My Shit Life So Far (10 page)

For all I hated Thatcher, Labour has been much, much worse. Perhaps a side effect of coming into political power is to develop a hatred of ordinary people. Nobody has ever really explained the urge to impose pointless, unworkable policies that dehumanise folk. Take ID cards, for example. There are a lot of practicalities about the ID-card scheme that the government doesn’t seem to have taken onboard. Like how are they going to get fingerprints off people from Irvine? It’s going to take at least a couple of hundred thousand years for their hoofs to evolve that far. And how do you actually prove who you are when you sign up for an ID card? Show them your passport? Well if that’s proofs of identity, how about we use that instead of a fucking identity card?

Our political culture is now so debased that we regularly hear ‘do gooders’ getting the blame for things. Enviromentalists trying to stop a coal-burning power plant or a new runway that will (let’s just remember) DESTROY THE EARTH are branded as our
enemies, these ‘do gooders’. Like doing good is a bad thing. You read all the time in the press that ‘do gooders’ are to blame—a sweepingly derogatory term. Or even worse, the ‘so-called do gooders’. I’ve never once read that the blame was being put fairly and squarely on ‘cunts’, and let’s face it ‘cunts’ must be behind fucking things up far more things than ‘do gooders’. If it’s not ‘cunts’ then I blame those ‘so-called cunts’.

There’s a lot of scapegoating around environmental issues. People criticise Ryanair and other low-budget airlines for encouraging people to fly. Come on, we all know that anyone flying by Ryanair will be doing at least half the journey by shuttle bus. But it’s the animals I feel sorry for. In the animal versus human wars we’ve pretty much won about as complete a victory as it’s possible to win. I mean, we still need to keep a close eye on the ants rising up, but as far as everything else goes we’ve pretty much stamped our dominance on their hairy faces, repeatedly—the ones we haven’t wiped out completely probably long for extinction as a release from us eating them and parading around in front of them wearing the skins of their relatives.

Once, my friend Scott and I took his kids to a safari park. A brutal experience where both man and beast are equally demeaned. It started off—as all safari parks do—with a ride through the monkey enclosure. There were no monkeys. The rumour was that they had proved themselves too mischievous with the cars. They’d overstepped the line between cute-pulling-at-the-windscreen-wipers mischievous and the-safari-park-management-are-having-us-all-killed mischievous. So you spent
the first ten minutes driving through an empty piece of scrubland where some monkeys used to live.

There’s a thing called Chimp Island there. What would you put on Chimp Island? I’m sure that if you and I each sat down to design ourselves a Chimp Island, they’d both end up being very different. On the other hand, I think we’d both plant some fucking trees. The chimps just sat there on this little island with that grim look you see on the faces of lifers in prison documentaries. Their faces said, ‘One day the wind will blow that boat over here and there will be a Great Reckoning.’

There were attractions where you could get much closer to the animals. There was a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Somebody had taken advantage of his friendliness to ram a HB pencil deep into his back. It had never been removed and some skin had grown around it. There was a cute little otter cheeping away in his enclosure. ‘Look,’ I offered to the kids, quite relieved at seeing something that didn’t immediately fill me with horror, ‘the little chap is saying “Hello!”’

One of the keepers sidled up to us. ‘Naw, he’s not saying “Hello!” His mate died last week…that’s him crying.’

Scotland is always releasing stuff back into the wild, seriously overestimating itself as a place that an animal would choose to live. The zoos are just as bad. Why do they think that pandas are going to have any more success breeding at Edinburgh Zoo? Not even people like having sex out of doors in Scotland. I can’t see the point, unless they’re planning on taking the pandas to T in the Park. The pandas had to go to Edinburgh and not
Glasgow. A female with two black eyes in Glasgow? You’d have had local guys breaking into the compound and declaring their love. More and more people are going to zoos in this country, not because they’re interested in the animals but because they want to see what life could be like with three guaranteed meals a day and a roof over your head. It’s notoriously difficult to get pandas to mate, and some zoos even resort to showing them videos of ‘panda porn’. Well, that’s not going to help conception, that’s just going to increase his late-night trips to get ‘more bamboo’ while he sneaks into the warden’s office to rifle through DVDs of David Attenborough.

