The Freak Box

Another spectacular year draws to close….ahh….sorry…..Thought it was 1981 rather than the dull shit show that was 2023.

I know I can be misearable but this year has been all rather depressing and that is saying something given the last three years which included a pandemic. The only upside of this year appears to have been the speed in which it came and went. Obviously my age plays a factor in this but it’s over now and so we can look forward (sharp intake of breath) rather than backwards 2023.

This Christmas once again I near enough saw everyone I have ever met to the detriment of my liver. If I didn’t see you it was your fault and not mine. I was doing the hard yards out there in the Guinness battlefields as my bank account (monitored by Jen) will testify. Horrific shit came to pass at London prices… This ain’t no Hartlepool turnout… This was ‘you need to lose a kidney to pay for this shit’ stuff. Great fun as ever though… But don’t tell Jen that…

And now I sit here writing this brief blog at the cusp of the new year, a time that I try to convince myself that I like. In reality I don’t. I like people and laughing and so I don’t really need the ‘event’ of New Years Eve unless I’m invited to do that stuff. I actually find the end of the year rather depressing as the joy of the lead up month fades away and the stark reality of the 2nd January kicks in and the utter filth of opening the work laptop bites.

Anyway, we are here now so let start… but where to start eh? Oh yes…..IT’S WAR!!

I’ll get this one out of the way quickly as it is far too contensious a subject to actually delve deeply into or express an opinion on if you aren’t directly effected. Gaza.

There are no winners here, only losers in the shape of normal people and people who either wish to die or get paid to potentially die. For a place considered one of the holiest on earth a lot of people on both sides have been viciously killed in the name of who has the greatest imaginary mate.

This is only a hint at my actual opinion which I’ll definitely keep to myself. I’ve had the actual conversation with a few people and it always ends slightly fraught so I won’t be putting my position in print, I’m deliberately avoiding it which as you know is unlike me but that’s how it is.

With this in mind let talk about something less awkward like the Ukraine War.

This mess grinds on with no plan, no endgame, no point. The complete waste of time that this is cannot be measured, total stalemate with the only upside that Putin has made his own country less of a threat to Europe than ever before because he’s used his weaponary to obtain an amount of land that would only impress Melchett and Darling.

So we head into the third year of a war no one seems capable of stopping or winning. Another year of back and forth with the odd metre won hear and there. Great. The meat grinder where all we have is death and misery to placate the twisted mind of a modern dictator. Welcome to 1914 where trenches ruled the waves and Generals supped on tea and crumpets in warm living rooms miles from any bother.

Something needs to give and lets’s hope it’s Putin rather than our support for Ukraine.

Deep shit eh? Best I talk about myself for a bit.

For the first time in 20 years Jen and I went on Holiday without any kids. This happened as I asked both kids if they wanted to come and they were non-commital as I wouldn’t tell them where we were going. Had I said Spain instead of Suffolk I’m pretty certain the parasites would have latched onto my wallet faster than an ‘Eastenders’ actress rubbing the stomach of a villian in a layby in Essex. They were given the blind choice and chose to stay at home with the dog. Marvellous stuff proving that I am merely a cashpoint rather than a hero or drunk role model.

As I said Suffolk was the chosen destination as I’m not particularly interested in sitting by a pool all day or, God forbid, a beach while shelling out £5k on a holiday I return from and immediately requiring another holiday. A great friend of mine asked me why I mostly holiday on this island and the truth is I think there’s a lot to see and I love it. Of course there’s a lot to see abroad and I will return when I fancy it but this year funds were supressed due to some mindboggling cost to paint a houseload of windows and that had to happen.

I digress. The kids stayed in London and Jen and I fled to the Shires where once again she discovered a magnificent property in a tiny village for some ‘adult fun’….not like that you filthy animals.

This trip was also a tester to see if I really like the idea of living in the sticks after 54 years in the Worlds Greatest city.

The short answer was an emphatic ‘No’.

There’s life in this old dog yet and I’m clearly not ready to sit in a tiny village waiting with huge anticipation for the most exciting thing to happen, namely the hourly ‘dong’ of the church bell or the lone crow of a Cock owned by a cock who moved here from city who thinks he’s now a farmer.

Don’t get me wrong, Suffolk is beautiful and magnificent but not when you are in your mid 50’s. At my age you still need a bit of ‘oomph’ and you aint getting that from looking at scenery particularly after a life in London where the fun and laughter are almost constant.

The biggest problem with Suffolk is the fact that it’s mostly shut.

I was in Southwold which has a fantastic beach and Old Town and I was looking for a spot of luncheon. We had a mooch around the town and at 1359 hours entered what looked like a lovely eatery to be told that they stopped serving food at 1400 hours….on a Thursday. ‘No problem’ says I and we continue to mooch only to find that all restaurants do the same and so your only option is to have a bowl of chips or a microwaved pizza in a pub.

As a North London scumbag who can get what he wants whenever he wants up the ‘Big Smoke’ I found this was a personal insult to both myself and my crammed wallet.

