Well, that was almost entertaining.
I don’t think many people expected the result of the General Election to be as close as it was and for the final electorate opinion to be a ‘hung parliament’, political jargon aside, Labour performed much better than anyone expected. Theresa May wanted to ask the Great British Public who we wanted to negotiate key Brexit deals over the coming months as the country plunges into its brave new world. We answered- not you, Theresa. She seems so cold and empty, unlike the warm and witty contrast of Jeremy Corbyn or even the humorous enthusiasm of someone like Tim Farron (the Liberal leader). Everytime she appears on telly, its like a cavernous yawn of evasive answers and questionable facts and figures. I’m not saying Labour are perfect, far from it, or that they necessarily would’ve been able to fix everything but- and it’s a huge Diane Abbott of a but- I still struggle with the logic that anyone from Grimsby could possibly consider voting the blue way, for austerity and unemployment rather than safeguarding the NHS or sending their kids off to university, debt free. The mind boggles. Usually, in times such as these, you’d expect me to rant about how the country that voted Conservative are stupid, have misguided and selfish attitudes and are the stain on the name England. But I’m not. Which took me by surprise as well. I stayed up until around about 3am watching the election results and instead of getting more and more frustrated like I did in the days of Cunt, erm, I mean, David Cameron, I was quietly optimistic. 72% turnout from voters aged 18-24 is phenomenal. Again, usually I’d moan that people my age would rather watch the fakers parading around on Love Island than go out and perform their democratic right. But that percentage made my ears prick up and take notice of this cultural and youthful revolution that Labour, mostly, has inspired amongst the young. This once-in-a-lifetime manifesto (fully costed and explained, no matter what the Tory-biased media say, honestly, read it for yourself) that helps the young, strengthens the working population and does not sweep mental health, the elderly or rising tuition fees under the big blue rug. Surely now, Theresa May goes into these huge negotiations of the country’s trade future in a weaker position than before. She called the election. She backtracked and made U-turns. She wanted to show her power to the nation who, she was arrogant enough to believe, would fall over themselves to vote for her. How our leader can try and broker a decent deal for trade outside of the EU when she doesn’t even have the support of most of the UK is beyond belief. But that’s what the Tories and their delusional followers deserve for having the sheer over-confidence that their position was safe. You see, they're nearly always the same, these Blue Bloods. They go to places like Sainsburys or Waitrose; they drive Audis and BMW's; their children are called Hugo or Edward (never just 'Eddie') and they look down on the slum-dwelling Labour supporters from their ivory towers in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and the Cotswolds. Or so I thought. It seems that a lot of places down south have gone red. Kensington the biggest of these. A place populated by toffs and boffs has downed tools on its blue agenda and picked up on the crimson tide. Grimsby is red again. As per. Some key marginal seats have been taken away from the Conservatives and the rise of socialism and a society for the many has begun to eat into their seemingly unassailable lead. I think that all of this is the fault of one man- David Cameron. The pompous, shiny-headed moron who did sexual things to a pig during his youth. It was his arrogance and insistence on using an EU referendum to get re-elected (for his own political career, not the good of the country) and would never have imagined that Britain would vote OUT. You voted for him. Twice. Maybe not you, personally, reading this, but the country in general voted for that immovably-lacquered hairdo and smug sense of self-entitlement as PM on two occasions. More or less. To me, he will always be Public Enemy No. 1. A Thatcherite child. To put it simply, a massive fucking bellend. Had the public come to their senses in 2015 instead of now, then there’d have been no referendum on Brexit anyway. But, aside from all that negativity. I’m so proud of my generation for finally getting off their arses and going to put a cross in a box, all my complaints about it over the years mean very little now. I’m so glad you’ve proved me wrong. Let’s just hope this new Coalition falls flat and May is found out once again as the ineffective EU puppet she is and Corbyn presses the no-confidence button (it sure as shit won’t be the nuclear holocaust button) and sends Theresa running through her wheat field, dragging Boris with her as we move into a safer, more sensible government. We almost did it, Britain.
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It’s a big day next Thursday. Voting day. The culmination of being bored to tears by the words ‘austerity’ and ‘deficit’, and one that means so much to people of my generation and younger- whether they believe it or not.