They’re doing all sorts of weird stuff with genetics these days. They’re unravelling the DNA code, cutting it up and splicing it together, implanting it and interbreeding species. They’re putting pigs’ hearts into humans instead of meat pies. They’re putting DNA from beavers into elephants and now huge rogue beavers are going on the rampage and elephants are building dams before they go off to find the beavers’ graveyard.

Researchers have also developed a genetically modified monkey. The monkeys were injected with a gene from a jellyfish that makes them glow in the dark and will one day help those that are seriously ill. What do they mean ‘one day’? They could help now. If I was seriously ill and I was given a glow-in-the-dark monkey, I’d start feeling better pretty much instantly. If they could invent a kitten that shits candy floss that would cheer me up even more.

Shortly after being sacked from the civil service, I found out that the university place I had doing American Literature fell through because the course got axed. I managed to get on a similar course at Sussex University but I had to wait a year to start. I desperately wanted to get away from home so I took a place on clearing at Aston University, just so that for that year I could have a grant and get out of the house.

The course I went on was inexplicably terrible. ‘Urban Planning and Policy’ or something like that. I just did absolutely nothing. I know people say they did nothing on a course and really they mean they didn’t work hard enough to do themselves justice. I literally did nothing. It was such a grisly subject, filled with people who’d got it as a booby prize in clearing, but they never threw you out. The dissertation at the end of one term was on the subject ‘Shopping Trends In Birmingham 1974’. My dissertation was handwritten, two pages long and entitled ‘Shopping Trends in Birmingham 1974: Who Honestly Cares?’

Aston University was, and I’ll wager still is, full of cunts. Most of the courses were engineering and technical stuff, and the largest society on campus was the Conservative Club. I lived in halls in Handsworth. It was like a practical joke—dropping a
whole bunch of horrible Tory fuckers into the scene of a recent race riot. The result was that everybody holed up in halls, ate all their meals there and drank at the union bar. It was like a colonial hotel in a Graham Greene novel.

I had to share a room with a bloke called Andy, an engineer, keen hockey player and a worthless human being. Andy was a dull, sporty nonentity who never really penetrated anybody’s consciousness; people who had met him several times had no idea who he was. It was like living with a ghost. He hated sharing a room and was always tense and grumpy. He had some posh sporty mates and they were always playing boorish pranks on people. One night when I was coming home pissed, Andy and his mates threw me into a bath of cold water. It was the sort of thing you were supposed to give and take there. I hated him for it in the deep, vengeful way a hero hates in a Spaghetti Western.

Luckily his engineering course seemed to involve a full day of lectures, while I had barely any and often just didn’t go. His chief evening activity was to write long, tortuous letters to his girlfriend at home asking why she wouldn’t have sex with him. I would read these when he was out, marvelling at the incredible weirdness of this seemingly ordinary man. One letter contained the amazing sentence, ‘Maybe love is just a stronger kind of like, i.e. Love = Like + 2.’ I didn’t really smoke but when I learned of Andy’s dislike of smoking and intense paranoia about cancer I always made sure to have a few ciggies in there every day. He spent the whole first term brewing barrels of homebrew wine
beside his bed and when he was away at the weekends I would piss in them.

I lived quite a drunken, dissolute life there for a bit. One Sunday I was going out to get a newspaper with a crippling hangover when a minibus pulled up. It was this guy from my course called Paul and the entire Irish Society Gaelic football team. They had a game but were a man short so I was dragged into the back of this van and awarded the position of goalie. I couldn’t wear my specs so I just stood there in my Hush Puppies and some borrowed shorts, dreading the first attack. I caught the ball cleanly and stood there feeling quite chuffed. In Gaelic football the strikers are allowed to charge the keeper into the net, and they did. We took a horrendous beating, then drank for two days.

It actually took me quite a while to get used to the range of English accents. I know everybody slags off Dick Van Dyke for his terrible Cockney accent in
Mary Poppins
. Nobody mentions the fact that if he’d got the Cockney accent spot on he’d have sounded like an even bigger cunt. England has, of course, done a lot of terrible stuff in its history. Scotland didn’t do any of that. We just helped them. If the story of the world were a movie, Scotland would be an evil henchman.

I was still very much interested in comics, and my mates and I did a little comic strip for the student newspaper called ‘Mute Dad’. It featured a dad who would just hit his son with all the standard parental clichÉs, but had to mime them because he was a mute. Nobody who read it had a fucking clue what it was about.

