From: keepontruckingbyrobertcrumb@fhfhfhfhfhfh.com   
      
   The phone rang on Wednesday afternoon and the photographer from the paper   
   wanted to meet somewhere in Purley as 'doing it in your back garden is a bit   
   boring'. So V and I met him on the traffic island, in front of the vast   
   Tesco supermarket--where we filmed the rats scuttling around outside last   
   winter but couldn't use the footage in the end.   
    After which V went back to college to continue to set up her show and I   
   went and met Stu, who I hadn't seen for a month.   
    Stu has now been dry for eight months; he looks healthier, is far less   
   choleric and snappy in manner and seems much less depressed. He's made it   
   out of a place I confess I didn't expect him to. I can see that he still   
   wants to drink and still needs to fill some hole.   
    He has been at the day group for many months and every time he finishes a   
   ten-week cycle, he begins it again. This consists of group therapy sessions.   
   Rather him than me, but of it keeps him straight etc   
     The fact that the man can write and play music on an orchestral level but   
   lives in this perpetual stasis of roll up fags, texting his girlfriend and   
   sitting in parks and in front of the tv, clinging on to a pathetic routine   
   of coffee, fags and talking about alcoholism, saddens me and makes me wonder   
   why he finds himself in that position in what should be the prime of his   
   life.   
    It always makes me muse on the kind of upper working, lower middle class   
   family life that he and I come from. How some of its propieties are   
   perfectly sound and others are joyless, paranoid and lockstepped.   
     Stu, when he was pissed and rambling would often come back to a story of   
   how, when he was a small child he bounced on the settee he was so pleased to   
   see his Father return home from work in the evening--his father was a prison   
   officer and they were living in a flat provided by HM Prison Service--and   
   his father walked over and slapped his head so hard he fell off the settee.   
   Then he would speak about all the punches and slaps and piss takes of his   
   childhood in Mitcham, from various bullies and nutters. One day in the pub   
   he turned the local paper around to me and said: 'I knew him'.   
   It was a picture of some shaven headed bruiser, who, it turned out, had   
   tormented Stu for years as a kid. He'd graduated from juvenile to adult   
   crime--violence, robbery-- and had hanged himself in Belmarsh prison.   
      
   Thursday my dole money never went into the bank. There was no explanation.   
   Sorting it out took four hours in and around the dole office and me raising   
   my voice.   
   I rand initially and they said 'bring proof from the bank that you have no   
   money in there' so I trudged to the bank and got proof-that simple sounding   
   request took half an hour.   
   Then I had to catch a bus down the dole office where a woman rang 'liason'   
   and I could tell, came up against someone who simply wanted to complicate   
   matters and not authorize a replacement. The lady in front of me at the desk   
   was well-meaning but not sharp.   
   "He's brought proof though," she said into the telephone. "Yes, but he's   
   *brought* proof he has no money."   
    Whoever the cunt at the other end of the line was, he wasn't sticking to   
   the regulations. He said that he had to personally ring the bank and check   
   there was no money.   
     I was already feeling annoyed.   
   "He says he'll ring me back at one pm. Come back then and leave me your   
   mobile number."   
   I wandered, keeping my mind off the sort of thoughts you need to keep your   
   mind off when finding yourself in thsi situation.   
    At twenty past two I was walking back up the steps of the dole office,   
   having heard nothing.   
    "He's just rung and he can't get through to the bank, so we'll just have to   
   wait."   
    "WHAT?!! OH THE BONEHEADEDNESS OF IT FOR CHRIST SAKE! IT'S BUREACRACY GONE   
   MAD! THERE'S NO MONEY IN MY ACCOUNT AND IT WON'T SUDDENLY GO IN NOW! WHAT IS   
   THE MATTER WITH THESE PEOPLE?!"   
   Everyone's looking at me. I resisted swearing.   
     "It's not my fault," she said.   
     "I know," I said, "but it's ridiculous. I know what's going to happen   
   here, I'm gonna end up with nothing and I've got debts to pay out today. I'm   
   not leaving."   
    It was true that I had debts to pay out but a pressing concern was a series   
   of cold lagers and a few cigarettes.   
    I sat for half an hour in the most incredible rage that you can be in when   
   having to sit still and wait for a phone call you know isn't going to come.   
   Eventually a manageress rang 'Liason' to find an answerphone message saying   
   that they 'were all in a meeting'.   
   "Yeah," I said, "a meeting in a pub that shows the England game..."   
    She suddenly said: "Okay, I'm making the decision independently."   
   I was issued a cheque to cash at the post office in about half an hour. I   
   thanked her.   
    "There's so much red tape you see," she said.   
      
      
      
   Then I went and had a sort of editorial meeting with the magazine's   
   publisher. She has got hold of--and if she'd have got this on Sunday night   
   she would have earned a fortune--photographs of the riot. Newspaper quality   
   black and white. Best pic: a line of riot police standing in a line across   
   the road outside Bar Rendezvous.   
   Later we went to the Hogshead and watched the England Switzerland game. It   
   was so loud and boorish in there, it reminded you of nothing else but a   
   fascist meeting. The TV was over the bar so that was completely deluged.   
    There was a whole element of youths there who only paid scant attention to   
   the match: they watched the crowd, looking, you could tell, for the moment   
   when it would 'kick off' and they could get a crafty kick in or hurl a glass   
   at someone. The pathetic, cowardly boorishness of it; the sham patriotism of   
   most of it: 'I'm English till I die' sung to the tune of some old sit com.   
   English till they die? Everyone of them would take French citizenship in   
   fifteen minutes if some boneheaded tabloid tv show offered to pay three   
   grand off their mortgage. It's just pavlovian boorishness and licensed   
   barbarity. Call me a snob and a curmudgeon, I don't care.   
    Seeing as Beckham and the rest of the jackasses would have no difficulty   
   seeing off the Swiss, at half-time we went to The Ship, which shows no   
   football.   
    After the Sunday riot, the mood in there and on the street was heightened   
   and a little edgy. Outside the Ship was a police van and over the road,   
   outside the pub we had been in, policemen stood outside the door, above   
   which fluttered a huhe England flag.   
    I watched this scene as the DJ, Ziggy (a good DJ actually. I said to him as   
   I went to the loo 'fucking hell, it's like an NF meeting over there and he   
   said 'yuh, that's why I've got me Irish rugby shirt on') followed the   
   instructions of the peaky-looking young landlady (her pub had been beseiged   
   by the riot on the previous Sunday) and played 'mellow' stuff.   
    The long intro to Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond swirled through   
   the pub and through the window I watched the eerie, near-empty street and   
   the large fluttering England flag above the pub door opposite, and policeman   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)