Tomorrow is Calling...

WTF as Johnny would put it. It's Midnight at the end of another half term holiday and I feel fucked. Have drunk loads today and don't feel that drunk. Me and the missus had one of those typical sessions where she painstakingly told me how everything in the world was shit; how crap I was at everything; how awful everything was for her. I'm quite used to this. I go along with it, express concern, apologise again and again (but not too obviously as that messes things up - contrition has to be quite subtle). Anyway, after half a day of this, interspersed with me cleaning and tidying I just flipped. I started kicking the hell out of a cupboard in the kitchen then went outside and whilst howling like a banshee demolished our piles of recycling (nice middle class Southern England touch, eh?). Smashed my fists into walls. Banged my head against dustbins. The full loony Monty. Q came out and told me not to be so ridiculous, think of the children etc.

Then it was time for our family sunday lunch. Inez my youngest was sobbing - she'd heard everything. Johnny my 14 year old who is now wiser than I'll ever be just looked sad and wary. That was a fun meal. I apologised as best as I could. The old spiel about how sometimes you have to go a bit mad in order not to go completely mad fooled no-one: They just think I'm mad. It's funny because in the general scheme of things I think of myself as really very sane. But it just goes to show, stir in 12 years of a rubbish marriage and 2 days of continuous nagging and moaning and Whoomph, anything can happen. I know how those mad hubbies feel when they kill their spouses/children/other road users. It is like there is a terrible in-balance in the world and it can only be put right by destroying things which are important. I swear that if someone turned up with a gun and shot me when I am in that frame of mind I would not mind in the slightest. Maybe this is how the Moslems in the news feel all the time?

Anyway, I bought Inez SIMS 3 as a small consolation for the Day Her Dad Went Mad. The Marianne Faithful picture? A naive fantasy about a time when it was OK for women to be good looking pleasers and not bloated ex-junkie pensioners bitter about their rotten choice in men. God, she looked good. Corrupt yes, but hey, that was the 60s.

Buy High, Sell Low - Stock market trading for prats

Some of you who have perservered though this blog may remember me talking about the stock market and me toying with the idea of CFDs. Contracts For Difference. These are like bets on whether a share, commodity or a whole market will go up or down.

Well, I tried these and it was just as awful as my stock picking experiments. My first gamble, I mean, informed speculation was to try 'Shorting' London Stock Exchange shares. This company had just been chucked out of the Footsie 100, had been collapsing in price for months and all analysis indicated that they were stuffed. I 'sold' these shares on the assumption that they would tank further, on a gearing of 10 to 1. I.e £500 invested would bring either 10 times that much profit. Or that much loss... Natch, within a day of me taking this position the price of this previously defunct company had spiked up by 50%. Yowsa. I was looking at £2500 instant loss... Except that I was so incompetant buying the CFDs that I had only exposed myself to a tenth of what I meant to. Phew. Only a £250 loss. Inspired by this I then bought long on the Footsie. American and Asian markets had gone up wildly the day before, everything looked good; what could go wrong?

The Footsie then went down 100 points straight after me making my purchase. Another £500 loss. Cautiously, now I try and call what the market will do, WITHOUT actually investing any money. I have been wrong EVERY single time. I am now wondering if my ultimate money making idea would be to try and simply do the opposite of whatever I think is a good idea. That is what they call contrarian investing I believe. I'll let you know how that works out....

48 and shagged out.

