Anarchy For The UK

My father is as mad for electricity as Watt, Faraday and Edison combined. The government of the day are being held to ransom by the union powerbrokers of the day, and it is not the mounds of garbage, mounds of unburied frozen stiffs, or even the possible onset of another bubonic plague that is getting up my old man's nose. It is the new regime of rolling power cuts. We lose our electric for half a day, morning or night respectively, almost every day of the week. My dad, working four jobs, well, working one on a three-day week, has recently turned our garden shed into a cottage industry overly reliant on coalmines. Without coal the electric stops, without electric, my old man's vision is stopped. Before the strikes really get going my old man was up in that laboratory ever week night and when he crept back in the house in the wee hours, he looked as crazy as Patrick Moore on 'The Sky at Night'. Now he looks even crazier than that. Whereas at first he was cock-a-hoop about lower electricity bills, the reality has dawned on him that without the volts and juice - his workshop is kapput.
I don't know what it all means, but if it means half-days or no days at school, they can strike as long as they like, because it isn't affecting me. These are happy times. Probably the happiest I can recall. Happy and gay, because people are out on the streets in small groups, some angry, carrying cudgels, others are more relaxed, pissed, standing around dustbin fires burning their own furniture to stave off freezing to death in their own beds. Britain is a swell and dandy place to grow up in I think, as I wander up and down our street on a power off afternoon seeing the flickering lights of candles in windows. It is Victorian indeed. My granddad says they ought never to have changed the gas lights to electrickity, and he can remember when the guy came around to light the lamps each night. I wish my street was like that now, some cobblestoned throwback to Sherlock Holmes and swirling mists and Jack the Rippers. I bet even back in those days it stunk just as bad as our street does now. I mean, they didn't even have proper sanitation back then, they just used to shit wherever the fancy took and bung their ox bones out the front door for the rats to gnaw on. I am getting used to rats sitting on our front wall chewing on the waste of humanity. My old man is still up in the shed most nights, trying to steal electricity from some grid or junction box or transformer or whatever. If it's electric you're after, my old man's hands bow like a dowser's rod as soon as he senses the juice buzzing through cables someplace. My mum says he'll end up getting nicked and ruining our good name, a name, I might add, I have already gone a considerable way to damaging anyhow.

I like the strikes. I am all for them because I'm alright Jack, thank you very bleeding much. When I get in and it's dark, like its dark outside, I get to eat baked potatoes that have been done in the ashes of the coal fire, and baked beans burned to a cinder by my mum on the camping stove my uncle John acquired from a posh widow in lieu of services previously rendered. I like all the chitter chatter, the static charge of imminent anarchy that hangs in the air like the balmy gases of the decomposing unburied cadavers down at the cemetary, though, the gases only leak out slow on account of it being the worst winter in living history. Yesterday, I got to sled up and down our street on a piece of rusty corrugated iron from my granddad's backyard. There were no cars around as no one had any money to buy petrol, and those that did have enough bread to buy it were using the petrol to run private generators or torch any building remotely connected with local members of parliament. The general consensus being from the man on the street, that the lazy bastards ought to get up off their arses and shovel coal twelve-hours a day.
I like the smell of anarchy. It's like Guy Fawkes Night only with a higher probability of carnage. Good old Guy, there was a man who had fully grasped the ground level principles of government; which were, seek and destroy. So, it snowed and our street went white and for a while the good people of my neighbourhod came and stood outside holding candles and wearing wee Willy Winky nightcaps gawping at the snow because the plug had been pulled on the idiot box. Meanwhile up in my back garden, my old man, by this stage certifiably insane, had somehow run about two-hundred feet of cabling he'd illegally removed from an electrical contractor of ill repute up a pylon about a half-mile away. By the grace of whatever dumb brute of a beast it was who oversaw my old man he had not been fried alive, and thus, I was spared what would have been an exciting morning watching electric company linesman scraping pieces of what once had been my old man, into an urn the size of an eggcup. Ho hum, life goes on, as do rats, garbage mounds, bread shortages, coal shortages, and the general upsurge in the nation's birth rate. I heard Mr. Zeus, the grocery store owner, telling several ladies of low-to-do slackness that it was all a fiendish government plot to get people to copulate rather than oogle News at Ten and then go to bed with a cup of cocoa. The ladies it seemed, where in total agreement, as they, so I understood from my eavesdropping position, were all in the club themselves. When a shop is dimly lit and idle chitter chatter about copulation and Winston Churchill is the rage, it is ridiculously easy to shoplift. Good old Winnie. As the unions began to grind the government of the day's chances of winning another election for half a century down to bonemeal, my old man was making hay while the lamps he'd strung up in his shed burned bright. No one saw, he was a fugitive child of the blitz and blackouts and he knew how to make light vanish. He needed to too, because it would only have taken the eagle-eyes of one nocturnally-attuned neighbour to bring an angry mob of electricity-deprived-sick-of-copulating residents storming up our back garden with pitch forks and pokers.