Problem number one: People of my age tend not to vote for reasons that are as flimsy as soaking wet tissue paper. For some, they say that they know nothing about politics and that it can’t possibly affect them. Wrong. You might not realise it but politics is always there, at the forefront of your life. It decides whether a Freddo is 20p or 10p; it decides how many hours a week you get to work; it decides what you have to look forward (and hate) about your future. Yes, it’s a very boring subject and one that I find needlessly confusing, but it is very important. Problem number two: Tory landslide on its way. I’d love to be optimistic about Jeremy Corbyn winning this election and making good on his promises (particularly the end of zero-hours contracts, the promise of free tuition fees, safeguarding the NHS, nationalization) but I just can’t see anything other than a win for Theresa May. The blue blood voters in their Range Rovers, filling a trolley with overpriced groceries at Waitrose will, yet again, have their say and slam down the shutters on a Labour government that wants to redress the chasm of social inequality that Britain suffers from. Problem number three: Biased reporting. The BBC may claim that it is impartial but surely it just follows the status quo of whoever happens to be in power at any given time? It wouldn’t dare contradict the establishment for fear of losing some of its budget (paid for by PUBLIC TV LICENSES by the way) and its freedom of programming. If you’re gonna be biased, at least admit it. I’m biased towards Labour. Then again, I’m not the head of a huge, national company with a name synonymous around the world for being THE original broadcasting service am I? Problem number four: ‘My vote doesn’t count’. Yawn. That irritates me more than most other things. If a million potential Labour voters claimed that their personal opinion was something that didn’t matter then that’s a million votes (essentially) gone to the Conservatives. Hence, they are once again voted in by the public as the ruling government. Stop it. Of course your vote counts. Look at the 1% margin of difference between leave and remain. If people say ‘my vote doesn’t count’ then how can you sit in your chair and have any sort of valid opinion about how you’re getting a rough ride when you had the best chance you’re ever gonna have to have your own voice. Look at the Suffragettes- they literally lost their lives, marriages and community respect for the right to earn women the vote. To have a voice. We have the freedom to do that in a democracy so don’t waste your chance. I urge you that so much. Problem number five: Image. At the last General Election in 2015, a lot of people refused to vote for Labour leader Ed Miliband because he had a nasally voice, a plasticine face and as I was horrified to hear on the local BBC news, didn’t have ‘as nice a bum as David Cameron’. You don’t vote for the person’s face. You vote for how their policies affect you. Then again, the media likes to focus on Theresa May’s shoes or Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of a tie. Who cares? Is their appearance gonna put food on your family table? Is their designer footwear going to pay for your education? Is their pathetically choreographed attempt at not being out of touch with most of the public going to end child poverty? Think about that. I do hope the public votes the way they feel is right. If you have your reasons for voting how you do, you go for it. I may not agree with the result but I’ll fight anyone to the death for the right to have this freedom of choice. However- let June be the end of May. "What we do in life, echoes in eternity"- Maximus Decimus Meridius (Gladiator) Now that uni is over it brings in a load of questions. Firstly, what the actual fuck am I gonna do with my life from this point? I have a degree, yes, and hopefully progressing onto a Masters course doing just this. Writing my opinionated spiel that nobody has ever asked for. The day you tell me to stop and you’re bored is when Blog Roll ceases to exist, okay? I keep thinking back to a year ago. Arguably my happiest ever time in the 23 and a half years of my existence. Grimsby Town had just won promotion at Wembley, Omar Bogle had become my all-time hero, I pushed myself towards averaging a First in my degree course. Life was good. Life now is just uncertain. Many questions being asked with only a few being answered. That’s not to say life is bad right now. It’s been a turbulent start to 2017 for reasons I won’t be going into. "Its not where you're from. Its where you're at"- Ian Brown I can’t believe its been a whole twelve months and three days since Bogez and Arnold scored at the national stadium in that London to send an army of travelling haddock heads into sheer ecstasy. Football, for me, is like the drug that you can’t unhook yourself from. It’s like some frustrating imitation of heroin. If you’re into that sort of thing. It brings you up and shoots you down just as quickly. That day will always be remembered for the drunken singing and incredible sense of relief that six years of pain and suffering were over. It was all worth it in the end. Three years of being the party animal of my friends has ended abruptly. It kinda just sneaked up on me when I took my eyes away from it. In all honesty, it’s been the most fun and fantastic time ever. A time of dodgy sleeping patterns, microwave meals, liver damage and a series of questionable decision-making that has brought me to this point, right