Who Killed Tangerine?

There is no such thing as a happy ending.
Call this life, purgatory more like.

I said to friends, sitting in a smoke filled living room in the late 1980s, 'This is as good as it's going to get guys. It isn't going to get better and in ten years we can look back on this time and say, "see, I told you so!"'.

I was accused of being a pessimist, which is probably a fair guess as I tend to be a 'glass is half empty' kind of bloke. The thing you need to remember is that Margaret Thatcher was the PM and we were halfway under the Tory regime that destroyed everything that made Britain great.

The thing was ten years later, sitting in a less smoky room, with many of the people I was with originally, we all eventually agreed that I was right. Yes, many of us were, individually, much better off than we were ten years earlier and there were, individually, great achievements; but the world as a whole was worse. This was 1998 and we had been under New Labour for 18 months and people, including us, were still in that blessed honeymoon period that this Labour government had bestowed upon us. Yet we all agreed that the country was worse than it had been and none of us had any allusions that it wasn't Maggie's fault.

I was in the pub last week with two of the blokes that shared the original forecast with me 18 years ago and were also there 8 years ago for the update. They both witnessed me say, in a God almighty like assuredness that, "It's going to be a damned sight worse in ten years."

I'm a Labour supporter. For a while, during the Iraq nonsense I considered switching my allegiance to the Lib Dems, but I soon realised that this was something I should only consider when I live in a marginal Tory seat. I realised something not so long ago - it doesn't matter.

IT DOESN'T MATTER! Whoever is in power they're going to fuck up eventually. It's got nothing to do with complacency or power mad bureaucrats (although Labour has always had a problem with that), it doesn't matter who is charge of the country, we are hurtling towards a MASSIVE economic and social upheaval. We are running out of fuel, we are running out of money, we have no future to look forward to because there will be even less then than there is now. We have social decay running rampant across forgotten council estates, we have growing civil disrespect, we have cutbacks and cost-cutting exercises that are depriving these victims of social decay of what little they already had and we have a National Health Service that, whoever runs it, will continue to place a massive drain on the resources of a people that are living longer.

The reason we have a Labour government that looks no different from a Tory one is because when all the chips are down and it's a matter of survival and making the country tick over until the next schmuck comes along, we're all fucked and it's just going to continue to get worse. Life in the UK has become, for many, entropy. But perhaps that's what it was all about anyhow...

Jacket Hangs

In a previous life, I was a little above a nobody. It actually suited me. In this previous life I had my fifteen minutes of 'fame' - within the context of the life I led. And like has-been celebrities from the real world, I clung onto it with every fibre of my being - which was a bit sad really when you boil it all down, mainly because this world was nothing special in the first place.

Someone asked me why I kept going back even though this former life had bitten me on the arse so many times and to be honest I can't really give a definitive answer for that. I've given answers, but none of them seemed to be really heartfelt. Then, amazingly, without any fuss I managed to leave it all behind - much the same way I gave up drugs - quickly and quietly, with no fuss and no fanfare.

This last couple of weeks there has been a concerted effort by certain people from my old life to try and get me involved in my old life again. I can't fathom why it means so much to some people, I wasn't a somebody, I was just above a nobody - that doesn't count for much. But, there have been a number of things, that I would describe as 'chain-rattling', that seem to have been designed to get me roaring back into my old life with all guns blazing. And I just don't understand why. Well, actually I can, but it's so screwy most people wouldn't believe me and I'd need to write a 300,000 word history to reinforce my belief.

Life's too fucking short.