Not that anything like that would have deterred my old man from his fiendish plot to dominate the new-fangled audio industry. Despite the strikes, the blank faces, the dreary weather, the monotony of hunting for coal, the English were taking to stereophonics in a big way, well, when they had electric they were anyhow. Pirate radio was broadcasting to a million kid’s bedrooms through battery-operated transistor radios in the dark gloom of night – and a good thing too, it was far more preferrable than having to listen to your parents copulate again. The pirate ships were anchored out in the choppy, deadly waters of the North Sea, which, even though my geographic knowledge was sketchy at best, I figured was north of Luton someplace. One kid, Alexander, told me they ran skiffs to and fro the Gonads to collect supplies and easy going chicks lacking rectitude. For a considerable time after he had implanted that kernel into my fast decomposing brain, I believed that there were a group of islands off the NW coast of bonnie Scotland called the Gonads where pirates who spun rock records, occassionally went to pillage women lacking arseholes. They were strange times, but nonetheless, prophylactic ones, but not in a prophylactic sense, given that the swinging sixties still had a swing or two left in their tailfeathers. Women, so I heard it said, were looser than they had ever been before, apart from up on the Gonads I suppose where they were pretty tight, given their lack of rectumal activity. On and on the three-day week and the power cuts went, and as is the British way, sooner, rather than later, pretty much the whole nation, apart from those up in places like Preston where they didn't even have electricity, grew accustomed to frugal power useage. Excepting my old man of course, he was burning more juice than Alcatraz on execution day. Sucking it out of the grid as was his wont while crazily designing a whole new era of stereophonic devices that would, he presumed, all but deafen the vast majority of British youth in their insatiable lust for rock 'n' roll. I admired my old man for his foresight, and his ability to steal from the electrcity board at a time when they were depriving everyone else of current. The trouble with electricity, as many other half-crazed would-be entrepreneurs have found to their own detriment, is that it is an unstable and unforgiving adversary. Fuck about with it too much and in the end it will turn around and burn you, alive if needs be.
Those times alas, are not like these times, back then it was uncustomary to hear a siren wailing, the war had been over for nigh on a quarter of a century, and unlike now, when upon hearing a siren the average man-in-the-street completely ignores it, during a power cut in England in mid-Winter in the late nineteen sixties, a siren going off and going off while simultaneously growing louder in intensity, was a big deal. And when those sirens actually came up your street and, not just up your street but right to your own front door, it was way more exciting than pirate radio and Batman combined.
There had a been a lot of small fires given the excessive use of candles by people who ought not have been let loose with the damned things, let alone matches. There had been chimney fires, bonfires that had somehow gotten out of control, gas explosions - the usual by products of hard economic measures and cruel and merciless depravation of electric light and heating. My old man however, was the first person to have his garden shed explode into a fireball and light up the surrounding neighbourhood for a mile in all directions as bright as a summer's afternoon. Many people thought it was the oft prophecised alien invasion, others, deprived of regular BBC news on television, thought it was a meteor strike. Some thought that some madman had blown up the power company, and even more thought it was God's sign to parliament that the people had endured enough and the miner's ought to get back to their mole-like vocation tout de suite.
Unfortunately any of those other worldy events would have proved more intriguing than having to watch your own old man dragged off by the fuzz for a myriad of crimes ranging from threatening behaviour, endangering life, defrauding the national grid - right through to storing hazardous inflammable liquids without the proper licenses. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it immensely. Oh, and what really pissed him off most was getting done for not having a TV license when he couldn't even watch the bloody thing! Life went on begrudgingly, as was the way in most parts of the fetid kingdom. The miner's went back to digging coal - the garbage got burned where it had been piled by de-mobbed WWII veterans who hadn't been able to find gainful employ since Nuremburg. The dead got incinerated, the government got thrown out at the earliest opportunity, and my old man walked away as clean as a whistle (apart from the TV license) on a technicality.
