Living in London is ace, but there’s one thing that really fucking annoys me about it. It’s not the people, or the air quality or even the state of the Nag’s Head Morrisons. It’s something far more impalpable than that. It’s every single corner. Because behind every single corner, there is something waiting to jump out and kick you in the balls.

Often it’s something you’d never even considered before, like having your room measured by the tax inspector to make sure it doesn’t count as commercial property, or having your external TV antenna robbed. Or someone trying to kick you while you’re getting off the bus (not thankfully for continuing integrity of my previous metaphor, in the testes).

Life didn’t used to be like this. I used to sail from one pleasant week to the next, buoyed only by the generally lovely stuff that happened in between. I had little, if any, shit to deal with on a week-by-week basis.

But that changed when I moved here. Shit abounds here. Letters, emails, phone calls, text messages, they’ve transformed from perennial bringers of joy and good news into purely different formats by which life can send me its stream of crap.

Sometimes it’s crap I can ignore. I can look at it and say, “oh well, that’s just some crap, I don’t need to address this, I can file this under crap and never look at this fucking crap again”.

But sometimes its some serious crap, I look it and say “shit this is some serious crap I’d better sort out right away”.

By the way when I say crap what I generally mean is somebody wanting money off me.

Basically right now after rent, travel, council tax, bills and food, my expendable monthly income is something like £23 — and I’m fucking frugal right.

So don’t sit there going, “Yo what’s this motherfucker complaining about, I know people who can only dream of the words expendable income”. And yes I’m sure some of those people exist, but I’m equally sure you probably don’t know any of them.

As we all are, I am only partially aware of the plight of others, and find no solace in the fact that people are worse off, and think it strange that anyone would, as either some heinous schadenfreude or irrelevant perspective.

The thing that perplexes me is that I was always told, if you work hard and live within your means you’ll always be comfortable.

Well, I live in a room that is about 9ft by 8ft, most British prison cells are bigger per square foot. I work somewhere in the region of 70 hours a week. And yet seemingly “my means” don’t extend to this. If I were to live within “my means” I’d be sharing a room with nine illegal immigrants and their gangmaster, but instead of sloping off to pickpocket like those lucky bastards get to, I have to write stupid words, because it’s the only thing I’m even vaguely good at.

And frankly I’m not prepared to live like that.

Sorry about this I just needed to vent. What’s the point in having a blog that no one reads unless you’re going to vent on it right. Again, very sorry.

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