Tributes to a Great Man.

Recently my Father passed away after a brief, but intense, battle with cancer. I am going to post the tributes we (His wife, children & grandchild) wrote for him. I say ‘Tributes’, and not ‘Eulogy’ as Tributes seems more fitting a word than Eulogy.

I am not going to say who wrote what, purely because I don’t think any of us, myself included, should get any credit. These words are here so that the tributes we made for him will last, and his memories will live on within the internet.

(1) When you’re a child, your parents are your entire world. And then you grow up, slowly losing sight of that fact. It’s not anybody’s fault that you do that – life gets in the way, and you lose sight of that childlike belief. I was the same. When I was a child, my dad was this amazing man who sang me to sleep with ‘Little White Bull’ and ‘High Hopes’, who beat me at arm wrestling, and let me and my brother beat him at wrestling. He was either ‘Big Daddy’ or ‘Dr Doom’ (Or ‘Dr Death’ I forget which) depending on if he was playing the good guy or bad guy. He was the guy who could make me laugh with ease, and was the pre-internet version of Google. When I was in trouble, I knew he could save me from it – unless I was in trouble with him, and then only my mum could save me!

He was the guy who sang in a deep baritone, who was the musical counterpoint to my mother, and who between them, instilled in me a love for great music. He was not only the person who showed me what it takes to be a great man, just by living his life – a warts n’ all life – triumphs and tragedies, Faults and Strengths. He also showed me that someone who doesn’t make mistakes doesn’t achieve anything. He was a man who would go out of his way to help you, and nothing was too much trouble.

He still is my hero, and he was our Dad.

(2) Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my own familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

(3) From the second I was born, my “Grandpa”, Peter, without a moment of hesitation or thought, stepped into the role of being my Dad. Willingly he took on that role and brought me up as his own.
Since that moment he became my rock, one of my closest friends and my worst critic.
When I was a child he attended every single one of my school shows, grinned and bared my singing and my first attempts on an instrument and my “rare” bile spewing moments about my Law tutor when I took Law!
Yes, he may not be here with me, us or anyone anymore, but I know he’ll keep his promises to all of us. He made several to me as I grew up; but these are 4 he told me…Such as being at my University Matriculation, My first Job, My Wedding (I Joke!), and some day my first child; He’ll always be with me every step of the way; telling me what to do or how to do something better, i.e. – His Way!
*Tad, noson dda. Hyd nes y byddwn yn cyfarod eto.
(Father, Good Night. Until We Meet Again.)

(4) What can be said about Pete that hasn’t already been said?? I met Pete, or at least started writing to him when I was 15, and he was 20…he was in Germany in the Army,….we had been writing on a regular basis for about a year when I finally met him…..He was nothing like I had imagined …he was tall….6 foot 3 I was short…4 foot 10 …he spoke with one’s plum in ones mouth…far too posh for Bewsey… that in itself caused panic…I was nothing like that…I remember running in to my mum asking her to get rid of him..…Mum and Dad’s reply was….. ”Give him the week-end you just might learn something”…..Learn something??,… I learned something in that week-end that lasted more than 46 years.. That he was fabulous company, he was funny, could be serious too when the need arose, he was intelligent, gifted with a dry sense of humour…saw the funny side to life…He was a protector…He later became an amazing dad to our kids, he couldn’t sing, couldn’t hold a note in a bucket, but that didn’t stop him from singing to his kids when they went to bed…he was an amazing husband… the things I “got away” with, he would just raise one eyebrow when he knew that I had overspent or did / said something wrong … he was an encourager…an amazing cook.. an organiser, ..I also learned much later that where DIY was concerned he wasn’t gifted…he took on several jobs…and didn’t finish one of them, hence his nick name of half-a-job-harry
He could be an old-fashioned strict disciplinarian with the kids, but each one respected him and accepted that what he said was law…if he was right, he stuck to his guns, if he was wrong he would… sort of…admit it with, “OK…we can’t all be right can we?”
He was gifted with the ability to put on accents, especially when reading a story to our 4 kids, he brought the story alive to them, he did the same with Ceinwen, then Esther, Alexis and in school with the children…he became all characters when he read and loved nothing more than passing on his passion of reading.
He could be a clown, a joker, a politician, a teacher, a preacher, a barrack room lawyer at times, a counsellor; each day with Peter was different…each day could be funnier than the previous one…I remember one night one of the kids had lost one of their toys that they took to bed….Peter searched for ages and wouldn’t give up until it was found…he then saw his chance and seized it with both hands…..when we went to bed, he sat up and wailed… “I want my Wabbit, I want my wabbit”…and carried on until all the kids were running around looking for a stuffed rabbit for him to go to sleep with!!…..Such was Peter, loved having fun with his kids, no matter what time it was…the apples of his eye…….good job it was school holidays… Years later, when Peter and I were ordained in London in 1991, as we knelt down to be prayed over; in such a solemn moment…Peter whispered “Did you bring my wabbit?” I did my best not to laugh but, couldn’t hold back my smile, even the minister when praying over us asked that we “keep the joy of the Lord” …. if only he knew…..
Peter was also a member of girl guiding…..he helped me, or did I help him? to run a Rainbow unit in Westbrook. He was supposed to help just for one night, but the girls wouldn’t let him stop, and he didn’t want to…that one night ended up him helping for over 10 years. It was “his” Rainbow unit and he thought the world of His little Rainbows.
Pete was a Chef in the Army and he was head cook and bottle washer at home….I loved nothing more than sitting down to one of his food concoctions…his lemon and lime chicken was one of my favourites… but the amount of time he took in the kitchen on Christmas Eve with the Turkey and pork and any other meat he cared to prepare, drove me mad…..but I never once complained when I was sat down to this gorgeous, out of this world, tasting meal on Christmas Day…food fit for a king….and that was Pete, unassuming, fun loving, family adoring, protective…He wouldn’t thank us if we said he was ”King” of the family,… but that is exactly what he was…Pete was king in his castle and our hearts and there he will remain…

(5) What can be said about my dad that the others haven’t already said? My dad was a strict man, but along with that he was also a very funny person….not sure he realised just how much he made people laugh. Please feel free to laugh, smile or even chortle at the following dad’isms’ because believe me dad will be laughing in heaven
Once while preaching he told the whole congregation that …….put him on his ass…pronounced arse!!!……he was a southerner so this was another name for a donkey to him, he couldn’t understand the shocked expressions as he looked up from his notes until mum explained it!!!
It was a quiet time in church when we suddenly heard a mooing sound…… it was dad starting one of his favourite choruses Majesty…..but it came out Moojesty!!!
If you came to the family home during certain times you had to be quiet!!…A very close family friend found this out when he arrived at Countdown time…. Dad ‘grunted’ his hello and Phil was told to be quiet until the programme had finished…. 30 mins of my dad calling the contestants wallys, idiots and several other names passed and Phil was then properly greeted by dad!!!!! This was also the case if you came when wrestling was on (he was a massive big daddy fan!!) or when NCIS was on…..and heaven help you if u dared to phone!!!
Dad said I was responsible for many boy bands breaking up…..Bay City Rollers, Bros, New Kids on The Block even Take That…..the reason I was responsible…because I liked them!!!!
And finally, dads final words to me (other than GO!!! Which he told me several times on the Wednesday & the Thursday he passed away) was ….YOU’RE GROUNDED, yep 41yrs old and grounded by my dad (for saying a bad word!!!) but I am happy to announce he grounded DARREN as well… result!!… Darren’s 1^st time of ever being grounded and he’s 44!!!!
Bye dad we will all miss you loads & please God don’t make him head of DIY or Gardening as it will never get done and heaven would end up with lots of bits of wood that “could come in handy later”!!!

(6) It’s an old well worn saying that rings true when I say that Dad was my hero & Icon,other kids have footballers or singers that they look up to as they grow up,but I idolised my dad.
My dad was everything to me all the way thru my life, he was not only my dad, but my best friend, my confidante and my counsellor, he always there giving me advice (whether i wanted it or not!!) slowly nudging me along onto the right path.
He never judged me on the things I got up to, I remember when I started playing rugby, my dad came to my first match and beamed with pride when I scored in the corner, on the way home, my dads typical response was to say with a smile “but you could have scored two if you hadn’t been showing off!”
I remember when I had to finish my rugby career due to injury,my dads words of wisdom when he came to the hospital “go out on a high,leave them wanting more, never look back” – – Well Dad, you have certainly done that with us.
Dad was a fun man to be around, my brother and I constantly had wrestling matches with him, I remember i used to spend most saturdays with dad watching wrestling on the tv, this carried through even to my early twenties, mine and my Dad’s favourite wrestlers were “the undertaker” & “The Rock” Dad always used to tell me that the rock stole his raised eyebrow look, now I’m inclined to believe you Dad!
It was because of Dad that I got a love for all music but especially the Rolling Stones,it still makes me laugh to think of his infamous Mick Jagger impression, I will never forget the way that dad used to strike the pose, he would curl his lips, stick his bum out and strut around just like Jagger! I now know where I get it from!!
Dad was so proud when I told him that my wife was pregnant with our now 2 year old son, I often turned to him for advice, he was always there, lending an ear when I doubted myself.
Dad, I miss you so much it hurts, thank you for everything. There is a hole in all of our lives now that will never be filled, Thank you for showing me how to be a man & a good father like you were to us.

