Marriage

I’m on my way up to Scotland to attend a friend’s wedding. Ah, marriage. I remember it well. For many it’s the celebration of human unification, the joining of two souls to become a greater whole. For me it was the biggest mistake of my life.

That woman, who shall remain unnamed, made my life hell from the second I said ‘I do’. It truly was the most professional deception in history and one in which I was the sole victim.

Prior to the wedding, it was all “You’re the greatest Charlie, I’d do anything for you. You complete me!” Blah-blah-blah. Damn it, I really hate being called Charlie. Then without warning it was ‘Do this, do that, fix this, fix that, take me here, pick me up from there, wear this, stop wearing that, grow this, stop growing that, bend over, rub this, hold these, cough, stand up straight, stop slouching, run…faster, faster!” ENOUGH WOMAN!!

As you know from previous blogs, we have since parted company. We came to an arrangement whereby we communicate once a year over the telephone, but using morse code. I confess to becoming even bored by this infrequent exchange and one year I left an active heart monitor on the other end of the line, while she blabbed away about her new Greek lover (or possibly her mother’s illness, I’m not an expert in morse code unfortunately).

Aside from these depressingly negative comments, I would thoroughly recommend marriage and just because I utterly regret mine it doesn’t mean yours will also be a seemingly bottomless pit of misery. So if you find yourself in a ‘do I?’ quandary, then I say go for it. Apart from possibly your sanity, your social circle of friends, TV remote, independence, enthusiastic outlook on life and your credit rating, you’ve got nothing to lose.

You know…for kids!

It is a well known fact that Britain is in the grip of a nightmare. A nightmare that stands on every corner, outside every school yard, inside every packet of turkey twizzlers.

I am of course talking about the ever escalating amount of paedophiles that now dominate our landscape. And the widespread hysteria that follows every report of a child being assisted across the road by a man with a large ‘lollipop stick’.

You would think that twenty years ago paedophiles didn’t exist!

And you would be right.

For it was, as a struggling undergraduate, working in a Bristol laboratory, in the late seventies, that I was first approached by someone with a problem they thought science could solve. This man, a popular child’s entertainer, had over years of working become numbed to his environment and those around him. Incapable of any sort of emotional feeling towards children he was desperate for some kind of reconnection. And in my youthful arrogance I was only too willing to help.

In my naivete I threw myself into the project without thinking the consequences. For if I had had the foresight to see just how disastrously my experiment might turn, I would have at least kept a proper record of the results and maybe even got two, three papers out of it.

But not unlike Frankenstein, turning his back on the horror of his creation, I rejected the experiment as a failure and I returned to my studies of static electricity on cats.

However like a strange virus that could seemingly only pass between single men aged between 45 to 50 I soon learnt of my work spreading and by then it was seemingly too late. The best I could manage as some means of damage control, but provided for on my meagre science trainee wage were a series of poorly animated commercials during the early eighties about a boy and his cat ‘Charley’.

I tried unsuccessfully to counteract the growing problem in the mid nineties, as I become aware of their ever increasing number, by releasing into the general populous a series of ‘test’ children that would attack if approached, and now these ‘hoodies’ as they’ve been dubbed by some corners of the media terrorise us all.

Sometimes Science just can’t win…