Fatal Happy Slap

SECRETARY: .. my deepest sorrows again sir.
BOSS: (Tearfully) And the funeral arrangements?
SECRETARY: I’m afraid an open casket is out of the question.
BOSS: …Vandals.

Politics in the Home

The house I grew up in was typically Victorian you know, high ceilings, low self-esteem. As a kid I watched a lot of T.V., particularly on the weekends with all the early morning cartoons and late night wrestling – not to mention WWF – so I added the living room to my expanding empire.

My reign was short lived. I was stretched out on the couch when the ottomum walked in, she wanted to put her feet up, as soon as I slid to the floor she leapt onto my burgundy throne, glancing at the clock then at me, then back to the clock. And then I clocked. It was coming up to 5:30. Her plea’s for rest were nothing more than a cunning rouse to secure the higher-ground. I knew what was coming next. I could only stare blankly as she requested the cable and wireless sceptre. Resistance was futile, I’d been pillaged.

With my strong-hold gone I had to make my room the base of my power, which started with me getting over my fear of the dark, a fear I wasn’t aware of until Nickelodeon and that awful, awful clown. I lost countless hours of sleep, curled under my duvet, obsessing over what to do about the phobia until about 3 AM when it hit me. I’d become so engrossed in my planning that I forgot all about sleep let alone the dark, and so with a wry smile I sat up straight, eyes wide open, and took the first steps towards becoming a fully fledged nocturnal creature. Years later I’d experience the wonders of a fully rotational neck.

In the meantime I really made the room mine you know, hanging up posters, slamming my door to test out security. I wasn’t so much trying to start rebellion as stop potential invasion, anyway one day I overhead my brother say to my mum that Charles Dickens couldn’t break my fourth wall, and I thought if a big man like Dickens couldn’t barge his way in then the room must be secure.

I also held a very inconsistent tenure over the bathroom which I intended to use as a base of operations, I say inconsistent because to really own the bathroom you have to be big on health and safety policy and my personal hygiene was all over the place, which really cost me during the prelims, thankfully I also had a very weak intestines so during election time I’d always make a comeback as is the nature of politics.

During puberty I managed to lock the area down, I made all sorts of promises. I promised the toilet that we’d have good import-export relations, let the lime scale who’d been around the longest and fought in the war against bacteria live tax free on the tiled walls, and during the years when my body became overpopulated with hair I still managed to reduce immigration from me to the bathroom mat, of course I just squeezed them into the dingier parts of town, the limeys called them a drain on society and a civil war almost kicked off. Then things started getting really shaky, the toilet has gotten wind through some whistle blower that I’d been flaking out on our import/export deal with an old sock in the airing cupboard and demanded that I declare my discharge, by this time the bathroom mat had begun to resemble a novelty afro and my public were becoming disenchanted.

May approached and I found myself increasingly out of the kingdom, sometimes going as far as five, ten, even twenty minutes away; riding bikes, playing knock-down ginger, the finer things in life. Little did I know that it was all kicking off back home. The cleaning bug had bit my mum. Zif! was waging toxic war on the lime scale and winning, it was more spring time zest than mustard gas but a crisis is a crisis, I thought if I could just keep negotiations happy with the toilet everything would be alright. But as the discontent had been mounting my brother capitalised on the mutinous feeling of the room, swore his allegiance to this and promised tax cuts for that, they in turn informed him of my budding epilepsy.

On a brisk and chill Saturday morning, as I was relieving myself in the vertical manner, I saw an arm reach into the room, and switch the light on and off, he would continue to pull this prank for two weeks, I’d never recover. I tried to blame my frequent trips outside, that I’d been tricked by an exotic and foreign place, the government painted the sky blue I’d cry, but my protests fell on deaf ears. In front of a council of tooth brushes I was told that I’d pissed on most of the electorship, de-stabilised the natural order of things and that because of my stop-start style of dictatorship I was being voted out on a motion of no confidence.

But a month later the entire public of the bathroom branded my brother a ruler most heinous and turned on him. I spoke to him about it and he said he’d been an honest man, that one minute he was moisturising and the next thing he knew the shower head had switched on, the apron was on the floor, and the toilet was overflowing. I informed him that he deserved a fair trial. Two hours later he knocked on my door, the verdict was in, and he’d been found guilty of ethnic cleansing.

Maths & English

I was good at Maths in primary school, adding up, subtracting, that’s pretty basic stuff. If you made a mistake you probably weren’t ‘carrying the one’ -It’s not hard, I mean we have two hands. They stress that a lot, Mr. Vosper had to constantly remind one of the shall we say, stupid kids, to always always always carry the one, and so began that boys life long love affair with incontinence, definitely a golden age for mathematics.

In Secondary school, I’m not sure what happened, but I’m almost 100% sure Maths and Art switched places? The teaching board, in a typical stroke of genius decided that the whole ‘numbers thing’ is old news, that the youths are into shapes now. As a result you had kids in Art running around with rulers, asking themselves what three dimensional really is, and math students doing their best Picasso impression, triangles, squares, circles. That’s not Maths; it’s one X away from a play station controller, or a game of noughts and crosses with special guests.

English was a different story.. Every other term. I always liked it though, people like to think that it’s different from Math because there’s no right answer; these are the same people that get a real kick out of saying Charles Dickens. In 6th Form I felt like I really wanted to be a writer so I became friends with some real literary types, the kind of person that has the words ‘fatal flaw’ in their MySpace ‘About me’ section.

I started watching films, then taking them apart, and then taking the whole VCR apart. Eventually I formed a writing partnership with a classmate but that didn’t last long, he wrote a horror short story where the virgin was the killer, a buddy movie with Harvey Lee Oswald opposite J.F.K. Plans for a 3D film shot in black and white. An Elephant Man biopic with a laugh track!

Eventually I asked my English teacher about the possibility of an after school group workshop and he gave me this fantastic piece of advice. “Watch the company you keep and choose your friends carefully, there are six billion people in this world and not all of them are gonna like you for you. Always remember there’s no person like third person”. He was a good man with a flair for the dramatic matched only by a crippling loneliness.

Extracts from a cigarette company

Boss: First order of business, can we sell to minors?
Suit 1: ‘Smoking against Ageism’ got alot of peoples attention..
Suit 2: ..But the ‘Benson’s Babies’ commercials aren’t taking off like we expected.
Boss: The adorable little kids in the angel constumes?
Suit 1: Public reaction ranges between “disturbing” and “nightmare fuel” sir.
Boss: Did you remember the harps?
Suit 1: Gold-plated just like you requested.
Suit 2: It’s the children raising concern sir.
Boss: Those rosey cheeked bastards haven’t got a thing right! I want those child actor contracts terminated you hear me?
Suit 2: We had several award winning actors in that spot.
Boss: Award winners, you mean some blonde haired freak gets an award for putting on a blue t-shirt and selling cereal?
Suit 2: Sir we had Thomas Haughton from the Yakult advert.
Boss: Yakult?
Suit 1: He’s best known for his part in the NSPCC spot.
Boss: The cry baby ..little Johnny keeps falling down the stairs?
Suit 2: Spiralled with a mahogany gloss..
Suit 1: The very same sir, the director also singled out your daughter in particular for special praise.
Suit 2: ..and an unforgiving marble finish.
Boss: She’s bug-eyed like the rest of ’em.
Suit 1: How a boy’s expected to grow in an airing cupboard I’ll never know.