It's been a while...

So yesterday I found 3 empty rum bottles behind my bedside table. This can be explained by the fact that I am a pirate in disguise, and also my other half has a somewhat questionable tidying technique. Out of sight out of mind has never been more true.

We actually got a glass recycling box this week, we’ve lived in our home for 8 months and the council never provided us with one. Well, now my brother in law works for them, on their recycling vans, so finally it is there. A green plastic box of joy. Sitting in the yard, making me contemplate myself and our society merely by flaunting all of the empty rum bottles I have collected since Christmas, when I had to stop putting glass in the ordinary bin after being told I would be fined for it. Of course my argument was what do they expect me to do with it, when they wont give me a pissing glass box? But anyway, I digress.

I looked at the mountain of abandoned captain morgan bottles, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed, I feel I should take a moment to thank, and apologise to, my liver.

I said on twitter last night, how I manage to run a house and a full time job when I drink as much as I do is beyond me, well actually its not. I know exactly how I manage, I have been trained by the best.

Since the age of16, I have drank pretty much every night. The date coincides with when  I started working. Every night I would come in, and settle down to my tea with my parents, each of us with a bottle of wine, or cider, depending on whether my mam had done the alcohol run.

A few months after I started work, my parents began making home-brew. You can see where this is heading. Batches of wine that would produce roughly a dozen bottles a time, and the alcohol content could not be established. The hydrometer reading was literally off the scale. Abandoning all methods of measuring the alcohol, we applied a drink a bottle and then stand up method. If after a bottle you could stand up, and carry on as normal, it was relatively piss week, so always make sure you had another one close by. If you drank a bottle, stood up, and stumbled about, laughing at how drunk you are, you know you’ll still get up for work on time. If you pass out before you remember to do the stand up test, remember to grab a bottle of irn bru and some skittles to sober you up on the way to work.

When my other half moved into my home, he couldn’t believe how much we drank. He quickly got over the shock however, and it wasn’t long until he got into the habit of picking up cans on his way home from work. Every night we would all settle down together and drink, listen to music and philosophise. I think in large part this made the awkwardness of us living with my parents somewhat easier to bear, for him and for my dad.

Some people will read this and assume we are a family of lushes. Well, I suppose by their standards, we are. But in our society we are quite your average family. The social class of our town is divided between those of us who are hardworking, go out early every day and work a full shift – where common practice is to stop off on the way home for the nights booze; 8 cans of pils for the blokes, a bottle of wine for the women – and the rest of the people who have never worked an honest day in their life; more on them later.

If the man works, but the wife stays home, as is common round here, food will be on the table when he walks through the door. If, like our family, the women work too we provide 95% of the trade for the local Indian. It is an award winning restaurant, the chef is amazing. He is well regarded as one of the best Indian chefs in the district. As well as it being a top class restaurant, he does deliveries. The food is fantastic, why cook when you can have food like that delivered to your door? Is my argument every time I consider making a home made curry. The home deliveries must make up roughly 99% of his income, with people popping into the restaurant for a “proper sit down meal” if it is a special occasion, like a birthday. In the 24 years it has been open, we have eaten from there almost every week, sometimes several times a week, and yet no one in my family has ever eaten in the restaurant and yet until I wrote that down, it never occurred to me as being odd.

I’ve carried on my tradition of evening drinking even after we moved out of my parent’s house 2 years ago. Dave rarely drinks, but he smokes like a bloody chimney, of which I remind him every time he dares to give me a judging glance as I throw back half a bottle of rum in one sitting.

A lot of people would read this and regard us as one of the problems with this country, a family of binge drinkers blah blah blah and broken Britain. I strongly disagree. I can drink like a sailor, and still get up at 7 and go to work. I am proud of that. I hold down a job, 11 hours a day I m out, working and earning money, paying my taxes to line the pockets of the others in our town. Our area has always had a notorious unemployment rate, thanks in large part to the colossal fuck over courtesy of Maggie Thatcher. The day that loathsome twat dies, there will be parties in the streets for miles around here. There are many people who have never worked, and will never work. I have 3 uncles who go through life living on their giro, I am working to keep them in baccy and beer. It’s a thought that irks me every day.

This morning, there was a new driver being trained on my bus. He was being trained by a Polish man. This is a touchy subject around here. In around 2006 there was a massive influx of Polish people to our area, Consett is widely referred to as Little Poland now. You go to any pub round here where theres a table of the perpetually jobless sat round necking back bottles of newcy brown, and ask them why they’re in the pub at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon. They’d sit there more than happy to tell you its because of “these bloody foreigners coming in and stealing all the jobs”.

Its an excuse used by pretty much every lard-arsed waste of space round here. The Polish came in, and stole all of their jobs. It doesn’t matter to them, that they have never worked, they have selective memories you see. As far as they’re concerned the jobs in Consett are for the people of Consett. It doesn’t matter to them that for the past however many years that no one in Consett has actually got off their arse to do the fucking jobs.  The jobs were there for them all along, they were just too lazy to go out and get them. Too happy to sit back in the house that the government pays for for them, drinking beers and eating food bought with handouts from my pay packet. If all of the migrant workers suddenly upped sticks and left, would all of these hard done by ProudBritishMen actually go out and reprise the roles the Poles left behind? Would they shite. They’d throw back another can of Special Brew, scratch their nuts and complain about how the buses had stopped running and the factories were shutting down.

I don’t think the Poles will leave, and I hope they don’t. The Daily Mail is always going on about how we have too many immigrants and how we need to get Britain back to it’s “best”. Tarring all migrants with the same brush, when it is not a problem with the migrant WORKERS at all. I watched that bus driver this morning, I see him frequently, he has been driving buses for a couple of years now, and until this morning I had no clue he was foreign. He has adapted a Geordie twang to the words he says regularly “Five pund twenty please. Ta. Cheers.” Standing at the front with his work bag, a flask of tea and his sarnies for bait. Perfectly integrated into our mad little society. Today when he’s finished training his apprentice, he’ll be back at the wheel. Shuttling the scroungers to the job centre, the scapegoat for their laziness, listening on an as they bellow and swear, angry at a situation that is no ones fault but their own.

Just like I will do my shift, travel for an hour and a half to get back to my little terraced house, and finish the other half of the bottle of rum. Another day spent working then drinking, drinking then working. But at least I am working. And the drinking? Well, it just helps take my mind off the fact that at another hour of my shift today will be going straight into the sweaty palm of another waster who thinks he’s somehow earned it.

Just another day in the North East.