Within a short time the days of the strikes and community spirit were discarded along with black and white televisions and oldy style gramaphones and the English took to ownership: to rock music, hi- fidelity and adultery in a massive way. Things were never to be the same again, not on my street, not on any street in fact, and certainly not in our garden shed which was nothing but a pile of charred debris -a fitting testament to the ingenuity of the average Englishman-in-the-street.

Luiz versus the Hound of the Baskervilles

Luiz finally got the Parka coat he'd been pestering for, the one with the quilted orange lining and synthetic-fur-ringed hood, because he'd gotten a paper round. He was trying to go straight after his earlier dalliances with petty crime. His mum finally got the coat on the club, a very English scheme that enabled her paying for it at so much a week, with coin of the realm or services in lieu of. His mum told him, twice, that if anything happened to the coat, especially while it was still being paid off, there would be all hell to pay. Big fucking deal, Luiz thought.
He was chuffed with the coat anyhow. When the hood was pulled up you couldn't even tell he had ginger hair. The paper route Luiz was riding each morning culminated in a street just one away from where he then lived, and for a month or so, the round went okay and Luiz proved himself a diligent and reliable pre-dawn deliverer of national news in all of its multifarious English newspaper forms. It was relatively simple work, even for a retard like Luiz. You cycled down streets, up paths, opened front door letter flaps and wedged said newspaper therein, basically shredding the first eighteen-pages of the Telegraph or Guardian. Luiz's family were always Express or Mail readers and newspaper's like those that were always light on editorial, always slipped into the average mail slot a treat. Strangely, that was about the time Luiz became aware of the great English class system. Newspapers like the Sun and the Mirror (the rags), were always delivered to council houses, whereas the Express and the Mail went to middle-class homes whose occupants still thought of themselves as working class, but not as low-brow as the real working class, and your snobby, snotty papers like the Telegraph, Guardian etcetera went to upper-middle class homes with fences and gates and signs like No Trespassing! And Achtung! If you were lucky enough to deliver a Times or a Financial Times, well, then you'd spend a half-hour riding up the driveway to reach the letterbox and a butler would most likely snatch it from your filthy hand and go iron it. The same class system didn't apply to Christmas tips however Luiz discovered. The best tippers were always the middle-class, followed by the council house tenants, followed more meagrely by the snobby snotty upper-middle class and you could fucking forget a Times reader tipping you at all. Luiz pretty soon learned that that was how they came to be reading the Times and residing in a house with a moat around it – by not fucking tipping the paperboy, coalman, milkman, postman, butcher, baker, candlestick maker et al. Needless to say, it was those snobby bastards who got pretty short shrift from their paper delivery person, let fucking Jeeves traipse down that driveway and pick the fucking thing up before the crows got at it. That was the general paperboy's anti-code. All was well. Until a new street got added to Luiz's ever-burgeoning but unduly recompensed route. On this additional street there was a shabby house with a brute of a hound stalking its unkempt gardens. The first time Luiz set eyes on that beast he knew it was a psychotic canine, the kind of drooling, slobbering, hulk of a crossbreed used to digging itself out of its own grave and eating parts of its own anatomy when scraps became scarce. He'd only got the damned street added to his round anyhow because the newsagent, Mr. Maxwell, had heard Luiz bearating the stupid little bastard who'd had it before him about being scared of Pluto and not holding up the paperboy's code of We Deliver!

So there he was, lumbered through his own inability to keep his cakehole shut. The guy who owned the house with the dog kept telling the newsagent that the bloody thing was only a puppy and wouldn't hurt a fly. Obviously, a lumbering lump like that wouldn't have the agility to nab a fly, but a paperboy wasn't a fly, was he? To his credit, Luiz was the first kid over that gate anyhow, and amazingly, the dog only raised one saggy eyebrow and drooled lazily, before it started sucking its own reproductive equipment. After that the dog and Luiz struck up a kind of mutual respect; it respected that Luiz had to deliver a fucking Daily Mirror each morning, and Luiz respected the fact that at any given moment he could be seriously mauled in the course of performing said delivery obligations.
