Who needs wit when you can be pointlessly cheeky? (EDIT)

Does anybody here watch Grange Hill?

Nobody? Good, it's shit now. But does anybody remember back when it was good? And when I say that, I mean about five serieses ago, before they moved the school to the middle of Liverpool and had that twat guy Togger or Tigger or whatever he was with the orange skin turn up and fuck it all up? Yeah? Before the stupid video game style opening? Anybody remember that?

The last proper series of Grange Hill was cracking. There was this evil deputy head guy who hit a pupil and tried to get him thrown out of school and who was really really mean to the kids. I think he ended up blowing up the school at the end of the season by accidentally setting fire to it (how do you blow up a school with a single match? I mean, just showing us a shot of some bottles in a chemistry laboratory is not enough to suspend my belief, but anyway). I can't even remember if it was established if he was killed in the resulting HUGE blast or if he escaped. I like to think he did, and even now I hope that he'll wander back into set, wearing a permanently hood-up hoodie á la Sam in Hollyoaks, and murder a few pupils. Oh I can only dream.

Why am I even talking about this? Oh yeah, well basically I was remembering the second-to-last episode, the one when the good pupils of Grange Hill realised that Mr Von Dastardly was evil and tried to stop him by putting his picture up on the website (I LOVE how I remember all of this but if you ask me who Deborah Tanning was, I'm stumped). Basically, Mr Von Dastardly found out and went a bit batshit. He stole a semiautomatic shotgun from the PE shed and marauded around the school, blasting holes in pupils left right and center. BLAM there goes the history teacher's chest-cavity. BOOM take that token black girl. CRASH oh NO KIDS YOUR HEADMASTER DOESN'T HAVE A STERNUM. It was such a good episode, and it ended with him mowing down a bunch of 11 year olds, straightening his tie, and being like "Stay in school kids... FOREVER" and cackling at his pathetic witticism.



Fucken dog. Ok FINE the shotgun thing probably didn't happen, which makes the previous two paragraphs totally redundant, especially as the rest of this post hinges on the idea of running around school with a shotgun killing 11 year olds. Which is what I would have quite happily spent most of today doing. But let's have a memento-style flashback because I'm smart like Ian McEwan and I understand the basics of non-chronological storytelling.

The day didn't start well. As I walked along the street to school, some little kid leant out of a car window and yelled "ALRIGHT MATE" to me. I don't know why, but I take serious offence at being greeted by people I don't know, especially when it is done in such a flippant manner. It also annoyed me that I looked round while walking to see his ugly little mockingly grinning face. It triply annoyed me that my legs kept walking and I was unable to think of an appropriately witty comeback. At all. I had essentially been outwitted by an 11 year old yelling "ALRIGHT MATE". I mean, that's not even a joke. It's just a greeting. I'm sure Oscar Wilde would have been able to slice that little shit down with a well placed blast of irony. But I was ironyless. I just kind of gaped and walked along the road listening to the Subways.

This happened another two times in the next few hours; small children waved at me and yelled ALRIGHT MATE which annoyingly jolted me out of my intellectual reveries about what it'd be like if there were an infinite dimensions, and the horrifying sense of the vastness of infinity. When you are thinking about an alternative dimension in which the only difference in the whole of human history is the fact that you happen to be wearing a green shirt instead of a blue one on a given day, being distracted by some pimply sugar-hopped eleven year old is hardly welcome.

This just adds to my hypothesis that young people nowadays do not respect their elders. When I was a little third year, I always respected my elders. In fact, I lived in mortal fear of the mighty 6th Formers who could crush me with their mighty strength and wisdom. I vowed that I would be friendly and nice to all the little implings when I was a 6th Former, and would spread peace and light across the galexy. And now, when I'm the oldest pupil in the school and am polite enough to not ram them out of the way, to occasionally hold open a door for them, to abstain from smacking them across the back of the head, what do they do? They take the piss and greet me impudently. Little shits. I don't think they're even particularly victimising me; they seem to just be generally cheekier to everyone. Fuckers.

