I’ve been moved to write for the first time in a while by a shocking experience today.

I was returning from the particularly dispicable doorstepping of a vulnerable member of society when I heard a familiar voice on the radio.

Kate Rusby. Oh she’s so lovely. A voice that could break your heart and all that. Oh yes, this will sooth my tortured soul.

But who’s that singing with her? No … it can’t be. It is, isn’t it.

Ronan Keating. Better known, even to his mother, as Ronan Fucking Keating.

But there it is. Fate rarely smiles on those who doorstep.

I woke up on Monday morning craving a cigarette. Normally, as a person who gave up the regular woodbine more than five years ago, I ignore these urges, but that morning was different.

So I found myself outside sitting on a chair, puffing away and feeling the sun on my face. It was a good feeling and I sat there for a while smoking my way through one cig, before putting it out, pausing for a bit and then sparking another. I went on like that for some time, with my housemates one by one appearing to ask what I was doing and me sitting out there staring at stuff and smoking. I felt like a smoker. It was cool. Then I remembered I didn’t really smoke so I went inside and didn’t do it again.

Yes yes peeps and all that homey yer wit meh? kinda blag. Well anyway, as you can see bolo is still in the process of breaking, reappearing and then breaking again. Have now got it back up and about and hopefully starting to get somewhere now, but interesting to note that all apostrophes in many of the posts have now turned into stranges symbols. This is one of those symptoms that doesn’t defy reason, but the explanation is so dull, I think I’m going to leave it.

In other matters, the runaway freight train that has been my life of late continued apace this weekend, with soul funk moves on Friday, lean dreams on Saturday and total annihilation on Sunday. To the dik who thought it was a good idea to try to choke me despite my repeated protestations that I wanted no form of aggression with him, I can only say I hope my head broke your nose. Big people should not pick on smaller people just because they think they can and particularly not when the sleight of frame person in question has about two weeks and one bad nights worth of pure rage inside him.

Hey hey hey it’s a bank holiday weekend. Y’git meh blad it’s a bank holiday weekend? Do you understand me bredren, it’s a chance to rest our aching heads. Put your feet up Grandad. Get the barbie on, it’s footy in the park and cricket and everything that’s right. Oh my god I need to rest my weary head. I need to go out drinking tonight. Sweet oblivion you are my oldest friend, come back to me and then let me sleep for two days. That’s all I ask.

The Groover spent yesterday throwing himself recklessly into a world of incredible pain. He does not yet know why he has done this. He knows that his heart hurts, his head is spinning and he is in work wanting to abuse someone. He hopes that things will get better, but he is unsure.

Halfway through the move and have broken the damn site completely about three times. Complete catastrophic failure type breaking as well, replete with a message that tells you that all actions are now forbidden, even blinking. Have managed to get it repaired, with I think only the loss of a picture off Bennie’s recent post. No doubt there will be more casualties, so whilst I would encourage posting, I wouldn’t encourage you to put up your masterwork in the next couple of days. Ya

I am moving bolo to a new server right now, so I wouldn’t post anything till Tuesday to be safe…. chars

My hand shoots out and makes contact with flesh and bone. Head bouncing off fist and another one following it. Throwing my fists, then my head into the job. Bodies dancing like drunken fighters, as he’s trying to counter. Trying to swing a fist up, get purchase, bring a knee up to my groin. But nah, no fucking way man, I’m not having that so I am dodging and smashing up, down with an elbow, and then stomping down towards a face with hands ineffectively in the way. Hard shoes sinking in to spaces in the ribs and the noise of the air knocked out. Run down the road, the sound of sirens behind me, jump a fence. This ultra-violence never ends.

Coming down the stairs to answer the door, and Paps gets there first. I can’t see who it is as I descend, but I can see him waving his arms depreciatingly. It’s a charity lady, Christian Aid to be specific. She’s asking about the little plastic bag which was apparently dropped round at ours earlier in the week. “Have you seen it, dude” says Paps. “Nah”, I say laughing at the idea that I might know where anything might be in this house. “Well it’s ok says the lady, most people who lose the bag just give us some money anyway.” This time it’s Pap’s turn. “Nah” and he closes the door.

