AROUND THE WORLD IN 45 YEARS
(Nowt-Su-Queer-As-Folk)
Standing Alone, Finally
This morning, as the last wisps of dream dissolved into the soft hush of waking, something in me shifted. In that hypnagogic stillness, my soul quietly evolved. No crowd, no clamour, just one clear thought: I stand alone, and I finally like it.
This isn’t solitude handed down by sorrow. Its strength, earned from walking paths few dare to tread. I’ve danced with silence, made it mine, a warm companion in the half-light between sleep and day. It doesn’t haunt me, it holds me.
So here I am, no echo to defend, no need to explain. I’m at peace with myself, my own unshaken friend. I don’t need noise to feel complete or known. Just sayin’… I’ve stood alone, happily. And yes, I’ve grown.
After all the chaos, the comedy, and the carnage, there comes a moment, not with fanfare, but with a whisper. This isn’t a punchline. It’s a pause. A breath. A reckoning. What follows isn’t a poem, though it dances like one. It’s not a confession, though it carries truth. It’s a musing from the half-light, where silence becomes a companion, and solitude stops being a sentence.
I’ve stood in crowds, on stages, in puddles of regret. But this? This is me, standing alone. And finally, liking it...
Budgie Balls and Bog Roll Beginnings
I was eleven when I took up smoking, not out of rebellion, but out of routine. Woodbine singles, wrapped in Zan-Isal toilet paper, two matches tucked inside like a gentleman’s starter kit for emphysema. Threepence from the corner newsagent where I worked as a paper lad. It was the kind of transaction that came with no receipt and even less dignity.
But my first cigarette? That came earlier. Aged eight, offered by a man who enjoyed “scouting” for little boys. He didn’t wear a badge, but he had the same grin as a fox in a henhouse. One puff and I was inducted, not just into nicotine, but into a world where adults were predators and children were prey. My lungs burned, but not half as much as my innocence.
By eleven, I’d added whisky to the mix. A small glass every weekend and school holiday morning, courtesy of the local milkman. He had a fondness for nicknames and a disturbing interest in poultry-themed anatomy. “Budgie balls,” he’d call me, with a chuckle that made my stomach turn. His weekly hands-on inspection of my prepubescent cage bird-sized gonads was the price of admission for my wee dram. I paid it. Because I didn’t know I could say no. Because I didn’t know what “no” meant.
While other lads were sneaking fags behind the bike sheds, egged on by mates and the thrill of rebellion, I was being groomed into addiction by grown men with grubby hands and grubbier minds. My boyhood wasn’t lost; it was stolen. Ripped away before I could even spell “peer pressure,” let alone succumb to it. I didn’t transition from boy to man; I was catapulted from innocence to damage with all the grace of a milk float crash. And yet, I survived. Not because I was strong, or clever, or blessed with divine intervention. I survived because I was too stubborn to die. Too bloody-minded to let the bastards win.
This chapter isn’t a plea for pity. It’s a declaration of truth. It’s about the absurdity of growing up in a world where your first mentors are predators, your first comforts are carcinogens, and your first lessons in manhood come with a side of whisky and shame.
It’s also about humour. Because if you can’t laugh at the madness, it’ll eat you alive. And I’ve been chewed on enough for one lifetime.
So here begins the tale of a stubborn buffoon. A lad who was kicked, pissed on, and still breathing. A survivor not of war or famine, but of the quiet, everyday brutality that hides behind closed doors and friendly smiles.
And if you’re reading this thinking, “bloody hell, that’s grim,” then good. It was. But it’s also funny, in the way that only the truly absurd can be. And I’m still here to laugh about it.
Puff, Sip, Repeat
The Gospel According to Grown-Up Bastards
By eleven, I was a connoisseur of coping mechanisms. Not the kind you read about in psychology textbooks, these were the street-level rituals of survival. Puff. Sip. Repeat, the holy trinity of self-medication for a lad whose childhood had been mugged in broad daylight.
It started with cigarettes, Woodbine singles, wrapped in Zan-Isal toilet paper and smelling faintly of stale whisky and betrayal, costing threepence a pop. Sold to me by the newsagent who didn’t blink at the sight of a paper lad buying lung cancer by the unit. I’d light up behind the bins, puffing like a miniature chimney sweep, trying to look older, harder, less breakable.
But the real education came from the milkman. He didn’t just deliver bottles, he delivered sermons. His gospel was poured into a small glass of whisky every weekend and school holiday morning, handed to me with the kind of grin that should come with a warning label. “Budgie Balls,” he’d call me, with a chuckle that made my stomach turn. The nickname was born from his weekly inspection of my underage anatomy, as if he were checking the freshness of his own bloody dairy stock.