My only consolation was that these kids probably haven't hit puberty yet and its unlikely that they had ever kissed a girl. This is my only comeback whenever I am outwitted by some dipshit 11 year old, and when the third little kid leapt out at me from the top of the biology staircase and yelled HELLO at me, I was ready.
"Oh yeah, well your balls haven't even dropped yet AND I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND," I yelled. The kid fell to his knees. His bottom lip quivered. He started to cry.
"IT'S RIGHT! I'M A PATHETIC LOSER! I JUST WANT ATTENTION!" he howled. I took no notice and picked him up by his tie. I proceeded to batter his ugly little monkey-head against the wall for like ten minutes before throwing him down the stairs and leaping down to crush his puny little broken body under my steel-capped hobnailed boots and



Ok fine I went up to hide in the library. There's no shame in that, though; our new library is buff. It has new doors and fancy computers and everything. I would pretty much sleep with it if it had some sort of manipulatable orifice. I spent like the entire day today slumped on a comfy chair in the reading room studying a book about Vietnam. Man that war sounded shitty. But the idea of being allowed to shoot innocent children (especially those who say ALRIGHT MATE in a vietnamese accent... "Alwight Matey I love you Longtime Ten Dorrar") is attractive. I might have fallen asleep on the chair, but I eventually got up and decided that it was time to go eat some food. As I left I noticed one particular 4th year who I have named "Kiwi Head". Not because he is from New Zealand, but because his head is shaped like a fucking kiwi. He has black hair, braces, and a permanent shit-eating grin plastered across his face. I basically hate him with my eternal soul.

Kiwi Head was grinning at me. I gave him a glare that should rightly have melted the skin off his ugly little face and strode manfully out of the library.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

What the fuck?

The beeper next to the door went crazy as I walked through the door scanner thing. Almost immediately one of the valkerie-like librarians dropped silently down from the ceiling and grabbed me. "COME BACK" she screamed. "YOU SET OFF THE SECURITY SCANNER". I would have done more to beat her down and flee the library, but I was temporarily reminded of the the last time I set off a security scanner; It was exactly four years ago yesterday, and I was travelling to New York dressed as an arab when the box of grenades I had labelled "For hijacking the plane and killing all the passengers" set off the beeper. I managed to kick one of the guards to the floor and I was running full-speed towards the plane screaming ALLAH when somebody took me down. Man, that took some explaining but I'm pretty sure they were satisfied with my explanation.

"TURN OUT YOUR POCKETS" hissed the librarian. Across the library, Kiwi-Head started sniggering. "Send him to prison!" he yelled. His wit gained a drumroll and a round of applause from a hidden studio audience. Valkerie-woman made me take off my jacket, took all the stuff out of it, piled it up on the counter, jacked my chewing gum and insinuated that I had stolen a piece of literature before finally ripping off a security tag that had been hidden in my pocket by somebody or other. I'm not going to insinuate who. Fucking Kiwi-Headed twat. I can only hope that his Kiwi-shaped head is a result of some huge brain tumour and that he'll be in a coma by the end of the year. Yeah.

Then the librarian made me write MY NAME DOWN on the library naughty book as apparently I like to steal tags from magazines. Ladies and gentlemen IS THAT JUSTICE? Luckily, I managed to track down Kiwi-boy later. I kidnapped him, beat him up a bit, then stripped him naked, suspended him from the ceiling using huge hooks, punched him a bit more, stuck long sharp metal pins through his jaw, then heated up a huge bowl of boiling hot Tempora Oil and tipped the pan over his stupid little kiwi shaped



Fuck's sake. Today has simply proved my totally ineffective position on this planet. I can't wait til I leave school and go on to be ineffective somewhere else. Like prison. Or MacDonalds. I'll have my revenge some day. Perhaps.

This post is the kind of thing that gets mentioned as a possible contributing factor in a follow-up to a news story ending in the words "...before turning the gun on himself."

EDIT: Turns out that it was actually a certain tall gangly stupidly named big-nosed art student in my year who put the tag on my blazer (you can try to guess who he is), and not Kiwi-Head. So sorry Kiwi-Head, you are innocent. But I still think you're a cunt. Fucking twatfaced bastard Kiwi-Headed little shit.

I will blog tomorrow

I WILL

The story of my birthday (+ digressions, natch)

Unless you have never met me before, have never read either of my two awesome blogs, or have been cut out of my life for the past few months, you must be aware that it was recently my 18th birthday. This was a pretty big event for me, being -as it was- the end of my childhood, beginning of adulthood, a realisation of my true existence on this planet as a member of humanity etc etc etc. It also represented my first opportunity to LEGALLY BUY ALCOHOL!!!!!! IN A SHOP!!!!!!! And - more excitingly for me - legally buy SPRAY PAINT!!! Pretty exciting shit.

Ma bday wz on the 1st of September, a date famous for England's historic 5-1 victory against Germany, being the birthdate of Romeo Beckham, and the 355-Day anniversary of the 9/11 Terrorist Joke-Ups. I decided to be a rebel and stay up all of Thursday night so that I could welcome my impending adulthood in style, listening to live rock music in a club full of semi-naked women and sipping dry martinis. I actually ended up watching a repeat of a tv show about pathetic fat englishwomen who still breastfeed their children, drinking three-day-old paintwater from a pint-glass. Oh well, at least I got to enter adulthood looking at some nipples, albeit horribly distended ones with weird albino kids hanging off them. Plus I was talking to the gf on the phone like a real man. So all in all, the transition from boy to MAN was pretty good.

