The time I was an insurance fraudster for a day or two.

This building was my office for my first proper job. I replied to an ad in a paper (that’s how old I am) and was granted an interview.

There were three other candidates and we were all asked to do a literacy and numeracy test, I passed and was offered the position, which was answering the phones for a car insurance company called Enterprise Insurance, giving quotes, taking credit card payments and filling out and posting cover notes.

After a few hours training on my first day, the two impeccably dressed and groomed directors just disappeared and left me to my own devices.
I pick things up really quickly and soon I had a decent phone manner and learned to navigate my way through the ‘bible’ of quotations I was given (I didn’t even have a computer), and I took 7 payments for a years cover, filled out, signed and posted the cover notes on my first day.

On my second day, a customer who happened to live a few streets away from my house rang up to complain that he had been in a minor collision and the other person's insurance company had asserted that his cover didn’t exist and was not valid. I said I’d check his policy and get back to him.
Half an hour later, I was sat by myself in the office and three Asian men walked in with baseball bats and demanded money back for four invalid policies. They were swearing and threatening me and though I’m no shrinking violet, I was a bit scared until they started making racial comments to me so I stood up to them and they fucked off saying they’d be back with more people at close of business.
I promptly locked the office, posted the keys through the letterbox and went home.

My girlfriend at the time’s Dad was a Detective Sergeant in the CID at Millgarth station so I rang him, explaining that I had been merrily signing legal documents and was effectively an unintentional accessory to fraud. He told me to leave it with him.

It turned out the two directors were young lads that worked for an insurance company in Bradford and had decided to set up a front, renting an office, putting adverts in various papers and then stealing documents and quote bibles from their employers, then taking money, keeping it and not insuring people at all.

All they needed was a phone monkey to do it for them while they were at work (which is why I never saw them).

I don’t know what happened to them and I never bothered to find out but I never got any comeback from it.
Suffice to say I never got paid either.

Man I wish I had heard this song a few months ago. Pretty self explanatory really.

Well I'm so tired of the rain falling softly on the ground
Just enough to get my feet wet but not enough to let me drown
I've been laying in my bed, wishing I had never woken
Begging God to rid my head of every word you've ever spoken

Broke my knuckles on the wall
Because I thought about the call
When you said you'd always love me
Do you not tell the truth at all

Well if I ever cross your mind
Make sure you write down the times
So I will know the moments I was eating you alive

And I now I lay here, waiting with the hope that
I might find some sleep
I need some sleep tonight
Cause I've been waiting on your call
But I know it will never come
But I'm still waiting by the phone

And don't you dare (don't you dare)
Say you ever loved me or even tell me that you cared
Cause you knew what you were doing and you know just what you've done
How dare you say miss me with your spit still on his tongue

I am broken, I am beaten, I'm mistreated and I'm torn
I am cold with no direction but I'm lost without your warmth
I'm trying hard to find some hope that I might get the chance to breathe
Get off my mind, give back my heart and get the fuck away from me

I know I couldn't give you much

But I know I gave my best
You were always my princess
And now he's sliding up your dress
And I know I gave the world everything I've ever had
Johnny Cash said love would burn
I never thought it hurt this bad

Well I'm so tired of the rain falling softly on the ground
Just enough to get my feet wet but not enough to let me drown
I've been laying in my bed, wishing I had never woken
Begging God to rid my head of every word you've ever spoken

Broke my knuckles on the wall
Because I thought about the call
When you said you'd always love me
Do you not tell the truth at all

Well if I ever cross your mind
Make sure you write down the times
So I will know the moments I was eating you alive

You are the itch that's on my back
You are the gum under my shoe
You are the horrors of my past
You are the chill that haunts the room
You are the creaking on my steps
You are cancer you are plague
You are regret, you are disease
I wish that you would go away

Kindness.

A favourite quote of mine has always been the following from 1920's Mafia boss and all round sociopath Alphonse Gabriel Capone:

“Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me.”

It's literally the best quote to ever come from the mouth of the worst person, akin to Pol Pot going on record as saying "Don't make the same mistakes your parents did, but be safe in the knowledge you will make a whole new set of your own" (spoiler alert: he did).