I had to pass an interview at Sussex to be sure of my place. I went down there on the National Express coach, a manned Portaloo of unbelievable depravity that I’d have to get used to over the next few years. As we pulled into Brighton I saw a beautiful girl sitting at the side of the road wearing a cardboard sign saying, ‘I may be Janet Ellis’, and thought the town would probably be good for a bit of a laugh. Instead of what I’d think nowadays, ‘You pointless student bastard.’ I missed my coach home and hung about on the pier till it closed, then slept in the entrance alcove at the side of the cathedral. Once I heard I’d got my place at Sussex I bailed from Aston, feeling that I had wrung what mirth I could out of it.

It was hard going back home, even for the six months before my course began, because without a grant I had no money and just fuck all to do. I knew that I was completely unable to hold down any kind of job, and Pollokshaws was like a tribute to boredom. If I were a budgie I’d have started pecking my own feathers out. I think boredom is a much-ignored factor in mental problems. In
Groundhog Day
, Bill Murray would probably have raped and killed Andie MacDowell quite a few times, really gone to town. I can see why they left that bit out of the movie. Bill Murray character’s real triumph is that he can still eventually fall in love with someone after he has spunked on her disembodied colon.

I had a friend nearby from primary school. He was called Charlie Baker (the guy from the school drawing competition, remember him?) and over the years he had blossomed into a fully
fledged eccentric. He wore three-piece tweed suits, or sometimes tight shorts and a straw boater. We’d go and get drunk together and talk pretentious shit. He was a good human being and it was inspiring to know somebody round there who was further off the map than me.

Charlie wrote short stories and little plays of a gruesome, violent and deliberately alienating nature. He would then submit these to various dull writing competitions, just to appal everybody. He was obsessed with certain things and they’d often turn up in the stories. He was obsessed with Robert Nairac, the SAS spy murdered by the IRA in the 1970s, the actress Greta Scacchi and James Bond. Versions of these, and often all three, would turn up in the violent, sexualised submissions he’d make to things like Strathclyde Library’s ‘Stories of Scotland’ competition. They’d be expecting reminiscences of wartime Glasgow, not a sexually deviant spy abducting a major actress at gunpoint.

There was an air of Joe Orton about his dedication to horrifying nobody in particular. He wrote a brilliant story for a competition to celebrate England hosting the European Football Championship. It was called ‘Playing for England’ and involved a description of two England players putting in a series of horrendous challenges during a match. They both get sent off, but it all turns out to be a ploy they’ve concocted so they can fuck each other in the dressing room.

I started to think of myself as depressed, partly because I thought it would be quite cool to be depressed. I think really I was just a bit bored and disgusted with my surroundings. My
GP referred me to a weekly group-therapy session, I think to give me a taste of what genuinely depressed people looked like. It was actually sort of hilarious. The first session involved us all sharing our likes and dislikes. A wee guy who’d been completely silent piped up with a comprehensive list of his personal hatreds, reeling off the names of several professions, character types and family members. It was the most fluent display of casual disgust that I have ever heard. A couple of people in the room got namechecked and there was a long pause before he finished by spitting out with inexplicable venom, ‘…and fucking postmen!’

Genuinely depressed people seemed a lot more troubled than me; it really gave me some perspective on what I was. An angsty, adolescent dick. Some of the people there were really very amusing in a cynical, downbeat way. One guy was a cartoonist and showed me a comic strip he’d done about panic attacks. It was really good, autobiographical and done in the style of a sort of modern-day ‘Oor Wullie’. There was a terrific bit in it of him having a panic attack trying to get off a train. There was something really funny and horrifying about seeing this wee Oor Wullie type clutching at his chest and thinking he was having a heart attack.

I had to do a speech about something one week. I worked hard on it and tried to make it really funny. Tough crowd, the depressed. Not a titter. As I walked back to my seat, the wee guy who had given the speech about likes and dislikes looked at me and said in an unbelievably mournful voice, ‘That was funny.’ He
spoke in that voice constantly, so I’ll never know if he was being sarcastic. I eventually left after about a month when it was announced that we had to go on a fieldtrip to see Scottish rockers Runrig. I’d decided that I wasn’t actually depressed but Runrig might well tip me over the edge.