Graveyard Waltz Pt II

I never thought I’d say this, but have a ‘type‘.

A few years ago, I’dve denied this vehemently, but it’s true…and I have a nasty feeling I know where that ‘type‘ comes from.

It seems my ‘type‘ are Tall, Long dark or black hair, piercing blue eyes and defined cheekbones.

Just like Miss A (for the most part) is/was/is. Though to be brutally honest, when I saw her ghost she’d lost the definition, long dark hair and  figure she had in yesteryear…but that’s probably just my sour grapes speaking..

Aaaaanyhoo. When you bear in mind that my 1st girlfriend Karen was Blonde and green eyed, and how that relationship ended, I suppose it’s only natural that I should veer toward her polar opposite – even if only to ensure that I’m not trying to date the ghost of Karen by chasing women similar in appearance to her.

So every girlfriend (and to think of it, every one nighter too) fit the profile of the new ‘type‘. Maybe a little loosely at first, then Miss A came along. What happened, happened, and the ‘type‘ came into full force and I rigidly adhered to it, BBW phase notwithstanding.  Then I met and rescued Gill.

Totally not my type.

At all.

Sure, she had cornflower blue eyes…but that’s where the similarity between her and ‘the type‘ ended. Mousy blonde-brown hair, not statuesque at all, and more curvy than the defined hourglass figure that I was accustomed to. Even personality wise, she was different – Opinionated, Insecure, Controlled by her parents, although still Strong willed, she was a total diamond in the rough, and the polar personality opposite of any of my past relationships.

The first few months of our fledgling relationship were still typical of most people’s, but with the added fun of a battle of wills between two strong willed people.

Yet I still ended up marrying her. Still not sure how that happened, but in any case that’s where the real fun began.  Especially when you consider that she is the only person to have got completely past every defence, and every wall that I had spent over 15 years building.

And that is the one main thing that I really don’t understand how it happened.

You see, this means that she is one of just 3 people on this planet who actually knows who and what I am, what makes me tick, and (worse still), exactly how to hurt me. Which should make me very uncomfortable….but doesn’t. Like I said, it’s a conundrum wrapped up in a quandary, covered in a mystery.

So how exactly did I end up with someone who is the absolute antithesis of ‘my type‘? Well, I’ve mentioned how we met for the the 1st time (although for me it was the 2nd time…but more about that in another blog) in a previous post, but glossed over what happened afterwards, and how I came to break her heart.

The first few months of marriage, as stated before, were a battle of wills – although for the most part, I am to blame for that as I tried my level best to fit into a mould that was never meant for me. I was trying for the archetypical husband, the ‘Hollywood’ version who you see in most romantic films  – caring, understanding, square jawed, full of empathy, tactile and promoting a level playing field.

Which completely isn’t me.

I’m the first to admit that sometimes I’m not the nicest or easiest person to be around. I can be stoic, aloof and downright anti-social. I deliberately isolate and alienate myself from the people around me, with my speciality being my skill of shutting out and pushing away people that care about me & I care about.

And therein lies the problem: This is not who I really am. Gill has said many times that she found me to be cold and very hard to be around at times…although this is not a deliberate act on my behalf.

I’d like to think that I’m naturally a friendly and open person who loves the company of others and like making friends….except I’m not sure I am, as I’ve reached a stage where I’m sure that is just who I’d like to be…Same goes for the antisocial isolationist, which  is just one more mask that I started to wear a long time ago, and has somehow made its way into my persona.
Which brings me neatly onto my next blog….

Masks.

The Graveyard Waltz.

It’s funny the things that you think about when you think you’re going to die.

Take, for example, myself. One minute, there I was in the shower without a care in the world (well, bills notwithstanding, naturally) when I discovered a lump. At the time I didn’t think much of it, until a week later when I checked and it was larger. Ok, now I was getting a little unsettled, and so a few days later I found myself sitting in my doctors, hoping to be told that I was being a drama queen, and to get on with it.

No such luck – he didn’t like it either, found another and sent me for tests. It was at this point that I got worried…and my thoughts turned to my own mortality.

I’ve read story after story in magazines where the writer has been in the same (or worse) situation as me, and expresses a feeling of either numbness, or anger toward a God that they hadn’t given a second thought to moments earlier.
I think it was Voltaire who said that “Everyone believes in God in their darkest hour.” and I’d agree with that statement – to a person, they each seem to get angry or blame the very God that they had denied existed or ignored moments earlier. However, I mercifully didn’t fall into that trap. I just thought about Zorbing.

I’d seen it in a TV programme, and the concept of being strapped into a giant bubble and flung down a hill really appealled to me, and was suddenly high on my bucket list, along with running in a (more than slightly dangerous)  race I’d read about, which involved running headlong down a very steep hill, and inevitably involved a lot of the contestants having their limbs broken and injured in new and interesting ways.
Now, before you think I’m a totally self-absorbed selfish git (which I am, but let’s not let that fact get in the way..) I also got to thinking about how my heart has pretty much become a graveyard for the women I’ve loved.

Ever since Miss A, I’ve tended toward self-preservation. They get too close, or I get too close, and I begin to shut down and throw up as many walls as I possibly can. There have even been women who have realized what I’m doing, and why, and tried to reach out to me, and end this self-destructive cycle. All have failed….or at least most have.

There is one who I got to thinking about while wandering around both the metaphorical graveyard of my heart, and an abandoned graveyard near where I live (Say what you like about graveyards, they’re a great place to think..) and I came to realise that as much as I’ve thrown walls and barriers up against her, and as much as I’ve hurt her terribly, she’s always understood why, and where I’m coming from. She’s also one of the very, very few people to get through all the masks and see the real me, and see me for the screwed up little bunny that I really am – and still want to be around me regardless.

At the moment, we’re dancing a waltz, with me as the reluctant dance-partner. I know full well that I should just surrender, but can’t allow myself to. After all, I reason to myself, there have been women who have done everything they could to help me, but couldn’t – and I’ve even been with a few who have got past all the masks, defences and walls…I’ve trusted…and was either betrayed, or just simply lost. So what’s the point? Why should this one time be so different?

Because I’ve faced my own mortality?

Not good enough.

I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve walked away from a situation that should have killed me, or come round from ones that did. So why should this one give me such a crisis of conscience?

I really don’t know. And in return, what have I learned from this experience – other than the fact that I have an overpowering desire to be strapped into a bubble, tossed down a hill, and dance another Tango with the lovely Thanatos?

I’m really not sure…but it’ll be interesting to find out.

Moving Not-So-Swiftly On..

20 years is a hell of a long time to spend doing anything.

Especially if that ‘anything’ is an anything that you swore you’d never end up doing.

Yes, as usual for my style of writing, I’m starting with a cryptic statement, and then throwing you, dear reader, in at the proverbial deep end. So without much more ado, let me explain what I mean by starting at the very beginning..

As I may have touched briefly on before in a previous blog, My father was a shop manager, and by all accounts a rather good one. This meant that he also expected me to follow suit and be a shop/store manager – a job I really didn’t want to do. By the time I had left college, I still had no real idea of what it was that I wanted to do, except that it definitely was NOT retail.

So with that in mind, I wandered vaguely from job to job, trying to see what fitted. As a work placement I had worked at a travel agents, but did nothing other than fall in love – again as mentioned in a prior blog – and decide that being a travel agent was not for me. Then I went to work for a famous holiday camp. I started off as a dish-washer and then drifted around the camp from job to job, ending up entertaining children and the adults – and having a really great time…although, if I was honest, never really fitting in with my colleagues, and slowly changing from the shy, sober young boy, into what a colleague described as an ‘extroverted introvert’, a person slowly learning to develop and use different masks to hide behind.

Then my mum wrote to me towards the end of the season, telling me that she had got a job at the BBB, and that she had arranged an interview for me when I got back, to which I dutifully agreed to – although at the time I had mistakenly confused the acronym for the BBB with BNFL, and saw it as something that could be interesting.

It was on returning home after the season ended that I discovered my mistake, and that my mum had got me an interview for a job in retail. Oh, Joy.
However, I went to the interview as I’d promised (after spending the prior evening bent over the sink, reluctantly having my recently bleached Billy Idol white hair dyed back to brown by an irate mother) and if I told you I tried my very best to get the job, I’d be lying. Unfortunately, my 2ndbest interview technique worked anyway, and I was pretty much immediately offered the job. In the dishroom. I could barely control my enthusiasm.

However, I told myself that I’d stick the job for the 6 months until the next summer season at the holiday camp started, let my temporary contract at the BBB end, and go back to entertaining drunken holidaymakers.

