PEOPLE JUST GET UGLIER

 IT AIN'T ME, BABES.

THE NEW BRITONS,
LIFE IS AN EMOTIONAL SICKBAG.

 I've been in the business twenty-six  brutal years and if some supersmug git tells you that On balance he has it about right, then he's lying to you  as well as to himself and what he needs is a quick rub-down with a housebrick. I don't know how it all got started, this shit, I brought her up just as if she was one uv me own, that shit, luvemtobitsIdo, more like a favver, I wuz,  than her own Dad.  It's all bollocks.  The natural step-state is warfare; why wouldn't it be? You're not my real ladder, you're just my stepladder, you can't tell me what to do.

Children  hate their step-parents, wield nasty little uncompromising  daggers, often egged-on by the absent, supplanted parent.  I have done some,  no, lots of  egging-on, too, in my sweet time, my child honed into a lethal, heat-seeking weapon, a little Exocet, fired From Me To you.  The guy stepping her was, by common consent,  unfuckingspeakable, a deranged public schoolboy, control freakery bordering on insanity, even his widow, the person to whom I was first married,  said to me, in our once-in-thirty-years conversation that he was as mad as a hatter, unbearable. He was a sucessful merchant, import and export, his life fine-tuned between Coventry and Manhattan but he hadn't bargained for and could not deal with the implacable hostility of another man's child, resident in his life, and by proxy, therefore, me, too,  resident in his life.  It was so unfair, apart from anything else, a member of his uptight household travelling most weekends to another's.  And coming back, time after time, transformed.  Fuck him and his plans,  I thought.  And I think that it was his inability to override the natural bond between father and child that led him to die young, from alcohol poisoning, in the  Coventry Salvation Army hostel.  It was kind of poetic, except that he was about as poetic as dogshit.

My own  contemporaneous step-experience wasn't as vivid as that;  Mrs Ishmael's person to whom she was first married didn't have much interest, it was she, in fact, who facilitated and encouraged his children's access to him - see, the language of the responsible divorcee, facilitated and encouraged, a veneer of gabshitery weakly  glued and pinned over a wormy hatred.  She should have openly hated him, detested him, he was an utter cunt, no good to man nor beast.  But she put her hurts away and drove the children to their father's every week, he being too lazy or too drunk to collect them himself. And he, too, despite repeated warnings from the medics, industriously drank himself to death at only forty-seven; it wasn't that he was brokenheart maudlin, he'd married the woman for whom he had left the then yet-to-be Mrs Ishmael, he'd been paid an over-generous share of the former matrimonial home's value, but he and his new Mrs just liked being pissed on vodka, whether his children were there visiting or  not.  He was too out of his  mind to orchestrate a campaign of civil disobedience in his former wife's home  but he had his own ways-  quite rightly - of pissing on our shoes.  When he did stagger up to the great off license in the sky I was tempted to say to his  children, See, that's how much he cared about you, couldn't even be bothered to stay alive for you.   I didn't, but I might yet.

But even without any sniper fire from his world, stepping his children was a horror show. I've never seen Groundhog Day but I understand that it's about - inter alia - somebody waking up everyday and fighting exactly the same battles as he did the day before, with the same people. My life was like that for years.  Didn't matter how much you helped with the homework, didn't matter how much time you spent, didn't matter that you taught them to drive, got them cars, gave them work, didn't matter that you turned yourself inside-out trying to nurture these graceless, poisonous little fuckers;  every once in a while it would be You can't tell me what to do, you're not my real ladder, you're just my stepladder, I hate you.  And they were quite right to hate me,  I wasn't their real ladder.  Not their fault that their natural parents got together and then got untogether, not their fault at all,  they didn't even ask to get born, much less adjust, welcomingly,  to  whoever their mother or father is now fucking. And that's all there is to it, really, sometimes it's veiled, finessed, but that's what it is, the step-relationship. Hatred. Life's hard enough without having to deal with ersatz, pretend parents as well as everything else.

And, lo, now the world is full of it.  Oh, one reads and hears of special, wunderkind children, who flit gracefully between their parents' current menages, spreading light and love and of course the implication of this,  the between-the-lines-shit, is that at least one set of  pseudo parents is clever and caring beyond the capabilites of most of the rest of us poor, stupid, selfish  fuckers.  But fuck them because for every one of these supersmugs there will be thousands of people ripped to shreds,  hosting a malignant parasite or two or three, their sunny second starts eaten-away from within, that's just how it is.  It is why, I guess, that in nature - where life and death and survivalism are writ larger  -  incoming males kill the spawn of their predecessors whilst we, assailed and suborned by witless, gobby childologists  -  Fuck me sideways to Christmas, I have known some Court Welfare Officers whom you wouldn't let near your Yorkshire Terrier, much less your children - we, anyway, probably because we have to,  continue to encourage and facilitate the impossible, the dangerous, the unnatural; thoughtfully, considerately, micromanaging, we make for him, Ruin's own progress.

EVERYBODY'S ENTITLED

TO THEIR FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FILTH.

I thought all of this in a split second when I saw this geezer, the step of Missing Megan.  And I thought Somebody in this press conference macabre will stride up there and punch him in the face.  Twenty-six years before the stepmast, as I said, and there was,  there is,  no circumstance imaginable this side of Hell in which I would say to Mrs Ishmael's daughter, Youanme, we had a date, Babes, youanme can still make that date, Sweetheart. This guy, whatever his fucking name is - I don't care - is doing all this Daddy's-little-girl- baby-talk shit, on global teevee, aimed at a young woman who is obviously mature for her years,  attractive and  sexually active; 


OOH LA-LA-LAH,

what bizarre impulse made him spew out this degrading shit, this Come home to stepDaddy wetdream nightmare doggerel?  And we can still go  on our Date. Can no-one  now deliver us from such stunted, tawdry mewling and puking?   There she is,  off with her adored teacher and if they'd waited - what? - less than a year, they could have done exactly as they pleased. Love and lust are a riptide but  the law is the law and Matey's gone down in the noncing flood,  only by months, but he's noncing  and will probably go to jail.  I don't much believe in jailing people but whilst we are still doing so we should certainly jail him. You just can't have teachers fucking their pupils or students or customers or stakeholders or whatever the fuck it is that Michael Spit-Gove says we should call them,  here, in the Big Society, nasty little Murdoch rodent. That she's nearly a woman, looks like a woman,  that  was the excuse of every nonce I ever heard, led me on, the little tart.   I didn't know she was twelve.

So, she's lost in France, in Love, knowing that some very adult shit is gonna fall on their two-hearts-beating-as-one and this jerk, speaking not to her but to some real or imagined constituency of  knuckleheaded Sun-reading sentimental morons, offers up  some grisly,  creepy and extremely suspect date with her fucking stepfather, as though it was  an  irresistible inducement, a temptation beyond her wildest, her stormiest hormonal dreams, an offer that would see her  abandon Romeo and rush headlong back into the arms of her wretched mother and her mother's equally wretched bloke.  No fucking wonder she ran away.