The Annual Day of Glory

Thursday 2nd July

Time to get out the bunting.

Paint your children green and set your own house on fire.

And that's just in preparation for breakfast.

Yes, it's nearly my birthday again and this time I have a few decrees as to what is expected next Friday.

One. There will be parades. This will include acrobats, elephants, pandas, gargantuan balloons shaped like cartoon characters and characters I have played on TV, floats decorated with important scenes from my life and marching bands.

Two. Tithes will be purchased. Primarily in solid gold, but games, dvds and books are also acceptable. See this list for more ideas.

Three. There will be cheerleaders. Of every nationality and creed. All wearing tiny skirts. In perfect formation cheering on the greatness of my birthday generally and me specifically.

Four. Beer and other alcoholic beverages will be provided in huge quantities at knock down prices. Though people should drink responsibly, they should be able to do so without a second mortgage.

Five. You will not be stupid. Even if you are stupid. You will walk around with an air of intelligence and speak of things like books, philosophy and lingerie. Discussion of sport is banned and will be punishable by public flaying. If you cannot manage some degree of looking like you are intelligent then you are permitted to sit out the day comfortably. Under a dungheap. That is on fire.

Six. Children under the age of 5 shall be painted green. This is not negotiable. They are to be disguised as shrubbery and made to blend in with the background. Children between the ages of 6 to 13 will be locked into one of the many theme parks in the country and not be let out until the following morning. Teenagers will be permitted to join the celebrations until such time as they say something offensive or insipid in which case they will be forced to live in France. Permanently.

Seven. Chocolates and Ice Cream will be delivered to the masses hourly on the hour until lunchtime, whereupon cocktails will be added to the list.

These are my decrees. Now go to and make it happen. Worldwide.

[ As a bit of political commentary, how much do you think all this would cost… as opposed to current government spending on things like …. Hmmm … overseas troop maintenance, health and safety legislation, alien research, university grants for foreign students and index-linked civil service pensions. Look, I didn't even mention expenses ]

Anyway, go to old sport, go to.

And so i face ... the yellow curtain

Monday 6th July

So.

It happened.

I got my redundancy notice on Friday.

In exactly thirteen weeks I will be starting my first week of unemployment.

I spent a great deal of Friday with a huge smile on my face, but not because I hate my job but because it's the end of an era that's long overdue.

(I do hate my job, but that's pretty much because I'm not keen on the concept of actually having to perform services for my money. Money should liberally cascade into a big pot for me to scoop out whenever I feel like it. Like a bottomless pinata of cash. I'd quite like one of those.)

I did spend a lot of time on Friday reconsidering my position, figuring out how sad I should be over it and the results came back inconclusive.

Obviously there's the worry over the mortgage and the next job and interviews and cv's and actual work and things. But all that comes under the classification of money and money has never done anyone any good, especially worrying about it.

Unless of course you're rich in which case I'd like to hear from you and maybe set up a personal interview. Bring your wallet, my time is worth a LOT.

This might sound strange but my biggest worry is loneliness. If I take up writing and working from home, I could end up talking to walls and picture frames and making up stories about the food that I'm eating coming to life and killing me.

(hmm, must make a note of that one)

I'm fairly sure I had a point when I started writing this.

I wonder what the hell it was.

Oh yes, my memory, what if that goes too? I won't be able to remember… um ... thing.

Anyway, the countdown's started, and again I'd like your help. Consider me now a word-seeking writer-monkey. You find something that needs filling up with words and has a cash (or other) prize / wage, then get in touch.

Consider yourself my agent. You know, with a big badge and sunglasses and nice hair, just no contract or commission. Go out and big me up. Link the site everywhere you can. Find jobs I could do or competitions I could enter.

Spread the word, my children.

Big Bad Jon is soon to be unleashed onto the world, and you heard it here first.

Poor, poor you.

There'll be letters for this one.

Wednesday 8th July

Do you ever get the feeling that you're going to hell?

Not so very long ago, I was involved in one of those discussions. You know the ones, though yours will probably have some different criteria. Ones where you discuss the future of the universe, famous historical battles and other matters of consequence.