I clearly remember my first day at the BBB – it was utter mayhem. This was the first BBB in the country ever, and the population of the UK had gone completely BBB crazy. The queues to get in the store were 5 or 6 deep, and trailed right around the store and down the road leading to the store, even needing the police to control the crowds. The queues to get in the restaurant were equally as bad. Once inside the restaurant, it was a quick spin around to show me where everything was by a shell-shocked looking restaurant manager, handing me my blue overcoat and apron, and then a very fast guide to the dishwasher and an evil machine named the viptop. I grew to hate that machine. It was a pan and tray washer, that you stacked the pans and trays in, closed and turned on. it would fire scalding hot water and tiny plastic pellets at the pans, cleaning them. At least, that was the theory. The reality was each pan needed at least 2 10 minute runs through the Viptop, a scrub and then another run, each time getting a face of hot steam, and perhaps a leg full of near boiling water and hot plastic pellets whenever you opened the damned machine. All the time the chefs were looking at their dwindling supply of pans and cursing you for being so slow….although to be totally fair, they only ever did it once before seeing the horror of the Viptop, the redness of your hands and the increasing amount of full trolleys being wheeled into the dishroom for me and the dishroom team to deal with, before rolling up their sleeves and helping us out.

The first restaurant team in the BBB was the first team that I ever felt I belonged to. There simply was no heirachy at all, and everybody helped everybody else out when they were snowed under. In life as well as work. The head chef and restaurant manager thought nothing of walking into the dishroom, rolling their sleeves up and helping us out when we got stuck and they had a slack moment, and the dishroom team likewise scrubbed up and helped out in the kitchen when we had a free moment. We worked very hard, played just as hard, and dropped everything to help each other out. This was where I first learned the importance of team work.

The temporary contract came to an end, and I was finished by the BBB, with a few months to spare before the season re-started at the holiday camp – which was fine by me. However, six weeks passed, and the P45 that I knew I’d need for my return to the camp had not arrived, so I called the BBB HR department (Something I’ve always found to be a misnomer – The HR department in any company tend to be neither Human, nor Resourceful, the only time you ever see them is either when they’re welcoming you to, or kicking you out of, the company that they work for) to ask where it was…to which I was answered “Why? have you left??” I replied that I’d left a month previously, and was immediately invited back for an interview.
The only satisfying part of that was the morning when my mum was telling me that I needed to look for a job, as one was not going to suddenly drop through the letterbox – The moment the words had left her mouth, the postman arrived, and delivered the letter inviting me back to the BBB for an interview.

For this interview I tried my level best not to get the job – doing all the cardinal sins of interviews, turning up in t-shirt and dirty jeans, battered trainers, and answering every question with ‘uh-huh’ or ‘nah’, gazing out of the window, the door, my shoes – in fact trying to give off a “look, I really don’t want you to employ me” vibe.

I failed again.

The interview lasted all of ten minutes, which was long enough for the restaurant manager to get free, come to the interview room, look at me and say “Where’ve you been? the restaurant’s absolutely filled to capacity, and suchaperson has called in sick – stop wasting this nice HR lady’s time and get back to work!” As much as I inwardly grumbled, I was happy to be back with the one team where I felt I belonged.

In fact, thinking back, all of the teams that I worked with in the BBB were incredible, always more of a family than just people you worked with. From the restaurant team I moved to the Full-serve desk after 3 years, where I met one of the very few people I ever truly made a connection with – a short ditzy blonde named Carolyn. From the very first time I ever met her, I knew we were going to be the very best of friends. I was stood at the desk, vaguely wondering what I was doing, when she walked up to me grinned and said “Hey, you’re Gabe, aren’t ya? I’m Cazza – know of any good hang-over cures?”

I remember laughing and advising a fry-up with several cups of sweet tea. A few weeks later, and we were as close as two friends could get. Between us, we ruled the full-serve desk, and nothing happened there without our joint say-so. We were often referred to as the First couple of Full serve, or Mr & Mrs Ravensgate, but we never had a man/woman style relationship, although we spent practically every free hour together in works as well as out of it. Thinking about it, it wasn’t until much later that I realised how attractive Caz was, but by then, she was my best and closest friend, and any other kind of relationship was unthinkable.

I can count the amount of people who really know me, and I have let past the masks I wear, on the fingers of one hand. Of which 1 is dead – to me, if not reality – I’ve practically adopted another as my little sister, and the other 3 are the only people who are not family (Adoptive, or blood) that I trust implicitly. The fact that they’re all female has already been commented on, but is irrelevant, and for another blog, and another time.

But I digress. From full serve, I moved to the warehouse and to another team I felt part of…mostly. Though with that team, it was predominantly male, and all of my previous teams were predominantly female. I had to adjust to ‘locker room’ conversations, and endless discussions about football – both subjects I could give less of a wet rats ass about. However, other than that, we spent most of the time working insanely hard, but having such a laugh, that it never actually seemed that hard.
There is a saying in my family – ‘cut one of us, and we all bleed’, basically indicating that the family is that close we act as one unit – such was the case with all of the teams I either worked with, or managed. We worked together, played together, and if an ‘outsider’ – be it customer, boy/girlfriend, or member of staff from another team – crossed any of us, they had all of us to deal with. It was quickly common knowledge that nobody messed with the full/self serve teams. Not even when the staff left, leaving just 3 people to run 4 different departments, each approximately the size of a football field.
Stressful? Yes – but it’s a testament to the strength of character of each of us, and especially our then manager, Martyn, that we managed it – and made it look easy. I owe a lot to Martyn, as it was he who decided that I was being wasted in the warehouse, and felt that I should be ‘one of the elite’, working in the showroom, and so pushed both me, and the powers that be in upper management, for me to be ‘promoted’ And so I joined the showroom team.

Shortly after that I met the woman who was to take a big chance on me…and end up becoming my surrogate little sister – Rachel MacKenzie.

I’d noticed Rachel when she first joined the BBB, as she was probably the only manager there with such an air of joie de vivre, and positivity that it practically oozed from every pore. Add the fact that she was (and still is) an extremely attractive woman didn’t harm matters either. I was bored stupid on the department I was currently working on, having already mastered office planning and was already looking for a bigger and better challenge after less than 6 months on that department. Judging by the mile-long queues stood at the bedrooms department, I beleive that I had found it.

A position of key-co-worker (a BBB way of saying supervisor) had arose on bedrooms, and I wanted to put in for it. My current managers (Hysterical that the BBB Business department had 3 managers and 4 staff…) took a dim view of me putting in for the job, as they felt that I didn’t have what it took…but one false accusation of theft later, and my conclusively proving how inept the management of that department were, and being cleared of the trumped-up charges that they had laid against me, they couldn’t put me forward for the position fast enough.

My interview for the position was probably one of the best interviews I ever had, with Rachel conclusively proving that she was going to be the best manager I had ever worked for. Every BBB internal interview previously had consisted of the interviewer and interviewee (me) sitting staring at each other for protracted periods of time, asking questions that had stuff all to do with the job, or ‘pat’ ‘I haven’t a frikken clue what I’m doing’ questions – (You know the kind – “what do you feel you can bring to the job?” More imagination that you, clearly chump…”Why should I give you the job?” Cos with questions like that, you’re going to need someone who is even half willing to work with a half-wit like yourself?…”Where do you see yourself in 4 years time?” Stood over your corpse with a smile on my face?…etc) But with Rachel, it was different, and when I walked out of the interview, I felt like I’d ran a marathon.

My time on the bedrooms department was the happiest I’d ever been in the BBB, and Rachel trained me very well. She was tough, completely demanding, and watched me like a hawk, tearing me a new one when I screwed up – which was quite often – and publicly congratulating me when I succeeded or excelled at something. Naturally this made me more driven than ever to succeed and to please her, as I finally felt that I was working for a manager who knew what I wanted and where I wanted to be, without me having to tell them a dozen times.

It’s small wonder that I in the future, when I was running my own department, I often pictured what Rachel would do, when I had a tough decision to make. Nowadays, post-BBB, we are practically brother and sister, and I see her as my mentor, best friend, and little sister.

After bedrooms came under new management, and I had a major clash with the new manager – who to this day I maintain couldn’t manage a pub-crawl with a bunch of alcoholics – I moved back to the BBB Business department….this time returning as specialist (A BBB equivalent of erm…not sure, really – above a supervisor, not quite a manager, but carries out all management tasks…but not an assistant manager either – ‘cos the BBB don’t do them…wink, wink) I quickly set about creating a new team from the ashes of the old team.

Time moved on, and I quickly realised that I was getting sick of the whole BBB situation, as the upper management were getting more and more inept (see prior ‘the madness of King Fanboy’ blog) and coming to work was becoming something I was dreading. I decided it was time to move on. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, plans were being made to get me out of the situation that I, and a lot more like me, were in.

Cue the 15th July, 1 day after my 39th birthday, and the BBB made the announcement that it was having a management reshuffle (Naturally not including the upper management in the re-shuffle – The mentally deficient Store Manager and his utterly incompetant lackeys jobs were safe, as were the jobs of those above him…it’s funny how people who shout ‘needs of the business’ and ‘streamlining the company’ always tend to ensure that the ‘needs’ they’re protecting are their own, and the streamlining doesn’t include the fat pay-rise they’ll give themselves when the dust settles…but I digress…) I discovered that my department was about to be streamlined….from sod-all staff, to much less than that.

