It's a Jungle Out There

After Twelve years of night cab driving, I am now into week three of driving in daylight hours and here at 50 degrees and 52 minutes north and zero degrees and thirty four minutes east I now get up at six o'clock in the feckin' morning. For gawds sake what time of day is that?  By the way don't be getting any ideas sending cruise missiles my way. I really must stop giving out my co-ordinates.

I thought I'd seen everything working in the twilight hours for the last twelve years when most of the population of my town are fornicating in private, apart from the dirty little feckers in the dark doorways and the back of my cab that is.  I'm used to looking out for wrong 'un's, I have been beaten, stabbed, kidnapped, spat at, robbed, assaulted verbally and physically, keeping an eye out for a knife, checking to see if they have means to pay, y'now the sort of thing.

Look at them! All dodgy and shifty looking.

I have been shocked at the level of illegal going's on in the day. Old ladies with an agenda, drug baron pensioners, bomb carrying single mums shopping at Morrisons, flick knifed partially sighted elderly men with white canes with hidden swords in them.

I've got my eye on all of them, one of them will make a move soon and I'll be ready.

I saw an octogenarian give me the once over the other day, she smiled at me and asked me if I've had a pleasant day. Sussing out where I keep my money bag I reckon. The single mum with two toddlers, the one with the pram that Ernö Rubik wouldn't have had the brain power to devise building never mind getting the mass of angles and joints to line up to open it, she looked well dodgy, cried because I helped her, reckon she's arms dealing.

Two very old ladies in particular are giving me cause for concern, always travel together and seem to be using going shopping at M&S as a rouse, they're not fooling me one bit. even with their tickles and the apple they gave me. Their bags are always full BEFORE they get to the shops! Hmm? HMM? Drug Mules I tells ya! Drug mules. Sensible twin setted crack whores they are, their teeth are already missing, their arms are already veiny by default, craggy loose skin, pot marked everything eh? EH? Classic crack hoes. I got their number...

I may well go back to night driving, at least morons act openly LIKE morons and whores and addicts let you know they want.

I DID see a shoplifter running out of Morrisons with a large two foot long brick of cheese the other day, that was quite a sober and refreshing site believe me. I sat back and admired the honesty of his simple endeavour to spread cheese around with his mates.  Its these twin setted and cardiganed monsters sitting quietly on the benches outside I don't trust, chatting and talking in whispered polite tones, smiling at each other and helping each other with heavy bags and giving each other pound coins for the trolleys. Hmm? Eh? EH? Bastards.

Confessions of a Taxi Driver, Part 5: All the Young Dudes: 1970's. Sex. Drugs. Rock and Roll. Yeah right...

We all make choices that shape our future selves, some good, some bad. I didn't make any choices. so here is a lightning fast review of my life in the 1970's through mine own, reminiscing, slightly twinkly yet sexy failing eyes...



All the Young Dudes...

    "Speed jive, don't want to stay alive, when your twenty five"

It is 1970. I'm listening to the song Spirit in the Sky, it's coming from a tinny am radio on a Crisp St market stall in Poplar, East London.  I've skived off from secondary school and I'm eating a hollowed out half loaf of bread filled with chips covered in tomato sauce and it cost me 12p from the chip shop.  Robbing bastards.  I am also wearing the thrown away leftovers from a gold bullion robbery.  Long story.  Another time, maybe.  I wonder briefly inbetween mouthfuls of greasy red chips what will become of me, my dreams and my fantastical, impossible fantasies of the future... This cockney boy wants to be a doctor, or a guitarist in a rock and roll band, or probably a villain.

Alas, instead...

I worked in Billingsgate fish market as a casual porter for £3 a morning at thirteen, I killed thousands of lobsters in the boiling house in Pudding Lane.  They scream when they die.  Explaining and believed by my mother why I had to go to school at four in the morning and getting away with it was a stroke of my lying, deceiving genius... I, months later, tear my left arm to pieces with a broken punched bathroom mirror shard in a teen angst ridden and hormone fuelled fit of anger.  I run away from home, nearly pass out on a bus where I lose two pints of blood.  After I'm sown back together I run away for the second time that day, this time from the policeman that had been called to the hospital I fell into.  I sleep rough for weeks on cold, damp cardboard, worked for a stripper in Soho, ate out of bins, got £30 for posing for a gay magazine.  Hassled by vicious gay pimps and cutting one of them with my pocket knife.  I return to the East End and live with a close friend's family and get a job as a packer and allocator in a dress manufacturers for £7 per week above the undercover in Petticoat lane.  I buy my first pint of lager for 28p.  I work by gas lamp every other day during the three day week.  I slept with all the women in a hippy commune I temporarily found myself in and sold the controversial Little Red Schoolbook to students.

I returned home, save the life of my little brother by simply calling an ambulance. Bought green and silver glitter platform boots.  Customised all my clothes with metal studs.  I wore black, red and white Loons, had a thing for multi coloured Tank-tops and original Ben Sherman shirts.  Didn't have a six pack, I counted eight.  Felt up my mate's mum, twice.  Bought cheese cloth shirts from the Kensington flea market. Always smelt of patchouli.  Got drunk with Alvin Lee from the band Ten Years After. He wrote his number on a fag packet and I lost it, he wanted to hear me play.  I told the singer song writer Carol King to get the fuck out of my seat at a Richie Havens gig, he'd opened Woodstock only a few years earlier.  Whilst head banging, I maimed people at a Pink Fairies gig because I had lead weights attached to the ends of my waist length hair.  I saw the band Queen before they were famous.  I nearly got blown up by the IRA three times.  I took LSD for a week, ate no food and just drank cola.  I got floored by three screaming policemen as I somehow managed to walk through a fortified police cordon whilst very drunk as the IRA were blowing up a car outside Selfridges in Oxford St, this will be the fourth and final time the IRA try to kill me.  I wore a kaftan to work.  I wore a long denim coat made of used jeans and a big fluffy white collar.  I wore jeans made of black satin with a laced up fly. I wore lots of make up and shiny nail varnish. I never smoked marijuana, used to eat it instead.  Introduced all my friends to drugs.   I'd chain smoke anything.  Sniffed glue, plaster remover and bus seats.


