If you screw your eyes up really tight, this could be me

Mel Gibson, ladies and gentlemen. A phenomenally successful actor and director, with a seriously acute sense of humour, immense charm, loads of money, yet is a complete and absolute nutter. He’s almost exactly four years older than I am, which accounts for the fact that he is old and wrinkly while I retain my youthful good looks and general lack of baldness.

Lovely Mel who, in our younger days, was often compared to me in the looks department (shut up at the back, I now who you are, bitch) and who for the longest time I wanted to be. The picture to the left is him in his mid thirties. Take a look at him now and you see the toll that the drinking, smoking and general screwed up living has taken on him. He isn’t ageing well.

Remember “Gallipoli”? Fabulous movie. I never saw the Mad Max flicks but the Lethal Weapons and his gig as William Wallace, though as historically inaccurate as it’s possible to be, is a flamin’ ‘tour de force’ at getting the blood up after a couple of beers. Or in my case, a claret or two!

But what the fyck is going on with the plonker now? Married to the same woman for, how long, 28 years or something? 7 or 8 kids? Up to now a fairly private man, with a particularly strange brand of catholicism which is clearly anti-semitic and, anti gay. Now, as an aside,  the bible has fairly clear  guidelines about people who don’t conform to the “norm”, for example the gay community. Strong views are held on both sides, if there are only two sides, but unless a firm theological point is being made then a person should keep their gob shut. Telling a magazine that one’s arse is only for shitting didn’t do him any favours. Personally, I think the whole God/gay/ Christian thing is between God and the people involved. The important part of active Christianity, for me, is loving people, no matter who the fyck they are. Unless they they are wilfully ignorant and have big nostrils. That’s not totally biblical but we all have our faults.

A few years ago Mel admitted to suffering from manic depression (now known as bi-polar, which sounds far more adventurous). That fact has been missed in his whole recent character assassination, in which, to be fair, he played a major part. He is also clearly mental when he has a drink in him, then it’s all “Jews are bastards” and “what are you looking at sugar tits?” to a POLICEWOMAN? I think he’s admitted his battle with the booze quite openly now.

I think it's clear from this picture that Mel is no longer in the same league as me or Clooney

OK, he went over the line in some of the shit he came out with. Most even. But as a man with a tempe,r I know only too well how easy it is to say all sorts of bollocks you don’t mean, in the heat of the moment. Which of us hasn’t said something out of order in a fight, who hasn’t called names or huffed and puffed like an idiot? OK, maybe it is only me, but I can honestly see what is going on and I can understand the upset (not about the BJ before the jacuzzi though, that’s went too far, as Greg Hemphill would say).

Certainly he is culpable for what has gone on, but I think his “mail order” Russian girlfriend knows ec=xactly what she is doing and why she is doing it.

Gibson’s crazy. He’s an alcoholic, religious nut-job with a God complex and a huge fear of getting old and ugly. Oksana appears to be a gold digging tart with fake lips, tits, teeth and who knows what else. Maybe they desevre each other, but I don’t think Mel deserves the shit he’s getting for having anger issues (which his family agree with).

If we looked into the private lives of all our Hollywood heroes I suspect we’d find much worse stuff going on. Read the biographies of the actors of the 40s and 50s for goodness sakes, they certainly won’t be any calmer or less crazy these days.

Feel free to hate on me, I’m just in the mood for a fight!

Then there’s the

it's not *my* plane, but you get the idea...

I’m on a plane.

Actually, by the time you read this I will no longer be on a plane, I will be in an office, at a desk, under fluorescent light and looking at a computer screen. However, let’s not allow reality to intrude. I’m on a plane and I am enjoying the ride, for a change.

Perhaps it was the weather as we took off but, something in the way the sky looked this morning, gave me the wonderful takeoff thrill that I used to get, all those years ago, when I started throwing myself about the planet.

There’s a definite chance that this could be my last trip for a while and I’m not completely  sure how I feel. Obviously it will be nice to be home more, to be able to help with the things Amber has had to manage on her own for the last few years. It will be great to be able to say goodnight to my children every night and it will be nice to be able to schedule a weekly class of some sort during the week. But what about my itchy feet? After all, I’ve been traveling, doing the rounds, in one way or another, since I was 16. That’s almost 20 years, people.

It isn’t so much that I don’t like being in the one place as that I feel a sort of hunger for change.

When I was growing up we only moved house once, but in those two houses my mother would change the furniture around, have us swap rooms, change the decor all the flamin’ time. It became almost a family ritual, my mum would decide a change was needed and the three of us (she, my sister and I) would set to for the day and see how we could lay out what we had in different, creative and exciting ways. Maybe that is where this hunger came from.

