There was a chemical spill outside of my house. The crash happened at about three in the morning. A lorry carrying ******* had turned over in the road outside. As soon as I opened the door I could smell it - all of it. From my doorstep I could tell there was a fire burning in the cab. I shut my door and went back into the house.
Inside my room I debated with myself as to whether I should go and help the driver trapped in the wreckage.
I decided to read an old newspaper instead.
Forty minutes later the police came to knock on my door and told me to stay inside. I told them it was all right, I was only looking at past events. One of them gave me dirty look. I shut the door and thought about whether I have any chocolate biscuits left.
The smell of the chemicals were really quite strong later on. I could smell it from under my door.
A clock on the side made a noise.
Trapped in here forever. I noticed that there were cobwebs on the corner of my walls.
No traffic now. Unusual for a weekday.
There were stains on the road for ages afterwards. Now I struggle to breathe most days.

Supermarkets

When I was younger my mother used to take me food shopping at our local Sainsbury's. Being the 1970's, there were no huge towering shopping centres. Sainsbury's, like all other high street retailers at the time, had shops – surprisingly, in the high street. There is always a danger when reminiscing that one can look back on the past through rose tinted spectacles, but in relation to retail it really was a much more innocent age. There were no locks that required money to be put in them to release a shopping trolley, there wasn't even any security to stop you leaving the shop with one. People back then didn't steal shopping trolleys because no one had a use for them, except the homeless, and they wouldn't go into supermarkets because they had no money.

I can clearly remember an old man of about eighty years old, sitting on the pavement, wrapped in rags with a dirty mug in front him begging for change as we entered our supermarket one day.

'Kick him!', my mother barked at me.

'But he's an old defenceless man Mum', I retorted.

'You spineless shit!', my Mother spat back, and in one action lent over and smacked the old man hard across the face.

This memory has stayed with me for quite some time, and I recently recalled it during an all night drugs binge at a local flower shop. It haunted me. Why did my mother smack an old crumpled man? It later transpired that the old man was a local tax inspector who sold fish at the weekends to top up his civil servants wage. One Saturday he sold my mother an old fish, which he assured her was fresh only the month before. My mother cooked the aquatic bird for my father who measured paper in Surrey five days a week. The underwater undergarment was foul and poisonous and caused my father to walk with a slight stoop for quite some time.

If my mother had parted with this information earlier rather than waiting until I was fifty-six, it could have eased my anxiety in manhood.

During my teenage years my friend Joth Quickney went one further. Having seen two sleeping tramps, or “Pivets” as we liked to call them, he raced over to them and produced a bowl of melted cheese which he just happened to be carrying. The two “Pivets” screamed with delight, and thinking their cheese boat had come in, stood up to receive the promised goods. Joth then opened his shirt to expose his nipple, lent forward and promptly dipped it into the rue. He then handed them the bowl and told them to make a song up about it within two hours otherwise he would fool a blind man into staring at the mixture. Fifty two minutes later they came back with an impressive song which was actually quite complicated and involved some two part harmonies. I forget the tune now, but Joth loved it and sang it for approximately two years after that.

Do you remember the time you got so drunk you couldn't fit your key into the door and you shat yourself on your own doorstep outside? Or the time you called your partner by the wrong name in the heat of the moment and she made you watch fifteen hours of her and her ex 'getting it on' as punishment? No? Neither do I. But wouldn't it have been great if those events had happened live on television?
Humiliation seems to be the standard on reality TV shows these days. If you took a four-man camera crew and filmed a man in bed reading whilst his sleeping wife laughs about his withered old man cock I'm sure you could get a decent viewing figure.
In fact, thinking about, that would make a great TV show. We could call it 'Crusty Old Cock Dreams' and Nicholas Parsons could host it. www.nicholasparsons.co.uk
Each week we film a wife laughing in her sleep about her partners genitalia. We could then intersperse clips of the wife, carving into the breakfast table with a Stanley knife, the dreamt image of her partners flaccid withered member. Her partner could then actually produce his cock and the audience could vote via text whether it was a decent likeness and actually worth laughing at. Every show could end with Parsons getting his own trouser snake out and asking the audience to send in pictures of his cock carved on their own breakfast table. The revenue from the texts could be given to some illegal immigrants in Southend-On-Sea so they can build a minibus out of match sticks.
Or what about turning up for work on Monday morning and instead of your boss telling you how pathetic you are, everyone in the office does it instead? And then, how about, the whole office votes that you get the sack and all of this is filmed and put on national television? Well believe or not this is actually becoming a real TV show. It's called 'Someone's Gotta Go' (presumably the illiterate person who came up with the title) and is being produced by Endemol USA and Fox television.
Mike Darnell, who is Fox's reality chief, said that it'll be 'Survivor meets The Office'. That's exactly what we need, a TV show cashing in on the deepest recession in living memory, plus personal humilation so we can all sit around and think 'I'm glad I'm not one of those poor fuckers'.
Fox says that it will feature small businesses with around fifteen to twenty employees. To add some drama to the mix every employee will have access to the company's HR department, thus letting everyone know exactly how much everyone else earns. These are real people being fired from their real jobs. What sort of society have we become when we class the televised destruction of someone's life as 'entertainment' ?
Now don't get me wrong, I know that in companies up and down the land that there are people earning silly money for doing fuck all, and all because they've been there so long nobody has the balls to ask them 'What is it that you actually do?'. But do we need to watch it on television? The answer is obviously, no.
I still think my cock carving TV is a good idea though, if there are any TV executives reading this please feel free to get in touch.