I followed Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath to a night club and stalked them.  I was blown off the stage I was sitting on by a faulty lighting assembly at a Thin Lizzy gig at the Marquee club, smoking and burnt at the edges, I was put on a stool with Rod Stewart and Keith Moon and got so smashed I can't remember the amazing conversation I must have had.  I owned a silver and yellow Puch moped, parked it somewhere and never went back for it and seeing as I didn't need my red glitter covered bike helmet anymore I deliberately left it hanging on a police motorbike's handlebars.  I got a question correct on a Capital Radio phone in about the Rolling Stones live on air.  Bastards should have sent me a photo signed by the Stones, instead they sent me a 7" record of Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas.  I told Spurs golden boy Martin Chivers he was a fucking gay wanker whilst I was drunk talking in an American accent on a central line tube train.  I made pasting tables for a whole morning, by dinner time became bored and air gunned them to the ceiling, doors and walls of the workshop I was in.  I left the building via the window, thought it best not to go back and ask for my wages.  I was photographed in Kings road with my mates wearing smelly embroidered full length Afghan coats with red braces and Dr Martens high leg steels, skinny shrink to fit Levis and long hair.  We were hybrid skinhead hippies, no one saw THAT fucking fashion statement coming.  I remembered the words to American Pie (long version) by Don McLean and sung it on street corners with my mate Paul. I wore a hundred bangles on each arm. Tattooed myself AND my mates with just a dirty needle and Indian ink, I pierced my own ear with another dirty needle and threaded the cotton through it and covered it in Vaseline, as there wasn't a precedent for men wearing earrings then, I pierced what was to become the "gay" right side...

A couple of years are obscured from me in a hazy half light, but anyhoo, I meet future first wife.  I thought at the time, Punk Rock was a load of old bollox.  I made reproduction furniture and at weekends dressed like Tony Montana before Scarface was ever made.  I ran men's boutiques in Carnaby Street, the West End and throughout London.  I once sold shoes to the Harlem Globe Trotters, they were all seconds, I didn't tell them.  I got married and a year later proudly created my first daughter whom became my prize at the end of the 1970's brown and cream rainbow.  Sadly, I turned into an arsehole fashion buyer and executive twat with a stupid poncy briefcase and a filofax from the end of the seventies right through to the end of the eighties. I am NOT an arsehole now however.


I'm Keith Hehir Lynch aka "@Mr_Taxi_Man" on Twitter, a bit old, still a babe and a cheeky cocky bastard.  I drive a cab and live on the coast and I'm prone to writing large paragraphs of text with bad punctuation and poor sentence construction when the mood takes me because, simply, I fucking can.  I'm still not a doctor or a famous guitarist. You never know, one day...

"All the young dudes, carry the news, boogaloo dudes, carry the news..." Oh! Fuck yeah...

Some of this was written by David Bowie, I thank him for his assistance and title inspiration.  I have only myself to blame for the rest. 





*this article has since been published on Sabotagetimes.com

Hastings. A.D.

William the Conqueror landed just about where the Kebab Hut on the seafront is now. As then, it is still the site of the beginnings of many a battle. The stabbings, mindless thuggery and murder on the spot where sandal met shingle nearly a thousand years ago is still a past time that is alive and well.

A fault line runs around this valley of death and villainy that surrounds Hastings. Aleister Crowley famously cursed Hastings with a curse that if you are born here you will never leave, he decreed it… Unless you find a stone with a hole in it on the beach. I have been drilling holes in stones and slipping them into the pockets of these moronic tribe members for months. I’m joking.

Hastings and its younger tearaway brother St. Leonards are nestled in a valley that slopes down to an always angry and tormented cloudy grey green sea.  Old families vie for status telling of their right as an Old Towner to be heard and respected based purely that they have been procreating the longest deep in the old twittens. They live and forever moan in the craggy south east corner.

To the north the Hollington men and boys are warriors all. Tribal, vicious and predictable. The Hollington women some say are easy of virtue, are fierce, loyal and some even proud of the generational poverty they are in and from. Insurance quotes are high in these badlands.

Pagan and tribal middlemen from all walks of life from the shore to the fire hills to the east paint themselves shades of green and share ale and a song of smuggling and taxmen every year in a festival that celebrates their old towness.

Drug dealers set up shop quickly, little dynasties are established, they all fall as quick, its not the police and the wonderful tech and surveillance techniques that doom their enterprise to failure, it’s the bigger, more established crime families that make sure they get caught quickly. Ready cash brings arrogance, it also brings the Rozzers and pain.

Shop lifting is a career choice, you can order your dinner or what size jeans you want from M&S, takes about twenty minutes if you buy yourself another coffee, it will be delivered forthwith. A two foot block of Cornish cheddar cheese from the deli can be yours for a fiver. Which is nice.

Flocks of buzzing two wheeled (Mopedus twatus) insects flow up the seafront’s thoroughfare and back again. The incessant noise is only stopped by the police when they pull them over and inspect these over revved and over designed machines.  It is the tribe of Corsa that reign supreme, The Parka wearing social miscreant sixties Mod has been replaced by modded 800cc cars that are designed for nannies and school runs. They sound like the hoards of Babylon with their oversized exhausts and under sized sensibilities rat running from empty car park to empty car park showing off their garish modifications and expensive insurance certificates that daddy and mummy are still paying for.

