Wednesday 21st May 2008

Wednesday 21st May.

I’m very worried about Marty. He’s left school now. He’s finished all of his exams and thinks that he’s done well and he’s out there in the big wide world. He’s working a lot for a sixteen year old and I feel that the lad’s taken too much on. Since he was fourteen he has been earning over a hundred and fifty pounds a week. I can honestly say that I doubt there’s another school kid in the country with as many paid hours of employment or working experience in a variety of jobs behind them as my son. He learned to worship the God of finance at a very early age. Most kids get a paper round for a bit of extra pocket money and Marty was no exception but he did it two years earlier than he was legally allowed to. Most lads would have been made up with twelve pounds a week to play with but it just made him hungry. Six months later he was working in the paper shop before and after school and then going from the newsagents straight to work in a take away until ten. This later stretched, against my wishes, to a midnight finish. Marty has brought me his fair share of trouble over the years. I soon learned that having him in a place of work in the evenings stopped him getting mixed up with kids with ‘trouble’ tattooed on their foreheads and a prison number branded on their bum cheeks. Now he’s out of school and working two full time jobs. He’s aimless with no clear point of focus or direction. For years he’s studied and trained towards becoming a chef like his brother. Last year he decided he wanted to go into the police force until he was told that you have to have and maintain a certain level of fitness and that put the lazy sod right off. He has a record for theft after he stole nine hundred pounds in phone credit from my credit card when he had some silly little internet girlie on the go a couple of years ago so that would probably be enough to stop him getting into the police force anyway.

He’s working for a leisure hire company and as a labourer. He does festivals and events putting up and running bouncy castles and assault courses. His boss is also a property developer and when they have no events on Marty labours for him doing up houses. He’s on the minimum wage, which for his age is just three pounds forty an hour. He comes out with about a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s not enough for my lad; he can literally spend that much on his takeaways and pop. He takes ten pounds a day just for his lunch because he refuses to take a pack-up. All of the events have burger vans and the like and he spends a fortune. He’s always had a huge appetite and with his work being physical he maintains that he needs that much just to survive, he wouldn’t know a vegetable if it came up and formerly introduced itself. Marty eats like a horse, is six foot six with a thirty-inch waist and not a spare ounce of fat on him. Life is so damned unfair but I ought to be thankful that he has inherited his father’s genetic make-up, well he certainly hasn’t got mine.

With working outside everyday he’s got a gorgeous tan and six weeks into the job he’s just beginning to develop some impressive builder’s muscle with hod carrying and cement mixing.

Because he ‘can’t make ends meet’ he’s taken a second job. He also works full time for a taxi firm in the control room. He works from eight thirty until five thirty through the day and then three nights a week he does midnight until eight in the morning on the taxis. He seems to be coping well, he’s young and he’s keeping out of trouble (so far) but I’m very worried about him. At least he’s given up his pizza making takeaway, two weeks ago he was juggling the three jobs.

He’s bought his moped for three hundred pounds. He’s paid to put himself through his CBT bike test. He paid two hundred pounds insurance and taxed and MOT’d his bike and now he’s completely legal and on the road so at least he’s got something to show for it.

Maybe soon I can get some board money from him; at the moment we have a new excuse every week for why he can’t afford to give me anything.

Yesterday was wonderful. At one point I had twelve lizards, one rat and one dog all out at the same time and playing in peaceful harmony. Frog has settled down a lot she’s at the stage where she’s still very aggressive and predatory in her viv but once I’ve wrestled her out of her environment she’s great and will sit nicely and let me stroke her. She’s even begun to climb onto my shoulder when we sit together if she feels that I’m ignoring her. Nobody ignores The Frog. This is a massive step in the right direction. I’m just terrified of losing half of my cheek, or a lip or the bottom of my ear lobe, she still has an evil personality even if she is calming down. Actually getting her out cuts me to ribbons. Iguanas have claws designed to act like pitons. They are capable of climbing vertically up trees. Frog is huge now and treats my delicate skin like the bark of a bleeding great tree trunk. Her favourite trick is to sit on top of my head. She weighs a stone and a half and has twenty claws and only feels secure when all twenty of them are fastened into something, usually me. I win. Part of her training is to never let her get away with anything but most of the time winning comes at a cost and when I’ve finally got her out of the viv and deposited on the back of the sofa she sits there glaring balefully at me while I’m bleeding profusely from some alarmingly deep lacerations.

Falcon doesn’t inflict quite as much damage but he’s still scared of being handled and will anchor every one of his claws an inch deep into my arms. Assante the bosc would like nothing better than to take off my fingers and swallow them whole. Obviously so far I’ve thwarted her reaching this objective and still hold claim to all of my digits and appendages, but it’s probably only a matter of time until I lose something vital. However, although I have managed to keep the biting end at bay she still has some formidable talons. Boscs don’t climb much and because they aren’t arboreal they are a completely different design to the iggies. Apart from a serrated jaw and the ability to bite easily through bone they are big, heavy set fighting machines. Their feet are built for killing rather than climbing and don’t I bloody know it.

As previous readers may remember I’ve had a bit of a mixed up life and due to circumstance and a faulty circuit in my stupid brain, when I was younger I used to get a perverse joy from self-mutilation. The shame involved finally became greater than the need to cut. For me it was never about attention and I was deeply ashamed of my scars. Perversely I now have identical cuts and scars and often get mistaken for a self-harmer despite the fact that I haven’t cut myself for five years, and other than that one slip, for fifteen years before that. I do get a bit squirmy when my arms and hands are very badly cut but I’m not ashamed of them any more because it’s just a hobbyupational hazard. I’ve had a borderline need for stitches several times now. With all of these wounds it’s a good job that I no longer have M.R.S.A, that would be a lot of unhealing flesh.