Such world shaping arguments such as …

McGuyver vs The Death Star

Superman vs Batman

Stephen Hawking vs the 1973 Boston Red Sox

Some stupid football team vs some other pointless football team

You know, things like that.

Well, not too long ago I was involved in a discussion of two particular historical figures and which one was tougher. Not more inspiring or more influential or any of that rubbish, just out and out toughness.

Don't ask how we got onto the subject, it'll take too long to explain.

The two historical figures? Helen Keller and Anne Frank

Yes, those two. Yes, I know it's not the sort of thing you'd normally discuss over the dinner table. Unless you're a member of the West family of course. Just put it down. Yes, I know I'll get letters.

So, in the red corner you have Helen Keller, a girl made deaf and blind at the age of 19 months. If you do your research, you'll find that she was also either mute or not with absolute certainty, depending on what you read. I'm not sure whether that matters in a no-holds barred cage fight, but we'll work under the assumption she's not.

In the blue corner you have Anne Frank, a girl who grew up in Amsterdam until those pesky germans decided to annex the Netherlands and who subsequently hid in a small hidden set of rooms for two years during the second world war before being betrayed and sent to Bergen-Belson (or Auschwitz to you and me) and died of typhus. She also wrote a diary while hiding, it's quite famous.

So who would be tougher? I'm fairly sure that, even while riding this rocketsled to hell, offering odds would be seen as being a touch tasteless. But let's press on anyway.

Might as well ask for a joint while you're offered something to smoke with your blindfold.

Anne Frank lived in a tiny space with 8 other people (2 families) for two entire years without a breath of fresh air and limited access to silly inconsequential things like food. She had to entertain herself without the statutory MP3 players or DVDs or even YouTube for vast quantities of time, which sounds like hell in and of itself. Imagine not being able to see that LEGO thing about Darth Vader in the Canteen ever again…. You'd cut yourself inside of a few hours.

Plus she would have to hold in her farts just in case a stray ripper got herself and all her family caught by the Nazis. Imagine holding in two years worth of farts. I know that a couple of hours worth can be agony.

Anne Frank is one tough cookie.

However, Helen Keller should not be discounted straight away. She was born in 1880, which as any schoolchild knows is the age when you had to be able to fight dinosaurs from the minute you pop out of the womb, so she must have been pretty handy then. Unfortunately before she even turned 2 she lost a fight to a sabre-toothed tiger who cast a magic spell on her to make her blind and deaf.

Probably using herbs and mystic rocks and things.

So from here on in, you might think a 2 year old has no chance of making it, right? Well you'd be wrong because she lived to be 88, and you don't get to be that old without being able to kick some serious buttock. Trust me, your Nan is probably harder than the ken-do club at the local community centre.

My thinking is that when one sense is lost, the others are heightened to compensate. Try it for yourself. Close your eyes, count to 50, and try and guess who the next person in the room to fart will be.

(I bet it will be you).

So Helen Keller lost 2 of her senses. (3 depending on what you read) which by my Encyclopaedia Britannica (cross referenced with the HERO source book) means that you gain superpowers.

It's not recorded what superpowers Helen Keller picked, but they must have been awesome because her secret identity was never revealed to the world. Perhaps she was some sort of ninja.

Hopefully someone else picked the colours of her outfit.

So obviously the fight comes down to a DeafBlind Superhero vs a small child with gastric pains. Most protection agencies would have words about such a thing.

Could that BE any more one sided a fight?

Other than if it was in the dark, I mean.

Come on, she was even in a little film called Deliverance. Bet you didn't know she was in that, did you?

So yes, I'm going to hell. But you've just read all that … and more than likely told me that I picked the wrong winner. Which means you've thought about it too.

I'll budge up, there's plenty of room in this handcart.

My life occasionally resembles a french art house film

Monday 13th July

Well, that's that weekend gone.

I'm fairly sure I remember most of it.

See, I never work on my birthday. Even when I'm at work I never work on my birthday. So Friday was a day of rest.

