Direct, from the toilet of inertia!

Increase the sleep

Top tip for dementia people is sleep. I was only getting 7-8 hours of sleep last week. As a result I couldn't concentrate on reading or preparation very well.

Last night I got 9 hours. This morning I was able to read the Saturday Times  - obviously not all of it - but several of the articles, and was able to skim-read others.

Ideally I need 9-10 hours of sleep every night now, just to be as fully functional as I can be these days.

I still feel tired though. You just have to get used to that bit.

Thing is, I'd promised the 2 players who could make this week's D&D session that I'd have an adventure for them - a special one-off adventure. And I got myself in a right old tizz about I don't mind saying, cor lumme, stone the crows etc!

Dungeons and Dragons update

2 players only this week, so I cobbled together a Wizard of Oz meets Beauty and the Beast meets something or other. I added things, tried to keep it simple, added more stuff, crossed out some other things, and in the end completely confused myself.

I've been watching a few David Lynch films recently which contain a few Oz references, and of course  the darkness and horror you'd expect.

I tried to keep the elements simple, coherent, but it wasn't making sense in my head. Then I read some advice about stories, you need fantastic locations, a reason to be there, clues, some red slippers (2 odd shoes in this case) a fairy made of adamantine...and so I meandered off the beaten track as I do, and lost my bearings.

I read it over and over and under again. No map of the land, except the one in my head, and I didn't know if it was enough or not. Would it sustain an evening? Would it even just fall flat and everyone get angry as they wasted an evening when they could have done something that wasn't SHIT?

So I got to Seager Hall in Union St and there were Hannah and Luke, and we started, and it went okay. In fact, they seemed to love it. 

It was all a bit Disney but with Bodaks, Helmed Horrors, Hags and other nasty things. Big huge walls of thorns the size of the Pentagon, scary castles, but a happy ending. 

Bramble Buttons, Nanny Grumbles and Grotbags

Got to have a happy ending.

So it was a perfectly good 'one-shot' as we call them. I just no longer have the clarity of thought to truly know if something is good or will even work any more. 

Luckily the improvisational skills are strangely still there to paper over the cracks!

The greatest interview ever

Peter Bogdanovich who was part of the new hotshot directors at the time (1970?) interviews John Ford - proper old school director of Westerns often starring John Wayne or 'Duke'. The new meets the old.

Don't worry - it's only a minute and half long.

Remembering the olden times

I've always been nostalgic at heart, and I have very fond memories of the television of my youth. Good, old-fashioned family entertainment, where generations could sit together and enjoy inoffensive entertainment without recourse to foul language and gratuitous penis shots just to be relevant and 'cutting edge'.

These days programmes have to be 'relatable', whereby a popular retard goes to look at Renaissance paintings which they've not only never encountered, but also don't care about, so we witness their ignorance and inanities in order to offset our own feelings of ignorance and/or stupidity.

I mean, look at these programmes from Channel 4. Family entertainment my arse.

Rylan learns...brain surgery.' But he only has 24 hours before his first patient. Can he remove the tumour successfully? 

String Theory with Joey Essex. Professional fuckwit gets lost in WHSmiths

Allan Carr's Top 50 Bumholes.

What ruddy nonsense! 

So it's time to look back to the Golden Age of British television! Where true entertainers - professionals - were the order of the day. Whether they'd learned their trade at Butlins or the old music halls, they'd all graduated from the university of hard knocks, and tough surprises!

Here are a few of the highlights, all of whom are sorely missed.

Shitting with Norman

We join popular entertainer Norman Vaughan on a toilet in mid- defecation where he interviews a variety of music hall stars, constantly interrupting his guests mid-sentence to answer for them. Occasionally punctuated with off-mike plops which Vaughan finds hilarious and grades with a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Jizz and Minge

Deirdre Jizz and Doris Minge, the old music Hall act whose real names were Arthur Tit and Reg Mump. Dressed as old ladies, they would sing unfunny songs around a harmonium played by a black and white minstrel, all the while goading each other about the other's personal hygiene or lack thereof, and end up directing their anger in the form of harmless race-based gags toward the minstrel.

Young Racialist of The Year

The annual event hosted by Katy Boyle and Gripper Stebson, to find the white supremacist of 1978: a golden year for Nazi youth as it turned out. The winner receives a Chelsea smiler, a life-time's supply of Wilkinson Sword razor blades and as many sweets as they can nick from Baldy's ice cream van without getting caught and duly receiving a buggering.

"And the title of Young Racialist of the Year 1978 goes to..."

"Give us 50p fatty or yer 'ead's going to down the toilet!"

Mike and Bernie's Celebrity Skid marks

Watch Mike and Bernie Winters race each other in a series of state-of-the-art British Leyland cars. This week Bernie's Austin Princess is up against Mike's Allegro Vanden Plas in some field or other in Lincolnshire.

If you listen closely 'Diddy' David Hamilton provides a completely inane and superfluous commentary which was actually meant for another programme entirely, but no one at the time noticed.

Guest stars Bob Todd, The Lovely Anna Dawson and The St Winifred's School Choir in the grand finale: "Mike's jump of Death". 

The series was banned after this episode. Which was for the best.

Nonce goes the 70s

There was a big 50s revival back in the day. Who can forget Grease, Showaddywaddy, Darts, Rocky Sharp and the Replays, or Dickie Tremble and the Reacharounds? All the while, hosted by a seemingly endless supply of loveable household paedos (Savile, Jonathan King, Chris Denning etc).

Children's TV was also a big thing back then. 

Who can forget Terry Spangles and The Winkle of Doom, which saw the eponymous hero... 