now. Right here. Right now. Even two years ago this month, when the embryo of Blog Roll grew into a fully-grown machine seems like yesterday. How about that eh? Over 700 days of me periodically ranting and swearing and boring and offending two-hundred plus viewers a week (or whenever I could be arsed to get out my pit, switch off Netflix and type). I’m intrigued, terrified and excited to enter this Brave New World. I’m sure when Aldous Huxley wrote his novel that he never meant ‘brave’ was trying out a new flavour of super noodles, ‘new’ meant replacing the diminished vodka bottle for yet another piss up or that ‘world’ meant the rainy streets of Crewe, Cheshire. But that’s how it is. "To alcohol- the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems"- Homer Simpson Fucks sake. I’ve just read that Shaun Pearson is leaving Town. He’s been such a good servant to the club and I kissed him on the cheek on a night out on Cleethorpes a few weeks ago. I suppose that’s become a goodbye kiss (purely hetero, you understand) to another of my favourite players after Bogle packed his bags and swanned off to sunny Wigan back in January. But anyway, Pearson going after such a successful time is the perfect extended metaphor for this blog post. New ideas and fresh opportunities. Just like me. With degree results and graduation still to come plus a job hunt that is like finding someone from Scunthorpe with all their original teeth still intact equals stress stress stress. But I’m game. So, as The Clash never sang ‘Lincoln Calling’, my application submitted, conditional offer granted, results to dictate my future. Let’s give it some knuckle, down some guzzle and get back out into the atmosphere. One day, you’ll be so glad to know, I might actually get paid for this sort of thing. It’s been more of a blast than the one that comes from a fireman’s water cannon. Have a good un regulars. Prepare for political rants and a generally depressing nature to these future posts, especially if James, err, Theresa May gets in with a landslide. Fuck. What a world. That’s it. I’m done. Three years a university student is over. It’s been a time of great banter, excessive alcohol consumption and a sleeping pattern that necessitates staying in my bed until the early hours…of the afternoon. What is upsetting is that Box nightclub will open its doors to students on a Tuesday night just once more, ever. Sad times. That sweaty, square dancefloor has seen its fair share of tipsy indiscretions and full-on, drunken delusion in the three years I’ve walked into it. The university’s decision to shut the Cheshire campus will have an adverse effect on the town of Crewe; whether any of the bigwig bastards thought about that is up for debate. Crewe is a town that, with the deindustrialization of the railways and the influx of immigration has become a typical, run-of-the-mill Northern British town. It has students at its heart. You can walk into any house on Hungerford Road and you’ll find students living in it. I wonder what all the landlords are gonna do when said students aren’t there anymore? This town, is coming like a Ghost Town.
Box has been at the forefront of my education, the place where you can bounce off the walls and sing along hoarsely until 3am before seeing your mates in Maccies later. Box has become this legendary place, in a similar vein to The Cavern in the 60s or CBGBs in New York, where an underground counter-culture was going on. The counter-culture being that people in Crewe still exist, no matter what the capitalists in Manchester believe. Okay, so Cheshire doesn’t have the glamour and the history of the big industrial powerhouse just down the M62, but, I am a student at Manchester Met Uni-and that includes Crewe. So thanks for taking a huge chunk out of Crewe’s future, you shits. One more night out as a carefree student, living 24/7 lifestyles on noodles and Hooch. Getting the work done has never been a problem, I’ve been lucky enough to have completely missed out on any dissertation stress and unbearable educational pressure due to my relatively laid-back course. The only thing to think now is: what the fuck am I gonna do with my life now? When I made the decision to quite training as a mechanic to follow my calling in life, I had ideas, a plan, now it’s just like…what? Exactly. Unfortunately for me, I can’t see how many employers will look at my Creative Writing and Film/TV Studies degree and say “He’s the one we want.” Then again, it was what I wanted to do, so fuck you. I should be getting paid to do this. Admit it. You’ve loved every minute of this blog since its inception back in March 2015. Okay, so I mainly rant about my shitty football team or getting drunk or making some very libellous comments about the government; but you can’t ever say it’s been dull. That basically sums up the last three years for me. It has never been dull. If it were my job, my actual earning money livelihood to write, then that would be ideal please. I don’t wanna be a barman for the rest of my life, serving drunk girls who think fluttering their fake Primark lashes at me is gonna get them a free drink. I guess it’s a transitional time for me as I return to being just a normal lad, rather than under the umbrella of ‘studenthood’. I could not tell you when my next blog post will be, hopefully next week, but, as Mick Hucknall sang, “if you don’t know me by now…” Andddddddd we’re back to blogging. Been a while, had some other things to sort out and alcohol to consume etc. You know the score by now.