I'm 48 years old, 49 this year and I feel fucked. As I write, my right ear is bunged up with snot from this cold which I've had for 2 weeks. The inside of my arsehole is pinned back with rubber bands; fired helpfully there by a doctor to try and cure my latest bout of piles. This in turn has given me killer wind and what seems to be like an IBS stomache - I feel like shitting all the time, and am... My hair is now really thinning out big time. I've cut it right back to try and be honest but the overall effect is still "CHEMO BOY: YOU FOOLED NO-ONE!" I've got varicose veins which this doctor demonstrated horribly by tapping my shin while I held the 'valve' by my groin. I could feel the valve wobble which is a giveway that it 'leaks'. Agh. I've not been able to walk properly since. The thought of blood oozing and pooling inside my limbs as my arterial system falls apart is demoralizing and crap. The operation would involve stripping my veins out like so much rotten spaghetti and I wouldn't be able to do much for 2 weeks. I'm trying to put this off. I thought you bloody well could cure them with lasers! But as the doc put it, it is not as though they're simply going to shine a light on you from the other side of the room. They cut holes in your leg, then shove the freaking laser inside you. Agh, again.

My sex drive has wilted and sex now just seems like this ridiculous thing that teenagers and the working class do. I'm not even trying to do it and the missus just thinks it's me being nasty to her. If truth be told, 13 years of being told that I'm sexually selfish, greedy, inconsiderate and frankly not that bothered about whether anyone else apart from me gets off hasn't helped. She denies it, but effectively Q has been saying I'm shit in bed for years. Nearly all of our really bad rows have been about bad sex (the wrong time, the wrong sort, the wrong feelings, the wrong wrongness) and I guess bit by bit my libido has simply thrown up it's hands and surrendered. Don't get me wrong, we still do it, but it's very much just occasional charity sex, where if I was allowed to, I would fall asleep afterwards for a couple of hours. Of course, our regime of housework, talks, childrens homework etc makes this absolutely out of the question.

I remember when sex used to be fun - for me at least. I'd think of it as like a meal, something to look forward to, something that made you feel good. Now, if I think of it at all it's just with guilt, sadness and regret. Guilt that I'm so bad at it, sadness that it seems to be over mostly for me and regret that I fucked everything up. And without sex, one really is cruising towards death. All that is left is the boredom and the physical decay.

Wah-hey!

Full of Shit

Does your partner ever leave notes lying around for you to find? Mine does, although the children may have seen this latest one before me. It read:

I don't know if I can keep loving you. You are so selfish and full of shit.

This is a fairly typical comment from Persephone; what is rarer is the fact that is written down. Makes the sentiments more official, harder to deny. I'm full of shit and selfish; there, I've admitted it, I'm ready for my therapy group. ' Hi, I'm John and I am...'

The thing is (here it comes; the justification) I don't have any friends or hobbies. I don't have demands that I insist on having met; like blow me now, feed me now, mend my clothes, be like my mother but without the guilt. So I'm not sure about how I'm selfish - it's probably mental selfishness. Deep down inside I like the idea of a woman who is bright and also wants to fuck me. Is that selfish or just unrealistic?

As for being full of shit, I'm always admitting my many shortcomings in a sincere fashion. If someone thinks of a new one I hadn't thought of I'm only to happy to take that on board as well. I think the shittiness aspect is probably that I don't hate myself. Early on in my life I figured that most people don't really like you, not consistently anyway, so you better rely on yourself. I might be wrong here, but I think most women are insecure and they don't like the people they are with to be kind to themselves. I don't mean kind by buying presents, lap dances or wasting money on really stupid gadgets like a electric cider pourer. I just mean kind, inside.

The War to End all Wars

No, not my marriage; our trip to the graves and battlefields of the Somme, Ypres, Paschendale. We went this half term for 3 nights as some sort of themed break. As someone pointed out, when your children are younger you take them to EuroDisney, as they get a bit older then it's the turn of that World War 1 'circuit'. The killing fields of Sassoon, Brooke, Owen, celebrated in a never ending pageant which is by turns moving and exploitative. Let's face it, the tourist boards of Northern France and Belgium don't have much else to offer apart from the senseless slaughter of nearly all the healthy young males in Europe 91 years ago. In some places, the Ypres Flanders Fields museum for instance, this is tastefully done. In others, The Hill 62 Bar/Coffee shop/trench/museum/experience as an example, the tone is money grabbing, sick prurience.

