Four a.m.

Four am is largely considered to be an unusual time to be awake, at least if it hurriedly becomes the standard or you’re not steadily watching your great ambitions disappearing through a pane of bullet-proof Perspex in the confines of a sealed twenty-four hour garage. It provides an unhealthily different perspective on the outside world when your main experience of them is nearly every one of the bastards being asleep. You begin to feel like Donald Sutherland in the passable remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A swift walk to the mailbox will merely reinforce your suspicions as you gaze at the tumbleweed of discarded chip bags rolling along the street. Everyone else, save those you cross the street to avoid for tradition’s sake, is firmly barricaded behind a mass of locks and solid doors. Sure, if you had a heavy enough brick or a sturdy crowbar, you could share a little space with these people, but for the most part they serve merely as an impenetrable wall between you and your destination, necessitating a joyless trudge through the growing mist and drizzle. They’re not being sociable, they’re not being accommodating, their being in the bloody way and making me walk to the end of a dark and dank road merely to turn ninety degrees at the corner and continuously prove that a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points. I don’t get to do straight lines where I live, I get to do these great sweeping curves that border on spirals, just to get to the garage and, a minute later, walk right the way back again.

I used to think that property was something to aspire to, at least in my younger years, the simple house + full fridge + willing sexual partner = contentment equation. Then I hit a certain age and, noticing the fact that the majority of material possessions were somewhat beyond my means I decided that property = theft, at least if it was something I wanted and some grinning pillock in a suit was strutting out from it or carrying it into his hideous car. Maybe I chose that particular thread of communism that levelled out just above my head, maybe I chose it because I was rather jealous of those who sat back and drank margaritas on their decking on summer days while staring at the pert backsides of those they had wooed… I cheered myself up with the knowledge that the moment the first flurry of spawn dropped from between one of the pair’s tanned thighs the whole thing would go to pieces, bitterness would swell up from beneath their ties and blouses, and the whole thing would end in miserable relentless ageing.

Whether I was right or wrong I shall never know… I never really stuck around long enough to find out… people tend to arrest you if you hide in their bushes too long. It never really troubled me that much to be honest… well, I largely just muttered the word “wankers” under my breath and did my best to force them into the road or face having to part their hands for a whole second as I barged between them… but I am suddenly starting to realise that it’s all a bit problematic… Half these bastards are younger than me… This can’t be allowed to continue.

Now I admit I have little real claim on any kind of wealth, in fact I probably have less claim than the vast majority of people ever to have strolled the planet… but for Christ’s sake, just look at the kind of people who do have this money… I wouldn’t lend the bastards a fiver and yet half of them seem to be sitting on enough cash to buy and sell my sorry arse several times over. Now either there’s a bigger market for servicing foreign businessmen in King’s Cross alleyways than I thought, or they’ve found some magical way of pulling money out of their various scabrous holes.

“But they have jobs!” I hear you say… and you know what, you’re wrong, you’re more wrong than you can possibly imagine… in fact, why don’t you just shut up, sit in that corner, and knit me a jumper before I’m forced to beat you within an inch of your life and then kick you another foot past that point. These people do not possess jobs… look at everyone you know who does something worthwhile and beneficial to humanity… they’re skint, they smoke twenty an hour, they can’t afford a house round here, and they probably smell just a bit… no, these people I see round here don’t work, they expel… but, you know what, they’re the reason you bought that 800 bladed disposable razor that cuts so close that your entire face resembles a sunburnt leper due to every single hair on his chin promptly deciding to grow inwards. I looked this stuff up, I actually looked… although mainly because my face is getting tired of being stabbed with tweezers in an attempt to stop curly black hairs growing into my brain. Nobody recommends using something designed to cause your face to swell like you’ve head-butted a nest of killer bees… except some square-chinned sack of unmentionable substances on TV who immaculately and bloodlessly removes any trace of hair from his entire body with one single short stroke of his billion-bladed Uberfleshplane Supersonic Thunder Machete XL. Oh, and then he pats himself with a f*cking towel and gets practically gang-raped by at least two women with cheekbones so pointy that with a bit of luck he’ll spend the rest of his days blind, penniless, and trying to relive his glory days in some seedy lap-dancing club.

He will sit in his corner by the toilets, facing in entirely the wrong direction, wearing a small homemade name badge complete with a picture of the days when he still had eyes, and desperately wait for someone to notice him. A little tear will escape his sockets every time he feels the rush of wind on his face as the bathroom door shuts and closes, and every day he will stagger in there and buy a cheap, single-bladed disposable razor from the machine that also dispenses condoms and travel wash, neither of which he shall ever need. He will then, after checking that he can hear nobody chuckling away to themselves in one of the cubicles, strike a pose, crack a cheesy grin, lather up, wink his cavernous socket, and prepare to relive the glory days… Then he’ll take eight layers of skin off his face with the first casual stroke and fall to the ground gushing blood like a serial killer’s over-flowing carpet shampooer after a particularly heavy night. Someone will eventually enter, stand a moment, gasp in shock, notice the nametag, point downwards, and say “Hey, welcome to reality you smug son of a bitch” and kick him so damn hard.

Yes, that’s what those people I envy do, they make me think that something that has more razor-sharp steel ready to draw blood than 15th century feudal Japan is the answer to all my problems. I hate to point this out, but it really, really, isn’t… no, the only problem that those razors are the answer to is the problem of having dry skin or, indeed, any form of skin whatsoever. Yet there are thousands of people involved in the process of this razor travelling from conception to existence and finally to lying in my bathroom sink covered in more gore than the inside of a cow… thousands… thousands of people involved in an end product that consists of me swearing… thousands… Worst of all, there was just one man, just one man, who stood up at a meeting and said “You know guys, we were looking for the new advancement in shaving technology, something that would establish our world dominance, something that would advance humanity beyond it’s meagre standing, something that will CHANGE EXISTENCE AS WE KNOW IT?... Let’s… stay with me on this crazy ride…. Let’s add another blade.”

“My god man… but they already have three bladed razors… and they seem to do the job… if a little too well to be honest… look at all my in-growing hairs… what’s the point in adding another one?”

“IT HAS FOUR!”

“Sold… here’s your millions.” You may have sat next to this person on a train… you may not have known who he was… you may have not known to beat him until he resembles a thin unpleasant liquid… but one thing’s for sure… he was wearing a fancy suit that costs more than your soul and he has a stupid haircut with bits gelled up in the middle. We must hunt them like dogs and drive them into the sea like lemmings.