If you take the Capone quote as a standalone philosophy then it makes perfect sense and the moment I first read it as a teenager I identified with it completely. It's forever been me, seen as a walking contradiction in terms by many but in actuality really fucking fair minded.

Kindness is too often seen as an all encompassing attribute, as opposed to the basic emotion that vies for power with many, many others that it really is. A fundamentally kind person is not defined by this one term of endearment, nor should they ever be.

A civilised society based on religious rules will always dictate right from wrong to its subjects, one act being acceptable and another not at all. A religious person of any faith or doctrine (they are all pretty much interchangeable really: be good or the magic lad in the sky will punish you when you die) will tell you that the reason kindness exists is due to the teachings of a higher power, a gift bestowed upon humanity via a human prophet so we had some rules to live by. An intelligent atheist or agnostic will argue that all animals instinctively have these rules hard coded into them from the get go. After all, even insects display behaviour or act in a manner that we would define as protectiveness, revenge, maternal instinct, generosity, cruelty, murder, selfishness and of course kindness.

I have never, ever met anyone that is not kind in some ways and in some situations and I've never met anyone who is completely devoid of kindness. Even the very worst people I've encountered in nearly four decades on planet earth have displayed affection for their children or empathy for people or animals that are suffering etc.

For my part, I have always tried to be kind when it is warranted and I think I do a pretty good job most of the time. I can be charitable and generous, loving and warm. I am loyal to a fault and always try to look out for other people. Having said that, (and this will come as no surprise to anyone who really knows me) I can also be a cunt. I don't use that term lightly, but I can. I can be acerbic and venomous, aggressive and mean, nasty and violent even.

The way I look at it is that at least I'm honest about it and I always tailor my reaction to a given person or situation. If I am wronged or if a person treats me badly then they have it coming and that's it. Just because I don't walk around projecting an aura of "nice" or pretend to be something I'm not doesn't mean I'm not loving and decent, it just means that depending on how you conduct yourself around me you will experience a number of interchangeable character traits.

I think also that a lot of people just have a need to conform to societal expectation by "acting" kind.
These people tick all the boxes of the kind individual and subscribe to all the ideals, are visibly seen to wear the t-shirt and walk the walk but when you peel away the layers, the core of them is pretty much the opposite.

The best example I can cite of this is an individual I knew for about 12 years: outwardly an outspoken vegan, animal loving, liberal, enthusiastic, positive, sensitive, out-to-make-a-difference social justice warrior, they had me fooled enough to buy into this bullshit for a decade.

The reality though is far from all of that. This person even had a double redundant online presence just to make sure the outward face of how they were perceived could never be confused with who they really were. A few months spent really getting to know this individual and spending time with them brought with it the realisation that they were in reality the most shallow, selfish, dishonest, neurotic, validation seeking, cowardly, mercenary and vain of people, wrapped from head to foot in a blanket of misinformation so thick it took me five months to unwrap it. I'm so glad now that I did.

They say that life's a journey and it is, we all evolve and progress and none of us are the same person we were yesterday. As much as we will hold onto our core values and beliefs, our experiences will hone and change us more than we can appreciate. One thing I do know that will never change is my standing by that quote.

Live and let live by all means but as Al said, just because you are kind, it doesn't mean you have to be weak.

Film clichés and a bit about Liam Neeson for some reason. It's organic this. Stick with it?

As if there has been no time away at all (which works rather well as precisely not one person has noticed in the interim) I will now list a few cinematic clichés that always strike me as particularly entertaining.

I was recommended a film starring Liam Neeson by my Father the other night called Unknown. I sat down to watch said film with no prior knowledge other than 1. it had Liam Neeson in it and 2. it's premise (as relayed by the Old Fella, who knows to operate on a strict "no spoilers please" basis) involved a loss of identity at some point.

