A world far away

It's Saturday morning and I have slept way longer than I usually do. I feel kind of disorientated. They say as you get older you sleep less. Certainly seems that way with me. Waking up weekend late and getting the day going slowly with coffee, nicotine and the paper is a memory of life twenty years ago. Except instead of a paper made from woodpulp the Guardian is now guardian.co.uk on my laptop. And Embassy Filter have been succeeded by Camel. It's coloudy out and the world is quiet. Sixty million Brits are reading about 600 Brits fiddling expenses and we are all pissed off because we are losing our jobs and our houses are longer viaable cash machines that can deliver new conservatories and cars with onboard computers and windscreen wipers that know it's about to rain.

In the e paper there was a video from a tearful poet in Tehran dreading what the new day is about to bring now that the scary eyed bloke with the turban and the long white beard has promised to start shooting people should they dare to have a public moan. In the background is Tehran at night. Not clear and big mooned like the picture I have chosen. Just black with splatters of white and orange light in half formed tower blocks. The Iranian night is full of sound as thousands upon thousands of people stand at their open windows and howl out their rage. Most call to God. Allah akbar! Allah akbar! It seems so like footage we sometimes see from night-time prisons when the cons shout at each other from behind locked cells. Should only one howl at the night, then the warders would open up his cell and sort him out. But when all of them shout there is nothing anyone can do. Which of course makes it so crystal clear that Tehran is merely a giant prison. I don't suppose they would mind all that much if their leaders dipped the public purse for some new curtains or boxes of Cornflakes for breakfast. They are rather more concerned that their leaders are about to cut them in half with bursts of machine gun fire.

Which of course is why they shout at the night. Shouting in the light might be about to become a whole new ball game. And all of a sudden my quiet Saturday morning seems something to be treasured. And you know what? If our leaders want some nice new furniture covers from Laura Ashley then that's fine by me so long as they leave the army in the barracks.

Nothing like bit of positive feedback!

It has to be said that my blog has hardly set the world on fire to date. Not the biggest of surprises I guess. The epicentre of the blogaspere would appear to be Tehran as I write and there certainly ain't no million strong gangs of pissed off citizens marching the streets of Dumfries right now. However, today was something of a red letter day for this aspiring blogger. I opened the front door of the office to find a letter waiting on the mat. Hand written to First Base, not me. Inside was a carefully folded piece of A3 on which the text of my blog 'The Kids of Jadeland' was printed. A couple of typos were marked and a line of highly constructive criticism had been added at the foot of the page. 'What an arsehole you are!' Other than that, there was no indication of which part of the blog had caused such offense. Never mind that. No way was this reader about to use the feedback section provided by Blogspot.com. No way. He/she printed it out on what must have been a very impressive printer to be able to handle A3. Then it was envelope, stamp and a trip to the postbox. Now there's real committment for you. And all for the sheer pleasure of telling me what a complete and utter arsehole I am. In writing! I guess I best respond to my anonymous correspondent. Since the postmark was Carlisle, it would appear you must be local. So why not push the boat out next time and come in for a brew and you can tell me what an arsehole I am to my face. Surely that would be loads more fun. No need for any high tech either. You just open your mouth and form the works. 'What .... an ... arsehole... you are!' There you go. Not that hard. I look forward to it. We're open from 12 to 4, Monday to Thursday and the kettle is on already. No need to be coy. After all, Dumfries might not have a million raging demonstrators on the streets, but we do have the luxury of free speech. See you soon, though I won't hold my breath.

Bloody phone in shows

I wrote this ages ago and never got around to posting it. having re-read it I am perfectly happy to stand four square behind all sentiments expressed herein! The image by the way is one of Bromsgrove from whence call in show bastards with names like Kaz seem to all come from. It will all come clear as you read on. Or not.

I mean, why do we bother?

