trips to the tip. The tip has changed quite a lot over the last few years. You now have to sort your rubbish out by commodity before you can leave it there. This always makes me feel like an Eco Warrior doing my bit for global warming and helping the community. In fact the council have kindly given us two bins with a third on its way shortly for us to sort our household waste into. You place glass, tins, plastic and paper in one bin, garden waste in another and everything else in the third. This sounds great and to not do this would be nothing short of Eco Terrorism. Now I don’t mind doing this but some council’s are going to fine people and give them a criminal record if they don’t. That’s great for able bodied people and those with full sight, but what if you can’t see and put the wrong stuff in the wrong bin by accident? Another thing is they are not reducing the rates for us doing their job. In fact they are putting them up and reducing services!

Anyway a local councillor came to see me today to ask if I was going to vote in the local elections so I mentioned this to him and he said he would give it some thought. Then he asked if I was going to vote for him and I said “no”. He asked why not and I proceeded with a verbal tirade about everything from the loss of our industries and our border controls to the fact Ted Heath should have been hung as a traitor for signing us into the EU without telling us our fishing rights were being signed away. Not happy with this and feeling in my stride that this little prick wanted my vote I then proceeded to tell him that Margaret Thatcher had ruined the country and that even worse Tony Blair has just had ten years to put everything right and he has sat on his arse and dragged us into a war. I mentioned the fact that the British navy had commissioned two new aircraft carriers and they would be built by Thales in France because Margaret Thatcher had closed all the shipping yards and we had no one to make ships for us anymore. Just to finish him off and apply the coup de grace I told him all politicians were lying scheming little bastards who were only just behind estate agents and solicitors in the trustworthy stakes. This sent him off with a flea in his ear.

For what it’s worth, I think we should all vote because millions of people died for the right to have that vote and to not use it is nothing short of criminal. What saddens me is that I can’t see any one worth voting for.

I have been looking for another place to live as in another country for some time. For the last 14 years in fact and have travelled as much as I am able and have come up with a myriad of ideas. One such plan was to be a joint venture with one of my mates who is a fitness instructor. We were going to buy a boat and sail around the world. Whilst we had good intentions we had greatly different ideas for how we should go about this. For instance would we want a motor yacht a sail boat or something else? How would we afford it and how would we live once we had set sail on the briny, what we would do for money?  The instructor wanted a motor boat so we would not have to struggle with sails while I wanted something that would not stand still on a calm day. I managed to find what I believed to be the ideal vessel in a deep sea trawler and the instructor said “how many birds are we going to pull in that”? I knew then it would never happen, he wanted the blue serge blazer the white linen trousers, the white plimsolls and a captain’s hat with scrambled egg around the peak. I wanted a sack full of beer over the side keeping cool, a pair of shorts, bare feet and just the sun on my back.

Alas due to family commitments I can no longer travel due to the constant care my mother needs. So another friend of mine whom I went to Greece with a few years back to look for property there announced he was going to Croatia. I looked at a few properties on the internet and asked him to scope out the laws, taxes, crime rates and living costs for me while he was there. He was also going to look at a pig farm for me that had a large plot of land a few pigs and a huge industrial barbecue. A couple of nights before he left we finished off a bottle of Absinthe, said our farewells and looked forward to our future prosperity raising pigs and running a barbecue type smokehouse. You just don’t get that sort of thing in the UK. If you go to Austin in Texas and stop by a venue called Stubbs, you will see the sort of place I mean. It’s a smokehouse that serves cold beers and has live music on most nights of the week and Gospel on a Sunday to cater for the church going crowd. There are a couple of places like that in Memphis and New Orleans. Apart from the weather, we just don’t have that type of mentality in the UK.

Well last night the traveller arrived back at my front door with all the news and none of it good. The pig farm had been sold the day he got there, most of the other places he went to see were either falling down or so remote you would not be able to get medical help if it was required. I suppose many of us think of a tropical island with no worries as Paradise. However what do you do for food, power, medical supplies and doctors and communication? Sadly Croatia is for the time being out of contention, however my travelling friend is off to China in the middle of May. I await a full report and who knows, one day it maybe a Texan style restaurant in China it would make a difference from a chinese restaurant in the UK?

Isn’t it amazing how the threat of legal action can stir up even the most slothful souls? After ringing my ISP up for the umpteenth time and telling them there is absolutely nothing wrong with my equipment, modems, routers and computers, they have managed to find a fault at their end and lo and behold my line was back up whilst I was talking to one of their friendly technicians.

At long last………..