I didn’t know I could say no. I didn’t know what “no” meant. I knew whisky meant warmth, attention, and a temporary escape from the cold reality of being a child in a world run by predators. So I drank. I puffed. I laughed. I became fluent in the language of deflection, sarcasm, irony, and the art of pretending everything was fine. “I started to become a clown.”
By thirteen, I’d graduated to pills. Uppers to keep me moving, downers to shut the world off. Weed was a staple, passed around in squats and parks like communion wafers for the damned. LSD arrived like a cosmic joke, turning my trauma into kaleidoscopic theatre. I saw god once. He looked like a milk bottle with legs and told me to stop trusting adults. I took that advice seriously.
As a runaway teen, drugs weren’t recreational; they were occupational. They helped me sleep on concrete, talk my way into shelters, and forget the taste of shame. They were my toolkit for surviving a world that had no use for me unless I was entertaining, compliant, or invisible.
The chemical carousel didn’t stop in adolescence. It spun well into my thirties, occasionally flinging me into hell. Twice, I smoked joints spiked with heroin, unknowingly, of course. One minute I was mellow, the next I was drowning in molasses, my limbs refusing to cooperate, my brain whispering sweet nothings about oblivion. I didn’t die, but I flirted with it. And death, like most things in my life, played hard to get.
The milkman’s gospel was meant to break me. It taught me how to drink without flinching, how to smile while being violated, how to nod like I understood the twisted logic of grown men who saw children as playthings. It taught me that survival meant compliance and that humour could be currency.
But here’s the twist: I rewrote it.
Urinals and Ouzo
A Greek Tragedy in Three Vomits
I took his sermons and turned them into satire. I took his rituals and turned them into routines on stage, in writing, in the absurd museum of my life. I turned trauma into theatre, pain into punchlines, and shame into survival.
“Puff, Sip, Swallow, Repeat” wasn’t just a habit; it was a philosophy. A rhythm. A mantra. It kept me alive, kept me sane, kept me from becoming what they wanted me to be: broken, silent, compliant. I wasn’t any of those things. I was loud, damaged, and defiantly breathing.
By the time I stumbled into my twenties, I’d perfected the illusion of functionality. I could hold down a job, hold up a conversation, and hold in the occasional existential scream, though it often leaked out between sips of cheap liquor and forced smiles.
I married my first future-ex-wife, a scarred, insecure woman who mistook my chaos for charm. Together we produced two innocent children, beautiful, bewildered souls who never knew, and still don’t know, the full extent of their father’s stolen childhood. They’ve since disowned me, branding me a freak who abandoned his own offspring to help other children halfway across the planet. And who could blame them? From the outside, it looks like betrayal. From the inside, it was a matter of survival. I wasn’t running from them; I was running from the ghost of myself.
But travel, ah, travel was where the real theatre began.
Though I’d already survived a childhood soaked in violence, including an attempt on my life, Greece was where the adult near-death experiences queued up for their curtain call. Athens, to be precise. A city of crumbling gods and crumbling morals, where ouzo flowed like holy water and the toilets were less hygienic and more philosophical, each one a porcelain metaphor for the human condition.
I drank. I busked. I vomited. Sometimes in that order. Sometimes not.
I lived in a cheap hostel with a cellar bar run by a Sri Lankan fake doctor whose cesspit of an establishment doubled as a pimp’s office and tripled as a cautionary tale. The owner looked like he’d been carved from feta and regret. He occasionally paid me in cash, booze, and the odd threat to mop up bodily fluids and pretend I wasn’t slowly losing my grip on reality.
Ouzo became my new communion. It tasted like liquorice and poor decisions. I drank it to forget the smell of the urinals, which were less porcelain and more abstract art installations. On more than one occasion, I slipped into a semi-comatose state on something unspeakable and landed face-first in a puddle of someone else’s regrets. I usually laughed while being pissed on. What else could I do? Crying would’ve just added to the mess.
The clientele was a mix of beggars, buskers, and the kind of people who thought shouting was a form of flirting. I once watched a man propose to his girlfriend while vomiting into a plant pot. She said yes. Love, apparently, is blind and mildly concussed.
I lived in a dormitory above the bar, which meant I never really left the bar, except when I was busking, playing sea shanties on my concertina around the port of Piraeus. The walls were thin, the bed was thinner, and the cockroaches had unionised. I shared the space with a rotating cast of misfits: drug addicts, a French murderer on the run, and various European lunatics who’d somehow washed up at the broken doors of Diana’s guest house, just a stone’s throw from the Acropolis.