At first I was irked when I found out that my job didn’t exist anymore, after all, my department was the only one consistently in the black, I had helped to turn it from £500k down to over £1 million profit and we had worked damned hard at getting there. Some thanks. Then I worked out what 20 years worth of working there made as a redundancy package….and I almost snatched their hands off.

All in all, over 200 years of BBB experience walked out of the door when the time came, something that I suspect the upper management did not forsee when they made the decision to ‘streamline’. My guess is that the idea was to shed the hangers on – the managers, specialists and supervisors who came in and locked themselves in the office for the day, telling their staff that they’re ‘too busy’ to help on the shop floor or see an angry customer. Sure, a few ‘veterans’ might leave, but 99% of people over the 5 – 10 year mark would be dyed-in-the-wool BBB staff, and accept the cut in wages and soldier on with less staff….right?

Nuh-Uh.

As I said, almost 90% of the experienced long term and long service staff – over 200 years worth of experience – took the money and laughed all the way to the bank, leaving all the Hangers on, well, hanging on.
The final days were truly amusing, as the growing realisation of the situation they were in hit the store manager, slowly they realised that the only people capable of running the shop floor were going, leaving mostly a team of managers, etc. who didn’t see dealing with customers, and selling furniture, as their job. I, and many others like me,  were asked to stay, and offered higher pay-grades, and almost considered accepting them…but all in all, we stuck to our guns.

So at the end of August, 2007, my 20 year reign at the BBB ended.

Now, over one year on, and I look back at my time I spent at the BBB with mixed feelings – Do I feel it was wasted time? No, not really…..well, not exactly wasted – Ok, the job I have now is ten thousand times better than anything I did there, but I feel that had I not had the experience of dealing with everything a BBB customer throws at you, or the experience of the continual indoctrination and conditioning that the BBB does to its staff, I would probably have sank without trace within weeks of getting my new job.

The BBB may have prepared me for my future, but it’s the wonderful people like Rachel, Cazza Mozza, Anne (Mother) Barnes and (Auntie) Pearl Cartwright that I worked, laughed, cried and bled with, and who either took me under their wing, or took a chance on me that who helped and shaped me into becoming the person that I am today.

God bless (and have mercy!!) on them all.

Mystery: Final Update (or: It’s funny what you find out when you’re not looking)

It’s a funny thing, life.

Just when you think that you have a pretty good idea of what to expect, something happens that should turn your life upside down, and make you question your entire belief in who you are and the people you know…but for whatever reason, doesn’t.

Instead, life continues on as though the potentially life-changing decision never happened, and you remain totally unaffected.

Take, for example, the woman that the past two blogs named ‘Mystery’ were about. I loved her, she ditched me in the most hurtful way possible, we met again, I realized that I’d never stopped loving her, she seemed to be even more messed up than she was when I knew her originally, she died, I spent almost a year grieving, I moved on, case closed.

Right?

Nope.

The problem lies with the whole ‘She Died’ part….you see, it seems that if she did die, she suddenly got better.
Or, for whatever bizarre reasoning she’d held in her head, she lied and made me believe that she was dead…and let me grieve the death of a living person.

Either way, I should be utterly furious. But I’m not. To be honest, I feel kind of sorry for her.

But first, I know you’re probably wondering how I know that her ‘death’ was a huge lie, and what happened to let me find out, so I’ll tell you.

About 2 months ago I got an email off a site that I’m a member of, telling me that people that I know on that site have updated their profiles, so I wandered over to the site – and let’s face it, It was a dull Sunday afternoon and I was stuck for something to do. It was there that I saw that ‘Miss A’ had recently updated her profile.
Now, I’m a big believer in the afterlife, but I’m pretty certain that it does not have internet access.

I agonised over contacting her via the site, but finally decided against it, purely because – and as a friend said – it could be her grief-stricken ex, keeping her profile going as some kind of odd tribute to her….so I chose not to contact…also because (if I’m honest) I didn’t want to find out that she was disturbed enough to have lied about her own death to someone that she knew loved her.

End of story, right?

Well….not quite. It seems that some things want to be discovered, no matter how much you don’t want to discover them.

Moving forward six or so months after finding out about her online profile being updated, I’m wandering around a local supermarket, when I turn an aisle and see a ghost.

The ghost looks up, sees me staring open mouthed at her, and freezes. I then do something very uncharacteristic of me.

– I ran away.

It was only when I was heading toward the exit that the thought occurred to me that I’m not the one who had clearly faked my death, and so I’m not the one who should be running, and so I stopped dead and turned back, vaguely wondering why I’d ran away in the first place. The rest of my shopping trip was pretty uneventful, and despite a growing feeling that I was being watched, nothing more happened. So much so in fact that by the time I reached the queues at the checkout, I was wondering if I’d been mistaken, and I hadn’t seen her at all.

Then I looked around and saw her again.

She was doing that whole “I’m-looking-but-I’m-trying-to-look-like-I’m-not-looking” thing, and to be honest I was considering doing the same…but decided to go for the full-on “Shouldn’t-you-be-pushing-up-the-daisies?” glances. I eventually paid for my goods, and with satisfaction saw that she was doing the same. I was vaguely wondering wether it would be worth starting a conversation with her, but decided that other than heavy sarcasm, I had nothing to say to her, and so was about to leave when I was nearly knocked over by the ghost literally running with her goods to the exit.

Like I said, it’s a funny thing, life.
When I found out her profile was being regularly updated, I felt betrayed and felt that I needed to speak to her in order to find out why she lied about her death, and why she did that to a person that she knew loved her.

Now, I realize that it doesn’t matter why she did it. – I’m sure she had her reasons, and I’m sure that they may have made sense to her at the time.

As for now? Who can tell – But it looks like Miss A’s story isn’t as over as I once thought it was. And I am actually happy that things didn’t end for her in the way I thought they had.

Kidology.

I spend a lot of time bleating on about how bad I was, back when The BBW reigned supreme, how I’m not like that anymore, & how I’m always trying to atone for the things I did back then.

Granted, I’m not anywhere near as violent as I once was – although the urge to spit on my hands, raise the black flag and start slitting throats still hits me from time to time – but this does not mean that it is safe to assume that because I say I’m no longer The BBW that it means that I am being totally honest with either you, dear reader, or myself.

Yes, most of the time I do try to do the right things, and even sometimes for the right reasons, too. In my prior blog, Jonah & I, I talked about how I’ve been pulled into doing something that, really, I am not keen to do, but don’t seem to have much choice in doing. And here is why I don’t like the task that I seem to have been given:

I don’t know what I’m doing, if I’m doing it right, and at what point I’m expected to walk away and let the person return to independance and allow myself to vanish.

Case in point: There was a person (let’s call her Jessica to protect her privacy…and plus I doubt I’d ever get her permission nowadays to use her name…) each time we initially met, she was in serious danger – at first from a stalker, and then from an attacker (mentioned in a previous blog on here), and each time the BBW ‘dealt’ with the person(s) causing the issue. The 2nd time however, I got too involved, I stayed too long and found myself ingratiating myself into every part of her life, solving every issue that arose – from helping her to become totally independant, to opening her eyes to a wider range of fashion that would suit her!

Somewhere during all this, we fell for each other, got married and had a baby. These were all things that I had previously considered beyond me, and were therefore pointless for me to even consider.

Nevertheless, it happened. Or seemed to.

The first few years were…..interesting, as I strove to be the ideal husband by behaving how I imagined the perfect husband would (and should) act. I’ll always be the first to admit to being a little difficult to be around at times in those first few years, as I struggled to settle into my new role of husband – and later father. In my defence, all I can say is that the transition from sworn loner to family man was not an easy one, by any stretch of the imagination.

Especially not when I was still dealing with The BBW, and the aftermath of closing down that ‘darker’ side of my personality. “Jessica” had a difficult uphill battle on her hands – especially when she couldn’t be sure of who it was that she was dealing with on a daily basis – The sub-BBW or me.
Yes, I had accepted the suggestion that the whole BBW persona could be a mask that I wore to protect myself from being hurt…..but accepting this suggestion didn’t stop the quiet thought/idea that maybe, just maybe, The BBW was the real me, and the new, ‘nice guy’ was the mask?

Even today I still struggle with that question: Who is the real Gabriel Ravensgate – The BBW, or the man hiding The BBW? In fact – and perhaps more importantly – Is there anything of Gabriel Ravensgate left, after having been using another name for so long?

In truth, I’m beginning to think that this question will never be answered truthfully. Mainly because the answer would be entirely based around the assumption that Gabriel Ravensgate existed in the 1st place as a direct entity in his own right, and not just as the extension of a scared 8 year old boy. Ditto for The BBW, who could have always been just a further extension of an isolated 16 year old, horrified at the way his love had died, and angry at being unjustly blamed for her death. Or neither could be true.

