I saw a football team on the telly tonight who were sponsored by Joy.

What a beautiful concept.
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3AM ETERNAL
By Matthew Craig
My Da used to work nights one week out of four. So, he'd leave the house about 9.15, taking his tartan rucksack with him, his "piece" all made up beforehand (his "piece" being his mid-shift snack, as opposed to a handgun or illicit girlfriend), and trot off to the Power Station. He'd return some eight hours later, whereupon we had to be very quiet for the rest of the day.
Not the easiest thing to do when you're the pudgy child equivalent of a loud tornado, with a dog, a vivid imagination, and a lot of toys that fairly scream "volume..."
I can barely recall what it was like to have to be that quiet, so I guess I never really bothered trying. I only really remember waking the Daddy up, oh, twice.
One time, back when I was more or less out of comics and into roleplaying games and miniature genocide. The Daddy was upstairs asleep, and I was trying to gently remove a small piece of plastic from a slightly larger piece of plastic with a modelling knife that, to my horror, was just the wrong side of surgically sharp. The sort of knife that could have cut Income Tax from a hundred yards.
The sort of knife that I ran through the top of my finger.
You ever have that feeling of, "oh, now that never happened?" That moment of unreality when you see something terrible, that's probably your fault, or is going to start hurting very, very much, just as soon as Time starts again.
In that instance, Time restarted pretty much straight away. Especially when my finger started to piss blood.
It's funny. There was no pain. Just blood. And plenty of it. I dashed into the kitchen to, well, I don't know what. I ran it under the tap, which only seemed to make the bleeding worse. I think I was panicking that I might have to go to hospital for stitches.
I have nothing against hospitals, really. I've had bad experiences in hospitals, sure (4 hours trying to keep an OD'ing girl from falling asleep, while waiting for a nurse), but nothing that I can really pinpoint as being responsible for my irrational fear. Maybe it was embarrassment:
"Ah, Mr Craig. Been in the wars, have we?"
"I cut through the top of my finger, Doctor."
"And how did you do that?"
" I was trimming plastic off a model tank with a modelling knife, and my hand slipped."
"..."
SMACK!
"Imbecile!"
Anyway, by this point, some two minutes after the incident (there was no blood on the knife, now that I think about it), I had exhausted all the possibilities that putting my finger under the tap or into a slice of bread had to offer (don't laugh: Hondle bit my hand once, and after trying to hide the stream of iron-rich goo trickling down my arm behind the Beano, the sainted Mother applied the heel of a crusty white loaf to my hand to staunch the flow. Either that, or she was having odd cravings...). So, I went upstairs, to seek assistance.
The sainted Mother was away for the afternoon to visit one of her middle-aged friends. Despite her protestations to the contrary, the Mother is not as old (or as Old) as she seems to think she is, and ten years ago, this was even less of the case. So quite what she had in common with some of the, well, biddies she used to hang out with, I'll never know. Especially the one who had a dog called Rupert, door handles that went the wrong way (if you were foxed by them, you really needed help), and a funny-smelling kitchen.
Thinking about it, the sainted Mother used to take me to some damn odd places. We used to go to this one woman's house, some social worker friend or other, and I would be jammed upstairs in a small office-style room, plastered with creepy-ass photographs of strangers, given a bag of frankly sweaty chips, a biro and a pad of paper and a black and white portable that would only ever work when St. Elsewhere was on (reminder: St. Elsewhere was one of an endless stream of hospital dramas set in Chicago. That Bloke who was the voice of KITT in Knight Rider played a consultant called Dr. Craig - see picture left). Meanwhile, the Mammy would be downstairs enjoying herself with all these mad Lefties, playing Trivial Pursuit (one time, I came downstairs and wiped the floor with the assembled company playing TP, the smug bastards), and helping The Drunk One who Always Pukes After a Glass of Martini to empty her guts headfirst into the bowl.
KITT-->
I mean, every time we went there, it was the same thing. Night of fun downstairs, night of boredom and No Fun for Craigy upstairs. You would have thought someone else would have brought their kids. Just once.
