Tax Disc is hard for me to say

It won't be long before I have to pay tax for posting this blog. Tax is salt and the government put it on everything. They grind it out of your wages, then shake it onto anything you want to buy, or use.

My road tax was up this month. So, just like last year I visited the post office with my papers and tried to pay for it. The post office - what a great pic & mix of personalities: Children swinging from the queueing rails. A foreign couple arguing with staff in half English. Five quiet pensioners shuffling through the line - I say quiet, but some of them do seem to hum constantly. A mail carrier wearing shorts, squeezing through the crowd trying to avoid eye contact. Two mums (who don't know eachother), one of whom thinks the post office is a necessary place to discuss the following with the other. . . . actually, before you read the list, 'discuss' is probably the wrong word. It's more like an indirect broadcast. She is looking at the other mum but is, in fact, talking to the whole room about:

- Where her child goes to school.
- Why her child is off school and in the post office.
- The nature of her visit to the post office and the full details of her "perfectly fucking reasonable" complaint.

And me, me who just wants to pay my road tax and drive home. Yet, much to my surprise the woman behind the perspex said I could not give away my £165.

"You need your reminder letter." She said.

"Why do I need reminding? I'm already here?!"

I don't even like salt but I'll put up with it if it's already on my chips. What I'm not prepared to do is have someone tell me to have it on my cereal and even when I reluctantly agree (just to get them off my back), they take my Cheerios and my salt, only to ask me to present a particular spoon before I can ever eat cereal again.

I'm aware this metaphor may have been stretched a little too far. Of course there's nobody in my life who determines what ingredients go into my breakfast. Hey, take the description with a pinch of salt! . . . . . .or just tax me for every desperate piece of writing I produce.

(If you do decide to tax me, please, just make it easy for me to pay)

Automatico

Taking a dump. It's automatic: get that heavy feeling in your bowels, bum dilates a little, sit on toilet and deposit. However, taking a dump has now become automatic in every other way possible.

My most recent visit to Frankie and Benny's involved a chicken, sweetcorn and mozarella pasta bake...with weird green vegetables. No idea what they're called but for argument's sake, let's just call them Nature's Strongest Laxatives. Inevitably the F&B's toilet was in for a chicken, sweetcorn and mozarella pasta bake too that night.

Upon opening the door the lights blinked on and I was greeted with Salute by the toilet itself. It then said Hello. Come stai? it said. How are you?. It was only when it counted from one to five in Italian and again in English, that i realised how educational this turd was becoming.

I finished and by now, me and the urinals were having full fledged conversations in Italian. I turned to flush the chain. There was no handle. Instead there was this sort of button, before I even touched it the toilet had flushed. Why this is the cleverest lavatory I've came across I thought. There were no taps just magical, miniature showers for my hands to be cleansed under. So impressive. Of course there were automatic hand dryers too.

So despite my chicken and Laxido pasta, the visit to Frankie & Benny's was a refreshing insight to the modern world we live in today. Well, it would have been if the toilet door was automatic too but it wasn't. I mean, I don't really have any use for an automatic door on the way into Specsavers or the Apple store, yet after I've just washed my hands (in a very convenient, germ free way) why should I touch the same germ ridden door handle that all the other converted Italians, who haven't bothered with the mini hand showers, have touched as well?

Cio che un carico di poo e wee misti!

The Bank of Excuses

Everyone has a bank of excuses. We make withdrawals mainly when we are lazy. Small cash withdrawals are for things like getting out of a dinner party with your boss - It's my nan's birthday that day, sorry. Of course this is from your fictional excuses account, an account system founded by the first boy ever to use - dog ate my homework.

It is your factual account, that can be the most pride swallowing to cash out from. Once you have made a withdrawal from this, you usually can't stop yourself. A huge lump sum of an excuse is withdrawn first, something that has some meat behind it, like a death/birth in the family - Oh it's too soon after what's happened.

We withdraw from this account, usually to avoid self improvement rather than to avoid awkward nights out, with not so close friends (colleagues). In my case I'm pretty much into my overdraft with this account because I've been writing much less and lessening my efforts in a job search...because I'm really just lazy.

So let's say there's been a death, then someones birthday, then you had a a confrontation with someone and it upset you for a week, something went wrong in the house, the car needed an M.O.T., the cat vomited, you caught a cold, while you were in the chemist getting paracetemol you saw your ex with a pregnancy test, you tidied your room really nicely, you went the gym once and was sore for a fortnight, you had a nose bleed, you done a favour for somebody and felt fulfilled with yourself for another week, you visited a family member in hospital, the car insurance went up, you worked extra hours to make up the payments for it, worst of all you booked a holiday because of everything that has been happening - so why do anything between now and the holiday? Nah, let's get the break out of the way first, relax until then.