In any case, it’s probably truer to state that The BBW, Gabriel Ravensgate, and the person I am nowadays cannot exist without each other, and each of them are neither masks, or ‘past incarnations’ of the person that I am today, but rather are all sum parts of the same person. But this causes a whole new paradox for me: Namely that if this is the case – which I think that it is reasonably safe to say that it is – Then instead of blaming The BBW for all the bad things I did, and the havoc I wreaked while ‘I was him’, then I must instead say that I’m to blame for MY own actions, that The BBW and I are the same person, and always were. Therefore I am still The Big Bad Wolf, and all my claiming to be otherwise was an exercise in self-deception.

Which is not going to be easy to accept.

Jonah & I.

I’ve been thinking a lot about God, recently.

Especially with regard to something that happened to me in Church when I was much younger, and how I’ve been running away from it ever since.

Let me explain.

When I was 14 – maybe even 15 – I was in Church as usual one sunny Sunday morning, a Church I had been attending faithfully for the past 3 years, when a man walked in. Not hugely unusual in itself, except for when you considered that this particular man was considered by many to be a genuine prophet of God. He spoke, churches listened….and the ones that didn’t tended not to last long.

I had personally seen this man in action previously, I had seen him both praise a congregation member for something (was never sure what it was, I only recall that the member of the congregation was thunderstruck that this guy knew about whatever good deed it was that she was doing) and also rebuke another member of the congregation with the words ‘Be sure your sins will find you out’ (6 months later, he was arrested for ‘interfering’ with children)
I had also seen ‘The Prophet’ – for the want of a better name – walk into a packed meeting, walk up to a wheelchair bound woman (That I personally knew as a friend of the family, and had been stuck in the wheelchair since a motorcycle accident) and tell her that God had told him that it was time she walked again. 3 weeks later, she was in happy agony, as feeling rushed back into her legs (much to her doctors consternation). 1 week after that she was learning to walk again. Nowadays she walks everywhere.

So you get the picture. This guy quite literally scared the hell out of me, and out of every Church he entered. So when he asked the Pastor if he could give a short sermon to the congregation that day, The Pastor merely nodded, indicated the pulpit, and sat down, clearly eager to hear what this man had to say.
The sermon was only short, and spoke about the good shepherd who left the 99 sheep to seek out the 1 lost sheep, and how we were not to be concerned about the size of the church, but we were to be very concerned about the sheep who wander away from the congregation, and are lost to ‘the world’.

Interesting, yes, but I was thinking more about getting home and having dinner, as I’d skipped breakfast that morning, and my stomach was complaining about my choice of 15 extra minutes in bed, versus a bowl of cornflakes. So I admit to only really half-listening to the sermon, glad that the guy hadn’t come into the church to reveal my crush on the Pastor’s teenage daughter to the entire congregation……not that I really thought God would notice me long enough to mention that to this guy, but you never knew.

Sermon over, and Pastor looking vaguely uncomfortable and a bit confused, The Prophet – still looking for a better term – made to leave…and stopped next to me. I remember feeling vaguely sick as the guy turned and looked directly at me, then started searching through his pockets. I even remember the fast prayer I inwardly sent up to heaven as I smiled sickly backat this guy – it went like this:

“OhGodnopleasenodon’tleteveryoneknowaboutmefancyinghelenpleasedon’t
I’llbeagoodboyandputmoneyintheofferingforeverpleasedon’ttellhimtotellthempleasedon’tjustdon’tpleaseJ esusAmen”
Then the guy brought a small bottle of oil out of his pocket, opened it and poured it over my head.

Suitably unimpressed and totally confused as to what was happening, I regarded him with the typically British “excuse me, but I think you’ve just deliberately poured oil over my carefully hair-sprayed head” sort of way. He then took my hands and declared to me (and to a silent congregation) that God had ‘Chosen me to be a protector of the downcast, forgotten and unloved, and to be a healer of hearts’
I smiled, nodded politely – I even think I might have said “That’s nice of him, thanks” – and hoped desperately that he’d made a mistake and anointed the wrong person.

After the meeting I was glad to get home, after having the Pastor and church elders telling me over and over again how ‘fortunate I was that God had chosen me for this wonderful and important task’ (Yeah, but why me?) How I was going to be the ‘good shepherd, seeking out the lost and forgotten’ (Really? can’t I just hand out the hymn books instead, like everyone else?)
I was glad to wash my hair for the 2nd time that day, and inwardly was hoping to also wash away the job I’d just been told I had to do…so while my family were enthusing about having the person ‘The Prophet’ had come to see sat at the dinner table, I was sat silent and thoughtful – already strapping on my best mental running shoes, and doing my stretching exercises in preparation for the marathon that I knew lay before me.

12 years later, and I’m 26, I’ve been the Big Bad Wolf for a few years, and I’m a good 10 years into running away from both God, and the job I’d been told He’d picked me for.

I’m in a chip-shop after the usual night out of hard drinking, womanising and random violence, when the tramp in front of me realises that he doesn’t have enough money for the chip supper he’s just ordered. The disappointment coming off him is almost palpable. In a totally uncharacteristic show of compassion, I tell the guy behind the counter to throw a few ‘torpedo’ sausages onto the tramps chip supper and that I’d pay for it. The guy behind the counter does a double-take, but knowing the shortness of my fuse, and my reputation for acts of extreme violence on people who don’t do what I tell them to do, the moment I tell them to do it, he wordlessly complies. I get my own fish supper, pay for both meals and leave.

The tramp is waiting for me outside.

I glance at him and begin to walk past, when the tramp grabs hold of my shoulder and begins to say something to me, something that I remember clearly to this day, as if he’d only said it to me a moment ago.(I remember glancing into the chip shop when the tramp grabs me, and seeing the guy behind the counter see this happening, wince, and start to reach for the phone – probably to call either the police, or an ambulance…or both. Neither were needed.)
The tramp says in a suprisingly clear and gentle voice, that “God will never let me escape the task he had set before me, that I can run, but the task will follow me everywhere I go. No matter how hard or how far I run, or how unholy and unGodlike I try to be, I will never run away from the light that is inside me. The light has been lit, and the unloved, the lost and the forgotten will seek me out.”
I turn to snarl a sharp, angry (and very, very scared) reply back to the tramp…..and find myself facing an empty street. I look back into the chip shop, hoping that I wasn’t going nuts and that the tramp had ran into the relative safety of the chip shop…only to see the guy behind the (empty) counter staring back at me frozen in place, phone in hand, jaw wide open, and looking utterly dumbfounded. I scowl even further, hoping to hide the fear that I was now feeling, and storm off.

Instead of accepting this for the fair warning that it was, I ran even harder.

It’s only now, now that I’m looking back that I see the real humour of the situation – and I’m positive that God has been laughing hard enough to nearly fall off his throne at the fact that I’ve been that determined not to help people, that I’ve been helping them every step of the way – and never seeing it until now.

It was only recently, when I was chatting to a friend and she asked me how I knew when she needed help, as I have an eerie, uncanny knack of turning up when she has a disaster or crisis happening in her life, helping her solve the issue, or supporting her through the issue…and then fading away to the background again – that I slowly realised that that was how I’d met each and every one of my close friends and acquaintances.

In every case, I’d ‘bumped into’, met, or turned up just when the person was either reaching their lowest point, or was about to. And in every case I watched over them, was totally at their disposal for a shoulder to cry on or an ear to hear, and generally did all I can to bring them through the bad place that they found themselves in….and in every case, the situation they were in directly mirrored a situation I had already been through, and so knew what they were to expect, and could advise them on the best things for them to do…or the right words for me to say to them.

I used to think that I’ve had a crappy life, and that nothing good happened to me…but now I see it for what it was. I’ve not had a crappy life at all, but rather I’ve had a life full of amazing and interesting experiences – some good, some terrible – but all of them are of some use to somebody.
I’ve never been able to deny the existance of God – bearing in mind the impossible things that I’ve seen, a paralysed woman walk, the dead raised, even myself knowing instinctively how a person is feeling, without ever having met them before, for example – but I have been guilty of saying that God had forgotten and abandoned me….when that was never the case. In fact, I think I have him to thank for all the wonderful friends I have, and the amazing people I’ve had the total pleasure of meeting, or even helping out.

So what now? Do I grow a beard, wear sackcloth and ashes and go from town to town, seeking out the lost, unloved, lonely and forgotten and changing their lives a la Michael Brandon in Highway to Heaven? (and yes, I just had to Google that!) Nope, not at all. All I think I’m going to do is carry on living my life, just as I always have.

Oh yes, and I’ll also stop running.