At No 62 a fat loathsome specimen takes your money (25 Euros for a family of 4) close to a sign informing any relatives of dead soldiers that it is not possible to visit the museum or trenches free of charge. You then enter a large room filled with War junk... and pictures. Photographs on the walls and in banks of old What-the-Butler-Saw machines showing war porn. Men and boys with faces blown off, intestines hanging out, maggots coming out of their rotting eye sockets. Simply tons of this stuff. You then step into a garage filled with tons of rusting ordinance, obviously scavenged from neighbouring fields which leads to the fat mans back garden where he has created a trench system with old barbed wire and corrugated iron sheets. When we were there gangs of Belgian schoolkids were shrieking about in the mud and I didn't get the impression that anyone was building up to a 2 minute silence.

This was one of those revelatory times when you are reminded that bad shit should never be used for the purposes of gratuitous entertainment. Car crash videos, porn, 9-11 documentaries and any private pay-as-you-go war musuem. All of them should be avoided.
Subsequently sticking to the official trail, I would reccommend the big German war cemeteray near Ypres. With its trees, black marble blocks and weeping dark stone figures it conveys far more effectively a sense of overall loss and mourning. Us Brits seem to love this stuff. You can go to the most obscure, off the beaten track cemetary, and you will always find at least a couple of British registered cars parked up nearby and some geeky father/son combo stomping around in walking boots. Train spotting became too recherche - now we collect war graves!

If it helps you plan where to go, I would say that Belgium is friendlier, cheaper and has better food than France. And everyone speaks English there.

Sex - Oh God

Fucking is fucked again. I've got a great anti-sex combo going at the moment which comprises:

1. A totally crap filling in my mouth which feels like I've got a golfball wedged in my top molars.
2. Killer Piles. Something I thought I'd sorted a couple of years ago has popped out again. When something is wrong down there, everything is wrong down there.
3. Queenie has informed me that sex is now simply a trade between us. I shag her; she gets something in return. Money, white goods, childcare when she goes away somewhere. I previously had thought that as a married couple we shared and co-operated but I am in fact simply a cog in the market economy.

Hell. I suppose most wives are defacto prostitutes. If you don't enjoy sex then you become a sex worker. Men get off , women don't, take it from there. It's made me think about how crap I am at sex. When you're younger you don't think about that (well, I didn't anyway). All you think about it having sex, never mind riffling the pages of the Kama Sutra. All those girls/women who never made much noise when I did it - what were they thinking? That old cliche, the shopping list? Some sort of sense of duty; this is just what one does?
When a woman did appear to have an orgasm it was quite startling and a real turn-on novelty. Queenie used to have them all the time back in the old days when I was unreliable, feckless, unfaithful and completely selfish. I used to be disturbed and jealous, so powerful were her feelings. As I committed more completely to her, and tried to do what she wanted in bed, her arousal grew less and less. In that classic man-woman way, she loved me more in the beginning, then as I loved her more, she loved me less.

She would deny this of course, but it is true. She says that things have got worse because of the damage done through the years. I'm not sure it isn't simply a combination of tiredness, old age and simply not having to put on a good show.

Why aren't friends electric?

We went over to our friends the Friedkins the other night. They're a decent enough couple and are unusual enough in that they are people we do socialise with. It was pretty boring. We see them and we drink wine with them and I don't think anyone cares enough to be self-conscious or awkward but it is ultimately dull. The one comic highlight of the evening was Fooey (despite being long castrated) getting impressive erections whilst sitting on the laps of the unwilling Friedkins. David works as an illustrator from home from morning to dusk - he has lots of projects and each one requires lots of drawings. A single drawing being something that needs hours and hours to do. Consequently, he doesn't go out much and has even less social grace than I do.