Or maybe it’s that, before I was born, my parents lived in East Africa. Moshi in Tanganyika, to be precise. I spent a large part of my gestation there and my mother only moved home when my father died. My uncle lived in East Africa too, he had farms in Tanganyika and Kenya and he lived there till he passed away, just a few years ago. I had relatives all over the world and a cousin who traveled to, and lived, in various exotic locations, Mauritius, Khartoum, Oman, all (to me) exciting sounding places, but the only person in my family who had never been anywhere was me (I was also the only person in my entire family who had never met my father, bat that’s a whoooole ‘nother set of issues).

I also wonder how my perpetual presence will affect Amber and the kids. Will they get fed up with me and wish I was off somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else? Will the dogs start to feel that I am a tiresome owner if they don’t get to greet me enthusiastically once a week, to practice their leaping and smiling?

There’s always the chance that this won’t be my last ever trip. We’ll see.

I’m not on a plane any more and I’ll soon be back in Kansas.

The few of the guys I’ve met have been delightful… proper gentlemen, if a little scary. Our entire family has an open invitation to join in the shenanigans. I have to say I am sorely tempted. I still don’t have my bike license so I can’t talk shop with them, but I am really good at motorbike noises, so maybe they’ll let me join their club and I can let my beard grow, get a few more tattoos and forget about the diet.

UPDATE: 20:22
There is a woman biker, recently arrived, who has a very shrill voice and a vocabulary like a scouse sailor. I am confident that we shall be hearing from her later.

I have only ever heard snippets of her songs, so I don’t really know what she sounds like but she is a breath of fresh air in a pop world where everyone is manufactured to fit a “type”, as determined by marketers, to generate the highest revenue. She came along in her plastic underwear, sporting a telephone as a hat, brandishing a teacup and saucer, and she took over the world.

I remember when Madonna did something similar, but Madonna’s various façade’s leant very heavily on her sexuality. She brandished her sex like a club and she smashed British pop culture to smithereens, all by herself. Anyone who says different clearly doesn’t remember. But Lady Gaga is barely sexual. Despite the outfits that show off her female body parts in a variety of ways, not always flattering, she isn’t using her sex to conquer.

For me, the music is secondary, if it even gets that high in the priority list. The exciting thing about her is her singular desire to be exactly who she wants to be in exactly the way she wants. Once again the pop culture is being shaken and kids are seeing that star quality, the X-factor, isn’t something that fits into TV talent shows. Creativity, drive and belief in yourself are much more important than paying attention to what Simon Cowell says.

Anyway, I fancy Lady Gaga quite a lot and I am happy to say that she is on my list.

Any of you have secret crushes?

It would be easy to point the finger at the media for this new trend, but that would be a little disingenuous. The media certainly feeds the market it creates, but its creative power is limited to unleashing the need within each of us to feel superior, especially in times when we feel insecure. Even when we know that we are as bad, or worse, than those we sneer at, it seems we must be able to join together publicly and affirm our own moral sanctity. The media is our “town square”.

When something goes badly wrong we need someone to blame so Sir Fred Goodwin has his home attacked. When we feel harm has been done to us we need to assuage our anger so we wax frothy at the CEOs and COOs of bankrupt companies, and the politicians who enabled them. It may make us feel better to be clawing at Jacqui Smith but shouldn’t the focus be more on the abuse of parliamentary allowances rather than her husband’s predilection for dirty movies.

I would suggest there are few people reading, watching or listening the news today who have not watched porn in some form, who have not “borrowed” some printer paper from their office or who have not been economical with the truth at some time in their lives.  But, my God, how dare the Home Secretary’s husband have a private chug?

At best this is all simply bullying on a national scale, at worst it amounts to monumental self delusion. And those who shriek loudest appear, eventually, to be the greater criminals.

We need to be aware that we, individually, have colluded in the whole global scam by virtue of our blind complacency and greed. When the gravy train was slopping onto the common table, we were lapping it up like hungry dogs and paying no attention to the fact that the train drivers were high on their own hormones, the engine had no brakes and we were all accelerating downhill towards a solid and immovable cliff-face. We allowed ourselves to be encouraged to aspire to enormous wealth and, when we couldn’t actually get there, to live as though we had.

Prioritise and focus. The situation we face needs leadership not blame, ideas not judgmentalism. We need to feel confident that when the man or woman at the helm makes mistakes he makes them honestly. We need to be able to believe that our leaders put us first, not themselves, and we really need to forget about “Looking out for Number 1”.

We are in this together and the only way we will get out is together. Anger is a legitimate response to being fiscally humped. By all means feel angry, but let’s use the anger positively.

We need to forget blame, hypocrisy and judgmentalism, the only thing that will take us forward is hope.

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