The Date…Part One. (A not so short story)

(*Note: This story is one of a series of 5, the first being ‘Epitaph’ all based around one night in a Nightclub…)
The alarm blared into life shortly after six in the morning. An arm emerged from beneath the untidy pile of blankets on the nearby bed and punched the alarm clock into a sullen silence. A few silent moments passed before a low groan was heard and the pile of blankets began to convulse as a mop of dishevelled brown hair made an unwilling appearance from between them.  The arm reached out as the hand attempted to find the crumpled packet of cigarettes lying next to the bed. After several attempts, and many muffled swear-words  the hand finally located and grasped the cigarettes. Pulling one from the pack, and picking up a lighter emblazoned with the words “Too dumb to care”, the arm retreated back beneath the blankets.
Another long moment passed before the arm decided to make its way toward the still (pretty much) blanket shrouded head. Another arm appeared as the blankets were slowly pulled away from the head, revealing a male face of indeterminate age framed by a shock of brown hair, which was currently pointing in all directions of the compass. The cigarette finally made it into the mouth, and was lit. The silence of the room was immediately shattered as the figure in the bed had a coughing fit. There followed another stream of curses, and the figure gingerly sat upright. Extricating himself from the blankets and standing up, the naked figure looked blearily into a nearby mirror and groaned.
Muttering something about ‘looking forward to retirement’; he rummaged through a pile of crumpled clothing, found the items he was looking for, and stumbled into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he emerged, washed, dressed, and fairly clean shaven.
The cluttered kitchen was his next stop, where he made himself a strong cup of coffee while he sorted through the morning’s mail. There were ten letters, eight of which looked official and were thrown into the overflowing bin without ever being opened. The other two letters were opened, glanced at, and put down in a coffee spill on the work surface as he wandered out of the kitchen. With a world – weary sigh he struggled into his coat, checked for his keys, and left the house for work.
The closer he got to work, the lower his spirits sank. After saying “Good morning” in a ‘What’s so good about it?’ tone of voice to the ever attentive security guard when he reached his place of work, he made his unwilling way to his office where he sat down and turned on his computer. When lunch time finally arrived, and after checking his watch for the Nth time since he first sat down, he directed one more choice phrase that would’ve made a rugby player blush at his computer, before logging out and going for lunch.
“I’m completely pissed off.”
He confided to his friend as he sat opposite her in the half – empty staff canteen ten minutes later. His friend, although not exactly drop – dead gorgeous, but not far off the mark, smiled back at him.
“Danny, you say that to me nearly every day.”
Her smile started to nullify the dark cloud that had been hanging over him all day (As it always did.)
“That’s because I’m pissed off nearly every day.”
His friend laughed and shook her head.
“What am I going to do with you?”
A list of things that he wanted her to do with him instantly sprang into his mind, closely followed by a list of similar things that he wanted to do with her, and after a gargantuan effort he managed not to dwell on any of them.
“I could tell you, but you’d probably give me such a slap!”
He said with a laugh. She ran her fingers through her jet black waist length hair, and batted her ice blue eyes at him coquettishly.
“I might slap you anyway for being such a grumpy sod this morning.”
“Is that a promise, Miss Richards?”
He asked with a Please-God-let-it-be grin on his face. She gave him a light slap across the back of his hand as she shook her head.
“You’re incorrigible!”
“C’mon Kelly, you know me – I’m a lot of things that end in ibble”
“F’r instance?”
“Well, there’s incredible, for starters.”
Kelly rolled her eyes in mock disgust.
“Not to mention irresistible.” she added with a half-smile.
Danny smiled in return, hoping that Kelly couldn’t hear his heart pounding.
“Kelly, I’ve been wondering….”
Danny paused, and took a sip of water, inwardly cursing the sudden dryness in his throat, and the butterflies in his stomach.  Kelly leaned forward on the table,  cupping her chin in the palm of her hand, as her half-smile threatened to become a beaming grin.
“Yes, Danny?” She asked, mentally willing him on to ask the question which had been hovering in the air between them for the past six months.
“I’ve been wondering whether you’d like to go out for a drink with me.” The words came out in a rush, almost jumbling together in Danny’s haste to say them before he lost the nerve to ask.
Kelly’s smile became a grin.
“I thought you were never going to ask” She replied.
“Is that a yes, then?” He asked, instantly feeling stupid for asking such an inane question.
“Of course it’s a yes!” She laughed, shaking her head, “The only question is when?”
Danny pretended to examine his fingernails as he fought to get his overjoyed brain working again.
“How about tonight? – I mean, are you doing anything tonight?”
Kelly smiled and nodded slowly “I am now!”
The rest of the meals in front of them were generally forgotten as they organized the details of the coming evening.  For both Danny and Kelly, the remainder of their working day seemed to pass fairly quickly as they looked forward to getting home and getting ready.  As soon as his work day finished, Danny went home to prepare.  After an hour spent trying to decide which clothes to wear, and a further half an hour meticulously cleaning every square inch of his body, Danny swore never to participate in jokes about women being vain for as long as he lived.  Following a quick glance at his watch, and a much longer and more critical stare at his reflection in his full length mirror, he finally considered himself presentable.
It was almost eight o’ clock by the time Danny arrived at their agreed meeting place, a small pub called ‘The Royal Flush’.  Finding a seat was easy, due to the fact that the pub was nearly deserted, with only a few locals stood around the bar, talking about football. Danny ordered a pint of Lager, and sat down as near to the door as he could.
Ten minutes later the door opened as Kelly breezed in. Dressed in a lightweight cream dress (low-cut and short enough to be considered ‘daring’, but not enough to be considered ‘tarty’,) and a light grey summer jacket, she looked beautiful enough to knock Danny out of step. Her hair, usually held up in a loose pony tail, had been intricately sculpted into a cascade of ebony ringlets that spilled in a clearly orchestrated chaos of curls across her shoulders. Danny had to almost physically restrain his jaw from hitting the ground in awe. Smiling at Danny, she started to make her way to the bar until Danny recovered himself, and deftly intercepted her.
“I believe that I’m supposed to buy the first drink, and any thereafter.” He smiled, gently guiding her to a seat on his table.
“Why Daniel Williams, You never told me that you were a gentleman!” She responded as she sat down.
“That’s because you never asked, Miss Richards. Now, what would you like to drink?”
“I’ll have a white wine and soda, if it’s all the same to you”
Danny bowed in what he hoped was a reasonable impression of a waiter, and went to the bar for the drinks. He brought the drinks back and presented Kelly with hers with a flourish.
“Your drink, milady”
Laughing, Kelly took the offered drink from him “My thanks, migentleman!” she responded.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, a comfortable silence at first, but eventually the comfort began to wear off as each fought to think of something to say. Kelly was the first to break the silence.
“So what shall we talk about now?” She asked with a smile.
Danny shrugged gently. “What about the weather?” He asked with a wry grin.
“Oh, piss off!” Kelly laughed “What weather? Do you mean the rain, or the rain?”
Danny chuckled. “Yeah, we do seem to be in the middle of England’s monsoon season, don’t we?”
“Monsoon season? I’m thinking about building an ark, and raiding the local zoo!”
The evening began to pass quickly as they began to warm to each other’s company, until by the time the bell was rung for last orders at the bar, they were sat hand in hand.
“Do you fancy going to a club?” Kelly suddenly asked.
Danny nodded eagerly. “Yes, which one – what about ‘Hatters’?”
Kelly paused, then shook her head. “No, I was thinking more along the lines of going to ‘The Blue World’.”
Danny smiled at her, pulling what he hoped was a reasonable facsimile of an impressed expression. “That’s a bit up – market isn’t it?”
“Not for the likes of us it isn’t.” She replied with a wry smile.
The rain had stopped by the time they left the pub, and a chill wind cut easily through the thin jacket Kelly was wearing. Trying to stifle the odd involuntary shiver, she slipped her arm around Danny’s waist. Danny smiled at her.
“Would you like to wear my jacket?” He asked, feeling her shiver against him.
“You’ll freeze to death.” She replied.
“Don’t worry about that.” Danny responded, as he took his leather jacket off and held it open for her. She put it on, turning around to face him as Danny buttoned it up for her. As he straightened the collar, Kelly slipped her arms around his waist, pulling him to her. Their lips met, gently at first, and then with increasing passion as each responded to the others kisses. Danny breathed in her perfume, felt the softness of her skin as she pressed herself against him. His hands slid down the jacket to rest on her hips, and he felt the heat of her body under the thin fabric of her dress, as it moved against the bare skin beneath. He then felt his own body start to respond in kind.
“Now isn’t this a pretty picture?”
The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and they broke off the kiss as they looked around, trying to see its owner. A figure stepped out of the shadows of a nearby alleyway and nodded at Kelly, as he glared at Danny.
“Evening, Kell.”
Kelly sighed, a sound of almost pure anger. “Matthew, I told you a long time ago to leave me alone, Don’t make me tell you again.”
Danny looked from one to the other in astonishment, hoping that his erection wasn’t visible to either of them, and promising himself that he was never going to wear boxer shorts again.