Most of my life has been spent watching people with more money and better future prospects than me look down their noses. They sometimes look at me as though I’m a badly behaved toddler or a puppy that’s just done a shit all over their Persian rug. Classic example: I got on a train that was for London Euston and I was stared at as I sat down by a snooty woman, blinged up to the nines with expensive tomfoolery (jewellery) and had her hair and make-up all done perfectly. Trying to hide the signs of ageing you see. As she whizzes towards 50, she covers her up her crows feet and sense of abject disappointment that her little suburban lifestyle is a complete, rotting mess. Anyway, what gives her the right to think she’s better than me? I’m a proud working-class, Northerner. I’m Labour and not Tory. I’m from the mean streets of one of the roughest places in the UK. I don’t take kindly to plum gobbed old bids giving me more daggers than Lady Macbeth. She honestly looked at me as though she’d smelled summat grim. I’ve never gone without in my life, thanks to hard-working parents and my mum doing the big shop on a budget for thirty-odd years. But, we’ve all made sacrifices at some point or another. For example, if I wanted new trainers then I’d have to save up my paper round/dole money for a few weeks. I didn’t get the opportunity to just go out with my Barclaycard and buzz in purchases left, right and fucking centre. Does that make me any less of a person than someone who has a never-ending supply of spare cash lying about? I don’t think so. These kids who have daddy’s money from his custy job as a top brass in a bank or as a high-powered sales executive that robs the poor and gives to their rich, stuck up family haven’t a clue what it means to struggle. There have been days, in the past, where I’ve had to choose whether to catch the bus or walk the journey into Town from my house. It shows exactly the problems this country has had and will continue to have (made worse if we elect Tresemme, by the way) that I could barely even scrape together a couple of bob for the bus. So, don’t look down your botched nose-job at me, love. You might think you’re happy with your Chanel perfume and your Prada handbag but let me tell you, when you wake up in the morning, you let out a ripping fart just like anyone else in the world. Don’t let people get you down over your race, colour, social class or background. It’s just not worth it. Preach. Next blog post in May…2019 There is that age-old question that has been debated and argued for decades as to who can claim to be the Greatest Band In The History Of The World. I’m sure most of you will stick your favourite in the ring, which is fair enough. It’s something that I just want to explore. And also, I haven’t written a blog post for over a week so I have summat to talk about here.