I like him, but what our relationship should be is going down the pub and talking about cars, freaks of nature, stories of great bravery and lists of pop facts. My wife might let me out to do this, but it would be a hard won concession and ultimately the cause of grief. David's wife would ostensibly not mind but would headfuck him until he agreed to stay in - working. He'd probably anticipate this and simply say that he has to work.

Whatever, the result is that we have another couple lowest common denominator situation. I.e you hardly ever get a couple that you like equally. Either the man is better, or it's the woman. Only our friends Tim and Maz (the unreliable, wont always call you back ones) are truly complementary, and better together than separately.

And tonight we saw the Bulls. Very bright man, Mr Bull, an architect with all sorts of issues stemming from a fairly warped childhood (like having a highly fanciable stepmum who is only 5 years older than you when you are 15 - Yowsa!). Used to beat his wife and kids but then grew out of it, or simply got too weary to do it; not really sure which. Being both architects they are good poster people for the current recession. Yes, it really is the end of the world as we know it. 6 years, Mick reckons, minus this first one. Other people he knows who used to do well out of property are even more apocalyptical. This one chap, Chris and his wife thinks that this is no less than armageddon; The End of Days. They want to do one last property deal, ha ha, converting their back garden into an underground dwelling in order to finance an escape to Scotland where they'll hunt, fish, burn peat and probably shoot outsiders. It's a super plan, only spoiled by the fact that the site for this project is the middle of the most conserved street in this most conserved of towns. If they went to Bath Town Council and suggested knocking down one of their boring Crescents to make way for a super sized carpet warehouse, they'd probably have more chance.

This in itself is quite interesting but it does make me wonder about my £41Ks worth of Vodaphone shares, er make that £35K. That's down from an original stake of £50K which was put into Prudential just before they tanked. Of course, if I'd hung on I'd have hardly lost anything, but then everyone was shorting financial stocks and as far as I knew the Pru was about to go down the Loo. It's seems I have a gift to pick shares at an absolute high point; like pushing a pin into a balloon. Pop! Thus was it back in the late nineties when I lost a few shirts dabbling in dot coms. One after another my top tips came crashing down then; all bar a little firm called Staffware. I bought at £3 sold at £1.50 and forgot that I had mistakenly held back 10 shares. A couple of months later those 10 shares were worth £500 - I was glad I still had them then but it was a poignant what-if moment when I sold them. A £150,000 what-if moment.

Essentially, if you are a bloody idiot you won't make money out of shares unless it is a rising market. I'm a bloody idiot. Maybe I should start betting on shares falling with Options or CFDs. As soon as I'd do this prices would begin to rise and the recession would be over. I'd be broke but I'd know that my actions had saved the country.

Peggy is Micks wife who is his rock in a stormy sea. He could be unfaithful to her, beat her, starve her, be nasty to the children and she will never leave him. It's great in a way but one might be forgiven for taking her for granted. A woman that pleasing just couldn't be that good in bed. Could she? I suppose you could just brief her: Blow me for this long, wearing this outfit, make noises like a wheezing stoat, then get on all fours and cry out 'Fuck me like the dirty pig I am!'.
Hmmm. It's just so crazy it could work.

James their oldest is a bit of a wild card. He seems very mild but there is a fearsome deranged intelligence there, unfettered by the sort of guilt his father has. We always worried that he would get Johnny to do something lethal as part of an experiment or jape. Once we were with the Bulls when James dropped a rock from the high bridge we were on to the dual carriageway below us. No car was hit, but it was startling and disturbing. Not least of all because his parents thought it was a bit of a joke. Sort of, Hey, this is what bright children do for a laugh. Where's the harm in it?

Summer Holiday - Part 2 - Majorca

After Italy we flew to Majorca where we hoped to get a bit of proper sunshine and some 'Us' time. In a more low key way, we were going to hook up with some other friends of ours; the everlastingly ebullient Frances and her family. The Canes are a long way different from the Willets (although both are much richer than us with loaded parents and mortgages of £0) in that they all dead normal, are hugely popular, love football, Big Brother, The X Factor, fart humour and so on. Of course the real truth isn't quite as simple as this but this is the broad picture.