“You two know each other?” he asked, glad that it was relatively dark
“Knew each other is the correct phrase.” corrected Kelly “But he’s too thick to know when to give up.”
“Do you want me to remind him how to give up?” Danny asked,
“No, he’s not worth it. “ Kelly replied “C’mon let’s go dancing.”
The next few minutes were a few minutes in Danny’s life that he would never forget, as time seemed to slow down for him. He heard ‘Matthew’ shout something from behind them, and heard him start running toward them. Almost in slow motion, Danny turned to try to protect Kelly from whatever it was ‘Matthew’ had in mind, only to watch Kelly give ‘Matthew’ the most perfect roundhouse kick he had ever seen outside of a Van Damme movie. ‘Matthew’ was lifted off his feet and sent flying backwards with blood streaming from his mouth and nose. Time then returned to normal as ‘Matthew’ hit the ground with a bone jarring thud, and lay still. Danny stared at Kelly in awe.
“I think you’ve broken his jaw!” he exclaimed “Where ?  How? …I mean, I didn’t know you could do Kung Fu!” Danny stammered, looking from the clearly unconscious Matthew to Kelly, and back again.
Kelly shrugged. “I can’t do Kung Fu – But Kickboxing….Now that, I can do, and have been for the past eight years. Don’t worry about him,” She said, nodding down at the slowly stirring figure on the ground, “He’ll be all right, I didn’t kick him hard enough to break anything except his nose and maybe a few teeth, maybe now he’ll leave me alone in future. – Now are we going to go dancing, or what?” She asked, slipping her arm around Danny’s waist. Danny smiled at her ruefully as they walked away together.
“Like I’m going to argue with you, after seeing that?” He asked as he put his arm around her “Just one thing I ask of you..”
Kelly raised an eyebrow at him. “What’s that?”
They stopped by a waiting taxi. “Be gentle with me.” He grinned at her .
Kelly burst out laughing.
“We’ll see.” She replied, giving him a gentle squeeze as they climbed in.
Mercifully the queues leading into the club were relatively short, and entering the club was easy, it being Danny’s experience of entering ‘The Blue World’ of waiting for hours in the freezing cold before having the indignity of being frisked by the over suspicious doormen. This time neither was the case, and Danny suppressed a sigh of relief, not relishing the idea of being manhandled by another man twice his width in front of Kelly.
Inside the club was a garish nightmare of multicoloured neon, laser lightshows, pulsing lights and pounding bass heavy dance music. Heavily oiled and scantily clad podium dancers twisted their bodies through a multitude of gravity defying contortions in time to the music, whilst the night club clientele either queued at all  of the five bars, or gawked in barely hidden lust at the gyrating dancers. Danny  squinted in the clouds of dry ice that seemed to shroud the inside of the club.
“Music loud enough for you?” Danny had to almost shout to be heard over  the near – deafening  noise of the dance music. Kelly smiled back at him,  and winked.
“Too quiet, really – I think that they should turn it up a little bit, don’t you?”
“Yeah – I almost heard myself think then.”
“That’ll never do, will it?”
“Well, you know what they say – Thinking leads to intelligence,  intelligence leads to dissatisfaction with the status quo, and dissatisfaction leads to revolution – and we don’t want that do we?”
Kelly looked impressed. “Did you just come up with that?”
“With what?” Danny had to almost put his mouth over her ear to be heard, and caught a brief dizzying hint of her perfume as she moved slightly in time to the music.
“ With all that about intelligence and revolution.”
Danny was tempted to say that he’d made it up, but knew that Kelly would eventually find out the truth. He decided that the best course of action would be to appear blasé.
“Must’ve read it somewhere.” He concluded after appearing in thought for a moment.
Kelly nodded then took his arm, half-dragging him toward the dance floor. “C’mon, I thought that we came here to dance the night away, So lets get some dancing done – it’s ten past twelve already.”
Danny smiled in reply, and glanced at his watch, noticing with mild surprise that the time was just gone ten past midnight.
“Before we trip the light fantastic I think that I’ve got to visit the little boy’s room” Danny said apologetically to her, turning toward the brightly lit door which stated ‘Guys’ in electric blue neon. Kelly pulled him back, a mischievous smile on her face.
“You mean that you’re not sure whether you need to go or not?”
Danny looked at her, pretending to be nonplused. “I’m not sure? What do you mean?” he asked innocently.
Kelly rolled her eyes “Nothing. Never mind, I was being facetious” Danny smiled and winked.
“So was I.” Laughing, he turned and walked through the doorway that led into the toilets, leaving Kelly smiling at him, not really knowing what he meant as he left.

While Danny was busy in the men’s room, Kelly made her way to the crowded bar to order Danny and herself a drink, then turned to soak up the atmosphere of the club. Nodding and smiling vaguely at passers-by, she waited until the drinks had been served by the slightly harassed bar staff, before positioning herself within easy sight of the men’s toilets. Danny returned to her side a few moments later with a perplexed expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kelly, suddenly feeling a vague sense of foreboding.
“It’s probably nothing,” Danny started, feeling slightly ridiculous “But I think I just heard some guy in there say that he had a gun.”
Kelly’s eyes widened slightly and her gaze automatically flicked across to the imposing figures of the doormen, who were currently locked in conversation with two giggling women. “Do you think that you’d better tell a bouncer?” she asked.
Danny shrugged “I don’t know, what if I’ve got it wrong, and the guy’s drunk and talking about his dick?”
Kelly nodded grudgingly. “Yeah. Then they’d probably throw you out for wasting their time”
“Or beat the crap out of me, then throw me out.” Danny added.
“Still….” Kelly took Danny’s hand “No point tempting fate, is there?”
Danny saw what she had in mind, and allowed himself to be led further away from the toilet door. They took up a position near the dance floor, but  within easy sight of the male toilet doors. Within five minutes of them moving, and no movement from the toilet doors, other than the usual traffic of people wandering in and out , Danny was beginning to wonder whether he had imagined the voice in the cubicle.
Kelly noticed his look of doubt and interpreted his thoughts correctly “Glad you didn’t tell a boun..”
Danny frowned, wondering why Kelly had stopped mid-sentence, her eyes locked on something over his shoulder. Turning slowly, with a feeling like a ball of ice had suddenly grown inside his stomach, Danny noticed that the toilet doors had burst open, and there was a slim, unkempt man standing (Guns?) outside the men’s toilet doors shouting something (Christ, is he waving guns around?) and waving, Danny realized with a sick feeling, two very large guns at the crowd of clubbers staring at him.
Two things happened at once for Danny at that moment; time slowed down on him for the second time that night, and he came face to face with his own mortality.

In a moment of curious detachment, Danny noticed that the music was still playing, but nobody was dancing to it, save for one person on the top dance floor, who was obviously in a world of their own where guns didn’t kill people. Danny suddenly found himself wishing that he were in the same world as that person. The DJ obviously noticed that he was no longer the centre of attention any more and shut off the music. (The person on the top dance floor continued to dance, regardless, Danny noticed)
For a moment, absolute silence reigned, as the gunman looked at the clubbers, and vice versa. Danny stole a glance at Kelly, preparing himself to push her out of harms way when the time came, but saw that there was nowhere to push her to, the crowd hemming them in on all sides. Then the gunman screamed something that sounded like ‘Miss his Range’, one of the heavily oiled dancers (Male, Danny noted to himself) screamed something else, and Hell was let loose in ‘The Blue World’
There was a deafening roar as the gunman’s guns went off together ‘Was one aimed in my direction? I heard the shot, so I’m not dead  – missed me, dickhead’  thought Danny as he turned to push Kelly behind him and out of harm’s way. In-between him starting to turn, the guns going off, and him continuing to turn, somebody gave his jacket a sharp tug, his wallet seeming to shudder in his inside pocket and Danny’s first thought was of amazement that somebody should be trying to pick pockets during a situation like this, inwardly cringing and thinking of Armageddon when the thunderclap of the guns going off sounded.
(All this happened within a split second, Danny realized later, when all had calmed down and he had discovered who or what had tried to ‘lift’ his wallet.)
As he turned toward Kelly, Danny saw that she was holding her stomach, a look of faint surprise etched across her face, casting a wary glance over his shoulder toward the gunman – who seemed to have troubles of his own, his face screwed up in agony, his gun hands flopping uselessly at the end of broken wrists, a thin reedy scream issuing from his mouth – then looking back at Kelly who was starting to frown.
“You okay, Kelly?” Danny asked, feeling stupid for asking, but not knowing what else to say.
Kelly held her hand out toward him “Danny, I think..” (Danny now noticed with growing horror the crimson flower slowly spreading across the front of Kelly’s cream dress, and the red petals of blood dripping off Kelly’s outstretched fingers) “I think I’ve been sh…..” she continued as her eyes rolled up into her head and she pitched forward in a dead faint, being saved from further damage by a stunned Danny who caught her and eased her gently to the floor.
Vaguely, Danny heard someone howling at the top of their voice, it was a howl of outraged horror, a sound of an anger and impotent fury too much for one man to bear. It was a sound which drove a cold chill up Danny’s back, a chill that grew even more wintry when he realized that it was he who was making the noise.
Danny realized that it wasn’t only him giving voice to his pain, as he saw the gunman still trying to use his broken wrists……

(to be continued)

Pretentious….

I write poetry. There. I said it.

However, I am NOT a poet. If being ‘a poet’ is being anything like 99% of the poets I have ever met, and any of the alleged poets I have seen on TV, Radio, or met in person, then I utterly refuse to be tarred with the same brush as they.

You won’t find me bibbling on about ‘textual photographs’ or how my poetry is ‘drawing a picture on the canvas of life’, or how ‘the poet is no longer an oracle but a populist amalgam of current thought‘ (actual quote). The only thing that I will say of what I write, is that I can manage to string a bunch of words together – sometimes they rhyme, sometimes they don’t. There’s no great mystery about what I do, and as far as I’m concerned, anyone could do it.