In my opinion, The Beatles are probably the most influential band of all-time. That doesn’t mean that they’re the best though. The reason why The Fab Four are so famous is because of their huge impact on popular culture. One minute there was nothing but grey overalls and days spent in steel mills for the young generation, the next thing you know Lennon and McCartney have written some absolute bangers and before you can say Khabib Nurmagamedov, we have a new thing called ‘adolescence’. So, that’s the claim of the Liverpudlian lyricists in being simply the best. My favourite band is The Clash- something that people who know me well will already be aware of as I constantly quote their lyrics and even have a Clash-based tattoo. Are they the best though? Sure, they have their place in rock and roll folklore and are well-known for being pioneers of punk, but is that it? I guess as far as their actual music goes, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. The mixture of punk rock racket, reggae groove and pure rock and roll is something that is as delightful as it is disorientating. They might be my favourite but I’m not so sure they would be ‘the best’. Another potential claimant to this crown could well be Pink Floyd. You might be reading this and thinking ‘what the fuck are you on about? Aren’t they that band that spend 20 minutes on guitar solos and hearing the voice of the devil?’ Yes, you’d be right. However, if we’re looking at album sales as a gauge for how popular or ‘good’ a band is then Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ steams ahead of most others. I admit, it takes some getting used to and you probably need to be Charlie’d up to understand that what you’re listening to is anything more than pretentious progressive rock. But, with so many million sales, they must have done something right. I’ve started to realise that I’m getting nowhere with this ‘best-ever’ debate. But I’m pissed off now ‘cause Town have just gone 2-1 down after a VERY dodgy referee decision. Anyway, moving on. What about Queen? Their Greatest Hits album is THE biggest-selling album in the history of the British Phonographic Institute. I remember my article for Kettle magazine where I claimed that Freddie Mercury was the greatest frontman in rock and roll. I stand by that statement. Now, I’ve grown up on a musical diet of Queen, Zeppelin, Meat Loaf and Quo and that makes me biased towards shredding guitar solos and banging drums. But Queen could be THE one. Bohemian Rhapsody is arguably the most complex song ever written and name somebody you know who doesn’t know at least most of the lyrics. Exactly. Beelzebub, Scaramouche and Galileo indeed. What that means is anyone’s guess but for Mercury and May, their perms and moustaches are something that should be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all on their own. So, I haven’t even definitively said what the best band ever is. That’s the beauty of it, you can have your own opinion on that. Honourable mentions I guess should go to The Rolling Stones, Eagles and, of course, The Stone Roses. Like Neil Buchanan used to say on Art Attack: ‘try it yourself’, see if you can finally say, once and for all, that you know what the best band in the world, ever, is. What a difference one week makes. This time last Saturday, I was moping about on a train to Manchester, picking at the humiliating carcass of seeing my beloved football team torn a new one by Crewe Alexandra. I might live in that town but its football team has never been more than a blinking light on the Final Score videprinter. I’ve never been a fan of theirs but I’ve also never hated them as much as I did a week ago. They only went and tonked my team by five goals to nil- as far as embarrassment goes, that’s about as hard to take as I can remember in a long while.
I can only really make light of the situation. Always look on the bright side of life and always laugh in the face of adversity. It’s kinda like going on a night out, getting drunk and thinking you’ve just pulled a Rachel Riley lookalike. You then wake up the following day, in a funny coloured-stained bed and roll over to find a Lisa Riley lookalike. Not something that you feel comfortable talking about but it’s a story that you sheepishly share as a warning over what can happen. But, Grimsby welcomed Mansfield to the seaside today and went and beat them 3-0. They beat a much, much better side with a much, much better performance. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall, sometimes. They do the hard part pretty well but the easier aspects of being a football team, for example stringing two passes together, seems difficult. Almost as if you’ve just taken eleven complete strangers, sozzled drunk from a week-long bender on the guzzle, and put them out on a football pitch. I don’t get it, like. I suppose there is always that old adage that ‘Grimsby Town may be shit, but they’re mine’. In most respects, that’s a true statement. I don’t think I’ve ever known anything so frustrating, so irritating and, yet somehow, so rewarding as being a football fan. Anyway, your humble blogger here has managed to get himself an interview for a university. I ask all my readers to think hard about whether or not they could picture me, this opinionated, lanky Northerner as a teacher of English? Well, that’s a distinct possibility now. Just think, in 20 years’ time, we could have a whole generation of people from the Alex school of thinking. A group of upstart young writers that ram their opinion and unnecessary insults into the ether of the internet, coupled with a real undeserved sense of self-satisfaction in what they do. While we’re on the subject, when did it become so unacceptable to share your opinion? I feel like, in 2017, that offending somebody is easier than finding a smackhead in Scunthorpe. You know what? If you can stand by your conviction to have your opinion, then I salute you. There are certain people in the world (Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins, Jose Mourinho) who you just don’t wanna know the cesspool of shit that comes out their gobs, but for everyone else, just do it. Bob Marley wrote ‘you can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people, all the time’. So, stand up for your right. If you wanna moan on Facebook about how ‘all lads are the same’ or use Twitter to spread your anti-UKIP manifesto, then do it. Just don’t complain when the inevitable backlash comes around. As you can probably tell, I wanted to keep my record of blogging every week intact, even though I don’t have really have anything to write about. Blog Roll is one-hundred percent, certified shite so I doubt you even noticed much difference. Hope you had a great Valentine’s Day and now to look forward to Pancake Day on the 28th. Ask a student what the most important factor of their studenthood is and I bet that 90% of them will say ‘getting their degree’. While I believe that you need to buckle down and work hard towards a first, there are so many elements of being a student that would be completely out of place in the real world.
