Yet again, money money money

After a few weeks of being in a fairly upbeatish mood, i'm now back in the pit of despair, and yet again, it's thanks to money.

One of my previous shitly written posts has covered a bit about why I am in a not good money place, but it has got worse...

I currently have over a thousand pounds worth of paydayloans through various companies, which I am juggling, and they just get worse and worse each month.

The thing thats really getting me down though, is that I can actually afford a real loan, no problems, which, even a fairly small loan of £4000 could pay off all of my debts, not including my outstanding student loan. I know that this isn't much compared to a lot of peoples debts, but it is enough to seriously screw my head up.

A few people have suggested either guarantor loans, or moving somewhere cheaper...
Guarantor loans: I don't have anybody who will be a guarantor. I'm completely and utterly financially seperated from my family, since the problems I had at university
Moving somewhere cheaper: I can not mentally live with other people, as I need my own space, and living with other people just makes my head absolutely destroy itself, and, for moving elsewhere, i'd need a deposit...Which I do not have!

I'm feeling in such a shit place mentally, I just want all my money problems to sort themselves out, I want to be able to oay my gas and electric for the first time since July, I want to be able to actually have a life, and not have to get further and further into debt to do so. I want everything to just sort itself out so I can get on with my life, and not have to be constantly worried and getting depressed.  It's getting close to the point where my head is going fuck this shit, I can't go on. I hope it doesn't get there, but thats exactly where it feels it's going, and, until my money problems are sorted out, thats the direction it's going to keep going.

Why getting ex soldiers in to teach is going to fail (from personal experience)

Over the past few months, and longer, there's been regular news items about Academies and Free Schools wanting to get ex members of the armed forces in as teachers, to help instill discipline, it even went as far as the principal of an academy in norwich saying she wanted to draft soldiers in on November 30th to cover striking teachers.

I had a few experiences when I was at school, which I think would lead anybody to say that this was an absolutely shit idea, and shouldn't evwn be given the time of day.

I went to a Selective State Grammar School during the mid 90s, in an area that if it's known for anything, is known for being a farmers paradise (as long as the pumps on the drains keep working) and for being the centre piece of one of the armed forces.
To put it in perspective, from my bedroom window at the time, all I could see when I looked out was field after field for twenty odd miles, with a major RAF base plonked right in the middle, even to this day, with my shit ears, I can still tell a Eurofighter from a Tornado G4, a Hurricane from a Spitfire and A Lancaster Bomber from a Lincoln Bomber just by the sound alone. At School every year, Prizegiving was held at the main hall (Whittle Hall) of the RAF Training College in Cranwell, which was just down the road.

The pupils at my School were a good mix of town and country, Council Estate and Manor House, but on the whole, very Conservative, and very well behaved. In the 7 years I attended, nobody was expelled, and, that i'm aware of, only two people were ever suspended (one of them was me...I won't say what I did, but it amused me incredibly highly at the time).

None of this meant though that we weren't typical teenagers, being annoying little shits, who would do what we could for a laugh, we just weren't violent and overtly disruptive.

In the tenth year, 2 new teachers were hired to teach Biology & Maths, Mr Dixon, who had been an NCO in the army, and Mr Caines, who had been a pilot in the RAF.

These were exactly the sort of people are being discussed at the moment, as teachers who will be able to instill discipline in todays troubled schools.

Did they manage to? Did they Bollocks!

They both taught my form, and i'm sorry to say, we managed to pick hold of every weakness, and twist it, and we were good pupils on the whole. There is a hell of a lot of difference between discipline in the armed forces, and discipline in Schools...Both teachers had left within two terms, after having major nervous breakdowns, purely and simply because we did everything we possibly could to wind them up.

I actually saw Mr Dixon a few years ago, he's now making a living as an IFA, and he told me that he'd gone into teaching, with the belief that it would be like the forces, where you obey your seniors without question, not quite realising that kids are not like that.

Most of the people who are bought into Schools from the Forces (if it ever happens) will be like this. They will not be able to instill discipline, they will have malicious allegations made against them, they will have every weakness twisted, especially if the pupils know that they are ex-forces.

Remember, I didn't go to a "Sink" School, I didn't go to a School with a Bad Reputation, I didn't go to a School with high levels of violence. My School was the exact opposite of this. If we could do this, what on earth are the kids in the inner city schools going to be able to do!

Deafness, total and partial

I've realised that i've mentioned a bit about my problems with my health before, but haven't fully gone into it before, so thought i'd try and set out the problem with my ears, and see how it affects me in everything, from conversation, through to language and grammar and everything...

Since the age of 6 months, I have been seeing consultants at hospital, regarding my hearing, it started because I didn't make any noise when I was crying, and I didn't respond to anything my mum said or did, unless she was looking me striaght in the eyes initially, the gp thought that I was mentally deficient (some people would still say that), however, eventually, he did get me referred the the lincoln ENT department, under the wonderfully named Mr Mallett (and, no, it wasn't Timmy).