In the weekday evenings the permanently disabled and long term refuse-to-be-employed are frequenting the bars, they’d frequent pubs but they are sadly, all closing down.  Tempting offers of free pool and cheap drink and your friendly understanding drug dealer who is never that far away, keeps everyone happy.

Gangs of uni students circle the one pint they have chipped in to buy fill the trendier bars. Predatory resident muggers circle to decide which one to separate from the herd and rob.

The vegetarian foody haunts have evenings of open mike poetry and prose, stinking in their tofu farts they celebrate oneness with the menu.  Coffee shops are multiplying in the arteries of this ancient conquered town. Caffeine, the expensive and highly addictive poison can now be brought to your table in its many tasty guises.  The giant multi nationals are setting up shop, we now have a cloned shopping area, all that’s missing is giant hooks that Chinook helicopters can lash too and lift it out and re-sight it elsewhere if projected forecasts aren‘t met…

The Old Town, a small insignificant snooty snivelling little village within a town, within a microcosmic city suburb of London that Hastings really is, pretends it has significant dwellings, shops and people and appoint themselves as the culture torch bearers of us all, some of which dwell within only at the weekends. They come down from the caffeine fuelled metropolis and attempt to subjugate and fawn patronisingly at our ways.


Councillors skulk in backs of taverns, doing deals with those that demand more land and ways to tame and profit from it.  Alfie Cobb and Robert Tressell must weep in their graves, from their perspective nothing much has changed.  Notorious baby killers are allegedly renamed, restyled and rebirthed. They are here and allegedly walk and work among us.

The bungalowed and mortgage free baby boomers tend their gardens and rarely venture beyond their cul de sacs.  Neat rows of micro suburbia habitats dot the valley.  Middle pensioned and middle incomed squeeze themselves in wherever they can, they at least hold the real torch of normalcy we all crave for ourselves and our children…


Housing rules that are disguised as well meaning policies and ethics destroyed close communities long ago. Council house dwelling rooms designed by committee are small, everything else just isn't.  You can't live next to your Nan or Aunty anymore, natural support systems commitee'd out of existence. Well done those committee members languishing in your settled graves, well done.

Gangs stand on street corners, strangely disassociated from their own neighbours.  In times past, everyone would have known everybody’s name in the street you lived in, it is now common to never know the name of the child you have watched grow up, the same child that terrorises you into never leaving your dwelling.  Community leaders have been replaced by the occasional drive-by of a comfy warm police car.  When did we come to expect and allow that to happen?  Who devolved our own community well being and self policing to the Police force?

Who Cares eh?...

Today I Said Goodbye...

Today, Amy is eleven. She is a bright and smiley and she's sitting quietly behind me with her sister, her mum is telling me what a shit time they all had in Florida.

Today, I get a poster put up on the office wall, its a picture of a kitten with BIG blue eyes, scribbled on it is "We love Keith! luv Amy"

Today, I took her to her first day at secondary school, she is chatty and excitable. Boys have been discovered I'm thinking...

Today, Amy is with three of her best friends they are going to a party, it's her first one that's not chaperoned. Much later I find her with with a group of boys and a cigarette is being puffed on like the grown ups do. I pick her up and take her home.

Today, her Mum started work at our place.  Amy now has a mobile phone, she is texting her friends and sits in the office waiting for her mum. She ignores me completely.  Mid teen angst and frown firmly in place, she is tutting at her mum to hurry up.

Today, I took her to where the bars are in town, she is slightly under-age, but mum says it's ok and she has to be in by eleven pm.  Her mum being a force of nature that the physicists haven't discovered yet, it's probably wise she does as she says. I pick her up and take her home at twelve thirty, her mum is at the door...

Today, I pick her up from college, she is on the phone again, bit tearful, I think it's man trouble.  She says her mum will pay, doesn't say goodbye and slams the car door.

Today, is the last day of college, she is out on the town, I've picked her up and she's happy and the energy is bouncing off her.  She pays me and throws herself into the heady summer night air.  I pick her up at four in the morning, she has found herself a man, on behalf of her mum I give him the "Look" If your a man you'll know the look I mean.

Today, I picked her up from work, ignores me again. Thumbs are clacking away at her phone in a text fury, not even sure she is aware I am here, but that's ok I'm the taxi driver, I'm just doing my job.

Today, her mum remarries, I'm invited to the wedding, I have to work but I make the effort and pop in to the reception in the evening for a short while, everyone is happy.  Amy is a woman now and we exchange grown up pleasantries.  I much later take them all to their new family home.

Today, I pick her up from work, she has been there two years now, again she is on the phone, facebook demands it... I tell her how many years I have been picking her up, this time she stops texting and we chat and laugh about times gone by.  Amy doesn't really know me at all, I've just sort of have been there in the background all this time.  Times arrow is swift.  I have just watched a young girl grow into a woman doing my job.

Today, I picked Amy up from work, she tells me she is moving to Brighton to work and live with her boyfriend hopefully in a couple of months and she is going on holiday in September.  She is telling me all this while her thumbs are paying homage to facebook, connecting to her world albeit in a digital format as we speak.  I tell her about my writing of this and that, don't think she listened, after all I'm just the bloke that takes her home now and again and that's ok because that's all I've ever done in her version of her world.

Today, I picked her up from work, she is working out her two week notice and is moving to Brighton in less than a couple of weeks, I wish her good luck and to tell her mum I said hello.  She got her worn grown up purse from her bag, paid me and walked away.  I said goodbye to Amy, maybe for the last time, she didn't hear me but that's ok, I'm just doing my job...

Thirteen, Unlucky For Some...

Thirteen! THIRTEEN! I have to press the...

No...wait... I...I... think they are joking...

They could be the same four men as last week...

Do I press the emergency button...?

I Can't find it on the menu...

Damn console...

Can't think...

Adrenalin surging...

Scared...

The banging I can hear is my pulse beating in my ears...

They hurt my colleague, I KNOW it's them...

