That's right, beer made me lose all my ideas.

   To spare the gory details for the sake of Charles' mam being this blog's number one fan, I've had a frigging good weekend.
   But all jokes aside I've got nothing for you, 'kin nowt, not a bloody sausage.
   Sorry.
   A short recap of the weekend though, the nerd-themed fancy dress party for Abby's birthday resulted in me and Sam talking shite for hours with her step dad Kris Needs.
   Kris is one of those incredible men who have been there and seen it all.
   "Kris, is it gay to get a blowie off a man?"
   "Well it happened to me once when I was on tour with David Bowie, his little helper bloke went at my cock when I was a sleep, nice bloke actually."
   The second reason for his incredibleness is the fact that he survived any of it.
   Then last night we went to a Youth Fight For Jobs benefit gig at the Hop Pole, they refused us service and then kicked us out so we did a wee circuit of The Harrow, The Green Man and The Swan and headed away home.
   Then the day we had band practice, polished up some more and had a laugh as usual, upon my arrival home I hit up the Sky+ box for the Toon-Stoke game, watched it, got angry and stopped feeling quite as apathetic as I had done toward James flat-heeded, bollock-brained, own goal-scoring wanker Perch, as I now call him.
   Same old, same old wi' Newcastle though eh?
   Anyway, next Sunday's post should be a tad better, I'maway on Sunday to Birmingham for the Tory Party Conference, currently I've a road sign with "I didn't pay for this sign and I wont pay for your mess" written on it.
   Thanks for reading this again.
-Nous

Help for... Horses?

   I love pissing people off, me like. This week it was the moral majority again, spouting their usual shite about Afghanistan. Specifically, about the charity Help for Heroes.
   As head of house at school, myself and my female counterpart (no, not like that) have the duty, to some extent, of choosing a charity for the house to raise funds for. Unbeknown to me was that she had put forward and basically agreed on Help for Heroes, a charity I have one or two issues with...
   Brace yourselves...
   First and foremost, use of the term "heroes"; what exactly is it that soldiers serving in Afghanistan do that warrants the label "heroic"? "Putting their lives on the line for your safety, rights and freedoms" according to most people, but what safety? I was unaware that I would be unsafe without the war going on, this points to the consequences of the war, the effect it has on me, is in some way safer than the state I'd be in without the imperialist invasion.
   So, cheaper fuel, lower taxes and three hundred odd young men and women not being dead is more dangerous than the reverse of this situation?
   Okay, so let's try my rights. My rights to what? That's right! My rights to other people's land, dignity and oil, my right to drop bombs on schools, mosques and hospitals and my right to Islamiphobia and to shoving my own British brand of democracy into somebody else's similarly broken system! Thank fuck for "Our boys" then eh?
   So are they pulling me over with freedom? No, no they're fucking not, what freedom do I have the right to that warrants them committing atrocities on the other side of the world? If they were fighting to the freedoms which I deem myself entitled to, they'd by in Parliament Square with the guns facing the door.
   Secondly, oh yes, "secondly", don't even think we're done yet, Help for Heroes is hugely backed by The Sun newspaper, The Sun is owned by NewsCorp which is owned by Aussie TV Hitler himself Rupert Murdoch. As a result, The Sun supports the Tory Party in their attack on the public sector that can't cope with the returning injured from the middle-east as it is and as a result HfH has to step in; when Jason Manford pointed this out on stage at a HfH concert the BBC, his employer, censored it. In a nut-shell, supporting HfH is encouraging the savage cuts in the public sector and the planned replacement of public spending in some services, such as youth clubs, with charities. All sounds well and good but why do we pay taxes? It's a system that doesn't work.

Two examples of  vicious circles.

   And lastly, HfH, as I said, is massive, it's funded by The Sun, it just held a 60,000 sell-out gig at Twickenham, I hardly think that Nightengale House's £200 will make a huge difference.

   £200 to a child with no family, no home and no future as a consequence of insurgency on the streets on Basra, however, that's a different story. What about he Solidarity for Palestine Campaign even? I doubt these will be taken seriously as ideas though, the school can be seen as politically motivated now, can it? Fucking ridiculous.

   In other news this week, The Electro-Possums are now recording artists! We started recording at Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School Friday gone and intend to record every Friday from here on in, referring to it as "The Henry Sessions", because it makes us sound cool.

   And myself, Jarrod and Elliot are currently in talks about starting to actually produce a comic book for Bag-Man, Tape-Boy and Reallydoesn'tlikespidersman.

   See you all next week, thanks for bothering to look at this again.

- Nous.

DePreston

  I've woken up in some pretty grim places before, sofas in dodgy flats, in my own chunder, dribble and pish, in kids play-parks, small villages in the Home Counties, once in field in France just north of Le Mans and in train stations up and down the UK but none, without exception, grimmer than this.
  For today (9.9.10), the Caledonian Sleeper I jumped on in Westerton on my way from Glasgow to Leeds, has dropped me off at happast four in the morn' in Preston, Lancs.
  This isn't a negative review of the Sleeper or of it's staff, they were kind, charitable and all in all, went out of their way to give me the beautifully comfortable bed they did. I of course thought I'd pay them the favour back by cleaning the room... Out of pretty much anything that wasn't nailed down.

  "Why", I hear you cry, "are you in Preston at half four in the morning on a Thursday Richard?", well, I've just spent Sunday to Wednesday in the fabulous Glasvegas with Joe and Rachel seeing unis and I'm on my way to Leeds to on the same. I'm resitting my AS levels but I need some inspiration to, well, to not sit on my arse for another nine months, pretty much. I'm looking at Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Leeds.

  It's also a right jolly to get free biros.
  So I'm on platform 1b in Preston station scribbling this on paper to blog it later, I did go outside but it dePrestoned me (see what I did there?), I know its happast four but, howay, this is a large(ish) city in the north west! Two shopping centres, a taxi driver in a cowboy suit, charvers, fat people and a cat that looked to be doing a Great Escape style getaway from, I'd assume, the home of one of the above hardly screams "we're competing with Lancaster or Manchester" but rather, "have you seen Blackburn, Burnley and Chorley? We needn't bother standing up to say hello."
  But that's the issue here, towns like Preston are continuously overlooked because of this attitude and yet they could become a centre for something. Take Brighton and LGBT celebration, Scarborough and the goth scene, these places are no-longer over looked whereas the Prestons of this world are.
  Clearly, once upon a time, Preston had something, that's why it has this magnificent Victorian railway station but as that attraction buggared-off, whatever it was, so did all the people and their money.
  Coincidentally, they've unreasonably moved my train to Manchester Picadilly to platform 5, time I buggared-off too.
Tara. - Nous