I CAME home from work last night feeling knackered.
And all the muscles at the base of my neck were knotted and taut.
I had eye strain and I could feel one of my headaches coming on.
Posh Boots arrived home at about the same time, feeling much the same – though I don’t think she had the knotted neck and back muscles.
So we decided to go straight into Tallulah’s wine bar in New Brighton and order a bottle of Rioja.
It probably wasn’t a sensible thing to do, but what the hell!
Well, the wine relaxed us quite a bit, but at one point I became so sleepy I lay down on the big velvet banquette and had a doze.
That’s a first for me – to go to a bar for a snooze, rather than a bit of hell-raising, the craic or to hold court by telling amusing stories laced with sneery wit, like the hip young gunslinger I used to be.
I don’t know, something’s gone wrong with modern life, and all the horrible motorway driving you have to do, and all the false imperatives you have to follow, if the working week makes you feel so sleepy.
Mind you, I’ve always had narcoleptic tendencies. Ever since I was a baby.
My mum tells me the midwife, at Billinge Hospital, near Wigan, had to slap me repeatedly when I was born to get me to cry, move or show any signs of life. She told my mum I was what they called a ‘lazy baby’.
(At least that’s better than what happened to my friend John. He was born such an ugly baby that the midwife slapped his mother! Oh, the old gags are the best.)
To look on the bright side, I suppose my vigorous early slapping by that midwife on 7 April 1957 was good preparation for an education in English State / Catholic schools in the 1960s and 70s – where children were hit routinely by teachers.
I was caned, rulered and whacked with a plimsoll by teachers all though my schooling.
How do the didactic ones manage now, I wonder, when they are simply not allowed to whack errant kids?
And how do kids grow into to wisdom and virtuous ways without ever knowing fear and physical chastisement?
Well, perhaps kids just aren’t growing into wisdom and virtue any more. Sometimes it certainly feels that way.
Of course, if you grew up in a working class northern English community in the pre-political correctness era, as I did (and as most of the readers of this blog did) violence was a frequent visitor.
Because when the teachers weren’t wanting to hit you, other boys were queuing up to beat the crap out of you. “Fight, fight, fight!� they would chant as they waited for the fisticuffs to start.
Things seem much more peaceful and chilled out now, and I am glad of that.
But you still occasionally see flashes of violence and hatred in pubs – mainly initiated by women drinking beyond their limit, I would say.
Generally, however, things have calmed down a bit, though the UK remains, undoubtedly, a rough, brutish country compared to other European nations.
Well, rough we might be as a society, and largely unhappy and stressed too, but I’m glad I grew up here.
Having considered the options of moving away, I’ve decided to stay.
England made me and I’m part of the territory.
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Smokehouse wrote...
Hi Steve, glad to see you are satying put. "Made in Wigan broke in New Brighton" might well be your mantra one day!
It is estimated that around 500 Britons are leaving good ole blighty each day. Many do not come back, although as some of your readers have rightly said the grass is not always greener on the other side.
I was watching a programme the other day and an American who was staying on some remote Pacific island made the telling remark: "We in the west have so much and we are not happy. These people have nothing and they are some of the most joyful people I have ever met. Iit says something about Western society".
I suspect that the answer is down to a lack of respect and rampant consumerism and materialism, and the feeling that we are owed something other than what we can work for or in some cases never have and never will work for. I would happily take a pay cut and a drop in living standards to be free from the the seemingly never ending threat of violence, vandalism and the spirit-crushing petty bureaucracy of the UK. Maybe the people in the Pacific islands are actually onto something.
Anyway mate I hope the headaches stop.
REGAN REPLIED: the headaches have stopped, though I am a martyr to catarrh at the moment. Thanks for your comments, old chum.
Posted by: Smokehouse | February 27, 2008 10:46 AM