So let’s have a look, eh? When I graduate and go back out into the big, bad universe, there are a few habits I need to get out of. First: it is not actually okay to sit in bed at four in the afternoon, eating noodles and watching Louis Theroux. Most people are at work at that time of the day and it is no achievement to have dragged your carcass out of your pit before 2pm. It’s not. Don’t sit there thinking it is. There are, surely, only so many times you can scroll up and down Facebook laughing at memes before you actually have to do some work. Second: No matter what us students think; it is not normal to go to bed just as the night sky is turning to daylight. The normal world is up for work and the school run long before we even decide it’s time to hibernate. This is a sleeping pattern that regularly interrupts my life. I don’t even wake up at 9am when I have a morning lecture…at 9am. £9000 a year well spent on tuition fees eh? Third: It seems a good idea to bulk buy super noodles, pasta and instant mash but it really doesn’t make a meal does it? No, it doesn’t. You can argue all day that a bowl of sort of warm noodles is a meal but it really isn’t in the real world. Some students I know have gone to their kitchens, found their cupboard bare, with the exception of a few loose pieces of penne and a half empty bottle of economy vodka. These same students have decided that the 10-minute walk to the supermarket or, in my case, the 30 second journey to the corner shop is far too much hassle for your frazzled mind to comprehend. The next logical step is to shrug and go to sleep. Yes, some of us students really do go for a nap for tea. If that sounds mad to you then you obviously have never been one of us. I know that doing work and finishing your degree is of the upmost importance but- the social side of things is something extremely crucial to your time as an undergraduate. How many conversations have ever begun with “Remember when we stapled those packets of crisps together?” or “Mate, I broke your baking tray when I threw it at that cat that keeps coming in the garden”. If you’ve never heard these entertaining anecdotes then you clearly haven’t spent time in Halls of Residence. Three years of excessive alcohol consumption, sleeping until the late afternoon, buying Nerf guns for seemingly no reason, thinking that watching the dating channel at stupid o’clock in the morning is high banter- is almost over for me. Insane. Madness. It’s been a blast. Cheers, like. President Donald J. Trump. That takes a lot of getting used to. How that has happened, I don’t know. I suppose the thousands of people that voted for Harambe as some sort of humorous ‘anti-vote’ are feeling pretty stupid right now. So they should. What opinion can you have on Trump’s divisive and controversial politics if you decided to spoil your ballot paper being ‘hipster’ and ‘anti-establishment’?
