Welcome home! Here’s your present.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently, which has seen my average daily visitors slump from a mind-bendingly high 16, to a gut-wrenchingly shit 4. To the twelve who left me, I offer you nothing but the two fingered salute. For those who stayed, you get the same, but blame the others for putting me in a bad mood.

(I popped up to Lancaster for a week of rest and relaxation, and feel moved to point out that my arrival back in town, and the story in the Lancaster Guardian about the recent spike in STDs, is complete coincidence)

My cat, Roxie, has been delighted to see me. She has been following me around the house, and looking for a cuddle pretty much non stop. She’s been a proper pain in the dot. At around five o’clock this morning, my bladder full from about six litres of cheap squash (I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I figured I may as well get off my tits on Kia Ora) I went to the toilet for a bit. I took my Nintendo DS with me so I could sit in peace and play ‘Lego Indiana Jones’ without disturbing the missus.

I was sat on the throne completing the Well Of Souls level when the cat tried to force herself under the door. She couldn’t fit, of course, but it was a good effort and prompted me to open the door and let her in. Which is a strange move, as I’m fairly private about my morning ablutions, and would usually scoff at letting even a cat see me shit. In fact, I even go so far as to close and lock the bathroom door even when I know I’m the only person in the house. I need to feel safe when I crap, I guess.

Roxie buzzed around the bathroom for a bit, purring, and rubbing herself up against my legs. She did what sounded like a little hiccup, which made me laugh, then vomited an enormous quantity of puke in to the pants around my ankles, which didn’t.

It’s the sort of start to the day that makes you wonder if it’s worth ever getting out of bed, isn’t it? So much so that I’m back off to bed. I can’t risk more of this sort of shit happening to me today.

Factory Record

My girlfriend, and my Mum, who I’m pretty certain are colluding over this, keep asking me when I’m going to get a ‘proper’ job.

“I’m a writer!” I explain in an exasperated tone, whilst adjusting my beret and twirling my bum-fluff moustache. “This is a proper job.”

This is despite the fact that I only started (hilariously) describing myself as a writer when I was a waiting tables in an horrific Italian chain restaurant, and felt insignificant next to all the actors, artists and musicians.

It’s no surprise I don’t want to enter the rat race (and on a slight tangent, there was an ace Channel 5 documentary on the other night about a charity in Mozambique that has trained rats to sniff out landmines, it was great, there are clips on YouTube, have a look) when all my mates do is whinge about office politicking and the interminable dullness of their life. OK, I may be permanently broke and miserable, but so are they, and they can’t sleep in until Loose Women has finished.

I’ve worked pretty much every shit job you’d like to name (binman, waiter, barman, Manager of Manchester city) but easily the worst was when I worked on a production line in a pre-packed sandwich factory in the Fens. I needed a job desperately as I’d run out of rum and fresh limes, and was in danger of sobering up for the first time in about four years. So I signed on at an agency, got an advance on my pay from my Dad, and bought two bottles of Havana Club from Bargain Booze and went back to pretending to be Ernest Hemmingway in Havana rather than Chris Taylor in Lincolnshire.

I lasted three days in the factory. On the fourth day, when the mini-bus was due to pick me up, I shut all the curtains at home, turned all the lights off, and hid under the bed with my phone off. There was no way I was going back to that place. People had been there for thirty years, they told me. And I couldn’t last three days. It wasn’t that the work was hard, it wasn’t. It was more that it seemed like some form of horrendous, mental torture. Everything about the place seemed to be geared to driving me insane. From the freezing temperatures, to the mindless idiots (this is not an attack on all factory workers, by the way, not by any means. Just the fucking imbeciles I was forced to work with) in my team, to the way the management played Mel C’s ‘Northern Star’ album on repeat for twelve, long, consecutive hours as a motivational tool. That proved to be the final straw for me. It was at that point I vowed never to come back.

I just didn’t seem to fit in there. I was different to everyone else. Not better. Just different. We had to continually wash our hands in anti-bacterial hand wash. “I hope this has some sort of moisturising agent in.” I quipped. “Nothing worse than dry hands, is there?” No one laughed. Not even a smirk. Hell, a look of disgust or disquiet would have done. I vowed never to speak to anyone there again.

I had got chatting to one woman and her husband at lunch on my first day. A member of staff had been removed from the canteen and sent home for the day for openly masturbating in the middle of the room. I filed the tactic away in my mind just in case things got really bad and I needed a quick escape. (“QUICK! Another one’s wanking! Call security!”). It was an instant ice-breaker, and the couple saw my look of horror and fell about laughing. They explained that I’d get used to seeing stuff like that, and that the fella in question was always at it, like a safari park chimp.