They went on like that for four or five weeks, mutually admirable, until the weather began to deteriorate and Luiz swapped from the denim jacket to the Parka. The first morning Luiz hopped over that gate dressed like Scott of the Antarctic, that fangy mutt was up on all fours with its hackles raised and its donger erect, snarling like some maimed beast. Luiz wasted some time attempting to placate that obviously riled animal with puppy platitudes and a rolled-up Daily Mirror - although he wished it had been a Telegraph, at least that fucker rolled-up gave you a bit of clout. Hitting a dumb deranged animal the size of that with a rolled-up Daily Mirror, was about as pointless as trying to stop a runaway train by standing in front of it with your hands out. As he made for the letterbox, with the paperboy's code forefront of his mind, the dog sprang to life with an agility that would have made the British Olympic selectors drool. It was on Luiz in a flash, its wet animal smell and warm breath all pervading. The Daily Mirror went in one gulp. Good riddance to bad rubbish. It had paws the size of ham knuckles. Teeth as yellow as Luiz's aunt Isa and fangs as long as icicles on a wintery morn, Luiz said goodbye to life:
Paperboy Killed In Savage Attack By Footloose Hound! As he braced for the inevitable bite; for losing a hunk of face and protracted plastic surgery that would most likely make him look like a South American villain, he toppled backwards and the hound fell with him, wherein it began savagely tearing at the fake fur around the Parka's hood. Luiz could hear large remnants of cheap manmade wadding being torn from even weaker stitching, and then he could hear the hound choking, trying desperately to chug up a synthetic fur ball. He didn't move, a sagacious non-move as movement itself is not advised when a dog, or indeed a bull elephant, is in the process of duly assaulting your person. He lay there gazing up at the clear morning sky where a hundred-million tiny stars twinkled brightly and dogs were not a species ever considered worthy of inter-galactic abduction, or space travel. Still the hulk of a hound coughed and choked a loud, wracking cough that echoed around the otherwise lifeless morning streetscape like an artillery explosion in a canyon. Luiz might even have prayed, although he doubts it in hindsight. There was no time for any kind of celestial diety to intervene in a dispute between man and beast, not when there were the law of the jungle to uphold. Finally, Luiz heard the gruff, demanding voice of an adult, either that, or another dog that could talk humanspeak. He was long past the point of surprise but not yet at the point of catalystic shock, somewhere in that dreamy state that preceded pain killing injections, sutres, amputations and a sea of morphine. It was a pleasant place he recalls. He heard the dog howling, howling like a kid howls when its daddy whups on him, or her, for some petty indiscretion. He sat up, giddily. Wiped a thin white layer of frost from his top lip, which remarkably, still appeared to be where his creator had positioned it and saw the dog cowering in the opposite corner, its muzzle all speckled with synthetic fur threads. Luiz reached for where those same threads had been situated by the tiny hands of foreign manufacturer’s precious moments beforehand, and felt his own head instead.

Realisation took a good few minutes to dawn. When it did, Luiz saw that the Parka was minus its hood, and the best part of one sleeve. He knew then, instantly, that having been attacked by a dog with an aversion to fake fur, was undoubtedly going to be the paltriest of his problem load for that particular day, and probably, for the remainder of that particular year. The guy who had intervened, St. Bernard, patron saint of dog handlers, then proceeded to berate Luiz rather sternly about the non-delivery of that day's Mirror. He was collecting coupons for something apparently, perhaps two-weeks at a holiday camp all expenses paid. Luiz smiled ungraciously - like a Halloween pumpkin the morning after the night before. Unremarkably, Luiz's old man handed him a sounder and more thorough beating than that dog had received. If Luiz's old man had gone and beaten that dog, that senile beast would at least have known what it was like to be beaten by a human being. Luiz's mum meanwhile tried to make him go back to the scene of the attack and locate the missing hood and sleeve as she intended to re-attach them and then trim it with flimsy yellow feathers that had fallen off of a feather boa. Being molested and mauled by a canine, being beaten by your own father for a matter that was not even of your own making - they were run-of-the-mill occurrences in Luiz's young life, but having to walk to school looking like a canary was a whole different can of worms. What kind of a boy would seriously return to the house of hell and scrabble around looking for a Parka coat sleeve? Not this kind of boy. Not long after that Luiz hung up his newspaper sack and his one-sleeved Parka coat and decided to over-winter next to the radiator near the headmaster's office at school. Scalping dinner tickets was a far easier gig anyhow, not to mention infinitely warmer.