I'd be lying if I said the examples were not drawn from personal experience but you can apply your own excuses and problems to the subject matter. Despite the current economical climate you can depend on your excuse bank not to go bust. It's infinite. You can withdraw as much as you like but only smelly men with yellow pants spend their life in a bank.

Killing Time

The strap on my watch just broke. Does that mean it's now just a really small clock?

My Shadow is Green

The pool at the gym has been green for months, and I'm not talking someone couldn't resist a wazz in the corner green. No, I mean really green, like Shrek and the Hulk had an aqua swinger's party, with Frankenstein and Slimer and Kermit the Frog (and of course their partners).

I pay well over the odds for that gym membership, the least I expect is a pool I can trust. The truth is, green, in all its forms, has been following me for a while now anyway.

A green balloon floated by my car as I was driving the other day, I think it was from Frankie & Benny's. Broccoli has ended up on every meal I've had recently. I'm full of envy for people in proper jobs that stress them out (Yes! I want to be stressed out for something I care about, not just stressed because my steel-toe-cap boots dont fit me properly or a customer didn't say thank you one day). Also, seems like everywhere I go I can smell weed and that's not because I smoke it, because I don't.

Maybe I'm turning into the Hulk, I'm getting really angry lately and I ripped my jeans earlier in the week. Maybe it was me who turned the pool green. I definitely did not have sexual relations with any fictional creatures though.

I just need to get away from all the green, perhaps I should stop recycling for a while too and start driving more and I don't know, leave all the lights on in the house, all day! And chop a tree down, I've kinda always wanted to that anyway.

Next set of traffic lights I come to better not be green.

Have I said green in this post too much? Have I defeated the object of trying to stay away from green by simply repeating the word excessivley? Has green won? Am I going insane?

Spare Key

He opened the van and inside was quite odd. Millions of keys hung on the walls and scattered on the floor (I doubt there were millions but there was a lot!) and one rackety wooden stool. I imagine the real Father Christmas to be like this man, no sleigh or reindeers but a Transit van holding the key to every house in the world. He sat and it took ten minutes to forge a new key.

He opened my car with it and switched on the ignition. He yanked a plastic covering from under my dashboard before plugging in a strange computer. I thought it was a bit of an aggressive violation to be honest. He pressed a few buttons on his computer and ended up extracting some codes from the vehicle. I didn't know my car was holding such information inside it and I thought me and my car told eachother everything.

The whole process took about twenty minutes and it cost me £45 to get a spare key for the car.

Now...I've lost my passion. Who can I phone to forge me a spare? And how much will it cost?

A Clean Break

If, for whatever reason you follow my blog - you'll have noticed that there has been a considerable gap between this and my last post.

I accidentally created this gap. Like when you accidentally snag your favourite jeans and you go along with it, nobody will notice. The World Cup happened and it was my cottony scar on the thigh of my denims. Why waste time juggling two passions, football and writing - when one of them is so colourful, has an opening ceremony and is televised across the globe (well except in North Korea) and the other well - is literally black and white?

So yeah, instead of blogging, reading, creative writing or even looking for a better job - I succumbed to the green fields of South Africa. I postponed anything that required any real effort until England inevitably went out of the competition. That week, when it seemed like the England team had also postponed anything that required effort until they were knocked out the competition - my mum and dad went on holiday. This provided time alone and a good opportunity to stitch up the pull on my jeans and get back into writing, job hunting etc. Before I'd even thread the needle, the initial tear was stretched to a gaping hole and it wasn't even a fashionable rip, it was ugly:

My brother's girlfiend of six years+ walked out on him. It's my duty, I think, as a brother, to substitute her for a short period while he reassembles his emotions (Note, I do not substitute her sexually, I'm merely a substitute for companionship). So that's what I did and that week, until my parents returned, I still didn't blog or do anything much, other than offer my ears and a nodding head, to my heartbroken sibling.

Mum and Dad come home! - time to patch up those jeans! Not quite. I won't go into details but Dad got shingles, brother's front door broke, my bedroom ceiling caved in from flooding and my cat got raped (by another cat, not a human). This week though, it's been a little bit quieter - maybe that's because my brother's gone away camping.

Right now I'm wearing pyjama bottoms and a pair of my girlfriend's socks, I don't think a rip would make me look any more stupid - so I might as well keep writing, regardless of what happens from now on.