The woman explained how she had been working on the production line for five years now. She lived in Boston and had, she claimed, used to be a QC, but found the stress and responsibility too great and so had packed it in. I marvelled at that. From being a lawyer, to having to put up with this shit for twelve hours a day? She must have been more bored than I was. I decided then that if she could do it, I should stop moaning and just get on wit it. I’ve always had a childish kind of respect for people opting out of society and just doing what makes them happy instead. And this woman seemed more than happy.

It only occurred to me weeks after I’d left the factory that when she said she was a QC, she didn’t mean a Queen’s Counsel, but a Quality Controller – the person responsible for the output of a production line and whose responsibilities go so far as to give them a different coloured hair net. It was a hammer blow to my young and naive ideals.

I’ve had more boring jobs. And more physically arduous. But I have never had a job that was such a relentless assault on my mind. I reckon I got out just in time. Another few days and I’d have ended up a humourless, mindless, automaton, like some kind of hair net wearing, sandwich filling Dr Who baddie.

I’d like to thank my Mam, my Dad, Baby Jesus, Josh and Eric Cantona

Finally, the recognition I feel I deserve. I’ve won the prestigious and glittering ‘Post of the Week’, from the lovely folks at, erm, postoftheweek.com.

“Terrance’s adept story-telling,” they reckon, misspelling my name, “made me laugh out loud – long, and hard – and so for that he gets the prize.”

Which is great news for me. It means I’m batting three for three in writing based competitions – the other two being Channel 4’s Young Journalist of the Year and the Virgin Atlantic flight VS026 to Orlando in-flight Poetry Competition.

Fame and infamy is just around the corner people. And here’s a Virgin Atlantic based archive piece to celebrate the achievement. I’m far too important to come up with decent original material now.

“On Jan. 19, Virgin Atlantic Flight 27 was en route to Florida when a threat was found scrawled on a bathroom mirror. The message, “American must die,” was written in soap, officials said.”

So begins the report on the CBS News website, detailing the story surrounding the trial and conviction of the member of flight crew who left the message.

This story is fairly important to me as I was on Flight 27 to Orlando. We were a good five hours in to the flight when we had to turn back to Iceland. I was half way through whichever God awful inflight movie Virgin had decided to thrust upon us as we wobbled our way down the emergency vehicle lined runway at Keflavik Airport. It was, I seem to remember, a scene reminiscent of the closing ten minutes of Die Hard 2. But with less Bruce Willis.

In moments of aeroplane based emergency, I tend to look to my father (a frequent flyer through business) for reassurance. Usually he sits in a state of zen like calm, a default position for my Dad. But as we came in to land in Iceland, he was pale and visibly stirred (not shaken, my Dad is far to cool to ever get shaken). This made me feel very bad indeed.

At this point we didn’t know fully what had happened. We had only been told that a message had been found on board, and that in the current political climate these things had to be taken seriously. And so despite being almost over land in North America, and despite us all wearing our Florida Holiday clothes, we turned back to Iceland where we would eventually spend 24 hours being interrogated by the FBI.

When we landed we were told to collect our belongings and were herded off the plane, by US Military personnel, and in to buses. From the runway we were driven to massive hangers, where we had our hand luggage tagged, taken away from us, searched, and given back to us. From there were we put back on the bus and we waited. For hours.

I don’t know how long we were on that bus for, it seemed to last for fucking days. People were cracking jokes, trying to make light of the situation, but all I could think was “I’m supposed to be in Disney World”. I didn’t see the fun in sitting on a runway in a desolate part of Iceland being interrogated by the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

My Dad could see the worry and discontent on my face and he did something I will never forget. He managed to smuggle his mobile phone on to his person and called home to my Grandma and find out the football scored. “Manchester United beat Blackburn 2-1.” He told me. “Van Nistelrooy scored a penalty meaning he’s set a new Premiership record for scoring in consecutive games.”

From then my mood lightened. Ruud and my Dad had combined to make this brief sojourn to Iceland acceptable. Not even the food we were provided with – mushroom soup followed by fish – could dampen my mood. As we were driven to the hotel we were to stay in, we saw the Northern Lights. People gasped and gawped and looked in awe. It was one of those magical moments you never forget. But I knew it wasn’t the Northern Lights. I realised straight away what it was. It was the Sun shining out of Ruud’s arse, lighting up the way home just for me.

On the cusp of death

My life, while not going swimmingly right now, isn’t quite at the stage where I want to end it. Yet earlier today, about four hours ago, I found myself in a horrible position where I didn’t know if I was going to die, or live.

I’m not sure how I want to tell this story. The narcissist in me wants to arrange some kind of clever narrative, like in ‘American Beauty’, where my death (or near death, I mustn’t forget that I’m still, technically, alive) is the start of the tale, and we work backwards from that point. Which, I suppose, is essentially what I’ve done with this aimless, irritating preamble. So forget all this guff, and we’ll start, as my Mum used to tell me to do, at the beginning.

