or “count your blessings” as my my mum would say.So I am.

• Michele and I are waiting for a “Popeye” pizza to arrive.
• Michele’s best friend (and the maid of honour at our wedding) has a new boyfriend who she’s really into, and it turns out he’s a rapper called “Busdriver”. So we downloaded a few tracks and it turns out he’s really bloody good.
• I found a tune by some american folk singer called “Richard Buckner” that really does things for me
• tomorrow is Friday

So it’s not all bad – even though the plastic-buring-psycho has started again…and those jelapeno pepper have given my bowels a load of jip….and…

Being a sad git I did the BBC national IQ test yesterday (the flash one). It really does demonstrate how dodgy the whole concept of intelligence is. All IQ tests do is demonstrate how well you perform in an IQ test. God help you if you weren’t English or suffered from dyslexia.
This time I got 120, on other tests I’ve got anything between 110 and 140 so what does that say ? It says that no-one really knows what intelligence is. It also says that I’d had a couple of bottles of wine beforehand…not that I’m trying to find excuses of course…grrrrr
On the other hand, there was someone in the studio who got 140 – bastard! And he was a city trader. Bet he’s got a big cock too.
[ additional – I just tried this IQ test and got 159 – even more confusing. If you need your ego boosted after the BBC one then give it a go ]

Michele bought me some really appropriate birthday presents this year. One in paticular really got me going: a pack of paper for printing onto black t-shirts. What a toy. We had our first go on saturday, printing a t-shirt for Steve the Copper with a picture of Mr. Slow on it (look at the photo and you’ll see why). After wasting about 5 sheets dealing with the usual printer type problems…grrrr…we got one that looked great. Steve certainly seemed to like it. After presenting it to him, Brodie, Steve, Michele and I went down to the Curry Centre in Lewisham and ate too much. It’s so good to see that place open again. They’ve been there since 1965 and when they got closed down recently Michele and I were quite upset. Especially when we noticed the Bailiffs notice pinned to the door. Not to sure about the new “modern” decor, I always liked the traditional taj-mahal/flock wallpaper style, but the food was still good – and they gave us all Brandies on the house – nice people.

It’s another Bank Holiday weekend thank god. So far I’ve done another t-shirt, for myself this time. It sort of looks like this, and we’ve done a card for Ralph (michele’s step dad). Quite a creative weekend all in all.

A good friend of ours lost his family, his job and his home recently. He stayed on our sofa for a few days with the few posessions he could grab before moving on to stay somewhere else. It isn’t fair and would bring the strongest person to despair. From my position in a marriage, with a steady job, a place to live and a potentially stable future it could have made me feel thankful and relaxed. But it didn’t. It just made me feel angry and unstable. Even the most civilised society is only three meals away from revolution. While we can look back with pity at all of the historical bollocks-ups we’ve made, we still can’t feel comfortable that we won’t make the same mistakes again – in fact it’s almost a certainy. It doesn’t matter what you do, you still live on a razor edge. It could be due to capitalism, madness, stupidity, or nature, but you could loose it all instantly. When a species has developed enough to be able to produce its own complete destruction then perhaps it’s time to call it a day. We’ve had our chance, let’s just leave it to the next lot.

Hmm – what a load of maudlin crap. Sorry. The guy I was talking about will end up winning again, and I’m sure there are many more happy-days to go before I croak. But surely it’s not a bad idea to occasionally go full-on with the paranoia, depression and mean waves from time to time ?
No this is all wrong – this was supposed to have been an “up” blog entry that went on about what a piece of brilliance the first series of “The Office” was and it’s turned into some sort of Joycean stream of consciousness from the arse of the world’s most miserable bastard.
Sorry. Here are some reasons to be cheerful:

• It was quite nice out for part of the day
• This wine isn’t bad considering it only cost 2.50
• Tomorrow is friday and then there’s a bank holiday weekend
• Epitonic
• The Iraqis are fighting back against the fascists
• Adrian is getting married this month

Today is my birthday and also the birthday of Saddam Hussein. All of this time I thought I was against the war simply because it was a violent way of protecting the U.S.’s oil interests, when in fact it turns out that it’s just because Saddam and I are both Taurian.

It should be illegal to go straight back to work the day after not being in. They should give us a day’s grace at least…:(

Well I went along, and there was a pathetic number of people on the anti-fascist side of the fence. Luckily there was an equally shit turn out from the NF. The winners were the Police who managed to muster about 2×10^100 coppers, and they did a sterling job of seperating us from each other. In fact there were more coppers between the two groups than people in the groups themselves. We did a fair amount of shouting at the flags and bald-heads we could just about see through the, rather thick, thin blue line…but it wasn’t really a show of strength. The police obviously liked the look of us, because they seemed very keen to make some home movies – how sweet. They didn’t film the NF, but then who’d want to watch those ugly fuckers ?
It really pisses me off when people slag off the ANL – who cares if they’re involved with the SWP ? They were there today and that’s what matters. Jesus christ I wish the left would stick together a bit more.

Ah well it was nice to meet some likeminded people anyway. I came back home via Everest sri-lankan take-away where I bought a spicy fish steak, and a fish-curry with hard-boiled egg roll. Super-yum. Now the rest of the day to mess about with some video capture, and a rediscovered interest in MAME.

Now and again it’s good to do absolutely bugger all. Good friday is normally a very dull day where nothing happens, so go with it and deliberately do nothing. Nice. So apart from going down the road to buy 4 bottles of revolting “wine” (2 for a fiver – I don’t care what it tastes like) I’ve not left the house all day. Nathan and Connor (a couple of the kids from down the road) totally soaked me with water pistols as I was coming back in….so I will soon be buying the most powerful water gun in the world and rewenge will be mine Muwahahahahaaha!

How cheery to see the people of Baghdad (quite a few of them in fact) demonstrating against Americas invasion of their land. It seems that outside of Iraq people don’t realise that Iraqis are actually as real and normal as everyone else. Anyone should object to being taken over in such a cynical way, even in the person they were taking over from is a bastard. They know, just as well as Wanker and Blair, that Chalabi is just as much of a shit as Saddam. In fact the only difference is that he gets on well with the U.S. state. Very much like Saddam was in the 1960s
Tim has spent a long while on my knee today. He’d be there still if I didn’t get achey and need to stand up. Lovely bird.

The fucking NF are planning to march in Bermondsey this saturday…almost ten years to the day that Steven Lawrence was murdered.

The ANL poster is here:
http://www.anl.org.uk/resources/stop_nf_bermondsey_190403.pdf
In a nutshell – assemble 1pm South Bermondsey rail station.
Having those thickheads marching is like them dancing on that man’s grave. It’s disgusting.