"Do the voice!"
"No."
"Go on!"
"No."
"Just do the cool Voo-Voo noise, then!"
"No."
Where was I? Oh, yeah.
So, I stood at the door to the Daddy's bedroom, not wanting to wake him up, but also none too keen on bleeding to death. I went in after a few minutes of moral debate. And came out straight away after trying to wake him with a whisper that an elephant would have had to ask me to repeat a little louder.
After a couple of repeated attempts, I finally plucked up the courage to actually speak in a voice loud enough to drown out a gnat fart.
"Da?"
"Whuh?"
"Da, I've...ah...had an accident."
"Mnuh."
Pause. Gush, gush.
"Da? I've, er, cut myself."
*COUGH*
Pause. Bleed, bleed...
"Da?"
"Whuht?"
"Da, look."
One gummy eye opens, like a lazy flytrap.
Focuses on the extended finger. Gush, gush. Bleed, bleed.
Eye closes.
Pause.
Eyes snap open.
"Fockin' Jesus!"
It was a real Father-Son bonding moment, you know. Beaten only by the time we went to a Memorabilia fair together, and were laughing at all the nervous fanboys too shy to walk right past the Sexy Vampire Models table. At the same fair, a woman offered to sell me a copy of Playboy that she had done a...spread for. I had to decline, but in the nicest possible way.
Having spent an awful lot of time staying up through the night to write this stuff, as you can probably tell from the grammatical and typographical errors that pepper this site like craters on the moon, I've become a bit more like my Dad, I guess. An occasional Night-Person. His world was filled with the noise of turbines and power, mine with the comforting freedom of the night, when screeching, elephantine housefuhrers are silent, and the Estate is asleep.
Of course, I'll be fucked tomorrow.
Not literally, of course.
Mores the pity.
You become used to it, though, I suppose. I enjoy being able to think and write without the rather oppressive amount of noise, inner as well as outer, that you get during the day.
Of course, sometimes, the sainted Mother complains that she can hear me typing through the wall. Which is probably true: I was nearly turfed out of a University computer lab for thumping the keys too hard. So I tend to feel bad if she complains about having lost sleep because of my ham-fistedness.
The world's a different place in the middle of the night. Most of the shops are shut - and I'm dying to go to Tesco's at 3 in the morning - and the television is, well, different. The Schools programmes are often worth a giggle. I got to see some fine actors (and hot actresses) talk through some Classic Shakespeare the other night. Some of the scenes were from plays I didn't know, and still more were from plays I had read through at school (I played three conflicting roles in Romeo and Juliet: Tybalt, Friar Lawrence and Romeo himself, which was interesting; in one scene, I had to kill myself in a fight, and in another, I had to marry myself to Juliet!). Educational and fun!
I think I need to get out more.
I find writing during the day to be quite hard. I can't seem to shut out the ambient noise.
Of course, you stay up all night, and you tend to lose the day afterwards. Which is why I haven't gone to bed yet. I don't want to go to bed at 6am, and wake up in time for EastEnders.
The sainted Mother has called me a Night-Owl before. Which is true, I guess. I hate going to bed. I used to dread it as a child. Not that I was scared of not waking up, or anything, but it just seemed like sleep was an inconvenient waste of time. There's too much fun to be had, too many things to read, too much TV to watch.
Although, even when I had Cable, the quality tended to drop off very rapidly after about 1am. As much as I like cartoons, I draw the line at Taba-bloody-luga. And a man can watch only so many episodes of Suddenly Susan without reaching for the lumphammer.
Give it up, Brooke. Give it up, now.
I suppose these late nights are also motivated by my unemployment. If there's no pressing reason to get up, then there's no real reason for going to bed early, either.
Suddenly Susan: Stinks, but not as bad as your feet.
Sometimes, I think I enjoy my own company a little too much.
Although, "enjoy" might not be the right word...
Matthew Craig, Breakfast Time, 1st October, 2001.
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