Was that a punch in the back of my head? Head stinging. Can't think...

I've forgotten where I am... adrenalin too high... hard to breath...

Another punch, they are shouting at me to stop you cunt.

Drive into the wall, take them all out... That's what I've always told other cabbies I'll do...

Clarity. Time my colleagues helped me on this...

I'm trying to drill down through the menu to find and press the emergency button...

Another slap to my face, still somehow driving... Too far away from help...

PRESS THE FUCKING EMERGENCY BUTTON!!

No response...

Console telling me to try again...

Out of radio and data range...

No one is coming...Again...

Oh Fuck...

Oh...

F   u   c   k...

Beaten.

Robbed.

I'm tired of fear.

How was your day at work?


The introduction above isn't a dribbling written bit of fiction, It's an example of the actual moments in the mind of a Cab driver as he is about to be robbed or beaten or every other combination of fear that's in between. The Thirteen? That's the call sign of a cab that doesn't exist down my part of the world.  It's a code that means there is an emergency, not the usual three times a week idiot that runs off without paying me. It isn't the unconscious muppet that has been thrust upon me by the police to get him out of town. I'm talking about real fear, instinct for survival that's kicking in. Because my mind is in survival mode and not paying attention I am now a missile on four wheels, I have forgotten where I am on the grand map in my mind, I'm now only thinking about getting out of this insane reality.

I'm not a trained killing machine that the armed forces spews out to ply their trade in the world of sand and flies.  A police officer gets good training and more importantly eternal permission to fight back if needed and handle this situation.  I am not allowed to even partly use aggression or put other road users in danger.  I don't know what to do, how hard to kick, punch and bite.  I'm thinking about these thug's mothers and fathers, wondering if they have children, not believing that evil is so... Local.

They sit next to me anonymously, comfortable in that fact and not unlike the internet, the dark side of human nature can deviously, devilishly take hold for a short while.  I am not anonymous however, I have an ID badge.  I am more heavily regulated than someone out on parole, my every small rule break reported with fines and penalty points for putting two wheels on a pavement, eating, drinking, wearing budgie smugglers and baseball caps.

In my pretend perfect little cabby world, I would like to see anonymity to be a pre paid premium fare to get in my cab, I don't know you, so it's my risk. not the perceived public risk.  There are more murders and assaults on Cab drivers than the rare but no less important customer murdered or assaulted by a taxi driver gone nuts.  Pay by debit card and some form of I.D and you get me cheap and happy in the knowledge that I know who you are.


My Local Council regulate, badly, the business I am in, they talk only to a Cab association that has never made itself known to me or to any driver that I know.  Despite the knowledge of 357 years of the taxi business under our collective belts, you would think we would be self regulating by now. They have recently produced an absurd document in conjunction with a faceless clearly ill informed, Police liaison officer to help cab drivers to cope in "Difficult" situations.  The first important bit of advice he offers is, "Always be polite."  The second piece of important advice is, "Always retain control."  The last piece of advice they offer is, "That it is best if someone sits behind me."  The whole reason security companies build screens for taxis is because we get attacked from behind most of the time.  These stupid laughable absurdities do not even come close to help resolve the alarming but common situation in the first paragraph.

The little fella in the cage is the cab driver

I recently watched as my colleague had his left arm snapped below the elbow after a small gang of multi ethnic thugs waged war on his body treating it like a trampoline. A "Thirteen" wasn't called, no time.  Myself and a few cabbies from other daddies came to his aid and corralled them, we phoned the police and after we clearly identified them all, they were arrested and taken away.

Three months later I am driven to the ID suite in Brighton, shown photographs on a laptop by people who sub contract their services to the police and I couldn't recognise any of the now shaven headed and hair coloured trainee killers.  Six months later they are all told charges are to be dropped, I'm never told this, I hear it in a conversation at work, it seems I am not important enough to be told and the thugs I helped capture are let free and now pass me smirking almost daily.  I have in my time as a Cabbie been kicked under my cab, slashed at with a knife, drop kicked, cigarettes put out on my arms neck and hands, held hostage for a couple of hours and a father and his sons drag me out of my cab and beat me for missing a turning. I have numerous others involving spitting, scratching, y'now small stuff. The list sadly is too long.





Please don't tell me to change my job. This is not a career this is my business. I do have the right to work without fear, we all do. The impact that the cheap alcohol filled and well informed empowered social miscreants have on you and me is starting to be felt now.  Maybe a vigilante will surface.  Maybe someone is about to break and fight back. Maybe they've had enough of being beaten down and ignored.  I genuinely pray everyday that I remain calm enough that it won't be me.  I'm no Travis Bickle, but I understand fear enough now that it could be me...or you.

The Year I Woke Up

Young, Ambitious but Arrogant and Untouchable? Something big one day will make itself known to you and will slide you down the big snake on life's big board game. You will find yourself at the bottom of the ladder back where you started.


It's the year 1990 I am ensconced in my office, there is a peculiar small square hole in the top left wall of my office, through it I can hear typewriters clacking, yes. Typewriters. Queries are being answered on the phones manned by some of the best logistic men in the business. All is well in my world. I've just had lunch with a big Italian American, having been flown over especially to dispense his wisdom on "How we do it over there" to me. I smugly know I do it better.  My driver picks us up from the R.S.Hispaniola moored on the embankment, where I have spent the afternoon being fed and watered. The big Italian stopped the car and he bought a plastic police helmet from a souvenir stall underneath one of the bridges that cross the Thames for his son in New York. Stopping a car on the embankment is never a good idea. got a ticket, chucked it out of the window and drove off laughing.

Nice Lunch

After leaving the world of back biting, metaphorically knife wielding bitchiness of the fashion industry, running one of the biggest and fastest growing specialist logistic companies in England was easy for me. My team I created were miracle workers, magicians that could solve anything, we were untouchable, the directors of the company meekly turned up every now and again to see if every thing was ok, of course everything was ok, I was in charge, everything will always be ok.