My girlfriend has to get up early to leave for work. At about quarter to seven this morning she was swanning round in her usual panic, barking instructions at me. I was tired, and grumpy, and still mostly asleep. I payed little attention to her orders, preferring instead to try and recapture the dream I was having about a beach, a lighthouse, and a large, shaggy dog. But the moment had gone. In my dream the dog started yapping loudly and incessantly at me, trying to tell me what shopping I needed to get and telling me not to forget to do stuff I’d failed to memorise in the first place, let alone forget. The peace, and solitude, and happiness had gone, to be replaced by the drudgery of everyday life.

I woke up, eventually at about half ten, and spent the next two hours dicking about on the internet, playing Brian Lara Cricket on the PS2, and drinking tea. In the back of my head I was desperately trying to remember what it was I was told I had to buy today. I knew there was something, as not only could I recall the sound of being told what to do, I’d found a pile of money that had been left to pay for it. I flirted with the idea of taking the money and fucking off to the pub to get drunk with it instead, but I must be maturing, as I soon realised this would be a grossly stupid move.

Milk? Bread? Teabags? I was listing things we seem to buy a lot of, in the hope it would jog my memory. Washing powder? Cat food? Ah! That was it. The cat has fleas, and we need some Frontline flea stuff from the vets. I stuck my jeans on, threw on a pair of flip-flops, and began to walk the short distance to the vets.

As I got out of the back door, I realised it was raining lightly. This was nearly enough to make me go indoors and stick on some shoes and a jacket. But fuck it, I thought, it’s not far to go, and it’s not like it’s pissing down, is it? I looked

to the sky to check the clouds, and there was an absence of what my Dad calls ‘thunder boomers’ but what experts call cumulonimbus (or something). So I braved it as I was.

This, I guess, was my mistake. There’s a little cut I travel down to get near the vets. It’s an alleyway between two lots of terraces. At the top of the alley, there’s about a dozen or so concrete stairs, and at the top of these, with the concrete wet from the drizzle, and my flip-flops greasy from, well, fuck knows what, I slipped.

I felt my feet go from under me right. I slid along for what seemed like seconds, just waiting to smash face first in to each of the dozen or so steps, down in to the alleyway. “I knew I should have put some fucking shoes on!” I almost, but didn’t yell, too busy was I bracing myself against the imminent danger of neck breaking.

But as soon as the slip started, it stopped. Right at my heel. I was balancing, precariously over the edge. Teetering even. Like the bus at the end of ‘The Italian Job’. I looked down, looked around, and placed my foot in a safer position. A cold sweat was now mingling with the rain. “That.” I said to no one in particular, “Was fucking close.”

I bought the cat flea stuff, and came home the way I went, determined not to be phased or intimidated by the experience. Later on the girlfriend phoned to make sure I’d got the shopping, I told her I had, but neglected to mention my near death experience. I didn’t want to panic her at work, and I may never tell her, such is her fragile state of mind at the moment.

Tupac Lives

It seems news of Tupac’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

When I worked in the pool hall in Grantham I saw a mate of mine on X Factor or Popstars, or one of those shows. He hadn’t told anyone he was going on, or that he’d been on, he just found himself in Manchester on the day of the audition (he was a removal man) and went for it. He sang that Ronan Keating song about saying it best when you say nothing at all. Which in my mate’s case, was very fucking apt. Anyway, he didn’t get the hilarious slating I hoped, but apparently he was told he had a good look for a boy band, but not the vocal strength to be a solo singer. Which was a very diplomatic way of saying you’re shit but at least you’re not ugly.

Anyway, this guy was the person who first told me that Tupac wasn’t actually dead. He mentioned something about Tupac wearing a pair of Nikes in his video that weren’t released until after he died (and reading that link, I bet he wore a size seven). When I pressed him on this total bullshit, he assured me that Tupac had staged his death to get out of the media spotlight, and retreated to a quiet suburban life-style somewhere unremarkable to avoid detection.

I voiced my opinion that I found it all very hard to believe and he replied that until he had met Tupac himself, seen him with his very own eyes, he too was a non believer.

“Hang on.” I said. “You’ve met Tupac?”

Apparently on one of his removal jobs he went to get chips from a chippy in Mansfield and Tupac was working behind the counter. He had had severe cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance, so much so that he was now white. He still went by the name Tupac (obviously), and still wore his trademark bandanna.

“I mean,” he said, “I didn’t believe him at first, but then why would he lie?”

I stopped knocking about with this guy not long after. I couldn’t work out if he was crazy because he’d concocted this whole story, or if he was crazy because he believed the guy who’d concocted this whole story. Either way, it was time for me to move on and stop going drinking with these absolute fruit bats.

All of which came flooding back to me when I read this article in the Observer Music Monthly magazine from a while back. There’s some bad craziness in this world, I think.