At about five past six on Sunday I climbed into the car after Liverpool 1- Everton 1 and switched on the radio. Why? Am I in the habit of boiling the kettle and pouring over my head? No. Do I tape United winning 4 -0 with Ronaldo getting three and then watch it 32 times with popcorn? No. So I'm not completely daft. And yet I am still mug enough to tune into 606 to be subjected to call after call of absolute and abject shite from so called Reds, most of who seem to be called names like Kaz and live in places like Bromsgrove or Bournmouth. Their moaning message is always crystal clear. Liverpool are in complete and utter crisis and doomed, doomed, doomed. They bleat on about how Rafa should be fired within the hour and nine hundred zillion quid be made available asap to save us. They are all convinced that Man City will overtake us in the next five minutes. And through it all, I get the sense of thousands and thousands of fellow Reds getting wound up like clocks rigged with Semtex and yelling at the radio 'CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS YOU STUPID BROMSGROVE WANKER! YEAH, YEAH. MASSIVE CRISIS. AS IN JOINT TOP OF THE LEAGUE, LAST 16 OF THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND FIFTH ROUND OF THE CUP. OH AND BY THE WAY WE'RE ALMOST AT THE END OF JANUARY AND WE'VE ONLY GOT BEAT TWICE IN ALL COMPETITIONS SO WHY DON'T YOU JUST PUT THE PHONE DOWN AND PISS OFF AND BE A MANC!" So you get the picture. Basically it is a case of bastards, bastards, bastards. So do I switch off and bang in a CD? Do I hell. I suffer the bastards from Bromsgrove and Bournmouth all the way out of town and onto the M58 and beyond and harbour dreams of tapping into some hyper CIA technology that could locate the exact position of Kaz in Bromsgrove and then do a Gaza on his house with a Hellfire missile or something. But switch off? No I don't switch off. Which I figure has to go down as self harm

twenty years and a few days

At six minutes past three on April 15 I guess had the same thoughts in my head as about 10,000 others must have had. Twenty years that might never have happened. All the stuff that has made up my life over those two decades would have been rendered null and void. But for a few feet and a whole tonne of luck, I might well have made the 96 dead at Hillsborough into 97. It is one of those grey goose walking over the grave thoughts. I mentioned to my youngest son Courtney that but for those few feet he would never have happened. I don't think he could really get his head around that. Probably best that he didn't. To be honest, I have never been much of a Memorial type of person but for some reason for a few months in the run up to the twentieth anniversay of Hillsborough I had a small nagging voice in my head telling me that I should go to Anfield for the day. Why? I haven't got a clue. No explanation whatsoever. It just felt right somehow. So I went along with my dad whose memories of the day are a little different to mine. He sat and watched the whole thing unravel from the stands, all the time wondering if he still had a son. No way to spend a sunny afternoon in April.

The coverage has of course been huge this year, right down to the Anfield event being screened live on the tele. Some of it has given me a slight insight into how flashbacks work for the soldiers we see at First Base with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I heard one lad on the radio remembering how he and others had managed to roll a guy who had passed out over the fence. And how he fell from the top of the fence and hit the floor like a side of meat. And then never moved ever again. And eventually someone threw a jacket over his head. This brought everything back to me as I had watched the thing happen from where I was standing a few feet away in the adjoining pen. The difference was that my pen was as sparsely populated as a terrace at an end of season game at a non league stadium. A few feet away the bodies were packed tight enough to kill. If I ever see anyone lying on the floor with their shirt hitched up around their waist, I am imediately taken back to those desperate moments.