As a semi-cinephile I am a fan of Mr Neesons work. We won't talk too much about Krull, which I chose to hire from Screen Videos on VHS for my Tenth Birthday party and then every week after that until I was roughly about Twelve, but Darkman was a childhood favourite when I was going through my cool Sam Raimi phase and I read Keneally's Shindlers Ark in my early teens and thought he was brilliant in Speilbergs adaptation. Ra's al Ghul was a stand out character in the excellent Batman Begins and I consider Taken to be a "leave your brain at the door" revenge favourite.

Liam Neeson is also one of those actors that you grow to love as a person. Not that you really know them or ever will, but your perception of how they conduct themselves in the real world based on interviews and articles and such leaves you with that warm "he seems pretty cool him, I could see myself going for a pint with Liam" feeling and I was sad to hear of his wife Natasha Richardson's death a few years ago, it really made me feel sorry and upset for someone I have genuine respect for.

Same goes for Gary Oldman, Jonny Depp, Eric Bana, Michael Gambon, Daniel Day-Lewis, and numerous others. Anyone that is good at what they do but remains down to earth and humble with a sense of humour has always appealed to me.

Anyway I watched Unknown a few days ago and it is a fairly enjoyable film with a decent plot but it descends into complete film cliché about half way through and then never recovers. While watching, it occurred to me that I used to have a list of such things committed to memory and always meant to write them down somewhere so here they are:

When driving a car at high speed you must do all of the following things:

-1. Drive on the pavement, aiming at pedestrians and white Cafe' furniture while beeping your horn and gesturing with one hand for them to jump out of the way. This will positively affect everyone's reaction times and enable them to avoid harm.

-2. If you must hit an obstacle that is not another car, enemy, or anything relevant to the plot of the film, it must definitely be a blue barrel with an open top that is filled with clean water. Such receptacles are placed on every road in every major city in the world for the purpose of collecting fresh water but you will do no harm by driving into them and knocking them over/spilling their contents.

-3. If you are pursued by the police, simply engineer a situation whereby you can make them crash into each other. This means that two or more police cars are incapacitated (if you are really lucky, loads more will smash into the back of them also) but yours is ok so you can then drive away but they are unable to catch you. In case you are unsure of your success this event will always be indicated by the sirens of the police cars making a sort of "weeeeeooooooouuuw" sound (I am not sure this translates too well when I type it) as they sort of stop working.

None car related:

-4.If at any point you encounter someone that writes/draws/paints for pleasure and they are above average, it is imperative that you do not make an issue of this as most people do not think that their work has any merit at all. If for example the other person has secretly drawn a really good portrait of you in pencil, they will not at any point appreciate you telling them that it is really good or that they should do more portraits in pencil. This only serves to draw attention to the fact they are insecure.

-5.Any and all mixtures of letters and numbers that are handwritten anywhere (inside the front cover of a book, behind a hung painting etc) are references to a Bible passage and are a piece of piss to decipher. Simply obtain a Bible and look up the corresponding bit. Like John 3:16 and that sort of business.

-6.If anyone shows you a picture of their bird/wife/newborn kid, they are brown bread in the next act. Keep away from them. Brown bread means dead as it rhymes with dead.

-7.If you trust someone and always have, that means they are a 100% grade A twat and will probably try to kill you at some point. A good way to counteract this is to never trust or love anyone ever. Basically if you are searching in vain for the someone that wronged you/committed some crime/is the head of the massive conspiracy that you are trying to unravel then go for the the person you have confided in the most. I would especially recommend the frail elderly man as it is always him. And he secretly used to be a Nazi.

-8.Firearms will always be in abundance but it is important to know when to use one correctly as your enemy and you will always shoot more bullets than your gun can physically hold and then run out of ammunition at exactly the same time leading to the possibility of a fistfight which you may not be in a position to win.
Here is a rather large tip: when you encounter a downed foe, take his gun. If you have the same type of gun or one that fires the same calibre of ammunition then take his spares, empty his gun and then reload yours. This is really easy to do and will gift you a tactical advantage but nobody ever bothers with it except in Die Hard, which is the best action film ever and nobody has taken note, even when they should have done.