My days were a blur of hangovers, hallucinations, and half-hearted attempts at self-improvement. I tried yoga once with a travelling hippy from Nova Scotia. She told me to “breathe into my trauma.” I told her my trauma had a restraining order against me, and I went straight back to my ouzo.
Eventually, I was forced out of Athens after being threatened at gunpoint in the hold of a tramp ship moored off Piraeus, but that’s another story I’ve survived to tell.
Greece didn’t heal me. It didn’t even try. But it gave me a new kind of madness, one I could laugh at, one I could survive. It taught me that rock bottom has a basement, and that sometimes, the only way out is through a bottle of anise-flavoured regret.
I left Athens on the midnight express to Istanbul with a suitcase full of stories, a liver full of resentment, and the beginnings of a voice that refused to stay silent.
Shanghai Shuffle
From Urinals to Uplift: The Buffoon Reborn
I left Athens on the midnight express to Istanbul with a suitcase full of stories, a liver full of resentment, and the beginnings of a voice that refused to stay silent. Greece hadn’t healed me; it hadn’t even tried. But it gave me a new kind of madness, one I could laugh at, one I could survive. The milkman had taught me how to swallow pain. Greece taught me how to spit it back out, preferably into a urinal.
From Istanbul, I kept moving. Not because I had a plan, but because standing still felt like death. I travelled through Asia, Europe, and the Americas, busking, performing, marrying, divorcing, and occasionally waking up in places where I didn’t speak the language but knew the price of a bottle.
I became a kind of rockstar clown. A buffoon with a passport and a concertina. I played sea shanties in ports, cracked jokes in bars, and performed in places where laughter was the only currency that mattered. I was a walking contradiction: an entertainer fuelled by self-destruction, a man who could make others laugh while quietly falling apart.
I remarried. More than once. Each time with hope, each time with baggage. I loved deeply, chaotically, and sometimes disastrously. But through it all, I kept creating. My art evolved. My performances sharpened. I learned to turn pain into punchlines, trauma into theatre.
Eventually, I founded the Gift of Happiness Foundation, a charity born not from sainthood, but from stubbornness. I didn’t believe in gods or miracles. I believed in real people, real laughter, and the healing power of showing up. I gave joy to children who’d seen too much darkness, not because I was whole, but because I knew what broken felt like.
Then came the Museum of Buffoonery, a shrine to absurdity, resilience, and the glorious mess of being human. It was part satire, part sanctuary. A place where people could laugh at the madness and maybe, just maybe, find a bit of themselves in the exhibits.
And now, here I am. 72¾ years old. One full year sober.
No gods. No gurus. No twelve steps. Just real life. Real pain. Real joy.
And the stubborn refusal to let addiction write my final chapter.
I quit smoking on my fiftieth birthday, five packs a day, stubbed out with defiance. But alcohol? That bastard clung on for decades. It whispered, it seduced, it lied. And I believed it, until I didn’t.
Now, I perform with new energy. I write with new clarity. I live with new breath. Not because I’ve found enlightenment, but because I’ve finally stopped poisoning myself.
I’m still a buffoon. Still a performer. Still a man with a past that reads like a cautionary tale scribbled in biro on a toilet wall.
But I’m also free.
And that, my friend, is worth celebrating.
Final Reflection
A Toast to the Buffoon Who Wouldn’t Die
Here’s to me…
- The stubborn old goat who outlived his vices, his critics, and a couple of marriages (give or take a ceremony).
- To the man who once mistook a bottle for a compass, a cigarette for a friend, and chaos for a career plan.
- To the entertainer who danced on the edge of oblivion and somehow turned it into a standing ovation.
I didn’t get sober by praying to invisible sky wizards or chanting affirmations into a scented candle. I got sober by waking up one day and deciding I’d rather be alive than embalmed in whisky.
I got sober by remembering the faces of the children I made laugh, the audiences I moved, the lovers I lost, and the art I still hadn’t finished.
This isn’t redemption. It’s rebellion. A rebellion against the idea that age means decline, that addiction means defeat, that joy is reserved for the pure and pious.
And here’s another truth: I’ve been happily single for the past 25 years. No one to share the duvet, the drama, or the final speech. So I’m saying it all myself, because who better to toast the buffoon than the buffoon himself?
Somewhere along the way, I heard a line that stuck: “It’s like stepping off a wild horse.”
That’s how it felt, not just quitting the drink, but letting go of the need to be in love, or to be loved by anyone else.
I dismounted. I dusted myself off. And I walked on, lighter, freer, and finally at peace with my own damn company.
So raise a glass of water, tea, or whatever doesn’t try to kill you.
To the buffoon who found clarity in the absurd, purpose in the punchline, and freedom in the final act.
I’m 72¾ years old. I’m sober. I’m still performing. And I’m just getting started!
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