My Shop And Work

I've just been sat idling on the high street with a glass of beer and a cigarette, away from the pub, admiring the certain shop fronts. There are so many, the old carriageways are littered with them. Why can't I have one? I wondered. I could sell books and CDs and ceramics and canvasses, all produced by myself as a one-man cottage industry. Go me.

I have dozens of titles which were wrenched out of my soul within the fiery furnace of addiction. I was so out of it I don't even remember writing them.

I recorded five albums in my time. The first one was screechy and crackly, described as 'madness' by an employee in a music store, who I kindly gave a copy to. However, an album is an album. I went to all kinds of lengths to get the rest of them produced. Laptops, boom boxes, dictaphones, tape players, the lot. The last one was recorded perfectly in a studio. From £7 microphones to Apple computers.

It would have been glorious to get my signature sculptures mass-produced. I sold a couple but I hated it, I would rather have kept them. I had a plan of gluing them all together with silicon onto a wrecking ball and hanging the collection from a chain off the ceiling. They looked alien. My favourite colour paints were bronze, silver and gold, like the Olympic medals. I had to travel to Stoke to collect them. Stoke is known for its potteries.

My canvasses made me proud. I had a technique honed down including graphic design, tracing, sketching, and doodling. Not to mention collaging. Photography was included. Usually of my ceramic pieces, but often of nature. I liked screengrabs from movies too, for drastic alteration. One of my traits was using sticky letters from the craft shop to add some text onto a picture.

There's nothing quite as stressful though, I find, as printing manuscripts or recording music. Something is always bound to go wrong somewhere.

Anyway, that's what I would sell in my shop, if I were ever lucky enough to own my own premises. I assure you, I wouldn't sell cheap ciggies under the counter, like the Albanian shop proprietors around here.

The brand would be named WOL™, short for Wheel Of Life. It's loosely based on the Buddhism faith. You know, you live and you die, and the wheels on the bus spin round and round. That kind of thing.

It wouldn't be about making a good living, it would be about doing something enjoyable, instead of packing tins of tuna in a factory. I've done all that production line work before. I used to slow the line down because I was too distracted eating chicken breasts and necking protein shakes on the job. Andy, we've got stock 'upto the rafters' my boss said.

Sorry, but I've got to get massive for the gym tonight, I replied. I'd have three or four meals in work. Then another seventeen eggs before I clocked off.

One time, I drank so much water to boost the creatine content in my saturated muscle bellies that it was coming back up and running out of my mouth. There was no more room inside me for anymore!

I used to turn up in the morning with a giant jug of it. The gaffer said I must piss like a donkey. The toilet was another great excuse to turn my back on the production line for a few precious minutes. One guy used to lacquer his hairstyle in there. He was in there pretending to use the crapper every time I was.

A coffee and a smoke on the bog equalled 'standard procedure'.

My worst job was in a marsh mellow warehouse. Several pallets of marsh mellow had 'exploded' all over the place. It was our detail to clean it up. Everyone and I mean everyone walked out but me and one other lad, when it ruined their clothes and spoiled their hair after one or two marsh mellow fights. We stayed till the end of the day, making a joke out of it and gaining a comical bond with one another. I smelled of marsh mellow for a week.

The following afternoon we were lumping heavy-ass sacks of 'hard rape' peanuts off an articulated wagon. That was the nature of agency work. You never knew what you would be doing next.

I got fired from a bakery for picking my nose one time.

It was handy, because the giant ovens were fearing me. What if the day shift turned on me and stuffed me in one? One lad in there used to sell knockoff designer shirts. I'd wear them on Friday nights out clubbing, double-dropping ecstasy tablets an falling all over the dance floor. A woman once acted like she was giving me a hand job and exposed my penis from my fly zipper. I was dancing with my todger hanging out for Christ knows how long. She thought it was dead funny.