The initial diagnosis was Severe Otitis Media, otherwise known as Glue Ear, meaning I had to have a pair of grommets put in my ear. Grommets are little plastic tubes, which are placed in your ear drum, and are meant to equalise out the pressure, and let your ear drain fully. These didn't work in the slightest, and my hearing got even worse than it had already been, and I had constant infections in my ears, nose, throat and lungs. As I was unable to hear, I couldn't speak properly, I could only hear my own voice through the vibrations across my skull, so, on the few occasions I did speak, I had an extremely nasal voice, which couldn't vocalise words properly. You know how people sou.d when they have a bad cold? Imagine that, but twenty times worse. Almost anything I had to do with my mouth, opening, trying to talk, chewing, led to incredible pain in my ears.

At this point, my head appeared to say that anything that involved grammar, punctuation etc would be too hard for me, coz I couldn't hear teachers properly, so I just read and read, and picked stuff up from there (both correct grammar, and definitely incorrect) and, I also decided that maths was the way forward, because you don't need any rules of grammar at all for that.

Through the next 10 years, I had 13 pairs of grommets, and 3 pairs of T-Tubes (the larger version of grommets) put in my ears, however, this did not stoo the infections at all.

When I was 12, me, my mum and my sister moved to Key West in Florida (to get away from the uk, in my mums words), and I loved every single bit of it, apart from the heat (i think this is the reason why I love cold weather even to this day), however, we had to move back to the UK in April 1995. The reason why? The ongoing problems with my ears made it prohibitively expensive to get Health Insurance.

2 months after coming back to the UK, I was booked in for an operation that I still call to this day "Scrape and Sculpt."  This involved the entirety of my ears nose and throat being "scraped" to try and remove all the infection from it, and then rebuilt. By rebuilt I meab grafts from other parts of my body put in place to replace all the stuff that was scraped out. This was an 18hr long operation, and I was on morphine for 6 months afterwards. I think that this may be where I got my liking for various mind altering substances from...

During my time off, I moved further and further ahead of people my age in matbs, eventually doing my GCSE 2 years early, and getting an incredibly high score, this was only 4 months after I started back in school.

I also got referred for intensive speech therapy, which did get my voice working to a good standard, no longer as nasal, but still quite so. Some people have said that since then, I have been trying to catch up on the 14 years or so not able to speak properly (I prefer just saying that i'm a gobby little shite)

Over the next few years, I had to go back into hospital on a few occasions, for touch ups to various bits of my auditory system, I was also diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, something that had been previously covered up by my lack of hearing. I find it incredibly hard.to tell peoples moods/reactions via their facial expressions, and that coupled with not.good hearing doesn't make for a good result, which is one of the reasons that, where I can, I prefer to communicate electronically.

When I turned 18, Mr Mallett decided that I should have a Hearing Aid. I had this fitted in the last term of my Upper Sixth, and, me being me, I kept on putting it down somewhere, and forgetting where it was (I'm exactly the same with glasses). I had a fucking amazing summer, including heading off to Leeds Festival 2000, gaining the nickname of Captain Vandalism, and being banned for life.

I then headed off to Manchester, to do a ohysics with astrophysics degree, where I received funding to get a minidisc recorder (to record lectures) and a computer with speech to Text capability. Me being Me, this never got used, as, for some strange reason, I never ever turned upto lectures...My hearing aid also didn't get used after freshers week, as it fell out of my pocket, somewhere, in manchester, and was never ever found again.

A bit of a side note now, but, even thougb I have had these problems with my ears, I have been going to gigs regularly since I was 14, at last count, I was on over 600. I love gigs, and my preferred place to stand is about 5-10 people from the front, by the left hand speakers . At gigs, it doesn't matter that my hearing is shit, coz the music is so loud, and I can feel the music through my entire body as well.

Back to manchester now, I managed to bluff my way through 2 years, before being asked "not to come back". I think i'd managed to turn up to 6 lectures in that time. The main reason I was asked not to come back though was that my Lab Tutor, who has been all over tv this week, as a copresenter of BBC Stargazing Live, took a dislike to me, and refused to give me a pass mark, even though there were 10 other people in the same boat as me, and he passed them all. I still think that B***n C*x is the biggest cunt on the planet...

I then started doing temp work around manchester, before falling into a job I was manifestly unsuited for, a Call Centre worker for Barclaycard...I managed to last 6 months there, before I fell into a massive massive depression, which eventually caused me to have to move back to the depths of the Lincolnshire Fens. Luckily, by this point, after 4 years of refusing to go back to hospital, I had got a referral to Manchester Royal Infirmary. I say luckily, because within 2 months of my initial appointment, I had been booked in by the lovely Mr Kevin Green, the ENT Consultant there (who is apparently rated as one of the top ENT specialists in Europe) for another big operation...