But it wasn’t just the restaurants. The idyllic village I stayed in had a lovely looking pub but it was closed Monday to Wednesday and when open it was from Noon to 3pm and then 6pm til 9pm. No booze in my middle slot and nothing when the sun went down….Mental. The nearest other pub had nearly the same but was closed for an extra day. This must be some kind of throwback to when the locals were getting up to ‘sow the seed’ or harvest the yield but isn’t really ringing the bell of this tourist to the area.

No matter (I don’t mean that) there are loads of beautiful places in this area of Suffolk and we find them all and every one of them has an old bloke in shorts, long socks and a short sleeved check shirt pruning a rose bush in his front garden. For all I know I’m under some kind of surveillance and this bloke is assigned to give the off.

Take Woodbridge. It’s like Trumpton, an absolutely beautiful place to live and then you stumble across the next problem.

There are two houses for sale when I’m in Woodbridge which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere and they are both £1.1million. London prices without the fun, the accessibility and the unbridled chaos but with added Cockerpoos, Blackheath hippies and the old blue rinse Tea rooms mindset where you tear a bread roll rather than hack at it with a blunt dinner knife.

We did take a boat trip from Orford the dullness of which can barely be measured. The skipper of this tug was clearly boring himself let alone us, the press ganged masses aboard.

For some reason the man at the tiller described a sandbank for a good three minutes. He followed this up with a full description of the adjacent sandbank and a building that wasn’t there anymore.

Before I went full Fletcher Christian we rolled back into the dock and I thanked him for a great day… Classic English Tourist stuff than a German or Frenchman would lap up as they would understand the fucker…

Despite these low level issues Jen and I had a fantastic time and will definitely return to Suffolk but I won’t be looking to move there just yet but I recommend you visit it, buy up all the second homes and live there eventually, it truly is a visual treat.

Back in London we came face to face with the shithouse government live on our TV screens in the form of a number of inquiries highlighting how utterly out of their depth they were during a pandemic.

To a certain degree this was high comedy but then you remember that people died and none of the so called people in charge actually seemed to give a toss or knew excatly what to do. They were simply involved in an ongoing battle to see who could actually look the best for the future moment when we would came out of it. Brilliantly they all came out of it looking like the filth they are.

I’ve said many times that we should never have expected anything less from a group of people with no experience on paper to run a country. I’m a big fan of letting Senior Civil Servants run this rock as they will do it for whoever wears the crown. Politicians should only speak with scripts given to them by people who know the score otherwise you get the Oaf factor where Johnson maverickly flip flopped on a daily basis as he didn’t like disagreeing or upsetting his inner sanctum.

The only people coming out of these inquiries intact were the top civil servants and Vallance and Whitty who luckily wrote everything down for their own ‘mental health’ as Vallance put it.

The Oaf was righly torn to shreds (hopefully he’s merely a Daily Mail column writer now), Cummings exposed himself as the dangerous snide that we, the little people, all knew that he was, Hancock cemented his reputation as an self-serving dimwit and Sunak literally rubberstamped his ‘I’m just a posh boy’ passport with a face of contempt oozing ‘I don’t need your shit’.

But they learn nothing.

As I write this I see in the news that Megamind Cummings has announced that he has had a series of meetings with RichTea with a view to beating Labour in a potential 2024 election. He has announced that he won’t assist the Tories in this endeavour not because of some moral shift but simply because they won’t meet the strict ‘conditions’ for his assistance. Total Madness.

They all need some kind of offensive verbals which I’m happy to personally deliver.

So a big year ahead removing these fuckers from our lives albeit temporarily. I’m a realist and they will return but lets at least give someone else a go before they go a similar way. In reality it doesn’t matter who gets the job as long as it isn’t this mob, remember that come the time but use your vote otherwise keep your mush shut.

I was going to tackle Trump and his potential return but I’ll leave that to next year should it happen as I don’t really want to think about it on New Years Eve.

From a personal point of view it’s been quite a laugh with loads of gigs and events attended. Loads of social moments took place resulting in 4kgs of mass added. Pathetic really after all the battles to get fit but I’m now ready to return to the world of sweat starting by simply staring in the mirror and reminding myself of the vanity that is deep down in the Guinness drowned part of my soul. This flab aggression will not stand so I’ll hit the streets in a couple of days with a new target in my thick swead.

I did discover a new hobby this year which involves bombarding the local authority with photographs of fly-tipping I discover in my locality. To the photos I add pithy reports and suggest culprits in houses where I think, but don’t actually know, that they might live.

This is the tragic extent of my 54 year old life this year.

And so after 17 books finished, 171km run, 9 gigs attended and 4kgs gained (although 2 appear to have jumped on board from October onwards) we reach the end of another spectacularly dull 12 months.

Next year we strap in for a General Election, a US Election, a comedy Russian election, and a Taiwanese election….Gawd…

Enjoy your evening….Over and Our from 2023