Falling apart at the seams

Sometimes...

...I think that I'm just out of step with the times. And sometimes I think I'm ahead of the times.  But then again, I'm not so sure of trusting anything I think anymore.

The last election is a good example, I think. Now, maybe my critical faculty is going but I read through the manifestos of both the Conservative and Labour parties and I could barely detect a difference.  Navy Blue vs Blue, say.  There was the odd difference, sure, but it was the same broad outline.

But all the media had it as "a real choice".  "A real difference". Labour are "anti-business"! Only the Conservatives know how to run the economy!  Labour won't let the NHS be privatised (let's ignore the PFI contracts that were set up under Labour for now)! The Tories will sell your granny's kidneys to rich oligarchs for spares! etc.

Were they right?  If Labour had been elected, would everything have changed?  Would anyone have really even noticed?

I suppose I just wanted a quiet life.

So, to continue from wherever I was last time,

I was earning more money than I could spend (well, within my very strictured conventions (I reckon I could be described as - to use the immortal words of The Great Leader - "prudent" - with money) but had no time to spend it. The whole thing just seemed pointless as an exercise.  I've no kids, it's not like I've people depending on me for money after I'm dead.  I'd sooner trade the money for the time.

OK, I did that in a pretty drastic way and still have no idea where it's going.

But at least that's exciting and I'm out of the rut.

Were I to act the pessimist I'd say "out of one rut and into another" but that's not yet been proved. At least I think I might be glimpsing that thing people call "fun" again, even if I'm not actually doing it right now.

This is going to be interesting to read back in a few years' time...

Blatter!

To the surprise of absolutely no-one,

Sepp Blatter has got his fifth term.  As I've mentioned, that's an irrelevance really.  He may well be the head of FIFA but I reckon that FIFA will have largely been dismantled by this time next week, in which case being the head of FIFA won't count for much.

I do hope the fallout is spectacular.

This isn't real, is it?

From the Guardian website:

"The Home Office said that one of the main elements of the psychoactive substances bill would be a ban on the trade in "any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect", with a maximum seven-year prison sentence to back up the ban.

But it quickly added that "substances such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, food and medicinal products would be excluded from the scope of the offence".

Basically this bill is being introduced to ban "legal highs", something like the Federal Analog Act in the US.  I'm going to write a really, really, really tl bit about this whole thing, but for the moment I'll just sit and sadly shake my head.

Well, so far...

This thing speaks for itself, I think:

FIFA fun...

...just gets better and better, doesn't it?

As far as I know, everybody who has an interest in football (except Vladimir Putin) is aware that FIFA has long been a corrupt organisation.  It's just assumed knowledge, isn't it?  The only annoying thing is that Sepp Blatter was not one of those arrested, when it's clear that he's the worst of the lot of them.

Anyway, that's not the funny thing.  The funny thing is that Blatter still intends to go ahead with the FIFA presidency vote tomorrow.  OK, these "votes" are farcical anyway because Blatter's bribed everyone to vote for him ahead of time and knows he's going to win, but this one?  Who's going to be there to vote?  UEFA are planning on boycotting, which can only further disvalue it.

Mind you, in FIFA-world, things happen differently.  I reckon the vote will go ahead, Blatter will (of course) be elected for a fifth term and he'll try to claim the credit for cleaning up FIFA.

Or, he'll do that util someone rats him out - and that will happen - and the whole fucking corrupt house of cards comes tumbling down.  He'll never see prison of course; he's 80-odd already and appeals, etc., will surely drag out until he drops dead.  And I suspect many of the billions he's taken from the game over the years are safely stashed away somewhere untraceable.  But at least he'll be gone.

I mean, Qatar, for fuck's sake.

So, yeah...

...it's gonna be a bit ad hoc.  Maybe it's time for a tangent.

Sir Gerald Howarth's name is appearing with - let's say "unusual" - frequency in internet searches today.  Anyone know why?  I don't know why I'm asking that because after all, only I know that this blog exists.  I suppose Google know.  Hey spiders, what's going on with Sir Gerald H?  Might as well ask the bots if they're reading.

From the outside, it was a stupid decision.

Who, in this economic and political climate,

would deliberately give up a well-paid job with no idea at all of what to do next?  A fucking idiot, that's who.  Oh, and this job, it was no ordinary job, it was one I'd worked at for sixteen years, right from the start of the company.  Just two people, the owner and me.  For about the first twelve years I didn't exactly make a lot of money (I remember one month it was £200 - before tax) but that really was because we couldn't afford to take money out of the business.

But we got there in the end and for the last three years or so, we finally decided we were in a position to take a decent-ish (and I'm not even talking big money, about £30K/year) salary out of it.  So why quit now, of all times?  It makes no sense.

Did I do the right thing?  What even is the right thing?  What will I do next?  Will it be the right thing?  Will I recognise it when I see it?  I don't know and as I've mentioned, I don't edit much either so I'm sure I'll contradict myself plenty as I go across this thing again and again until everyone's either stopped reading or dropped dead.  That's why there's so much rubbish in this.  So many wasted words.  Why, just one of those words, to choose one at random, let's say "fucking", that word, that could fucking feed an African child for a year, that could.

Oh I don't know.

I'll go as far as to say that I think if I hadn't stopped when I did, I'd not only have fucked myself up even more but could have potentially fucked the whole company.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  I think this is where things start to go a bit awry.  The intention of the whole thing was to attempt to document what the fuck was going to happen to me - certainly that's true - but more to the point it's possibly where some of the posts could be described as "feeling sorry for myself", which is never a good look.]

So here we are.

The line about being cryptic in the opening post is going to prove prophetic.

This thing's going to be very episodic and rely on information that hasn't been (and may never be) revealed. Events might seem to happen in the wrong order, or things might not be remembered properly, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.

Some of it's going to border on stream-of-consciousness stuff, too, which I can never be bothered to edit at the time of writing.  Maybe I'll go back and try to organise it later but for the moment, it just needs to be somewhere.

I know, that only makes it more cryptic.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  I think this was an attempt to explain to myself why I was doing this whole thing]

Went a bit peculiar there for a bit.

It seems right to start off with some sort of explanation.

But I'm not going to, because I'm an awkward bugger and anyway, I don't think I can fully get my head round it yet. Not enough to explain it properly (or in a way that anyone else would understand), so that's going to have to wait a bit. It'll emerge in pieces, I reckon, like making a jigsaw, it'll be fun, trust me, but not all the pieces are there yet, so I can't do it now.  To stretch the tenuous analogy to absurdity, I know where all the pieces are but I don't have them all yet, and even if I did, I'm not sure I'd know which way round they would go.  Or which way up for that matter.

Occasionally in the middle of the night everything seems to fit together but these must be dreams, because nothing fits in the morning.  But at least all the bits are still there.  My biggest fear (actually not my biggest fear, that comes later) is that there would be at least one bit missing and probably several.

This is very cryptic, isn't it?  Even if you knew who was typing it, it would make scant sense.  I suppose I better start at the start and see where this thing goes...


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  Interestingly, this is nowhere near as mad as I remember it]