I would never say that Hilary Clinton was the ideal choice because, let’s face it, she wasn’t much better, but the Florida fucktards that put the word Harambe into their box are as much to blame for Trump’s weird angle on American politics as the man himself. Blog Roll very rarely enters the bizarre and frustrating world of politics but if the people I’ve seen complaining all over social media about Trump showed the same anger and passion towards our own Tory government, then we might have seen a better result in the 2015 General Election. The one’s who didn’t vote because ‘they don’t know anything about politics’ are, in some cases, not all, the same people who are now spewing out their anger at Trump and flinging around the words ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘xenophobic’ all over the place. I’m not a supporter of Donald Trump and never will be but why not get your own house in order before you decide to come out with your uninformed and, frankly, ill-deserved opinions. The focus of a lot of hatred has been Theresa May, our PM, over her alleged allegiance with the American billionaire. The Prime Minister nobody wanted or even voted for is making decisions on behalf of a country too lazy to go out and try and decide their own political fate. This country, for whatever reason, voted for the pig-fucking, shiny-foreheaded David Cameron who jumped shipped at the first sign of Brexit and showed himself to be the cowardly Conservative arsehole that I always imagined he was. I’m not, of course, saying that if we had voted Labour then Trump wouldn’t have got in. So, don’t get me wrong. I’m merely wondering why we can cry tears of sadness over something happening in America but pay very little attention to our own people in our own streets. Maybe I’ve got the whole thing all wrong and I just don’t get it. Anyway, enough politics. I don’t wanna start 2017 with my loyal followers thinking this is The Observer so we’ll skate over a few Blog Roll topics- Number one: Grimsby Town lost to Stevenage on Saturday, the less said about that, the better. Number two: I have six months left as a university student. There will be no more time for lukewarm noodles being eaten in bed at 4pm; no more time for slothing around claiming to be doing important work while all the while I’m just revisiting Louis Theroux documentaries. It’s a tough life. I’ve just realised that this is probably the angriest, most scornfully toned blog post I’ve ever written. As much as I’m not gonna apologise for that, I’m not gonna make a habit out of it. So, enjoy the short few hours left of January, traditionally the most depressing and boring month of the year and kick off your 2017 with a juicy drink or two. Cheer up, its nearly Valentine’s Day. Identity is a funny thing. It’s something that we, as humans, are in a constant struggle to find and yet we only have a vague idea of what it actually means. You know what’s coming here. A rambling and sprawling piece of opinion writing that nobody asked for. But fuck it. I’m gonna get paid for doing this one day. And also, nobody has ever asked me to stop.
A sense of belonging is what I think it is. As we all know and are well-versed by now, I come from the less-than-glamorous surroundings of North East Lincolnshire, with all its derelict fishing docks and unique looking people. That, itself, is my identity. Whether I like it or not. But- and it’s a Zinedine Zidane of a butt- that doesn’t feel like the place I belong to. Cue the unsurprised murmurs from my regulars. “Here he goes again, having a go at his hometown while he sits in luxury with his fat student loan”. Oh, you. What I’m getting at is this: there is something that seems to hold me back. When I went on holiday to Amsterdam, I felt more contented than I had anywhere else in the world. That laid back summers day when I laid in Vondel Park, as high as a helium balloon making its way through drops of Jupiter, with not a care and not a worry was perfection. I didn’t worry that while I fell asleep in the Dutch sunshine that some opportunist pickpocket was gonna dip my pockets and nab my loose change to go spend on smack. I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about anything. I was at one with my surroundings. If this is sounding too hippy-ish for you then why don't you go and read Katie Price's autobiography; yeah you'll really see some profound thoughts in there... That was such a blissful feeling that I’m probably gonna be driven to madness trying to recreate it. I remember just being on the metro on the most beautiful city on Earth with enough mind-bending substances inside me to take down a small elephant and I felt happy. I felt good. I felt like I, you’re ahead of me, belonged. It just was. Even as a creative writing student, finding the words to describe that sensation is almost as impossible as finding a virgin in Scunthorpe. The only thing I can think it was is that I belonged there, somehow. Like I could just go and live there and carve out a living doing literally anything and I’d be happier. They say never go back. But who the fuck are ‘they’ and why do ‘they’ tell you what to do? Whenever I tread the mean streets of Grimsby’s East Marsh or the rain-soaked pavements of Crewe, I don’t feel that same sense of belonging. I feel more like I’m being held back in some way. This is absolutely not another unnecessary dig at my place of birth (although I could go on about that for DAAAAAYS), I’m just curious to figure out what makes me tick. Like when you disassemble a clock and it has all its intricate parts that couldn’t possibly work without each other. That’s kinda like me. If I decided to get rid of this introspective and thoughtful side to myself, then I wouldn’t be me anymore would I? Really makes you think, like. Amsterdam is in my heart now. Like Ian Brown said: it takes time for people to fall in love, but it’s inevitable. The Mancunian prophet hits it right again. It isn’t all about the lax attitude to drugs or even the hilarious sight of some leather-clad, old woman doing teasing tricks with a mars bar in the red light district windows. It’s about slipping inside the eye of your mind, don’t you know you might find, a better place to play. When you find somewhere you feel you belong, never let it go. |