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.