-9.When having sex with a women, make it last more than twenty five seconds of clothed humping, no foreplay, blind insertion and arched backs as in my limited experience they don't like this very much. The kissing with tongues part is cool though.

-10.If you ever fall out of a building, the metal roof of a car, however forgiving and crumpled afterwards it may be, will not save you. I would suggest either falling onto something soft such as a stuntman's air mattress or not falling at all and taking the lift.

-11.By the same token, if a car ever hits you, you will always roll up over the bonnet and smash the windscreen with your body, but it's totally cool as you will not be harmed save for a few freely bleeding cuts on your face.

-12.Never order a double spirit on the rocks then down it in one, then order another and do the same, then order another and do the same, then order another and do the same, then order another and do the same, then order another and do the same, then order another and do the same. Normal people do not drink like this and you will be fucked and have to go home early.

-13.When diffusing a bomb, DO NOT call upon any actual training or bomb diffusing expertise. Simply pick the Green wire, think about it until the digital timer counts down to 00:01 then change your mind and cut the Red wire. This will prevent an explosion 100% of the time.

-14.If you have a big dog, train it to not bark when it is about to be easily killed or if it is about to eat a juicy steak. Train it to whimper or be happy in these situations but by all means teach it to bark loudly at all other times.

-15.If you own a laptop computer, always allow it to be easily stolen and never password protect it as this would prevent simple access. Same goes for removable USB drives, never password protect them and if you backup your computer onto them then make sure you leave them out in the open so that they can be nicked.

-16.If you are on a subway train and are being followed, wait for it to stop and get off. As the doors are about to close, hop back on again. Your pursuers that will be in another car, as seasoned as they may be, will never spot this, will never be prepared for this and will then run alongside the train with an expression of frustration tapping on the windows as if they will be able to go fast enough to override it's momentum and thus the door mechanism. And I say fuck them, they want to get you and I don't want them to.

-17.Feel free to shout either "Noooooooo!" or a persons name if they ever die in your arms after a few minutes rather than taking the time to get your mobile out and call the ambulance that would inevitably arrive within that timescale and possibly save them.

-18.Always offer a person that has professed to be a recovering drug addict/alcoholic a drink/some drugs like it's the most normal thing in the world. This is THE most sensible thing you can ever do as it allows you to have a great night.

It was organic and I hope you stuck with it.

The pendulum of sexual preference.

Like most of you I imagine, over the years some of my opinions have evolved and my personality has had a few tweaks here and there as I have got a bit older and wiser. Growing up on a working class Yorkshire housing estate instilled in me a few "default" ways of thinking that I never thought to deviate from until I became a bit more self aware and gained enough real world experience to form my own opinions. One of the standard beliefs held by my peers (and so by association me as well) was that any male that deviated from the sexual norm of liking girls was disgusting, a person to be feared and hated. This led to the mistaken belief that where we lived and where we went to school there were no gay people. To us gay people were so alien they seemed to live a million miles away from our world where people drank, swore, had tattoos. went to the footy and got into fights.

Obviously this was due to the fact that if anybody at any of the schools I attended had admitted to being gay then their lives would have been made a living hell for the entire duration of their education. In my last few years of high school this prejudice was at its peak and although there were a few vague rumours about one or two lads and lasses, I never actually met a bona fide "out" gay person until I was in my early twenties and even then I had the firm conviction that a person was either 100% straight, 100% gay, or in the case of the bisexualised, 100% a swinger of both ways.

It was only when I begun to have the casual acquaintance of homosexual people via friends of friends or through work did I begin to give the subject any more than a passing thought. I'm not sure whether this is due to some kind of personal repression or if I am the same as everybody else but I do recall a time when I could never have admitted it to myself, much less the entire world, that I could acknowledge the attractiveness of another man. Nowadays, and more increasingly the older I become, I couldn't give too much of a fuck what most people think of me and anything as trivial as people speculating about my sexuality would make me cackle like a witch but back in my teens I would have been very embarrassed at the prospect.