Christian Aid once knocked at my parents house when I was younger and when my Dad answered, and explained that they were not one of the charities that he gave to, the lady said “well, I hope your children die”. I for one, have never forgiven them.

“Gulp….er…sorry, mate?” That punch-in-the-solar plexus effect that happens when the stranger with whom you thought you were having a friendly chat feels he has your trust, then without warning decides to let you into his strange world of ‘between you and me’ opinion – in this case I was hit with: “course y’know, they’re all farkin over ‘ere innay!”  - …er, sorry, mate?  - Dem lot. More over ‘ere than in farkin’ Affrika or India or w’revver it is they farkin come from. – (Jokingly [as you do]) Don’t think there’s a billion Indians over here mate. – (Deadly serious, and getting a little red-faced) Farkin ‘is! Comin’ over ‘ere, farkin millyuns an’ billyuns ov the bastards. No bluddy white faces anymore. We just letum in. Farkin red carpitt. Tell ya mate, more over ‘ere than over there, no jokin’ mate. Farkin disgrace. Farkin Blair. - (Playing dummy) So what you’re saying is that you disagree with the immigration policy in this country. You think there should be more stringent controls on economic migrants and an overhaul of the asylum application process? – Dass right mate. Send ‘em ‘ome mate. Farkin’ ell, no bluddy Crissmass anymore, s’all Divarrrley this and farkin Muslim that. Farkin no Inglish anymore, jus’ jibber-jabber. Send ‘em farkin ‘ome, I say. Farkin scroungers, takin’ our jobs an’ benefits. Farkin disgrace that Blair.  - Listen mate, I….  - Fark me, issat the time. Got a leg of pork in the oven. Nice meetin’ ya…(Hands empty Cobra pint glass to barman.) Cheers, Raj, take it easy mate. (To me) Good bloke that, always look after yer in ‘ere. After my stunned confusion had subsided, my ‘smug, self-righteous lefty liberal elitist’ shame at not having shot him down in so much inglorious flame, as a stinger would a Zeppelin, burnt like a dodgyy vindaloo. Next time I promise to be drunk…

Said Bonehead from Oasis and he meant it. Still, he probably only knew three chords and one of those was a C major. Personally, I quite like making music with sequencing software. It’s good to be as untalented as me and get to have command of a fifty piece orchestra and I’m not sure the real London Philharmonic would put up with the two hours of repeated play it takes me to get a drum break right or to pick the exact amount of echo to apply to the Marimba.

As you can see, the worst thing about sequencers is that they make you procrastinate. You have so many options on what sound you might achieve that sometimes you just get too lean and waste half a day worrying about whether you should go for flute sound 3 or 4. Mind you at the moment, I feel strange enough that I would quite happily throw a drum and bass break together with a distorted banjo and invent a new form of music called Formbyism. Or reverse a Celine Dion (sic?) loop and mix that in with a bit of Aphex Twin and Mungo Jerry. This is no time for proper tunes. I want freak tunes, acid noises and stomach emptying basses that allow me to stop listening to the noise of thought in my head and shake my bones in temporary peace. Silence is unpleasant.

A few years ago, sometime in the six form I think, a few of us had spent our Wednesday ‘activity’ afternoon in the pub.  We were hungry on the way home, so we ducked into a kebab shop for the necessary food fix. For some inexplicable reason, and despite the fact it was about 6pm, one of my mate’s younger brothers was coming up on a very harsh acid tab at the time.  He’d been holding it together pretty well in the pub – at 16 this geezer had already done 20+ trips, so either his sanity was already dispensed with or he could really handle it.

