A Funny thing happened on the way back from rehab

With a fair wind, and barring of course any injury time capitulation I'll be marking 5 years since I walked through the door of a drug and alcohol rehab that had been carefully selected by my friends and family based on the one I was least likely to walk out of and instead continue to make myself very very poorly. They chose well, and I knew the party was well and truly over. Fear not however as this isn't about me grandstanding my war stories from when I was a cocaine and alcohol force of nature, a truth I used to be shamelessly proud of. I spent a decade thinking I was having the time of my life, and only after what was to be my last hangover finally lifted did I actually start paying any attention to real world issues. Things that didn't occur to me or that perhaps had never even come across my radar suddenly quirked my interest. In truth, my sole purpose in life for most of the previous ten years had been about me widening my circle of partygoing friends, and self-medicating. Anything beyond that simply didn't hold my interest even momentarily. Sobriety changed everything for me. Like many fellow addicts, recovery began like one giant Rubik's Cube made more difficult by some friend of humanity having peeled off the colour tabs, and it fast became apparent that I needed to occupy my brain with something, anything to quiet down the incessant chatter in my head that the sudden off-ramp into clean living had sparked. Then, much to the astonishment of just about every man Jack in my circle, I caught politics... in a big way, and as I imagine is the case for other late arrivals to the political/current affairs arena, suddenly everything that caught my attention led me to ask more and more questions about exactly how it all works... I didn't and still don't like the answers that my research was returning, and from that disappointment came a thirst for solutions, and a view of the world today based on somebody effectively learning backwards from where we are right now.

Those who know me through Twitter might be surprised to learn that there was once a time when I was considered bookish, and I did study British political history as one of my A Levels, but that was followed by a good 20 years of total nonchalance towards anything other than having a party so I had little to call on in terms of a bank of knowledge. I was a Daily Star reader throughout most of my years in the political wilderness which probably best illustrates how oblivious I was to real world issues, and how in tune I was instead with the likes of Jo Guest and Lucy Pinder (my guess is that most men in their twenties can still read a Daily Star in 3 minutes flat... can't they?).

Without wishing to turn my first post here into a meandering brook of nostalgic idiocy, I guess my point is that had anybody known me 5 years back, it's fair to say that I was an unlikely candidate to end up sat at a laptop at 10:00am on a Friday morning in June 2022 about to publish an introductory post to accompany the launch of a blog that seeks to make sense of where we are right now in the world of politics via the medium of my errant imagination... but here we are!

What I can promise is an honest take on the world around us based on my nerdish obsession with the news, served up in a goulash of satire, and seasoned with only the finest sarcasm that the political landscape merits in its current state of disrepair. Often sweary, and enraged, but hopefully taking a slightly lighter view than might be found on many of the myriad of excellent blogs available today... So, if you are of a disposition  where by you might possibly enjoy seeing Liz Truss likened to a woman suffering a glacially slow stroke having fallen face first into a vat of Botox then this my friend is probably the right blog for you...  (so now we all know exactly where we are at).

Always happy to listen to suggestions and of course criticism, but most of all, I hope you enjoy my skewed take, and that it brings the odd smile to your day. Thank you for taking time out of your day to lend me 10 minutes of your time, and hopefully this blog will bring you as much entertainment as I hope to have creating it

Stuzi