I bought a new house in one of the quays in Rotherhithe by the Thames in south London. My ex secretary, now my live in partner, is a sexy bright legal secretary, we are both earning salaries that would disgust most people, obscene even. 

New years eve, most of our customers are shut, we, like some of our larger blue chip clients are eternally open. A big brash driver, feared by some, but on time, loyal, never let us down is told to do one extra important pick up, instead of refusing to do it, not answering the phone or feigning sickness, turned up at my office, whilst coincidently, after hearing about his displeasure in not wanting to do it, I was tapping out, one fingered, a new contract for him that would have extended his hours by five a week and made him richer by one hundred pounds a week.

I woke up in Guys hospital A&E, a glass ashtray was still partially embedded in my skull, the nurse was sewing up the last of eighteen stitches, a young policeman wearing an identical replica of the plastic helmet the big Italian bought recently was hovering nearby. Mr Brash the driver and his son decided to pay me a visit. Cowardly and from behind, they succeeded after several attempts to break the aforementioned ashtray, y'now one of them old pub type really large ones.  The pain in my ribs and back are from from the kicking I got whilst unconscious. They also wrecked the office, threatened me and others not to ever say a word.

Heavy and satisfying for some...

The police had them in custody within the hour, charged with section 24 of something or other, apparently that's serious, (no shit Sherlock.) Six months later in Southwark Crown Court, they walk away with a suspended 2 year prison sentence. Yes, I don't know why either.

It is now late June, 1990.  The now, not so sexy legal secretary partner of mine moves out and shacks up with the driving instructor that is training her to be an ADI, she leaves me with a massive mortgage. A week later my little sister dies.

I'm think I'm coping quite well, I have just let out my beautiful quayside home and move onto a housing estate just off Borough High St near London Bridge not too shabby really, s'ok I'd thought.  A month later one of my two cats are run over, the second goes blind from leukaemia and my stupid arse sentimentality wouldn't let me do the decent thing and let him die. He slowly dies instead. That was big of me wasn't it?

I was "Promoted" at work to run the head office operations, but politically that was to remove me from the power base of the city of London operations where I really did my "Thing."  Apparently my cracks were beginning to show, the "Boy wonder" wasn't so wondrous anymore and by Xmas I was gone, made redundant. After contributing building the company from a handful of cars to a multi national with nearing a thousand commercial vehicles it was over.  A guilty senior director gave me a cheque, a big one and a free cab all the way home. I left the company car, pension, private medical insurance and a "Whatever" expenses account behind.  I also left what was making me bad.

It's a year that's all, twelve divisible months broken into four or five week segments. I started at the top of a tree, untouchable. The year finished with me driving a van for a courier company for a pittance a week.  I tried to get a job with some of the other logistics giants but they could get a uni graduate to do it on half the money I was getting. Strange at first that my colleagues never said goodbye, no leaving card or party, no contact.  Its as if I no longer existed. They didn't call because I was a true son of a bitch.  I took too many of them down as I trampled over them to get to the top of my little tree. Evaluating that year has taken me twenty years.  It was the year that replayed the most in my mind, like a torturous and hideous mocking haha! from the past.

My arrogance and failure to deal with my emotions cost me my job, Did I mention the wife and two children I'd left? Although the reasons were outside my control, It was doomed to fail, married at nineteen, by the time I was 31, twelve years of marriage was over and a third of my young life gone. I missed my children during all that time, made difficult to see, and I being too busy to see them.  I was wrapped up in arrogance and my self denial that I even had a soul. Didn't need one.

It was the passing of my little sister that did the most damage, unknown damage, the viciousness of grief tore at me and my psyche, changing my DNA strand by strand, slowly revealing my secret real self to me. I realise now I am on a journey of some of the most rawest emotions known to man, I stop at all of them, experience them, indulge in them, disgust myself because of them.  I am not a victim of them, just an observer. I have since lost both my parents and nieces and nephews of my other siblings. Yet, crushingly another beloved little sister. Someone in particular, because of our closeness in age, understood the nuances of our early lives that is continuing to either shape me or beat me.

My own cancer gave me a surf on the edge of a wave of death, I have learnt one important thing.  Nothing stays the same.  Everything and person is in a transient state of decay, if it's good it won't be for very long.  So, I now enjoy the moment I am in.  No doubt I have a lot more lessons yet to be shown to me.  Is this maturity speaking? Maybe, or maybe it's a cosmic mindfuck I'm having, a worse case scenario on my life that's being played out for real.  The angel of death showing me what will happen if I don't change.  Maybe, I'm still in my office with the square hole in the top left corner of the wall having my own small apocalyptic nightmare of how my life will pan out during a quick smug nap after a fancy lunch with a fat Italian American who's just bought a stupid plastic hat. Maybe.

Poly Styrene Oh Cancer! Up Yours!

Today is my birthday and last night the plan was I'd wake up at whatever time, have a big breakfast and sit in my garden and ponder whether I can be arsed to write something, anything that an editor might be interested in reading. That was the grand plan for today.

I wear a nice silver bangle on my right wrist, haven't taken it off for years. I awoke earlier than planned because I smacked myself in the mouth with my bangle so hard it drew blood and made my lower lip swell.  Well, I did wear it, but after it being chucked at the bedroom wall, it is now sitting on the chest of drawers being taught a lesson.  I slid downstairs and after opening my birthday cards, (I got a lovely one from the Mrs) the kettle was on for a cuppa, I got twenty messages on Twitter full of well wishes, made me smile, nice of them to make the effort I thought.

A tweet on twitter caught my eye by Kathryn Flett, a fellow Random-on-Sea inmate who is more than a little bit good at the writing and journalism thing. We talk...or more accurately  tweet random polite bollox every now and again.  The tweet said...