"I'm now a man," I confided to her when Teletext switched from 23:59:59 to 00:00:01 (I swear it managed to miss out 00:00:00 somewhere along the line. I'm sure that this must have some serious moral or scientific ramifications, but I am no rocket scientist and thus the missing second of space-time means nothing to me).
"Very good, she said. "But every second I waste talking to you, I fail to spend working on your birthday card, which is like a third done and is getting more crap by the second. Happy Birthday."

(NB: My girlfriend is some kind of freak who thinks that spending eight+ hours working on an incredibly intricate birthday card is a good way to show her appreciation of my talents. It is, but come on love, effort. When it's her birthday she's getting a £2.99 'Happy Holidays' number from the cornershop with a watercolour picture of a farmhouse on the front to function as both a Christmas AND birthday card... you see, her birthday is close enough to Christmas for it to work! YES!!!! And she will appreciate this card because it Shows That I Care.)

I took her snubbage of me as a hint to fuck off, so I ended the conversation in my customary manner (interrupting her mid-sentence to yell BYE!!! and then slamming the phone down as hard as I could. Then pressing the "End Call" button), and collapsed to bed in the very very early hours of Friday morning (at 12.47AM, exactly... rebél), safe in the knowledge that a: I was a man and that b: My girlfriend was losing hours of sleep JUST TO ENTERTAIN ME. This devotion backfired, however; she woke me up THREE TIMES in the night with text message updates about said card, the final being "It's 6:30 and your card looks like shit, I'm going to bed".

I was awoken at 8 in the morning by my little brother strolling into my room saying "Happy Birthday, I have to go rowing so get up and open your presents, you dirty fuck."

-- (Perhaps I should take a second here and explain why my little brother was going rowing YET I WAS NOT. Basically my little brother is an adorable fellow who wants to be like me in every way. He'll argue against this hypothesis but I'm the older one and I know best about everything. In wanting to be like me, he has decided to embrace the idea of rowing and thinks that going to every training session is the key to promotion. However, he's about a year and a half behind me in his enthusiasm for rowing - I've already gone through the 'keen' stage, followed swiftly by the 'slow realisation of how things really work', 'crushed hopes', 'broken spirit', 'bitter resentfulness', 'jaded cynicism' stages in that order. I have finally arrived at the 'wry, wistful, knowing sense of my own futility' stage. This basically means that there was no fucking chance of me going to a rowing session on the morning of my 18th birthday, no matter how apparently important it was, no matter how little I actually had planned for the morning of said birthday. I was just not going to go out of the principle of the thing. My little brother, who has yet to be crushed by the tedious nepotism of the Boat Club, is welcome to go straight ahead and train if he wants to, though.)

So yes, I leapt gleefully from my bed, wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy sleeping shorts, and gayly ran down the stairs. I ripped open my many presents, rejoyced at the good taste of my family, and then rejoiced more at the sudden influx of birthday cash from my extended family who, after eighteen years of fairly crap presents, have apparently finally realised that all I really want from life is MONEY (for a full rundown of my gifts, please read Hatchet Zombie over the next few months). I have to highlight my trendy new jeans and even trendier new t-shirt for real awesome stylez, though.

After my spirited stand against the evils of going to rowing training, I spent the next hour lying on the sofa in my underwear watching a repeat of the OC before pulling on my clothes and rolling into Kingston to visit the squaw and get the card which had been built up so much in my mind that it would basically be impossible to be as good as I'd imagined it being. But what do you know - it was actually pretty good. The daft bint had painted me a full A4 masterpiece of things I liked and song lyrics and shizzle, all surrounded by kerazy swizzling colours and shit. It was bare good blud. I was quietly impressed, and immediately framed it and put it up on the all in my house just to show all the party-goers later on (I'm not joking). She was embarassed. I didn't care.

Because she's my girlfriend and she gets mortified if people look at her work, I've decided not to stick the picture on the internet so that everyone can pick it apart and mock her for the amount of effort she put in to entertain a dickhead like me. I do this because I care about her feelings. Of course, I am lying. Here it is:


Click for bigger.

HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THAT PICTURE!!! LUCIA DID THAT!!!! LOOK AT IT!!! Fuck man, that is actually SO GOOD. LSB is pretty talented actually. I can't believe that I was the lucky one who spiked her drink, date-raped and impregnated her and now is forcing her to marry me so that her future brood will be able to go to heaven when they die. Five points to anybody who can identify the song lyric going through this masterpiece (no, not Debaser, you dickhead).