We stayed in a Finca - a converted Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Miles from the nearest beach or town it was quiet and had a pool. The joke was our room - see cell like view above - which turned out to be haunted...

To put this into perspective, I have never stayed in a place before which was haunted for me. Other people may have said, 'I think this place is haunted' or 'There's a ghost here' and I will have replied 'Sure' or 'Really?'. Whilst thinking, maybe it is and maybe it is not. Leaning heavily towards the NOT. It took me and wife a couple of nights to figure it out: The fact that we both woke at exactly the same time every night, around 3am. It would get suddenly very cold. There would be the sense of things coming in through the above window and then the feeling of disquiet, of there being a presence in the room. A presence that did not like us. My wife felt it absolutely the same as me and thus we would lie in bed, joking to each other until around dawn when the feeling would lift and we would get back to sleep. It quickly got to the stage where we would dread going to bed; to combat this we pulled the mattress into the living room where things, whilst still unsettling, were not nearly as bad. Luckily the children did not pick up on any of this stuff. I spoke to Pedro the owner about this who was not impressed 'No-one here has ever said anything before, mind you,' and here he gestured dismissively to the neighbouring finca which shared a structural wall with ours ' The Germans who live there think there are... Spirits? I think they believe that just because this land here used to be a Roman cemetery that there are ghosts! Ha!'
I think I said something about how pathetically obvious that was and that led onto a discussion about the foolishness of Germans in general. Not so foolish that it stopped them from owning half of your island, I was tempted to say. And that night me and Queenie locked the windows in some sort of attempt to keep out the angry Centurions, or whatever they were.

During the days it was hot - pretty much the only proper heat we got that summer of 2008. And we swam either in the pool which we mostly had to ourselves or in the sea once we managed to expensively park in someones cabbage patch down in one of the beach villages. To start with there were a lot of Italians on the farm with us; funnily enough they also had escaped from Northern Italy which, like us, they did not find warm enough. One evening, Pedro organised a meal/cultural get together in the yard outside. It could have been head clutchingly awful and/or embarrassing but in fact turned out to be one of the best meals of my life.

Unlike most Brits, these Italians seemed to be very unselfconscious. Within moments of sitting down, one of the men looked up at the stars, motioned all around him and pronounced 'Bella Atmosphera!'. Someone helpfully told me 'This means... Beautiful Atmosphere'. I replied that my Italian stretched that far - if no further - and the ice was broken.

Our children played with their children, hide and seek and games that children might have played on balmy summer evenings in England in the 1930s. The adults drank wine, ate lots of seafood and sang songs. We didn't know hardly any of the words, but we hummed along as best we could much to the unmalicious amusement of the others. Foreigners know so many songs off by heart! I can just about manage all of Rock N Roll Suicide by David Bowie but it doesn't compare with Amore! sung with gusto. All and all it was like the movie idea of what a big family meal in Tuscany should be like. To be make it perfect all was needed were a couple of nodding old crones dressed in black.

For 2 or 3 hours it was a glimpse perhaps of what life might have been like if ... I'd been a different person in a different country. When the final toasts were made, I proposed one to Italy and really meant it.

Los Angeles Christmas

Just come back from Los Angeles tonight. This was our mammoth (in turns of money) family Christmas trip to see Alice, Neil and Sofia. Alice is my stepdaughter who is now 25, is with Neil and has Sofia who is 3. I've been very lucky to have had Alice as a stepdaughter since she was 11, especially bearing in mind how fucked up and deranged some of her friends have been/are. Teenage girls on the whole - not a good thing. These older guys who fantasise about screwing young girls; are they mad? You might get a shag but then your head would be totally done in. Everytime they lost a T shirt, couldn't get into the bathroom or whatever it would be as if the world ended. And you'd have to express some sort of concern.

