Red Leader: Enemy activity has been slight

A mate of mine had to take her sick child to Alder Hey Hospital today.

It's never easy doing that.

At best, you're in low-level panic mode anyway (a sliding scale depending on the severity of your kid's condition) cos the GP reckons he/she can't handle it after all; you've no idea where to go when you get there, and then, NOW, on top of it all you've got to scrat around for change to feed the hospital car-parking meters that sting you for £1.50 for each hour you're there.

Yeah, it's a minor consideration set against the more pressing, obvious and immediate danger.

But to me, it is taking advantage of people and profiteering in the most despicable manner.

If you fail to "Pay and Display" your ticket, you get hit with a £30 fine rising to £60 if you don't pay up in time. What happens after that, I really dread to think. Perhaps they take ownership of your car? Maybe not - but a summonse to a magistrate's court is a definite possibility.

Two things spring to my brooding, pissed off mind.

1) It's a sick joke to charge parents to park at the children's hospital. What? You think they're there for the fucking fun of it?

2) Car parking charges at all hospitals have been scrapped - in Scotland.

This isn't going to be another rant at Gordon Brown. God knows he and his wife must have suffered and grieved at the death of their first-born child. And they must have spent hours and hours and hours in hospitals. I'm not taking the piss, they know how things can rapidily go from calm to catastrophic when you're dealing with sick kids.

So surely it's an easy win, a voting certainty, even...THE RIGHT THING TO DO...to just remove that totally unnecessary hassle, that stupid pointless problem, that horrid sweaty Business Manager (hospital car parks) diktat and scrap the charges for the rest of the country?

Well I think so, anyway.

I'm devastated. Lost. Without hope.

Gah!

I'm in search of the Lost Sound.

This won't mean anything to anyone, except obviously Nick. And me.

In the 80s, I used to have a guitar sound that was killer-diller.

I had an HH IC120 combo, an HH 4x10 cab, a 1972 Fender Strat (lovingly mellowed and worn-in, maple neck, whammy bar) put through an Electric Mistress flanger, Boss chorus, Wem Copycat, Boss octave-dropper, a CryBaby,...and this weird little overdriver called The Rat.

The sound was somewhere between The Banshees (Rat on) and the Coctaeu Twins (Rat off).

It was all beautifully analogue, nothing digital about it.

It goes without saying that not an atom of that stuff I had remains in 2008 and I've been trying desperately to recreate The Sound.

But I CAN'T.

FRIDAY: A weird day all round, then.

I realised when I was on here last night that there were two ways to play Friday;

One. stone-cold sober and hangover-free.

Two, the exact opposite.

The first would lead to confusion, great angst, a general feeling of unreality and wanting to hide or die.

The second would make me behave like a lickspittle corporate tosser, trigger monstrous depths of self-hatred, fear and loathing, and - quite frankly - was never going to happen.

Anway, this is how my day went, I think:

Staggering into the office at way past noon, covered in blood from the home-inked swastika facial tattoos, I hurtled around brandishing a smoking revolver, loudly threatening to drill a cap through any fool who dared catch my eye.

Eventually, I sat down at my desk - a man who evidently meant business.

The staff cowered and grimly went about their work as if nothing was wrong.

Glint-eyed, I brooded there, snarling and spitting broken teeth, waiting for my deathly accomplices to join me.

A hot fuss on the reception intercom, a sweeping flap of shrouds, the unmistakable stench of death and very bad sex announced their arrival.

So, gleefully, me and the boys selected our target.

Our sacrifice.

We'd picked an old family man who had never dared say boo to a goose.

Well, you don't want too much resistance when the blood-lust is rampant, catching in your throat and making you gag.

We sat there, them and me.

I watched them carefully. My eyes narrrowed.

And it was then that the hideous truth started twitching in my mind for the first time.

MY GOD!

These people are vampires.

Yes.

The very folk with whom I'd been laughing and drinking, whoring and partying for all these years are the blood-sucking undead.

Creatures without a soul, without pity. RUTHLESS in their lust for glory.

But it was too late. I realised what had to be done.

I winked at the Slayer, our hitman, who had up until this point been salivating at the mere thought of getting some wet-work after so long.