I’m sorry, I’ve been browsing the top poetry blogs on a certain ‘Social Networking’ site- Let’s call it ‘Myface Spacebook’ – and it’s annoyed me that half of the poems on there are flowery meaningless junk, with the so called poets applauding themselves for the ability to create a few rhyming sentences and acting like there is some great mystery to what they do, and there is some kind of extra special ability to being a poet. Then their readers fawn over them, telling them how great they are, and how relevant their words are to modern society, attempting to speak indecipherable gibberish in order to sound learned & like they know what they’re talking about.

Sure, some ARE good, and I’ve even liked some of the poems, but let’s make no mistake here, poetry is not difficult to write. It doesn’t need to rhyme, or be very long. As long as it means something to the person who wrote it, then in my (space)book, that’s fine. If the audience can get involved and can share some of the emotion that was being felt as the poem was written, even better.

A long time ago, when I used to do readings to rooms full of people & took writing seriously, it used to irk me a little that I was always cornered at the end of a reading by several groups of people:
The old dears who wanted to tell me that I was a nice young man & Jesus had a plan for me (still waiting…)
The Students who wanted to ‘know what I meant by….‘ ‘Was I implying…when I said…‘ ‘was this a reference to…‘ (Sorry mate, it’s just something I wrote on the back of a cigarette packet a week ago & stretched out into a poem two hours before reading it out to you – I wrote it because I was drunk/sober/happy/sad about something/someone…delete as applicable)
and worst of all…
Other Poets who wanted to know what I thought of their work, did I get annoyed when ‘non-poets’ tried to write, or tell me the juxtaposition of stanza x didn’t correllate with what was being said in the segue, and have you thought of re-writing it by changing y to z – crediting them, of course…(Ummm…what?)
Hence the fact that I stopped writing for a while…I really didn’t want to turn into someone who thought that being able to string enough sentences together to make a poem or story made me special. Because it really doesn’t.

It’s rather like my opinion of Jogging Bores – people who think that the ability to jog makes them special in some way. It doesn’t. I’m a biped, I can jog too. I just don’t want to. The name Jim Fixx mean anything to you?

I can write poems, but I’m not a poet. I’m just me.

Epitaph…a short story.

I’ve been planning this for weeks.

Horrible weeks that seemed to stretch out forever, as the hateful doubts filled my head again and again and again. But this time I’m not going to listen to them, No sir, not me, I’m gonna do it.
And when I do it, all those perfect little people with their perfect little lives and their perfect little jobs and their perfect little partners and their perfect little clothes are gonna form their perfect little mouths into shocked little circles, and die. Then I’m gonna laugh long and loud.
It was a real bitch trying to figure out a way to get my guns into here without those monkey-suited doormen stopping me, but I did it.

Ha.

I was really clever, much more intelligent than those steroid soaked muscle bags, I figured it out and then did it. I posed as a cleaner, easy really, with the size of this place, even got a job as a cleaner here so that I could do it, but I was never a real cleaner, really, even though I was getting paid to be one, I was pretending all the time. Yes sir, they all thought that I was a cleaner, even the company I was working for, ‘Interclean’ thought I was, gave me an identity card and everything, but I was never a real cleaner.
Hmm. Thinking about it, maybe I am a cleaner tonight, I’m gonna clean this place clear of maggots, so maybe I am. Don’t give a shit either way, I’ve been planning this for weeks and I’m gonna do it tonight, Then I’m going to laugh. I’m going to laugh like they laughed at me that night when that bitch beat me up on the dance floor.
Fuck. I said she beat me up. Damn. I feel like a wimp now, But I’m not, I swear it and they’re all going to find out that I’m not a wimp tonight. Oh, Yes indeedy. She didn’t beat me up, no, I just won’t hit a woman and she was so very pretty and then I spoke to her and she spoke to me and I asked her a question and she answered it and I told her my funniest number one joke and she didn’t laugh and I said that she was crazy not to laugh ‘cos. it was the funniest joke in the world and she said that it was the sickest joke in the world and I knew straightaway that she was thinking those thoughts about me and so I told her that she was the sickest ugliest bitch in the world and she hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and I won’t hit a woman ‘cos I’m a gentleman, that’s me, and I heard them all laughing at me and I knew that my nanna was right and that people are bad so I have to make them see that I am not a wimp, that I’m a big tough man like in all the films and so I’m going to kill all of them.

Just a few more minutes.

I can hear the music boom chakka booming away through the toilet doors. It’s funny how all the music sounds the same from in here but I don’t know why. I’m laughing to myself because I’m so very clever. I knew that the teachers at school were wrong when they said that I was slow and that I had learning difficulties because I hadn’t read much. I did read, but not the books that they’d given to me, I read my comics and I knew that I was going to be like Wyatt Earp and Superman and clean up a town and tonight I’m going to do it. I’ve taken all my guns from their hiding places in this toilet cubicle, fifth one from the left, and loaded them, and got a hard-on when they ‘ka-chicked’ when I put the bullets in them –

Oh.

That was smutty talk. I’m sorry Nanna, I didn’t mean it, but it’s true. No, I’m not really turned on by this gun, I was thinking of that girl I slept with once. She was so very pretty too, but she laughed at me too, when I didn’t get hard straight away.

Bitch.

She deserved what she got, it’s just a shame that it wasn’t me that did it. She married that Big Man, and he used to beat her, and then he killed her, and he said that it was an accident, but I know better, I know that she probably laughed at him too, and he obviously got very angry with her, and so he…….

Somebody’s just walked in, but they can’t see me because I’ve got the cubicle door shut and locked and the music is still boom chakka booming away outside, and now my hands are sweating. (I wonder if the song outside has changed? It doesn’t sound like it, but it’s so hard to tell from in here.)
Oh, God. What if this guy knows about me and my plan? He can’t know, he just can’t. I’ve kept it a real good secret, told nobody, not even Mrs. Grange who lives next door to me. She’s an old lady and she’s a nice old lady, not like those other old ladies who look at you funny like scared mice, like they’re worried that you’re going to steal their pension off them, or beat them up, or kill them, or something but I wouldn’t do something like that because I’m a gentleman, Yes sir, that’s me, a gentleman and Mrs. Grange invites me into her house and gives me cups of tea in china cups and little cakes that taste like shit, But I don’t tell her that they taste like shit, Because she’s a nice old lady and I’m a gentleman.
She tells me that I remind her of her son Bobby who got killed in a motorbike accident, ten years ago and she gets sad when she thinks of him, and I tell her that if she likes, I’ll be her pretend son and make her proud and she smiles and says that she’d like that very much and that I’m sweet and a nice young man and I smile because I like her, and I’m smiling now because I’m going to make her proud of me tonight.
Whoever it was has gone out now, and he didn’t even wash his hands, filthy dirty maggot. I wish I’d seen who he was so that I could shoot him first. BANG! And it wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t washed his hands after using the toilet.

Two more minutes.

I’m getting nervous now, but in two more minutes it will be half past midnight, and this club will be almost full up to the dance floor, it always is at half twelve on a Saturday night, and it’s nearly one minute and thirty seconds to that now. My watch is so very pretty, Mrs Grange gave it to me for Christmas. She said that it was her late husband Charlie’s (God rest his soul, amen.) and he’d have liked me to have had it, even though I’ve never met him. I went to his grave with Mrs. Grange once, and she put flowers on his grave and she cried a little and said look at me, senile emotional old woman that I am, and I said You’re not a senile emotional old woman, you just still love Charlie (God rest his soul, amen.) even though he’s not here anymore, and I think that he’s waiting for you to join him in Heaven someday, and so is Bobby. And Mrs. Grange laughed and cried at the same time and kissed me on the cheek and said that I was a very nice young man, and that Charlie (God rest his soul, amen.) would think so too, and then at that Christmas she gave me his watch, and I’ve taken very good care of it, and I only ever wear it on special occasions.

Like tonight.

It’s Time.

I’m going to unlock the door and get my guns ready to be fired while I check that the coast is clear, because you never know. All clear. I have a lot of guns, three in all, and they’re very heavy but I don’t mind, and the extra bullets I’ve brought are heavy too, but I don’t mind that either because the weight will make me muscular in time until I look like Superman, or Arnold Schwarznegger, and then every man will respect me, and all the women will want to sleep with me, because any intelligent man knows that that’s what women want in a male – the two ‘M’s – Money and Muscles, that’s all they’re interested in, Oh, yes indeedy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a gentleman like me, or would love them forever and ever and a day and never hurt them, they don’t care and laugh in your face. But get some muscles and a lot of money and every woman will be trying to get you into bed with them, everyone knows that. I think if I carry these guns around for long enough I’ll get lots of muscles and all the girls will want me, there’s no mistaking that.

Half past twelve exactly.

I’m feeling the butterflies in my stomach starting to wake up as I approach the door that leads out into the night-club, but they will go away after I’ve killed the first few maggots, I expect.
Here I go. My Nanna and Mrs. Grange are both going to be so very proud of me after I finish my work here tonight.

Oh, Yes They Will.