After a few moments of telling foot-shuffling and smirk-surpression, Dave lost it. We were all in the queue, about 5 of us in total, and there was already a family of chunks in front of us, ordering their delights from the miscellaneous menk stick.  The laughter erupted with a noisy ‘phhhhhhhhsssssssssst’, and bubbles of saliva were born and exploded over several of our backs.  It was the really crippling laughter that only narcotics can bring.  We took him outside and sat down with him.  Once the laughter had subsided to a level that would allow him to speak, Dave said, “That meat, that thing on a stick…..it could be…..fucking…..ANYTHING!” Then he lost it again and began convulsing on the floor with laughter, which brought us more attention than we wanted.  Once he’d calmed down a bit again, he coninued his explanation..”and you……you……pay money for it……and, him, the kebab dude, he’s…..fucking evil!” It was too much to take for poor Dave, and yet again he cracked up.

All was ok from then on until we got to the Esso garage a the top of my road. Dave needed Rizlas. Full credit to him, he didn’t ask anyone to go in for him, or perhaps he did and we refused, I can’t remember.  What I do remember is Dave staggering out, laughing his tits off and trying to explain that ‘that cunt’s beard kept flashing ON and OFF!’.

Had to take a break from this writing malarkey to sort my life out for a little bit. Also trying to move this website from one server to another. The combined effects of these two things mean that there is a good chance we’re about to experience a bolo breakage. Oh well fingers crossed.

Incidentally, just wanted to say that I wish I could paint like Fred Fabre.

Out on Friday celebrating the sale of a good few tshirts, some design work, the last few months of animal hard work and not least the end of a week enriched with a bit of sunshine. Needless to say really, it quickly descended into a drunken frenzy of strange dance moves and twisted proportions. Still, these things need to happen every once in a while. To all who were involved, good work.

About a month ago part of the bolt on the bathroom door fell off. This meant that it was no longer safe to lock the door as whilst you could slide the bolt in, you lacked the means to pull it out again. Obviously this has resulted in lots of walking in on people, furtive knocking to make sure it’s empty and the strong social prerogative to leave the door open when you finish, thus indicating to your fellow man that the stink-room is vacant and waiting their attention. My own tactic while in there is to whistle loudly in an effort to convey both my presence in the room and to indicate my satisfaction with the task at hand.

However, unfortunately on Tuesday evening I forgot the above byelaws in a moment of confusion. My mental state was caught somewhere between intense confusion and elation and this caused me to step into the room and firmly lock the bolt before proceeding with my business. I remembered to do the whistling part (needlessly), and suspected nothing, but on returning was hit with the revelation that I was locked in, sealed in a ceramic tomb. The cold/hot feeling familiar to those of us who occasionally make mistakes washed over me and my instant ape-man response was to seize the bolt with my bare fingers and exert force. Unsurprisingly, this was wholly ineffective and hugely painful and even when I attempted the pull bolt with sleeve of jumper as a protective barrier trick, I was rewarded with nothing.

Pacing the room I was filled with fear. What a twat I would look to my guests sitting below. Would I have to call one of them up to kick the door in from the outside (given that it opened inwards I couldn’t try that one). Would I have to spend the night here wrapped around the u-bend, Prov passing maroots under the gap in the door and thin slices of cheese for sustenance. I might even have to clean the place. The thought and the terror that went with it was too much. I seized the toilet roll holder, smashed it into smithereens, rooted through the wreckage for a handy screw, forced that into the point in the bolt where the piece of metal had broken off and pulled with all my might. A moment of resistance and then “pop” and I was free.

From now on I will be going to the toilet in the garden. It’s pretty rubbish out there, but you can’t get locked in, just out, which has happened to me as well, but that’s another story.

My face
Is all over the place
Angles galore
Nose to the floor
One eye’s in heaven
The other’s next door.
Singular eyebrow
The crooked half-grin
Just asking for someone
To smash it in…

Maybe one of the reasons why sporting success has been so hard to come by in this country is that the sportsmen and women kind of suspected that all the efforts involved would be worth nothing more than a quick buck to the powers that be at all levels: sporting bodies, governments and big business. On the back of our Ashes success last Summer, this has been proven. The sport itself was never allowed to celebrate its transformation from one with less support than a Primark girdle to one that people (briefly) cared more than fuckwit-ball about, rather the celebration was done on its behalf by the ECB and the MCC who respectively sold a sport at its national viewing peak to Sky for several hundred million (unthinkable in the days of Atherton when it could have been swapped for a toffee apple or a blow job off of Geoffrey Boycott), and raised the ticket prices at Lord’s several times above inflation. As a result of their fiendish avarice I now have to sit in my garden in the sunshine today instead of sitting indoors watching the Lord’s sunshine, and tomorrow I have to pay through the nose to go and sit in the Lord’s sunshine when I could be sitting in my garden.