He had made it known that he is the assassin, a fearless demon who bellowed that blood WOULD BE SPILT in HIS NAME and NOW!!

He winked back at me, slyly showing me the dagger with which he would soon slit the throat of our unlucky pensioner, allowing us to feast on his gushing life-blood.

We killers cackled. It was...Time.

I was assigned to bring the condemned man to his doom.

I stood up to fulfill the order of of the Slayer.

So imagine my surprise when he said: "AAAAaaacchhhh. It's inappropriate for me to be herrrre nooooo. I'm off ooot."

Useless cunt, hissed the demons.

TO BE CONTINUED*

*won't be.

The night closes in and I'm sitting here with a half-done bottle of Smirnoff and a weary sense of deja-vu, trying to marshall my ideas while an intense cacophony of dogs, cats, children, wife singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, television and CDs all play their part in making rational thought tricky.

Ah well. Was ever thus.

The tiresome daily ritual of trying to set up some sort of workable detente between myself and the corporate greedheads who rule the roost is leaving me so disheartened and detached that my desire to be any longer involved in the process is all but non-existent.

And with the dying of that comes another more urgent need. A need to get to the place of definitions.

I used to have a car that was capable of moving at about 140mph for sustained periods. It wasn't a particulary good car. In fact it was a very, very bad car. The one thing it had to commend it was a well-engineered motor that would, in certain circumstances, make it go very fast indeed.

It was a long time ago now, but the memory is still clear.

Being me, I'd decided, after a few near misses, not to push my luck, to stay in range of the nearest speed limit.

So it was only on rare occassions, and always very late at night, that I'd venture out, like a werewolf, with the determined idea to run the thing for a few seconds near to the edge... The Edge ... there is no other way to explain it. To stretch my luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration.

I'd quietly leave the house. Drive sensibly to, well, The Place, let's just say it was near Wales, and then...

Pressed back in the driver seat, and with a rigid grip on the wheel, I'd push the accelerator down. The car would start jumping and wavering. Seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred. Third was always the boomer gear.

Then faster still. Not even daring to look down any more at the speedo, eyes totally focused on the centreline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

Sometimes taillights far up ahead would come closer, faster, and suddenly -zaaaapppp - gone past.

A second's loss of control and there would be a crashing, cartwheeling slide and a death notice in the paper the next day.

But that is where the edge is.

The only people who really know are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back.

I won't ever do that again.

But for those who dare, the edge is still out there. The place of definitions.

And here we go again.

The Survival Project is as good a name as any other for this volatile thing that we're into.

Why not? And so much for the labels.

Things have progressed rapidly. So, where do we go from here?

There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days.

And unfortunately for the rest of us, not even the rich feel safe from it.

The rich feel anxious and confused. And when the rich feel that way, they act like wild animals.

The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times.

And we are in toubled times.

So eventually their rampage takes out the next line of command and, after a long and complicated process, the fallout comes down to saps like me.

You can't feel properly alienated from a process you never knew, or from a choice you never had.

All I know is the fun has gone out of it. There is no hum of madness or adventure, no festering backwaters of hate and conspiracy.

The cord is cut now. The ugly, slow-burning reality of what I do is over. And probably for the greater good.

In any other line of work except writing, people who try to deal with the world and reality from a split-focus base are called "schizoid" and are taken off the streets.

I have tried to see all the angles, which I admit is a lunatic idea.

My wife is laughing hysterically as I write this. I think she is crazy. The fat can go into the fire at any moment, and we will all be fried like offal.

I look forward to the next stage - but I fear it, as I fear almost everything these days.

I feel humbled and strange and tearful.

I've just tracked down through the net my dad's WWII bomber squadron.

My old fella died ten years ago; he was, to me at least, a hero.

When he was 22, in the 1940s, he flew Stirling four-engined heavy bombers on 25 operations over Occupied Territory.

22! For fuck's sake.

He was a commissioned officer, a flight lieutenant, a pilot, and got his wings at 21, he joined an operational squadron six months later and, according to the RAF website, took part in more than two dozen night bombing ops - including raids on some targets still classified as secret.

All the flying was at night.

The kill-rate for Stirling crews was above 80%.

