The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

My life has hit the skids for about the 50th time since I left school. I’m going to need bailing out and everything’s a fucking mess. I’m losing my job again at the end of this week, last week I lost my house, and the week before my girl left me. I’m crushed, I can’t sleep, and I was going to stay with her till I found a new place. At the moment, my daily routine is based around trying to not think about how badly everything’s gone wrong; at work I bury myself in the papers and shirk as much responsibility as possible. Work’s over by 6.30pm and I pick up food and go straight from there to my buddy’s where I’m staying, take some prescription tranquilisers and watch four hours of Sky TV while he works on his politics MA upstairs. I set up the sofa bed around 11, do some more tranquilisers and try to sleep. It should be noted that I actually passed up the opportunity to stay at a house with seven hot girls from Brooklyn in it. They’re in a band and on tour, but that place didn’t have Sky and I don’t want to talk to anyone, let alone a bunch of fucking hipster indie chicks. It sounds bad, but all this is a symptom of a bigger problem.

As I write this, it’s Armistice Day and I’m reminded of my family heritage. I come from a family of Naval officers of note: my grandfather died in 1951 as the Number One on HM Submarine Affray, which sank off the French coast without explanation (a book just got published about it called Subsmash, which sounds like a very sensationalist name but it’s an emergency codeword you use when your submarine is in trouble). It was a huge deal at the time - a major event that was in the papers for weeks and had the Prime Minister making statements outside Downing Street (Wikipedia it). He was only a year older than I am now. My step-grandfather, Captain Jack ‘Hank’ Henry (he even had a hero’s name) was in the Fleet Air Arm, shot down Japanese fighters in the Pacific throughout the war, worked with the SAS in Korea, became a test pilot for early jets, then became a diplomat in the US and met Kennedy, Nixon and Louis Armstrong. He died about two years ago and the church was completely full, which never happens if you’re over 80, unless you’re special. My grandmother obviously had a thing for heroes. Even my dad - who I’ve had my problems with over the years - went to war twice, spied on the Russians from a submarine, got an MBE and does something pretty important now.

I am the spawn of these men, and I have never done anything. After school (a liberal boarding school that my father nearly killed himself paying for), I went to art college and spent my loans on drugs, clothes and records, went to rehab, went back to college, did okay after not fucking around for the last three weeks, then worked in a trendy trainer store, did loads of coke, then got a job in ‘new media’ - a good first job that I fucked up by being late, lazy, hungover, gacked out and asleep at my desk most of the time. I was then unemployed for three months until my buddy hooked me up to stand in for someone on maternity leave as a receptionist at the management company that looks after the Chuckle Brothers and Jim Davidson among others - mostly the ‘greats’ of light entertainment who had their day in the sun 15 years ago. So, for the last eight weeks, I’ve spent my days doing things like looking for the correct brand of pink champagne to give to Julian Clary after his opening night in Cabaret, photocopying Gillian Taylforth’s press cuttings and putting Eddie Large through to his agent’s PA on the switchboard.

So mostly I’ve chased girls, avoided responsibility and never tried hard at anything, even stuff I thought I cared about. I’m so fucking lost it’s insane. While I was doing pills all through my late teens/early twenties and playing bass in the worst hardcore band you ever heard, my friends where sneaking about behind my back building careers, getting real degrees or learning their instruments properly so they could tour in real bands and make a proper go of that shit. I’ve managed to get to 24 without even having my name on an electricity bill, I’ve never left Europe and I definitely never commanded a fucking submarine. I can’t even drive.

I know I’m not the only one who feels like his life is going nowhere, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll probably fall into something worthwhile eventually - it just scares me that I don’t have a clue what it’s going to be, and I literally don’t know what it’s going to take to make me try, or make me commit to anything. A terminal illness or getting someone knocked up are my two best guesses, because I can’t see it coming from deep inside. Having fun took such a precedent over everything that proper, real life is just a total impossibility. I thought I took the righteous path, but I didn’t. As it stands now, my way of life has gotten in the way of my life. I don’t know if any of this is relevant to anyone else. Maybe some of you feel like this too. Maybe I’m just venting. Sorry.

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