clinging to the wreckage

As a child I spent a lot of time in Scotland. My father’s sister lived there and she happened to be married to my father’s best friend. Therefore, every single break we had we would drive up to Scotland to see them. It was always an adventure. It always seemed to be snowing to the extent that we would never be able to get into the street that my aunt lived in, and if we did happen to venture up during the summer months there was always talk of the Loch Ness Monster and how we may see it as we passed by. I loved those trips and never realised at the time that my aunt was a narrow minded dependent who could not drive and showed no ambition to travel, to learn, to discover, or even to understand how to use a bank machine. I feared her because she was an authoritarian. And still Scotland remained magical and mystical to me. The first time that I visited, in my excitement, I walked my cousin to school – Scottish school holidays were different to ours so she still had a week or so befor...

It’s empty in this room but I suffer less than many thus far I reach out to you time and again only to miss and fall and this abyss is deep so I search for things things to bring light and meaning sometimes there’s even a faint flicker of hope usually when I see my cats at play or hear a piece of music a song and yet for you I long and feel deep misery in this stone cold silence.

This year is a year of writing and reading. It is a year of study and a year in which I will finally try to escape the corporate rat race. It is a year to be brave and to embrace poverty in the pursuit of being true to one’s self; a year to stop sacrificing my time, my life, to those who are making a lot of money and who shuffle me around like I am a pawn on their chessboard. It’s time to find a literary agent and to find out the truth once and for all about my writing. I’m poor and I have no traditional ambitions. My old car and my rented home and my lonely life make me a failure in the eyes of most but I have always set out to be a humble man with a desire to write and that is what I do. I make absolutely no money from writing but I do it anyway. I do not enhance my career through my studies and yet this year will be the year I embark upon the daunting English Masters Degree. It’s a year, however, to remain on the edges of traditions, scavenging what I can to keep me happy when ...

New Year’s Newsflash: you can’t afford anything. The British government is hungry. It’s hungry with an insatiable greed never before seen and they are ensuring that inflation increases exponentially. Tax... tax... tax... it’s all in the name of your protection... they want to make sure you can’t afford to harm yourself... NO... they just want MORE MONEY! The first thing that you should probably do as this year arrives is go to the supermarket and buy lots of canned goods. It won’t be long before you can’t afford food. Buy a few bottles of beer at the post-Christmas sale price... because they won’t be going back to normal price, they’ll be going to double the normal price. It’s not the companies selling them that are making more and more profit (although they often increase them more to do that anyway) it is your friendly government trying to make a profit on everything.  Happy New Year.