I am really annoyed. I’ve just been up town and narrowly missed getting myself arrested and certainly only just avoided a fifty pound on the spot fine. I can’t believe how jumped-up and petty some police officers can be. I have always had great respect for the police, even our local limited, corrupt and bent force, I think they do a great and very difficult job, or at least the honest ones do… but honestly!

I bought a couple of cheap pareperback novels to take on holiday with me. My niece Kez and I always used to pass books backwards and forwards but I rarely see her these days. Because of the animals my house despite being quite big is stripped bare of almost all storage potential, every available space that could have a cupboard has a viv instead. I don’t hoard. I couldn’t stand the thought of throwing two almost new books away, had nobody to give them to and wasn’t close enough to a charity shop to hand them in there. So I put a ‘stick it’ note on them saying that they weren’t a bad read and to ‘help yourself’. While I was in the pedestrianised part of town I left them on a bench and then walked away.

A few feet further on and a policeman stopped me. He had my books in his hands and not only embarrassed me by talking to me as though I was an idiot, but also tried to do me for littering. I told him that if that was all he could find to do, then either society had just passed through a thirty second reformation or he was turning a blind eye to real criminals to harass innocent people just so that he could throw the weight of his badge around. I asked him if he was on commission for every spot fine he handed out and he threatened to arrest me for God’s sake. I very nearly accepted the fine to make a stand. I wouldn’t have paid it of course and would have ended up in court just for the sake of being a martyr, you can’t ever win against officialdom, I’ve learned that over the years. In the end I apologised like a feeble little sheep, told him that I wouldn’t do it again, which I won’t and he let me off with a warning… jerk!

I am absolutely bloody spitting chips and furious with Daz. I have no proof to lay blame but I’m hoping that my area manager can get it from the blanked out camera and if I find out that Daz did what I suspect him of then I’m going to sack him if I have the grounds, if I don’t then he’ll receive an official written warning.

My computer has blown up, it is totally useless and I believe that Daz has dropped it. I was so against lending it to him while I was away on holiday for this very reason but he wittled me down until I felt selfish and mean for not letting him use it. I gave him my password and said that he could use it for the duration of my holiday only.

On Monday I used my laptop all day. At the end of my shift I shut it down as I always do and put it in the cupboard under my counter. It was working perfectly up to that point. I was off work yesterday and this morning and when I got in at lunchtime I went to boot up my laptop only to find that it was dead, there wasn’t even a power light. I took it into the computer man who told me that it had ‘probably’ been dropped and that it would cost at least a hundred pounds to fix and that I might as well get another one. Back at the shop I rang the manufacturers only to find that my guarantee ran out last month. My laptop is only a year old and I can’t afford to replace it. I have no guarantee, no insurance and I’m stuffed.

I rang Daz to ask him if he knew anything about it and he said that he hasn’t touched my laptop at all since I came back from my holiday. I told him that it had been dropped and that as I hadn’t done it and he was the only other person in the shop that I found him hard to believe. Knowing fine well that I can’t, he told me to check the cameras. Calling his bluff I said that I’d get onto head office and ask them to check for me to see if we could get to the bottom of it. I told him that as per our agreement if it did show that he’s used and dropped my computer then I’d expect him to replace it. He said again that he hadn’t touched it and that I must have knocked it and not noticed.

My shop is CCTV protected, but the relevant camera, i.e. the one directly above our heads behind the counter is blacked off and only accessible to head office staff. I have rung my boss and asked her to check for me but she hasn’t got back to me yet. If he has used it against my wishes, broken it and lied about it I am going to see if that’s enough grounds for an instant dismissal. I will never lend my laptop out again selfish or not. I now have no computer for work and the days are going to be endless.

And I have more sad news hot on the heels of the death of Giza, Akora one of my little leopard geckos died through the night. I got up this morning to find him dead in the bottom of his faunarium. It did shock me because Akora was the healthier of the two emaciated little leos. He was over twice the weight of Neako and yet she is still bright and perky and hanging on. I say that I was shocked but I shouldn’t have been, both of the leos from that awful shop were in a terrible state. The owner has since gone bust apparently; she was only open six weeks. Because Akora was so much better than Neako I had high hopes of him pulling through but if I had never seen Neako I’d have expected it. He wasn’t good at all and only appeared healthy in relation to Neako. I’m sad but not heartbroken. I hadn’t had the chance to build much of a bond with these two little guys and because I half expected them to not make it I haven’t let myself get attached. There is not a cat in hell’s chance of Neako pulling through and I’m just waiting for her to die too. I could take her to the vets and have her put to sleep and I am tempted … but what if?

The good news is that the changeable lizard that I bought from the same place is fit as a fiddle and doing remarkably well so at least I’ve got something to show for all of that money. I’ve tried ringing her to ask about the two rats that I’ve bought and paid for but her phone has been disconnected and the shop is all boarded up.

What that disgusting woman and her dirty shop have shown me is that this area is yelling out for a decent reptile centre. I don’t mean a pokey little shop with two species of lizard and a snake or two on offer but a vast space with hundreds of species and display animals. Oh if only I had the capital. A local Quick Save has closed near us. It’s directly across the road from the train station and the perfect premises in the perfect place. It even has its own car park that I could use half of for summer lizard aviaries. It would be my dream come true, so if anybody out there would like to be a silent partner in a venture that would capitalise on a gap in the market, please get in touch. Oh, you’d have to pay for it all though because I’m broke. I suppose a hundred thousand might be enough to make a start to build my empire from…Anybody?