Sitting alone at my desk in my parents house looking out at the garden and thinking about a cup of tea. Marketing letters strewn scribbled upon around the room and a headache from the night before. Makes me think that I hate working from home, but actually, it’s ok, just a bit quiet and hard to concentrate. Maybe I will have that cup of tea…..

Had the pleasure this weekend of watching a film made by, starring and certainly heavily funded by estate agents. When I say a film, I really mean a film in that it was shot properly, clearly had a script of some form, was properly edited and most importantly was full of explosions, automatic gun fire and protracted fight scenes. It was based on apocalypse now and it’s central message seemed to be to say “we are cold-killing salesmen types, that dominate the battlefield in the same way that we dominate the local housing market”. Normally this kind of corporate offering appalls me, but I have to admit that in this case, the film was so well executed and the actors so into it (including shouts of ‘lets kill some gooks’ and ‘I really love the smell of napalm in the morning, me’) that the whole thing pulled off rather well. So good work Gibbs Gillespie, I will never mess with you over rent payments again and apologise for the incident a few years ago when I failed to convince one of my inebriated pals not to urinate on the luxury cars in your car park. Please don’t kill me.

Inside my soul is a beautiful place
Where great symphonies get written
Where Booker prize winning novels get laid down
In neatly lettered prose
On a daily basis.
My heart is full of great paintings
Great pamphlets to be written
And films
Films of epic light and colour
Stories that make you think
Walking out from the cinema hand in hand
And tear stains down your face.

The countryside is best taken at high speed, through a train window in my opinion. From that vantage point, on a warm day like today, the green fields, small hamlets and woodland copses take on an idyllic blur, that makes semi-urbanites like myself feel like we might be wasting our time, tap tap tapping keyboards all day in cubicle land. We should be out there sitting on a tree stump smoking a pipe with the land rover sitting in the background and the dogs running free in the yard.

Well, yes, all that may well be true, but equally I should probably be ruling over a hareem of fine women somewhere in the south american jungle or playing pro Baseball for the Harlem JobDodgers. These are the kind of thoughts that run through my mind when I’m sitting on a train. I like the sensation of the land speeding away and that’s why I sit facing backwards. I don’t care about the land rushing up in front of me, but I’m pleased to see it moving out behind. I like the looks of sheep and factories and I like the fact they go past and I don’t have to see them again.

Am not going to try and over-analyse that, just chucking it in for context really. Just wanted to make the observation that if we did slow down (tilt train stops tilting, drop the contents of the lavatories and the smokers step off for a cigarette). If I was to take the opportunity to get off at one of these impromptu stops I probably wouldn’t wander into what had appeared to be a rural replication of the garden of Eden. Most likely close up I’d find it was a hot-bed of racial violence against immigration, headed up by some BNP style Mosely lookalike with those moustaches that you apply wax to. The village shop would have last week’s papers in it and last year’s magazines, the locals in the pub would stare at you and if you stayed long enough might treat you to a kicking or spot of buggery in the car park. Country villages are hot-beds of hatred, intolerance and bigotry and even the fields, which look so healthy green from so far away are riddled with chemicals, illegal landfills and seven-foot inbred farmers when you get up close.

Best to stay on your train, carry on thinking, carry on drinking (in my case) and look forward to getting back to a city whose all prevalent dirt doesn’t attempt to hide the degeneracy of the humans that live there unlike these dishonest disney town pestilent villagers who make their houses out of thatch and try and claim a lottery grant when they get burnt down.