"Am saddened by the death of (Random-on-Sea resident and punk icon) Poly Styrene."

My day came crashing down. Punk Icon Poly Styrene of the X-ray Spex,  someone I have known for years, had died. She lived a street away from me, she came back to the seaside to look after her mum she once told me a long time ago. She was someone a bit special.

She was someone that waited two hours for me to pick her up from the airport years ago because she didn't want to pay silly money for the airport taxis to take her home.  Someone that craftily negotiated a good deal on some chairs in a second hand shop we were in.  Someone that could dress so innocuously, you wouldn't have given her a second look in the street. (The fame thing, by choice wasn't really that big a deal for her.) Someone that could dress so stunningly she would blow me away.  Simple and classically expensive twin sets with an edge only Poly Styrene could pull off.  Hair so amazingly glossy... well, you can tell I was more than a bit enamoured by her.

There is a lot I could tell you about Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, but I'll keep that to myself out of respect for her family and friends.  I will tell you she launched her new album "Generation Indigo" from her hospice bed nearby, she wrote, recorded and promoted it dying from that cunt cancer.  Something we both battled and I, have made it thus far...

She was truly someone born to make a difference, to influence, her legacy is... Well, Google away to your hearts content on that one and judge for yourself. This isn't really a eulogy about a career and a true Icon of our times, it's about a little lady that lived around the corner from me in a place affectionately renamed by Kate Flett as "Random-on-Sea." A place that Poly styrene knew could be magical in the morning and frustrating in the afternoon.

This is a clip of Poly Styrene explaining her new album track by track, important to note her back was broken in two places and she was heavily medicated and dying of cancer during the filming of this interview. If this little piece means anything to anyone you will know that positivity and courage is something she had an abundance of.

  Poly Styrene, Punk Icon. Marianne, Daughter, Mother, Friend.

3 July 1957 – 25 April 2011

Men! We are at War...

Pippa's Arse this, Pippa's pert bottom that, What is the matter with you lot? Pippa Middleton's arse is not a religious icon, admittedly though, it was discovered by the world in a big church. Get a grip men, it's part of their plan for us to focus on her derrière whilst the rest of them take over the world.  Confused? You should be, you and I mister are in the middle of a long war...

What am I talking about? Women. Birds. Babes. Chicks. or Oi!  Whatever your favourite cute slang word for them may be, you don't understand them do you?  You throw your hands up in the air and accept the age old bollox that men are from Mars and women are from another galaxy, Andromeda probably, that's near but far enough away isn't it?

You've seen him right? We all have, the pug ugly bloke with the stunner on his arm, what's he got you haven't hmm?

My commander in chief.

The answer is not what he has, it's how he talks to women. He is a general.  One of our glorious leaders in the war.  Men judge other men, ie; I feel better because I'm taller, dress well, and have more money than him. Women have created that reoccurring thought beast.


A woman doesn't really think like that.  Ever.  To attract a female and proceed into the upper ranks of manhood is far more basic and simple for most beaten submissive men to understand. Now your thinking come on then Mr Big Bollox what is this great magical secret?

Take The Piss.

Three words. The only ammo we will ever need in this war. Pippa's arse? Pah! I would have slapped it and sent her on ahead to get the beers in.

Successful Battle Strategy Example: 1.1 section 1. first paragraph, taken from the blue book of being a man, which is green by the way...

"At a bar, you've seen a filly you'd like to um... Talk to.  Walk up to her, (she is already preprogrammed with a selection of laughs, put down's and cold icy stares at your weak line of chat) buy yourself a drink.  Never, ever, buy her a drink.  Instigate eye contact and say something simple like, "Your top doesn't match your shoes" and walk away, don't make any more eye contact or look back. Guaranteed during the course of the evening she will approach and ask YOU what you meant.

Your hair colour is clashing with me shirt

Ok, she has finally approached you, now what? Remember she is probably an admiral of her local fleet of fillies, like the navy, there are more admirals than captains. Note: she is ready to fire off a diatribe at you that is rapid and well rehearsed.  Tell her someone as stunning as her should really buy better shoes.  Stop.  Tell her you have to talk to a friend and walk away from her a second time.

You have now thrown her the equivalent of a stun grenade, she is standing there outside her comfort zone. You have complimented her and rejected her, she is confused. You haven't disrespected her.  You haven't invaded her space or made any sexual innuendos. She has a highly sophisticated inbuilt defend and destroy system to use on you. But her system has just crashed. The "Blue screen of death" to coin a phrase has just gone off in her head.

Walk back immediately during her reboot, be quick, they reactivate pretty damn fast. look at your watch, make sure it's a good one as women naturally have good profiling skills, Lorus and Timex and anything that can be bought from the Argos catalogue tells them you are a dick. Tell her to put your number in her phone, explain you are busy for the next couple of days, but to ring you and maybe you'll have a coffee at a place of your choosing and if you're free and have the time. You have not relinquished any control.  You have not been threatening or demanding. You have told her nothing about you, but you HAVE told her you're in charge and you are not needy or wanting.  She now believes she is dealing with a senior officer. You told her she was stunning and she wants to hear more...

         End of communication.

Leer and you get nowhere. Yes, women love to be told they are attractive, do it in a slimy way and they gain control over you and the battle is lost. Women love MEN, not men that mirror a woman.

Even if you are in a "Relationship" the war is raging on...(what the fuck happened to the concept of boyfriend and girlfriend? It doesn't even appear as an option on facebook! Not even noticed that have you?) The word "Relationship" is a heavy armoured weapon they use to smash you quickly into being a submissive twat. Its a word that YOU should own to flatten her into submission when you feel the time is right to take the next step, not her.