But... WAIT A SECOND... What's that I said beforehand? "Party-goers". WHAT? PARTY-GOERS? HUH? PARTY? Yes, people, I managed to finally succeed having a party at my house. I did this by telling my parents that I would be able to keep the invite list down to eighteen people. This quite obviously was not going to happen, but we all pretended that that was the plan, even while the piece of paper featuring the list of people who had been invited steadily got more and more filled up with small writing, crossings out and addendums and the amount of beer my dad bought grew steadily larger and larger. Eventually the list was more like forty people... and I still didn't invite you!!!! Yes, you, you know you know who you are, you person who conspicuously failed to be invited. AHAHAHAHA. I don't actually know who I am referring to here, but I'm sure that I've planted the seed of doubt in some poor bastard's mind.

Just to really twist the dagger further, here's a picture of some of what you missed out on:



Just to pour some barbeque sauce and flesh-eating HIV ants into the already bleeding dagger-wound, here's a rundown of all the booze purchased especially for my party by my folks (this does not feature the rest of the beer/hard alcohol brought by the rest of the partygoers, which was pretty plentiful)

• 2x 24 crates of bottled Holsten Import
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Budweiser
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Stella Artois
  
• 2x 18 crates of Smirnoff Ice for the girls
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Grolsch
  
• 1x 24 crate of canned Stella Artois
  
• 2x bottles of Pimms

Pretty good, eh? AND YOU DIDN'T GET ANY OF IT BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T INVITED!!!! AHAHAH!!!! Loser.

Is it any surprise that I can't remember much of the actual party? Just fragments, people, fragments. I remember candles. I remember a sudden influx of people at like 10:30, including a guy who gave me an awesome yellow and black Von Dutch hat which I am going to wear to every rowing session from now on. That guy later broke a bottle of beer over the head of someone else, which was pretty funny. I remember being in a hole for like ten minutes. I tried to get out, but I kept getting sucked back in. That was pretty weird. Then a couple of scallywags tried to christen my tent (Which I think of affectionately as the "Tent of Love") with some actual sticky disgusting love. Luckily, the Von Dutch guy (who has some lovely stubble), picked up a passing girl and threw her bodily onto the tent, flattening it and (hopefully) the raging hormones sloshing about within. I remember being given a huge leather jacket by Mike and Ogg. This is like a proper black-man motorcycle leather jacket, which went SO WELL with my new hat. Made me look bare ghetto blud. I doubt I'll ever take either of them off ever again. I seem to remember somebody being violently ill next to my fountain, and then me being forced to drag her by the nose to a car. I'd swear that a load of glow-sticks appeared from somewhere, and some passing cool person gave me a pen that had arms and a little button on the back and if you pressed the button THE ARMS PUNCHED. I recall sitting on a wall with my homegirl and motivational guru Cassie for about five minutes having a deep spiritual conversation about how good I was. She told me a story about the Terminator, if I remember correctly. Then two indians that I had never met before kind of walked into my garden and shook my hand. I was like SUP YOU ARE RANDOM INDIANS I DON'T KNOW. Then they asked me if I wanted to go out clubbing with them and I was like SUP RANDOM INDIANS NO BECAUSE THIS IS ACTUALLY MY 18TH BIRTHDAY PARTY! If my memory serves, I kept grabbing random people by the arm and dragging them to my fridge just to show them how much beer I had stored within. Which was a lot. I remember eating chicken satays. I remember lying on the floor laughing heartily. I remember playin' black music and rapping along like a proper little homeboy. I remember getting a good (but allowably fidgity, considering the surroundings) night's sleep. I remember ice.

You know what I don't remember?

Anybody crying.

MY PARTY WAS THE FIRST ONE I HAVE BEEN TO ALL FUCKING YEAR IN WHICH I DIDN'T COME INTO CONTACT WITH ANYBODY CRYING, BEING OVER-THE-TOP DRAMATIC OR BITCHING HEARTILY ABOUT THEIR BEST FRIENDS. I think that this makes my party pretty much the best event ever.

You are SO jealous you didn't get invited. BTW if anyone still wants to send me any birthday money, please, go ahead. Get in touch via comments. Buff.

Oh fuck, school in two days. Have I started homework? Have I FUCK.

PS: Pretty much every dialogue featured in this post is either embellished, poorly remembered, or totally fictional. I can't remember conversations very well; I just tend to recall the gist of the details. You know, the tone, the mood, etc. And I'm a boy so I misread a lot of moods. So basically, in all likeliness very little of this post actually happened.