That plane, which he loved, made Airfix models of, and went on about until the day he died, was a bloody death trap. Still...

He was in 214 squadron.

I've found that their motto was: "Ultor in umbris" - Avenging in the shadows.

All the stuff he used to talk to me about when I was tiny, and all the stuff he used to talk to me about when I was a mature adult, and all the stuff that's in my head and pretty much makes me what I am today, for good or ill, is on this site.

When I was nine, my dad took me on a ferry trip across the river, which was something we often used to do.

Except this time, he had with him a packet of memories. A strange paper-wrapped package which I had seen before, but which he had never spoken to me about.

Inside the package were bullets, German fighter plane bullets.

And as the ferry made its way across the water, he explained to me that he had dug them out from the seat of his tail-gunner, a chap I only know as "Tiger".

Really. That was his RAF nickname. Ironically given because he was so softly-spoken, a man who never drank alcohol but who would always stand his round in the pub while he had only orange juice

He had been killed by a German fighter pilot during one of the raids when my dad was his skipper.

As the ferry steamed on, my father tipped the slugs over the side and they disappeared in the murky depths.

I suppose it must have been a poignant moment for my dad.

He was obviously "cleaning out his closet" and for some reason, wanted me along.

For me, it was a total waste of good Nazi bullets - the stuff of dreams for a nine-year-old in the 60s.

Anyway, finding this website made me remember again that my my dad was a brave, brave man and I miss him terribly.

x

The redleader guide to breakfast:

1) Open new recyclable packet and pour "top brand" organic muesli into bowl.

2) Prepape to drench with ice-cold milk.

3) Pause, puzzled, while pile of rolled oats, nuts and dried fruits from around the world strangely moves about, as if a tiny mole is burrowing upwards from within.

4) Stare wide-eyed as fucking great big MOTH struggles to free itself from health-giving grains.

5) Gasp in horror as unknown species of lepidoptera opens wings and barrels around the kitchen.

6) Vow never to eat hippy shit EVAH again.

7) Send stinking email to suppliers of moth-infested cereals threatening to burn them.

8) Never get over it.

Cheers.

Anyway, ace fun though this has been, I must away to my sepulchral crypt to sleep, perchance to dream.

Just time for a quick Morrison's chilli chicken leg and a last quench from the neck of the great god we call Birandee.

Night, men.

It's been veh real.

haha

*so is a chatroom

I was musing drunkenly to myself while recklessly driving recklessly in to work in a reckless manner this morning - this is all too good to be true.

Guess what?

It was.

Anyone got a job for a drug-addled, cynical, long-haired, burnt-out, murderous, ancient, drunken rock god?

I have my own guitar, various effects pedals and loud amp.

Oh, and, er, crazy stripper wife, kids, dog, cat, crippling debt, many lethal addictions, mental illness, an irresistible death wish and a (wrongly, I believe) medically-diagnosed vampiric blood-lust.

Also, I can be incredibly rude to to total strangers on trains - a bonus for your company is I am prepared to travel.

My hobbies are listening to music, writing poetry and water-colour painting. I also enjoy embalming road-kill with a view to resurrection.

References upon request.

Today I heard the true bleating voice of the paranoid middle-class bourgeoisie when it comes face to face with a minor inconvenience - and it was fucking funny.

I was backing my car into a parking space at a supermarket, when suddenly this wire-framed-spectacled, "rugger" shirt-wearing puffed up sack of cunt leaps out of his poxy 4X4 Range Rover, runs up behind and shrieks: "So! I'm supposed to find somewhere else to park? AM I?!"

Get back in your car and behave - before someone fucken bursts you.

Said my lovely lady wife through the wound-down passenger window.

And, huffing and puffing, Atilla the Sunday Shopper did.

Ace!

Today was of great spiritual signifigance in China when parents said a public goodbye to their dead children lost in the earthquake.

But, all those hundreds of weeping bereaved mums whose kids died?

Just get over it, yeah?

It's KARMA - Duh!!!!!

Sharon Stone said it a few days ago, and, as with most Hollywood folk, you have to ask, is there anything they don't know?

Jesus Christ.

Who are you to question the Mullholland Drive elite?

Haven't you even heard of Basic (slag cunt-flash) Instinct?