At long last it seems like the politicians will finally be forced to release all the information about what happened. Twenty bloody years! maybe we should feel honoured. It took the bastards nearly thirty years to make a show of trying to get to the bottom of Bloody Sunday. It really hit me at Anfield the other day that they picked the wrong bunch of people to try and shut up. It would take a lot to shut up the city of Liverpool. I suppose that was what ultimately made me want to be there. Supporting Liverpool has been a big thing in my life for as far back as I can remember. But before Hillsborough it was more or less about supporting a bloody successful football team. After Hillsborough everything changed. Being there, surviving it, watching it sort of moved everything onto a completely different plane. Without Hillsborough, Istanbul would only have been half the event that it was. Hillsborough was the ultimate act of London giving the north a kicking. Why were the police such complete and utter bastards that day? Maybe because they had been given licence by the government to do absolutely what they pleased during the Miner's Strike. They had been allowed to kick the shit out of anyone in a pair of jeans and a Tee Shirt and nobody said a thing about it. In fact half the country cheered. After all, they were only northern miners. Served the bastards right. 96 Scousers crushed to death in pens? Served the bastards right. Just imagine the fuss there would have been if 96 stray dogs had been packed into a tiny cage and suffocated. My oh my wouldn't there have been wailing and gnashing of teeth from Hampstead and Welling Garden City. 96 Scouse Football fans? Sod 'em. Surely it had to be their own fault. It was the greatest crime aqgainst the North since Peterloo. And they expect us to let bygones be bygones and buy the bloody Sun.

They can all rot in hell first.

Thoughts of Martin through a sleepless night

You know how it is when you are dead, dead tired. All day you think about what an absolute load of sleep you're going to get only to find that when the time comes you find yourself wide awake? Well, maybe not. In which case count yourself lucky. That was me last night.

This blog is obviously having a bad effect. As the insomnia kicked in, I got to thinking about different stuff to hunt out on Youtube to stick on a playlist. I'm 48 for Christ's sake! But maybe there are insomniac 48 year olds the world over who lie awake through the wee small hours thinking about stuff to stick on their playlists. Who the hell knows. Well, I started running lists of iconic, life changing stuff and it didn't take all that very long to get to Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream'. I guess this was the very first time in my life that somebody's words really rattled into my head. How old would I have been? Ten or eleven I guess. And all of a sudden there must have been this guy on our old rented black and white TV. Remember those days. 'Great service you get renting your colour set from Granada...' And I went from paying no attention whatsoever to being hooked like a snared trout. How many has that happened to? You can count that one by the billion.

Of course it has been a great year for mixed race couples like myself and Carol the world over. Martin started a ball rolling by daring to suggest that black kids and white kids might just hold hands one day and play together. Well some black kids and white kids grew up and got married and wound up having brown kids. And one of those brown kids just got made President and all of a sudden Mulato is the new black.

There have been lots of times when I have found Dr King's words rolling around my head. Watching the Clash at Rock against racism gigs back in the 70's whilst the dock wearing gangs of skinheads spat and snarled and seig heiled. Then a few years ago when we were on holiday in Gambia: looking out at this island out in the river. There was an old busted up white fort and a few dusty palm trees and it suddenly hit me that there was more than a passing chance that a relative of Carol and Dyonne and Courtney might well have passed through those gates a few hundred years ago. Then leaning on railings by Pier Head and looking out across the waters of the Mersey to Birkenhead and getting that nagging feeling of shame about where all the cash came from to build those big fancy buildings. Including the one with the two birds on it- the same birds that sit on the badge on the red shirt that my lads wear to go to the match. Just above where it says Carlsberg. Yeah, that one. Then hawking stuff we had imported from India around Universities in the early eighties and they all had a recently re-named Steve Biko building. Until finally a couple of years ago we climbed up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and looked down at the Reflecting Pool and thought this was the very place where it all happened. When I was three.

And then of course that never to be forgotten night last Novemeber when Barack lit up the world.

And so I gave up on the idea of sleep, trawled around Youtube, dug out the video at the top of the page and worked out how to post it. And it's posted. And I really like the music the guy has overlayed over the speech. And let's face it, these are words that you just can't get enough of. Well, I can't.