The Battle Plans: excerpt from section 3.2. "Living with the enemy"

A cheeky but effective way to keep your "Relationship" from sinking, Why not phone your partner at work, convince her to remove her undies and post them to YOUR workplace. (Next day open the envelope to a FULL viewing office, say nothing and put the undies in your drawer, act as if this is normal.) This is the same as getting a promotion by the way.  She will be coming home wearing no underwear, she will be expecting something and make sure you give it to her.

NB: DON'T send your pants in the post to her.  The post-room boys will open it and hand them to her in front of a full office. THIS is not the same kudos as YOU got. And don't be expecting something when she gets home, well, apart from a jab in the ging gangs with a stiletto. You lose this one soldier.

Confidence gentlemen and a bit of patience is the key. Oh! Women will tell you this article is a load of bollox. Ignore their ploy and subterfuge. Men, there is a war going on.


Take the Piss and do it well men. It's a war and they are winning, they almost have you where they want you, as a servile lap dog, the irony is they love a bad boy, whilst they demand YOU comply, they yearn for the bad boy, in their dreams and secret thoughts.

Rules of Engagement: excerpt from section 4.1

Attire, Buy good clobber, expensive always clean brogues, spend at least a months salary on a decent watch, Invest in a nail cleaning kit thing women have and keep nails and your teeth clean at all times.

She can handle any size weapon

Misbehave, don't disrespect. Throw a tantrum, don't be violent. And for fucks sake, man up! Lets stop this age of men showing women their female side, show her your manhood and show it often. Then stop. Throw her a googly, show her tenderness, love and little acts of beauty. (Don't buy her flowers, only do that for your mum or nan) YOU own all these weapons. So start using them now, She will only unconditionally surrender and end this damn war to the man that has these qualities.

One day in a not too distant future, our glorious fallen flat capped forefathers will salute their sons for retaking this battlefield. Pubs will be back, women will be in the snug as grateful girlfriends and Bars will be Banks again. And only then, will you be a man my son...

I Was a Strippers Runner.

It's 1973. There is an oil crisis in the middle east.  The IRA are blowing up anything and everything. Richard Reid the shoe bomber is unfortunately being born and J. R. R. Tolkien has unfortunately just died. There is a secondary banking crisis that causes negative equity in the housing market and the UK has finally admitted to being within 30 miles of the near continent and has joined the European community.  A new value added tax has been stuck to everything and the Conservatives are in power and Sunderland only go and beat Leeds 1-0 in the FA cup final. Sort of sounds a bit familiar doesn't it.

It was during these series of events I trip and fall on a feisty and now angry stripper on a chilly and crisp November afternoon just off Soho Square in the West End of London...

 

After being called something clearly physically impossible to do by myself, I offered to carry her heavy bag as an apology. She accepted and pushed me into the club shouting at me to hurry the fuck up, I pass the big fat Greek doorman and followed her down the red lit stairs. "Look after my bag" I was instructed with a red painted long finger nail pointing within an inch of my eye, she warned me not to move. I sat and didn't move...


Another reason I didn't move was because I was in the second row of a smoky and dark, sparsely attended strip club watching a brightly lit stripper do what strippers do.  As I haven't seen many naked woman in the flesh, this became an instant highlight of the last four days.


My next surprise was Cathy.  A brunette, pale skinned and curvy, full lips with the reddest of lipstick, was now wearing a blonde afro wig and on stage taking her clothes off to the now iconic song "Walk on the wild side" by Lou reed.  That song still stops me in my tracks at whatever I'm doing. I still remember her perfectly arched back and fine arse moving and gyrating to it.


I felt compelled to make myself useful for the privilege of watching her unbelievably perfect bottom and picked up the knickers and basque thrown to the side near the front of the small stage and I put them in her bag.  Within minutes Cathy the stripper now minus the wig, was marching towards me on the way out of the door, grabbed the bag I was holding and sped off past me, I followed her out willing my hard on to go away.


She watched me collect her outfit and gave me fifty pence, thanked me and rushed off.  I ran after her and asked were she was off to next.  she was already speed walking to another strip club 100 yards up the street, one of about fifteen or so she would perform in rotation most nights.


So the deal was done. Cathy often called me a cheeky little bastard, but I got £2 a night from her and in turn saved her money buying new outfits because either the top or the bottoms on most of them were nicked during a performance by the other girls or snatched away by paying punters wanting souvenirs. I was a goal keeper of knickers, the comedic fighter of old men to rescue a bra.  I even ending up on my arse on one occasion with two old men fighting it out over her black satin knickers, I say "Old" anyone over thirty at my nearly fifteen years of life would have been old to me.  One fight even stopped the show and Cathy and three other strippers on the stage were wetting themselves laughing at the tug of war I was having with her now stretched and torn frillies.

I'd like to think she regales her exploits to her grown up children today.  Maybe, she tells the tale of a young man who she once paid to pick up her knickers. Maybe, she has never ever told a living soul of her life as a stripper. Maybe...


Why was seeing naked women the highlight of those last four days when I fell over Cathy? Apart from the bleedin' heterosexual obvious, I was going "Home" every night to my bits of cardboard I stashed away to sleep in.  I was homeless.  A runaway.  I slept with one eye and a two inch penknife open in my oft shivering young fist.

The £2 a night deal with Cathy kept me fed on a breakfast, lunch and dinner from Wimpy's and bought me a warmer coat, she probably saved my life from the heroin oblivion that I was offered by gay pimps and some of my fellow street sleepers. In fact she never knew I slept on a cardboard mattress near Centre Point underneath the warm air ducts that kept me in a constant state of damp...

Less than ten years later I was running some of the more exclusive menswear boutiques of the day in the west end of London. I was dressing a multitude of major and minor celebrities, minor royalty and had Esq printed on my business cards.  Everyday I passed some of the doorways and strip clubs I slept and frequented on my way to work.  My own shop doorway had its homeless sleepers, I kicked them out and got rid of their cardboard, I didn't give them a second thought.  Ever.