Well, it was supposed to be. You'll be glad to hear though that when we were done, the library and spare room and even the living room, yard, garden and kitchen looked stunning. I even found loadsa stuff I thought I'd lost, including the medical bits I had to take to the doctors for testing.

You think I'm kidding.

Point being that for the barbeque on Saturday, if people showed up and the weather turned bad like the weatherman said, then we could all fit into the house.

In theory.

Well, as long as nobody felt like breathing out and the cupboard under the stairs was used to stack the corpses. That would make it a fairly normal Saturday anyway.

So the house was clean, we've watched all the CSI on the disk and I've already cast the Prince of Persia to his doom around 500 times by throwing him off a cliff.

What to do now?

Well, since it was my birthday and I was still sober, this probably means going outside and tempting the fate of the skygods.

Which we did.

We even got as far as Manchester to see a show. Granted, the parking in an NCP car park can be likened to sex with an ugly prostitute. It costs too much and you're never sure of the time and you're definitely sure it wasn't worth it. Plus you know places where you can get a better job for free providing you bring a copy of heat magazine.

Where was I?

Oh yes, deviant sexual proclivities while out in Manchester. We watched a stage show on Friday night… Where's that photo gone now? Dammit. Now you'll have to wait until later for me to tell you cos I need to show you the photo … when I find it.

SATURDAY

We watched Krod Mandoon (Did you see it? Oooo, it was good. Kicked the arse of Robin Hood, no smegging worries) until 2pm when the first of the no-shows was to let us know we'd be spending the day on our own indoors.

14:01pm. First person shows up.

14:12pm. Second person, bringing persons 3, 4 and 5.

From here on in it's like a procession. Think of it like a clown car in reverse with another fifteen million people piling into my house one after another. It eventually got so much that I burst from my humble abode under lightly grey skies and dared the universe to a pissing contest…

I got out my barbeque.

The rain was instantly tempted to join in the party. So I got out my secret weapon. I bared my balding forehead. The rain was now only held at bay by the sun's rampant desire to give me sunburn of the ninth dimension.

I checked the weather for Saturday. It was supposed to rain from 2pm onwards through the night. It actually held off until half nine when there were just about enough left for us to stroll indoors leisurely.

I say leisurely, I might have had a squiff or two to drink by that point.

I opened my first bottle at around 2pm. At around 4 I decided to move up to a big green comedy bomb. I make them best, so even though I demanded to be waited on hand and foot, I decided to get this myself.

You know the combination of wkd, bols, vodka and red bull all in a pint glass? There was a problem. The fifteen million people shedding human skin and muck all over my garden had appropriated all my pint glasses, even the bizzarely shaped ones, and there was no way in hell I was using a plastic pint glass at my own party.

Visions of whipping people went through my mind in terms of getting some glass washing done. I could do it, I had a whip not many meters away. Then my eyes alighted on salvation… at least for them. …

Presented to me in a field somewhere in Scotland 4 years ago at 3am… a 2 pint glass stein. (Actually that's the second drinking vessel I've been given when visiting scotland. I love those northern bastards, they get me).

If you've ever wondered what a magnum sized BGCB looks like, then come to my place with the ingredients and I'll show you.

If you bring enough I'll make one for you too.

Things get fuzzier after that.

I think I remember someone asking me if I would like to eat zombie flesh for a world record attempt. I think that's what he wanted, who knows. Next time I see him though I'll have to give him back his shoes, though why he left his feet behind I have no idea.

I remember holding a tiny guitar that sang to itself. It had buttons on it but they didn't seem to have any relevance on what and how it sang to itself.

I remember opening my laptop, probably looking for pornography, and going onto amazon. I'll know if i did something wrong as and when the packages start arriving.

I remember someone cursing the pope in latin and in song. It might have been me. You'd have to show me photos to go with that accusation.

I remember thinking that Pringles with thousand island dressing is one of god's better creations.

I've since tried that while sober. I'm right, they are.

I don't remember sleeping though.

What day is it?