Right. I've had enough now.

'To shit is vulgar; to plop, divine!'

The Culture of Work

Why aren’t these people dead yet?

Having lots of video playback in my head- situations I regret. One period that always plays back like a nightmare, is the first job I got in London when I returned in 1998, 27 years ago. 

Until I got FTD I’d barely thought about it. But in recent years it’s been gnawing away at me like some disease. This particular period of my life is primarily what causes me to randomly shout out expletives. 

I’d decided to check out what the world was like outside masonry so I quit my job and moved up to London, living on the floor of my mate's living room for a couple of weeks until I got sorted out.

I'd lived in Wells for 2 1/2 years and was bored out of my head as all my friends had left and I was in a dead-end job as I saw it, earning £200 net a week in a stonemasonry workshop. 

Nothing to do, and no one to do it with.

I'd really lost my confidence and at the time didn't realise that I was in the middle of a long depression.

I’d also just moved into a bedsit in Crouch End and was having a less than satisfactory social life. I thought I’d reconnect with my old London friends as it had only been 2 1/2 years since I’d lived there, but people had moved on to South London and in their social lives and I found myself rather isolated.

I got a job in a TV production company. I was quite excited as it was a company whose programmes I liked. So I got the job, met all the stars, and thinking I was in with them was pretty overfamiliar. 

One thing you don't do in these companies is get too pally with the 'talent.'

As a runner or dogsbody, it's your job to do everyone's bidding, essentially as a slave. People in the media industry proclaim their status by being as rude as possible to the runner, as you can't answer back and I was even earning less in London than I was as a mason in Somerset.

In retrospect I think this all points to a failure in my social behaviour which was always present - not knowing how to behave in certain situations - when to shut my gob and when to toe the line. 

As I've said before, I think my frontal lobe was pulled out of a skip when I was being assembled.

I made a few mistakes as a runner, said some inappropriate things to management and 'talent' and overall did myself no favours.

I had some bad luck too to be fair.

The flip side was the ugliness of the media industry - a public school bullying culture, where I was insulted to my face and spoken to as an idiot, which of course I'm not, even though maybe my behaviour had let me down at times.

It all started at the top with the CEO who was quite the tyrant. He didn't like me from the get-go. 

He was a classic public school bully.

And it makes sense, as the British public schools used the fagging system, whereby younger pupils went through a rights-of-passage as servants to the older boys and were often subject to beatings and bullying. 

These are largely schools which produced the kind of psychopaths who would have been sent out to brutalise the various peoples of the British Empire. With the Empire gone, where else would they go but The City and Television?

It got so that my mental health went from general lowness to rock-bottom. After a month or 2 I had to take deep breaths before going into the office building: I just couldn't do anything right for them. 

The abuse was relentless, and all the while I blamed myself for not coming up to par.

One evening I had a minor breakdown, and everyone was just either ignoring or laughing at me.

One person I did get on with there I confided in. She was a development manager and said she really didn't understand what had happened and that they'd got me completely wrong. She gave me a list of 12 people to contact in the industry and to mention her name. 

Within 2 weeks I had left for another much better job thanks to her kindness. 

Apparently they missed me when I'd gone.

Fuck 'em.

I still beat myself up about how pathetic I was in not standing up for myself and letting people treat me like shit. This is what happened and I've never told anyone any of this. I hope by writing it down this somehow acts as a catharsis and is the start of the end of these horrible memories that keep haunting me.

Because as you can tell I still feel ashamed.

I guess I just didn't have the backbone during that particular period. Especially when your opinion of your self has flat-lined.

Years later and everything seems to point to me having ADHD and some other neuro-divergent behaviours. 

Would they behave like that in this day and age? 

Probably. The media industry outside the corporations is largely unregulated.

Self-Employment

Since getting my diagnosis I now stand up for myself more than ever. Most people back down when you do that.

I guess I feel 'what have I got to lose?'

(I know - but this is relatively new to me... )

It took me until 36 to realise that I couldn't work for other people. 

I would be lost in a vortex where my life depended on trying to please.

I wouldn't stand up for myself either.

I lived, ate and breathed work. I could rarely get away from it. It pervaded my dreams and any waking thoughts, catching me unawares. And these were trivial low-paid jobs too.

In the case of some employers, I ended up exploding at them like a super-volcano of pent-up fury.

Other times if a few of us were unhappy about something I would be the one speaking up in a meeting, and turn to my brothers for support who would all be staring at their shoes.

Oh. it's like that is it?

Thanks. I know who you are.

Being self-employed was initially terrifying, but it was worth it. It means you can listen to your Spidey-Sense and not take on certain jobs. Also, you can call out a bad idea and it doesn't matter so much about the ego being bruised as they're not your boss.

You can tell a contractor to fuck off - or tell a client you're not interested in a job because they're a nutter.

I had a good guy working with me for a lot of the time. In the end he was doing about 75% of the work as my brain just couldn't get in gear.

There are more people who should be self-employed. I know who they are, even if they don't.

I miss my friend Mat

I used to enjoy my chats where Mat would rationalise the world, break down the chaos and let me see clearly what was going on. 

He'd do it really quickly too, which was great as we could have more time for drinking and laughter.

How many people do you have who you can really talk to, completely unhindered, uncensored? 3? 4?

People like Mat leave a big void. It's only when I look to the phone to reach out to a friend that I become all too conscious of that loss.

I think of Suzy, rolling up her sleeves and getting on with a director-level job, running the house, walking the dogs and taking the girls to all their sports meetings and social appointments!

And the girls getting on with their lives. 

How bloody senseless his death is. 

That's real loss, that's devastation. Much worse than dementia.