This one was a bit different all my previous ones, on the very very first inspection of my ear by Mr. Green, he found a Non-Malignant growth, in both Ears called a Cholesteatoma. Cholesteatomas form when the ear drum hasn't properly healed from some form of a rupture, and, instead of the skin on the ear drum growing outwards, it grows through the rupture, fills with infectious matter, and then eats its way through the structures behind it. In some cases, the packet bwhind the ear drum keeps itself clear of infection, so it is safer to leave it alone (this was the case with my right ear), in other circumstances, it needs removing, and fast. In my left ear, the Cholesteatoma had completely eaten it's way through the Ossicles, and was 1/4mm away from touching my main facial nerve, where it ran through the Mastoid Bone. I was told that if I had left it another 2 months, I would have lost all taste, and all movement in the left hand side of my face. The other thing I wad told was that my previous consultant was a complete fuckup, as the growth would have been highly visible for at least 7 years...

I had the operation to fix it all (i still have a beautiful scar behind my left ear, which lets me know when the weather is going to change) and had my ossicles rebuilt (out of cartilage took from my outer ear)  and my eardrum renovated, this time from tissue taken from behind my earlobe. Before it got removed though, a fair few photos were taken, some of which are currently extremely high on the google image rankings for cholesteatoma.

Back to lincolnshire I went after this operation, in absolute agony, but mr green refused to prescribe morphine for me ( :( ) instead, he very unofficially advised me that the best thing to help with the pain, was to smoke a lot of, what was by that point, one of my favourite substances, so, because I couldn't ignore what he was telling me, I got very very very very high, for a long long time. I did a few other jobs after this operation, none of which I was suited for...including one where I was regularly breathing in Fibreglass dust (no PPA equipment was provided). My hearing actually improved substantially after the op, to the point where I am now classed as only partially deaf instead of fully deaf.

Most people I meet do not realise I am deaf at all, unless I tell them, as I have got vwry very good at facing people when they are talking, so that I can add the slight bit of lipreading I can do, to the noises I can hear. Another reason I don't like twlling people on the whole is because of the vicious bullying I received, a common form, at secondary school was for people to slap me hard around the ear. This hurts at the best of time, but in my case, it caused absolute and utter agony, and I thnk it is because of this that I became pacifist. It's better for me to avoid any form of fighting, and run, rather than risk having something hit my ear.

I still have to go to the consultants, every 6 months, I travel up to manchester to see him, and will have to do so for the rest of my life. The problem with Cholesteatomas is that theynever fully go, they are always lying there hiding, waiting for an opportune moment to spring back up and fuck you over again. I also still get agonising pains running hrough my ears from time to time, often conneced with tinnitus, but, luckily, by now, I know my ears inside out, and I know whether the pain is something I need to go to the GPs about, or even ring mr green up about. My GP doesn't believe I have any problems with my ears (even though he has.copies of all of my medical notes) so it normally ends up being ringing Mr Green.

I know this has been a long read, but it's been something i've been meaning to write down for ages, and thought that this train journey was the perfect opportunity

Thank you for the days

So, here I am, after a few weeks of general alcohol abuse, starting up on a month or two of sobriety, and starting back at work tomorrow.  So, what have I been upto for the last few weeks, apart from avoiding anything politicky or trade uniony as much as I can...
Number 1.  Trying to get my head back to it's normal place...there have been some successes and some failures
Number 2. just under a week back at the parents in lincolnshire...this really badly set my head back, as I had to put up with my mum and my sister for the whole time, and as the house is right in the middle of nowhere, it was the whole time...I love them both, but find having to put up with the two of them together more than anybody should have to cope with, even at the best of times
Number 3. Celebrated new years, and my birthday, in alcoholic style. White Russians abounded (if you didn't realise it, my main main cinematic hero is Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski. I aspire to have his laid out charm and slacker lifestyle, helped by @kate_mccallum_
Number 4. Travelled to the place I call my second home, the lovely bootle, where I got to see my second family again.  The family Mac, one of whom is actually my twin, help my head feel like me, and are always there for me when i've needed them, and that has been a lot recently. It isn't just the central family, it's the people who are attached to it, so, in no particular order, by twitternames @Kommie_Kermit @Beckyweckywoo @karmajmcw @steheyward @doriongriffiths    I had a bloody good time there, even though it did involve a lot of pain!
On the way back, I also met up with the lovely @Shenanigans_PCS who is a fine specimen of a human being, and is just an allround ass kicker!
I am now trying to detoxificate my body, and my mind, and get myself back to being a functioning member of society, with the interest in politicky stuff, but whether that will happen or not, who knows...I may have a break from the internet (may do, but not bloody likely) but, if I do, would like to say byeeeeee
One final note...There is someone.on twitter who you should all follow, if you don't already, somebody, who even though i've never met, feels like he's been a friend for years, so on that point, can I introduce the lovely @podwangler   seriously, do all follow him!

The end of my twenties

So, it's finally coming around to this point, after almost ten whole years, I am now less than 11 hours away from leaving my twenties forever. A few people have said to me, it's nothing to worry about, it's a great age, but for me, it seems like the loss of my youth, I will no longer be able to call myself young on anything...so, how have I been coping?? In the stupidest way possible, high scale alcohol abuse...i haven't had a single hour sober for the last two weeks, and I aim to keep this going today, tomorrow when i'm drinking with some friends here in this town, and all the way through to monday, when I will be leaving liverpool. I may not make it, but here's to my commiserations