It was round about this time that I really got to know Paul Marsh, with whom I’d been on the debating society at school. I remembered writing a piece for one of his speeches and being absolutely amazed that he did it. It was all about how perhaps our reality is simply a zoo for aliens and they each have one of us that they watch as a pet. While some aliens will have Harrison Ford and find it delightfully entertaining, others will have to observe some junkie sleeping all day and occasionally retching into a stolen handbag. In the context of a second-year debate it might as well have been a high-pitched Russian naval ballad with maths for lyrics.

That’s Paul—he’s inexplicable. If I had to honestly try, I’d say he’s like a flavour you’ve been hypnotised to forget or a long-lost Scottish Christmas movie from the 1970s that contained blasphemous scenes nobody remembered shooting after being filmed on a site of occult significance.

Now a more skilful writer would build a character up gradually; perhaps some anecdotes about their early life would give the reader an insight into the man they become. I’m just going to hit you with it. Give you an example and see if you can grasp Paul Marsh. OK. One time, Paul had to charge a magical sigil he’d made to create world peace. To do this he
recorded a tropical calypso single that he released on the internet called ‘Peace Mango’. Bam. Paul Marsh.

He wasn’t always quite the way he is now, but the seeds were there. He was a bit of a reactionary when I first knew him, pretty much a Tory. I remember giving him the first
Invisibles
comic. If you’ve not read it, you definitely should. It’s a crazy countercultural primer by Grant Morrison that we were into for years. I can still see that first issue flying across his bedroom as I threw it to him. He got into a lot of esoteric stuff off the back of that and the world lost an electronics journalist and gained a psychonaut.

Actually, while we’re on the subject of things you should read, get all of Grant Morrison’s comics—just go on Amazon or whatever and do it now. Mark Millar and Alan Moore are things you should get into too; there’s a density and care in their comics that I’ve struggled to find in modern fiction. My favourite fiction writers are James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Gene Wolfe. I never meet anybody who reads Gene Wolfe, and it’s sad. He’s often labelled as sci-fi or fantasy, but really ‘genre fiction’ is just a construct to stop people from finding interesting things to read. There are vested interests who’d rather that you were reading about some prick’s midlife crisis in Hampstead instead of something that might change your life, like
The Invisibles
changed Paul’s.

Paul and I did quite a lot of drinking before I had to go off to Sussex. Paul’s mum used to get him a big slab of beer every week. We’d go out clubbing and then head back to his and drink
until we passed out, playing a fighting game he had for the Atari that was less than worthless.

For some reason, we fell in with a group of gays and would go to gay clubs quite a bit. We were nineteen and had the idea that gay clubs would be full of straight, fag-haggy women who would assume we were gay, giving us the element of surprise. The gay clubs, it turned out, were full of poofs.

There was a straight girl called Babs in our group who developed a stalkerish love for Paul. She was a pretty full-on Catholic and was always bringing him gifts and tokens of her affection. I remember sitting with him at the end of some party she’d shown up to. For some reason Babs had bought him a cappuccino maker and he was using the cup it came with as a makeshift ashtray. One time we all went to a club and Paul started getting off with a random woman who was clearly wasted. She passed out and Babs came out of the toilets to see Paul attempting to shake her back to consciousness. The last we heard she had gone to Lourdes and perhaps became some kind of nun.

One of Paul’s key traits is the delivery of bizarre, esoteric, absurd or terrifying information as if it were a commonplace truism. I once met him off a plane for a week’s holiday in Barcelona. Eschewing the usual pleasantries, his posited the theory that the sun may have a consciousness. He’d been terrified on the plane because he’d been given a pen that is supposedly used by astronauts and was worried it might explode at altitude. Even though it’s designed to go into fucking space.

We took acid together one time and I tried to raise the psychic shields necessary for that drug. Acid is sort of like having your psyche shaken about in the mouth of a huge beast. The inventor of LSD died aged 102 this year. At least he died the way he wanted…riding a winged centaur into the belly of a giant worm. Just as we started to trip Paul told me of his recent readings that proved that the earth was about to be hit by an asteroid. That weighed on my mind slightly to be honest.

Paul has turned me onto a lot of great stuff. The best one is something he told me about at a Hogmanay party we were at in the nineties.