The kids of Jadeland

Yesterday I was invited to give a drug and alcohol pep talk to a bunch of youngsters at a place called Apex. Who were they? Technically they had somehow been assessed as being 'at risk of offending'. Nice to see that crystal balls are still alive and kicking. Interestingly enough hardly any of them had actually done any actual offending other than dropping litter and flicking V signs at community wardens. I think the key was that most seem to have ome from chaotic families which meant that the powers that be were well and truly convinced that they would follow the same well trodden path of crime, benefits and daytime TV as their parents. Nothing like tagging people with labels and leaving them there, eh? Being on the course entitled them to £55 a week because it was deemed that they were in training. Well, we wouldn't want anyone to think that there is a problem with youth unemployment would we? Perish the thought. I have a hypothetical question I like to put when I do these kind of things. It goes something like this. You've got £50 in your pocket and you're not allowed to blow it on drink and drugs. In fact you have two spending options. Option 1. A pal has been tossed out by his mum and dad and the homeless department have told him to take a hike. He is going to have to sleep out under a bridge and he wants £50 to buy a sleeping bag and stuff. Option 2. A member of your family has cut their leg and the wound has got infected and it is going green and grangrenous. £50 will cover the cost of some anti-biotics which will save the leg from being lopped off.

So I popped the question and all hands went up to vote to save the family leg. They always do. Bless them. However they were still looking at me like I had lost it. Next I pointed out that this was basically the choice the government is going to have to make in the nest few years. In a bankrupt Britain, the option will be NHS or the Bru. (For all the worldwide followers of this blog, in Scotland 'the Bru' means the DHSS, the social, benefits...) So basically they all needed to get their heads around the idea that one day there would be no magic cash dispensing machine to give them a free flat, £60 a week and an extensive range of extras if they could manage to come up with a baby.

The question was then asked about where they thought all the money came from. This provoked a great deal of head shaking until one young lass beamed and said 'a factory yeah. A money factory!'. How right she was. Good old Gordan Brown has of course reached the same solution. If you can't make it, print it. In the week of the the death of the now sainted Jade Goody, no doubt the tabloids will have all kinds of fun at the expense of the much reviled Chav underclass of the sink estates. How we love hate these young people who live with the unerring faith that money will magically jump into their hands once a fortnight and that the state will always provide a free flat and cover the bills. The Neverland of crisis loans and bedding allowances. For most of them, this is the way of life they have been brought up with by parents and grandparents. The Welfare State is now 50 years old and we have second and third generations of citizens for whom it is a definite lifestyle choice as mopposed to a safety net. When the money runs out and the benefits train pulls out of the station we are going to have millions of our fellow citizens who will not have the first clue what the hell to do. Whatever happened to the money factory? Whatever happened to Jade? And then it will be time for shop windows to start getting smashed. Happy days.

I'll write it now just in case...

Have an hour and then it is the motorway south to Anfield. Over the last fortnight Disleyland has become Dreamland has become that place the Al Queda suiciders reckon they are en route to care of a belt full of C4.

4-0 against Real Madrid. As in Real Madrid! 4-1 at Old Trafford. As in AT Old Trafford. You know those old clips of the encircling Soviet Armies meeting up with each other in the snow and thereby cutting off 300,000 of Hitler's finest in Stalingrad? Just imagine how it must have felt to be a Russian on that minus twenty degree day. Knowing that you have well and truly given Hitler and all his lackeys a complete and utter kicking. Well any Scouser worth his or her salt just has to feel that way this week. We didn't just beat then. We buried them. Humiliated them. The greatest of all things about a win like that is that it lasts for years and years. Even the Mancs can't escape the fact that they were completely done. Well that's pushing it a bit. That lot would never admit anything, but what the hell. And then yesterday they go and get done again at Fulham at all places. Wheels off the wagon time and how good was it to see Super Danny Murphy slide home the dagger from the penalty spot. So all we do now is put away Villa to move to a point behind and chose down the goal difference. Then if we do, then it's maybe just maybe.....

And if we don't, then at least I have got these gloating, taunting lines down and logged. Most of us try to live out our lives as polite, reasonable human beings. I certainly do. And then it all stops for any of us stationed at either end of the 33 miles of the East Lancs Rd that seperates Anfield from Old Trafford. Then we get that whole Bosnian Serb - Bosnian Muslim thing going down. It ain't pretty but when you get a 4-1 under the belt you really don't care!