Alice, whom I pleased to say I never had a sexual relationship with, never gave me a hard time about anything. Sure, she was regularly transfixed with grief (for instance at the age of 12 she would cry because she wouldn't see how she could afford a mortgage later in life. Ha! Join the club, girlie. Then it would be the more usual things: Boys, careers, friends, skin care regimes) but she would mostly keep it to herself.

Anyway, she is still a worrier. Concerned about the past, worried about the present and scared of the future. Just like her mum, Alice is not one of these people who would say, "Oh, what the hell, let's put it behind us". Or, "Que sera, sera". Sofia is a sweet if er, assertive little girl and Alice is too worried to discipline her or tell her off particularly. As a notional grandparent, I worry about this. If normal teenage girls are bonkers I hate to think what one who is never told off will be like. Still, I was told off constantly and I'm not sure it made me a fantastic person or anything.

Los Angeles. But what is the point of it? I love films and the fact that most emanate from here is great but... L.A is a boring car infested dump. A million roads in search of a suburb, or something like that. Weather is quite clement for December in that it didn't rain all the time or was freezing all the time; having said that I went to bed fully dressed with 3 pairs of socks and was still cold. L.A apartments seem to mostly have these mad little gas heaters built into the walls which pump out choking carbon monoxide as soon as they are lit. So you worry alternately about being gassed or the place burning down. Easier to freeze.

Mostly everything seems selfish. The cars everywhere with one person in them. The grim quest for tips if you are anyone handling money or providing a service. I had this horrible fantasy about being taken to casualty over there and in addition to having hand over all my credit cards, doling out a never ending stream of $1s and $5s to porters, nurses and administrators. And then the taxes! I picked up a couple of parking tickets, one for being in a resident only zone (shame the sign was half a mile away) the other for being in a cleaning zone for the wrong 2 hours that week (the traffic wardens spend more time in the streets at this time than the street cleaning wagons which race through at a steady 30mph). Anyway, these tickets - pay online and the buggers clobber you for tax as well. Buy anything in a shop, the price is never inclusive of tax; they hit you for that on the till. However, the thing that really got my goat was their bloody mobile phones.

We had a pay-as-you-go mobile over there which costs 20c a minute. OK you might say. But wait: You pay that for every minute someone calls you as well. And best of all, you pay that if someone even only rings you and you don't answer. Victor Meldrew, eat your heart out.

When we flew home I upgraded us all to premium economy for any extra £800. It's true, money can buy you love - or that's how it feels when you aren't with everyone else. One feels more secure, safer. The stewards are kinder, friendlier more jokey. There is a great sense of being able to relax. Fuck knows what it is like flying Upper Class. Maybe you get blown whilst having your scalp massaged by a Tai Chi master. Meantime you are fed foie gras and Krug is syphoned into your mouth by an ingenious pump.

You see I'm quite a nervous flyer. As much as I believe in past lives, I am sure I have previously died in a plane crash. I would not be surprised if I died in this life in a plane crash. I know what that particular terror would be like as the Jumbo plunged down in a flat spin, passengers screaming, moaning, praying. Before we went home I had this dream about flying where I was the only passenger in this luggage storage compartment which had no windows, but did have a big saggy sofa with loads of cushions. The carpet and everything was threadbare but it was very comfortable and luxurious in a way and I felt very relaxed as the plane bucked and dropped through various turbulences. Perhaps, what makes me feel anxious is the thought of dying anonymously in steerage; the cattle truck in the sky. A fatal plane crash in a nice seat is somehow preferable - that's the Leo in me, I guess. Whatever, everyone had a nice flight and enjoyed the experience. All I have to do is make more money for other similar insulating experiences. (My currency speculations eventually made me £2000 profit. Shame I lost loads more pissing about on the stock market like a complete dumb twat. Financial Stocks and the Credit crunch don't really go unless you do know what you are doing. Maybe it will all come good in the end. Pray for Vodaphone because that's where the not so smart money is now.)