During my time as a perfectly dressed, groomed and manicured twat I even masked my cockney accent with something more agreeable for my clientèle.  Now of course, I am full of eternal contrition and until now I have never really told of it in any great detail.  I have had some amazing careers in my life, adapting and reinventing myself as required, I think those days on the streets and now my life as a Taxi Driver and budding writer are as close to the real me as I'm ever likely to get.  I am also aware that I'm only ever a pound away from being homeless.  Indeed, we all are....

And I often wonder If Cathy still has a fit arse...



Update! This has since been published in The Observer on Sunday Magazine Broad sheet pull out special on Soho in the West End of London. (May 2015) it also had up to 7000 likes on their online version including The Guardian site.

NB: This is an expanded upon narrative from a previous piece I did called "Mirror In The Bathroom..." It can be found on your right in the popular posts section (eighth down) it goes into more detail about my time as a runaway and homeless teenager.

Thanks for reading. 



This has been published on the Sabotagetimes.com.

I Hate Football...

Hackney Marshes,
Europe's largest playing field.
1,500 players every Sunday.

My father Martin lived and breathed football.  From the age of five until I was eleven years old, he took me to nearly every home game at Spurs in Tottenham.  I saw, yawningly, every apparent so called master of the game from 1963 till 1969.  My dad was also in a Sunday football league club who's stupid name I cannot remember and played it down the Hackney marshes and practised it at the London Fields in Hackney every Thursday evening.  I was at every match, helping with the kit, ball boy and orange cutter upper and hander outerer.


I remember the smell of sweat, liniment and the heat that came off my dad and his mates.  All this boredom took place crazily in mid winter, when a fall meant a bloodied gash on your legs from a frozen solid ground.  I recall twenty two men creating a fog of steam on the pitch from breath and body.  I was immersed in football, a grounding in the game that would make other kids jealous. But, I fucking hated football.  I didn't get it then and I am in as much in the dark about it now.

Jimmy Greaves

Kicking a football seemed such a mind boringly dumb thing to do. At the spurs ground one Saturday, Jimmy Greaves nearly took my face off and knocked me over during a heavy tackle that pinned him to the fence I was leaning over, y'now the bit they put adverts on for chav football kits, drinks and fags.  Why didn't I move as this herd of power grunting and cursing came hurtling towards me and nearly took my head off?  I wasn't paying any attention.  I was looking at the green grass.  We didn't have much of it around the towered hamlet that was the cockney cultural centre I lived in called Bethnal Green. A stupid name for a worn away permanent bald patch of a scabby part of London.


Someone recently asked me in the Cab what did I think of Spurs, and to deliberately stupefy this eager and drunk football fan I told him I had no interest in horse ephemera, he paid me, called me a cunt and got out. All that happened when I deliberately antagonized this fan of overpaid and over here football playing egotists, was to enforce my belief further that punditry and fandom for football, is at best a distraction from sorry little dramas in their lives.

I miss my Dad, he hadn't been to Spurs in many years. he couldn't afford it and to my eternal shame I couldn't afford the time.  I should have took him. I should have stood with him in the same spot we occupied faithfully come rain or shine all those years ago.  I never did.

Recently, sadly, my brothers, sister and family members were standing outside the City of London crematorium by the hearse carrying my father. It was resplendently covered with flowery footballs, personal tributes and the Spurs insignia, all faithfully crafted and recreated in carnations.  One of those inexplicable moments happened that can never be explained in life.  Spurs manager Harry Redknapp walked on by to visit a loved one, he looked over, clapped and saluted my Dad and then continued on his walk to his own private destination of remembrance.

I missed this final poignant little tribute to my Dad, a footballer and lifetime fan of it.  I was looking away staring at the wind making shapes in the green grass, reminiscing...


I hate football...

Published in Sabotagetimes.com

The Women Of The World Unite And Make Some Pancakes Day.

Pancake day eh? Strangely, albeit humorously coinciding with International Women's Day and "Booty Appreciation Day!" UK women just don't Get the "Booty Appreciation Day" thing by the way, they'll probably be thinking its yet another new car or toddler shoe-wear promotion at Mothercare or something.  But what's happening today? Thousands of tweets on Twitter from women being all stand uppish and globally arsey about pancakes?

International Women's Day. A noble UN recognised institution going back over a century. The Suffragette battles for equality, nameless women standing up for their oppressed sisters. Noble and noteworthy indeed one and all.  But what do I hear and read this morning? Women moaning about making pancakes! On this century old day of campaigning for woman's equal rights, instead of bemoaning your lot in life why don't you go out and buy the ingredients needed to make some lovely pancakes?

Ooo! Have I got your back up now? Let me remind you it's normally the matriarch of a family that pass traditions down to the next generation. If my dear old Mum was still alive today, I'd have driven to East London to sit in her kitchen and stuff myself with her pancakes, it was one of the very few things I looked forward to as a child and those yummy smelling memories will make me smile forever.
 

I'm just saying if anyone wants to buy me this..

You go ahead and rebel, all you self promoting do-gooding trendy women of the UK. You're the ones missing the point of how special today is.  Confusing your roles as mothers and matriarchs with your bemoaning of low pay and lack of status in the workplace is a crime against all your children, men, relatives AND friends that have no mums.  Yes, dads make great pancakes too, I know I do! But when your mum makes them...sigh.


So why not bang your drum tomorrow hmm? Of course, it being Ash Wednesday you will probably hijack the day and moan about fags won't you? AND ignore the fact its the start of Lent for millions of people.  Get in the kitchen today and create some new memories for your children and rekindle some old ones for others... And invite some of us orphans around while you're at it...


Oh! Annie Lennox, Stop banging drums for every cause on the planet and toddle off home and make your kids some pancakes there's a love...