bad thursday

Recently one of my mates informed his granny, on asking, the welfare of his wife. She’d just given birth to their first child and there had been some complications, essentially, the wee bairns heed and ripped her mimsy as it exited from her internals. Needless to say she was in some degree of discomfort. Granny, in her infinite wisdom, decided to offer words of sympathy by reminding my mate to compare his wifes agony to the pain ‘our Lord suffered on the cross’…

I mentally recall this story when someone mentions ‘Good Friday’, it’s superseded the ‘why ‘good’ Friday?’ of my past. I remember asking my mum at church when I was six and being baffled by the answer; apparently it was ‘good’ because Jesus died for my sins… I still remember mum looking a bit uncomfortable telling me this. Frankly I can’t help feeling that she was rather keen to keep her six-year-old son away from images of a bloke nailed up on some wood with blood pissing out his side wearing a painful hat (of course, for me, this was the best part) but the ‘sins’ bit I found utterly confusing, I wasn’t sure what a sin was and I was fairly sure I’d not committed any, being six and everything. Pleased to say I’ve rectified that now.

Despite my complete bafflement at this whole religion business I’m quite happy to take their holidays (and as mentioned in previous posts, I do like churches very much) so for me this excuses all the atrocities committed in the name of Jesus the saviour. My conscience is clear. With this in mind, this is the last P for a few days, I may be able to rustle up a quick post in the interim but don’t hold your breath.

Yesterday was yet another soul destroying day of none ness in the office, I was glad to leave at 3.30 for that bloody meeting which involved a winding district line journey into town. I read the end of my book which caused me some alarm, and watched the spring scenery pass by from the rather disconcerting view of a tube seat. I’ve never quite got into that, I feel as if a tube belongs under the ground, when you see them or travel in them over the land it feels somehow wrong, like an earthworm creeping over asphalt. By the time we crossed the Thames everything returned to some sort of normality and I eventually alighted at my destination, met the person in question in some massive corporate offices off Piccadilly and wandered happily through Soho among the runners, hookers, poofters, directors, drunks, junkies, artists, students and writers. I’m very fond of Soho, there is nowhere else like it in the world, it manages to combine sleaze and bohemianism with a self-knowing wink that contains both humour and hopeless misery.

I had a pint in a pub on New Oxford Street with my new book and met up with Swineshead for a few more jars up the road. We stood outside as dusk formed into dark and drunk beer and smoked cigarettes and chatted about cool shit, I left them all to it at 7.30 as I was meeting Myfwt at the flat, this was realised after a packed and piss pregnant tube journey back South and on arrival she and I had a splendid rest of evening eating and sipping G&T’s.

Just before I went to sleep I watched an interview with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson -creators of Steptoe and Son after writing Hancock’s Half Hour. It was fascinating, hearing how they worked, their relationship with each other and the actors they wrote for but what I found more incredible than anything was the way they met.

Before being writers both were ordinary joe’s with everyday jobs leading completely different lives in opposite ends of London, until, one day, each contracted TB, a dreadful terrifying disease that normally kicks off by the patient coughing up pints of blood, which is what happened to Ray one morning on his bus to work. In those days you were carted off and ordered to bed in a sanatorium, you had less than a 25% chance of survival and if you did remain alive you could be incarcerated for years on end, and it was in this dubious environment they met, as TB patients on the brink of death. Suddenly Steptoe and Son will never be quite the same.

Have a nice break, remember, it is for your sins He died, I done nuffin’

Turn it right up, Happy Easter