Red Eyes

Is it a kind of cold?

Or am I just slightly hung-over?

And slow to recover because I’m old?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a fog all through my brain,

A thumb print on my sinus

I feel pretty suspect and look quite low

Or so I am told

Oh-oh, is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes.

Is it the pints that I drank

That’s causing this sense of distraction

Should I have eaten the food I was sold?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a dull throb in my temple

A perpetual sniff in my nose

And the bags under my eyes are as dark as holes

With creases and folds

Oh-oh,  is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much?

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes. 

Machinery

I learned that I was not made for engineering (or even engineered for making) at an early age. As a child I wasn't particularly adept at using pester power, but I deployed it on a few occasions to get what I thought I wanted. My most magnificent triumph was the Fantom Four Hovercraft, a toy that brought such befuddlingly long-winded yet fleeting pleasures that it was either going to teach children the very meaning of patience, or end up in the bin.

But my most shameful experience came after identifying a very exciting looking box of Meccano in the local toy store (now a PC repair shop that also specialises in fixing Sky remotes). I banged on about it for ages, inspired by the amazing things the TV advert suggested I would be able to make.

Of course, what the TV doesn't make clearly, is that making anything interesting out of Meccano when you have the technical abilities of a gerbil requires hard work. Lots of hard work. The kind of hard work you're not really looking for in a toy shop, but might expect to find in some sort of El Salvadoran copper mine. I probably spent all of half an hour trying to stick some perfectly basic metal struts together, before realising that they were more fun if you pretending they were swords and rushing off to slay some dragons in the garden shed. Of which it turned out there were fuck loads. Who'd have thought it?

To this day, me and machinery get on like an EDL organiser and a Kurdish shopkeeper.

Dole

Over at Speedyrants, my huffin' and puffin' alter ego asks can benefits claimants sue the Daily Express? The answer to which turns out to be "probably not" but getting there presumably makes him feel better, which was was in all honesty the only point.

I was unemployed at the tail end of John Major's 1990s recession, for about 9 months. It was soul destroying and deeply unpleasant. Though I did have a lot of time to play Civilization. But what I think people who might never have gone through this fail to perceive - mereckons -  is that being able to sit around doing nothing and playing shitty PC strategy games and watching daytime tv is only fun if that isn't all you have to do.

You can't skive if you have nothing to do. There is no glorious frisson of breaking the rules, or feeling that you have got out of doing something unpleasant. That's it. That's your life. Conquering Macedonia with your chariot force is all well and good,  but then you realise that your real life plunder consists of a tin of TESCO basics spaghetti hoops and sellotaping the wallpaper back on.