I never really recall going through any cast iron doubts about my being straight, I knew from a pretty early age how affected I could be by a nice looking lady wearing not very much and I never harboured any feelings for any of my mates or any male celebrities but I found it a bit strange that I could see someone that was better looking than me and who got more attention from girls at school and along with being envious of this, there was a very definite sense of appreciation on my part. I was not at all comfortable acknowledging this.

Much later it occurred to me that absolutely everyone can be placed on a sliding scale of sexual preference and none of us are homo or hetero by default. The very, very gay are on one end of this scale, wearing outrageous outfits and buying everyone champagne and on the other there sits a man with a pint of mild and a copy of The Sun secretly terrified that his Son might one day come out because he is still single and listens to Robbie Williams.

On this scale I would place myself at about the 80% straight mark, as I am a man that goes doolally when my girlfriend seduces me with new underwear BUT on the other hand I can comment on how well another man wears his suit without being self concious. I like watching a good scrap BUT I cry at the drop of a hat when kids are suffering on TV. I can easily have my head turned in summer by a lass with long tanned legs, and will mostly let my eyes linger for a moment too long at the risk of getting busted BUT I did once see a picture of David Beckham with his top off and thought he looked strikingly good.
Take a moment dear reader to be honest with yourself and put a percentage figure on how straight or gay you are.

Nowadays people (especially youngsters, or "the yoot") seem to find it a lot easier to comment on such things and seem to lack the repression of years gone by. I was struck by this the other day when reading the excellent Generation Kill, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright's account of his experiences with 1st Recon Battalion of the US Marine Corps during the second invasion of Iraq.

One passage of the book quotes a Marine referencing the physical attractiveness of Sgt. "Fruity" Rudy Reyes, a (straight) fitness guru and martial artist who is considered to be the most attractive man in his platoon:

"It doesn’t mean you’re gay if you think Rudy’s hot. He’s just so beautiful," Person explains. "We all think he’s hot."

I was surprised that such an attitude would be present, much less comfortably vocalised by a gung ho US Marine and experienced badass killer but there it is and I thought it to be an hilariously candid quote.

In a weird kind of way I suppose I am quite proud that I am not a product of the environment I grew up in. For instance I know men for whom even discussing two men kissing or having sex is too much for them to bear, they squirm and screw up their face as if to vomit, as if the mental image will somehow turn them. Way I see it is: ok, as long as there are nubile young ladies in stockings and thongs with push up bras and nice heels in this world it's not for me and never will be. It wouldn't arouse me or give me any pleasure but fuck it, whatever makes you happy or gets you going is what you should be doing, in accordance with the standard disclaimer that it's all consensual and nobody comes to any harm. I could certainly never be offended by two people of the same sex being affectionate in public as I know some people are and I see it as progressive that I have such a radically different attitude than the one I was programmed with as a child.

So in essence what I am trying to say is
A: "Go me! I am so accepting!"
and
B: "I admit that I am 20% gay."

Arrogance is worse than genocide. Probably.

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Oh My Good Lord. Dubai Interpol headcase poster update.

I was strolling home tonight after a hard days work and decided to check my balance at a rather secluded cash machine. What should be taped above it ladies and gentlemen but PART FUCKING TWO!!! THIS WAS A COMPLETE COINCIDENCE!!!



This revised and expanded edition now includes such gems as the all new list of references which include Harrods owner and crusader against government conspiracies Mohamed Al-Fayed, MP and founding member of RESPECT with a nice line in sexual cat impersonations George Galloway and "dead beside a bottle of gin on a mountain" Chief Constable Micheal Todd.



I have decided to refrain from indulging myself for once and let the pictures speak for themselves so I implore you dear reader to take the time to read this madness in it's entirety. I do however feel that I must at the very least quote the following line: "Digital Star trek Deborah came late, no room on Page 3 for you. You Exposed silly girl." That is sage advice right there.
CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO MAKE THEM BIGGER!



THIS INFORMATION ORIGINATES FROM A BIOGRAPHY WHICH WILL BE PUBLISHED UPON THE DEATH OF IT'S AUTHOR.

I can't fucking wait to read that, it will beat the living shit out of Katie Price's.