Spent a portion of my weekend wondering how to convey to my upstairs neighbour that he and his mates were really taking the p1ss noise wise. Not just the music, guffawing and juvenile antics, but also the TALKING IN THE FUCKING CORRIDOR. By the time I was bothered enough to go and say anything, i knew that they would be totally hammered and I was afraid that the long-matured rage might burst through the surface, egged on by my complete inability to speak French when I’m angry. “Excusez, errr, huffffff, sbbbbbbbeeeer, huffffffff’. They might have snickered at this, once their initial reaction of “Oh, it’s alright, it’s us, we’re making the noise and you can see from our heightened state of ego and pleasure that it’s very much worth it” had been conveyed. Then, just possibly, I might have stopped my linguistic back-firing and done something physical to express my dismay. Like grabbing one of their heads and licking it, then barking like a vicious dog. Comedy value that image I know, but think about it – your neighbour is willing to traverse physical and animal boundaries if you wind him up too much. Do you start remembering your manners ? I think I’d make the effort. Especially if I thought that my neighbour’s next move might be curling one out under my doormat, then marking his territory with a ring of p1ss and perhaps a speckling of j1zz……..
As a footnote, you may have noticed that French people don’t generally drink to get drunk, in the sense that we and other nationalities do. There is a very good reason for this – the arrogance grows to a RIDICULOUS degree. Well, in the fair town of Bordeaux anyway.

Bopped over to Thames Valley Uni on Saturday to take some photos of tshirts, hoodies, hats and the people within them for the new frankiewedge website (this is the old one). It was an amusing business. As amusing as when you get a room full of caned and hungover people, hand them a load of expensive photographic equipment, lighting, reflecters and white screen type things and then attempt to get them to stand still long enough to take photos of their jaded, ageing faces.

Fortunately, we were aided in our plight by a couple of photography students who a) knew what they were doing with the kit, b) had done this before and c) were not afraid to bollock and push a load of strange and aggressive strangers about to get the shots they were looking for. As a result, we are now sitting on a set of the most crispy, high definition and downright well-shot images ever seen this side of a clothing website. Big thanks to Jess and Alex for that. Hope we can work together on some other stuff soon.

Looking forward hugely to getting the new website finished now (it’s just a bit too sick), and it was a wicked day that led to some other very good and perhaps not so good ideas (see photos included).

Did this post a few days ago and then stuffed it in my pocket to get dug up when I could be bothered to go through my clothing:

So I’m back and my brain is full of fog. Literally. I can’t think, I can’t walk properly and I end up sitting on the bench in the park for 15 minutes thinking about my destiny. From optimism of the days before, suddenly feel like it’s all impossible. Success is for other people. Confident people who blag and smarm their way through life. Self pity reigns supreme so I turn my tune up to max and stomp through town thinking yeah I’m an angsty fukker and don’t none of you rood boys get in my way cos I’m one day back from holiday and I’m looking for a reason to stomp your head.

Work inevitably hits like a bag of chips. A ton of work piled up on my desk and no time to read email or walk around chatting to people. Make a few phone calls trying to bumble through a few consultancy words, conveying the required polite, keen tone and steering clear of swear words or screaming down the line. They don’t like that. Then hustle round super quick because I’m on the road most of this week. Surely revenge from work for going part time. “send him to the North East. That’ll learn him.”

But now I’m on the way back from the cold lands and actually feeling a bit better. Another sleepy morning slogging it across the East Coast, another presentation (usual mixture of cold sweats, overheated armpits) and the same stilted blend of small talk with cabbies and workshop attendees alike. Through that and I’m feeling good that I’m a few days off part-time valhalla, I’ve got a bit of high-grade sitting at home, a weekend fashion shoot to plan for and a long suffering girlfriend that loves me (mostly). It’s easy to get caught up being morose and fashionable, harder to count the blessings. Probably worth it though and as I write that, the sun is coming up over the hills and the businessmen are looking up blinking from their laptops. Surely it’s a sign, or orbits or weather or something? Praise be for cups of tea, ruddy faced old people and colourful trainers. I love them.