Nelson Muntz is a character from The Simpsons, the bully at Bart's school who graduates to being merely a slightly unpredictable hardnut in later episodes. When I saw my first Simpsons way back in the nineties, I recognised Nelson straight away. I felt as though I knew him. My own Nelson wasn't quite a bully, but I'd certainly found him intimidating.
The school was tiny, Ilmington C of E Junior & Infants on the edge of the Cotswolds. There were seven kids in my class, expanding to nine or ten by the final year. We got to know each other reasonably well, excepting Nelson - as I'll continue to call him - because like I said I found him intimidating, and I really had the impression he worked at it. One day during the later years, our teacher - Mr. Davies - announced that we would be keeping diaries of our daily activities as a writing exercise. None of us were particularly happy with the idea. Nelson was particularly disgruntled, explaining to the rest of us that he resented the proposal that he might be required to keep a record of all the little kids he'd beaten up that week. Even at the age of nine, this struck me as a slightly weird announcement. It must surely have occurred to him that he could simply omit mention of all the little kids he'd beaten up that week, but apparently he really needed to tell us about it.
Boasting aside, he can't have been much of a bully. I never really developed a fear of him as I did with a couple of the older kids; and once we all went to the much larger secondary school, much like his Simpsons namesake, his status was downgraded to that of mere hardnut in relation to some of the genuinely violent psychotics spawned on the farms around Shipston.
Additionally, Nelson was sometimes quite funny, so if we were never quite pals, it was difficult to harbor animosity towards him. He sold me the first two Boomtown Rats albums and one by Public Image Limited when motorbikes and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal lured him away from anything punky, as happened with almost everyone else at our school.
I was never into motorbikes, although I drew the Philadelphia Freaks riding their bikes from the Inferno strip in 2000AD comic. The Philadelphia Freaks were a sports team of horrific cyborgs, and the drawing so impressed my art teacher that it was pinned to the wall in the art class. It also impressed Nelson. He asked if I'd accept a commission to paint horrific cyborgs on the petrol tank of his own motorbike. I said yes. He paid me a tenner, or maybe a fiver, and gave me the drawing of the character he wanted me to paint. He'd taken my art from the wall of the art room and cut out his preferred monster. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but obviously I wasn't going to say anything.
I spent a weekend painting the thing, using the enamels with which I would paint Airfix kits to fill in the detail on a silhouette of the figure sprayed in gold paint. I don't recall the result as having been anything special, and years later, I popped the question on facebook:
Do you remember I painted the tank of a bike for you, maybe around 1982? Did it ever get put back on the bike and did you ever take a photo? Just wondering because with hindsight I'll bet there's probably some reason why bike custom people don't use little pots of Humbrol enamel or whatever it was that I used.
It turned out that he did remember:
I do and do you what I fucking regret selling it to this day it was brilliant the tank and the bike I mean, do you know never took a picture of it either (sorry) I remember to this day it was black with artisan robots and stuff way ahead of its time the bike was an old villiers Sprite 250 that I had for my 12 Christmas !!!
This came as a relief to me:
I'm just glad it worked. All these years I've imagined you taking it out on the road and the whole thing sort of peeling off before you're back home.
I'd anticipated some vague memory of resentment over my shoddy custom job, thankfully without foundation.
Think back it all brings back a bit of a comedy, the day you gave it back to me Michelle Warren told me I couldn't play with her tits anymore after I got my painted tank back it kind of took my mind of things ..... Oh and the paint job was as good the day you gave it back to me think sold it when I was 17 or so !!!
I remembered Michelle Warren but not her tits, and I suspect it had escaped me that Nelson had ever been granted access to them, so it's probably a good job that he mentioned it or I never would have known; but this exchange came later.
Meanwhile back in the eighties, I left school and had no good reason to think about Nelson; but as I've found, as one progresses along the path of one's existence from one place to the next, those I miss tend to be those I never knew very well, those who provided texture, those who had something but not a good reason for us to keep in touch. So from time to time I wondered what became of Nelson. Eventually, inevitably, facebook provided the answer to this question which I probably should have known not to ask; because we still didn't really have much to say to each other, and then there was the Brexit referendum, upon which Nelson opined:
Sorry Lol you are a better person than that !! We have got a real chance to actually do things right and if I'm being selfish get our own way for once, we as a country have objected to 79 (I think) new EU rules and our objections were ignored every single time, try not to look into this too much I think the vote to exit is nothing more than ....... "Do you know what, I am fed up with being dictated to 100% of the time and ignored if I dare challenge or question" we are quite prepared suffer in the short term to forge a better environment for ourselves. The whole immigration bit is largely a red herring and a convenient label to stir the shit
Despite my being better than something or other, this wasn't a dialogue I could see going anywhere useful, which it accordingly didn't:
Doom and gloom doom and gloom suck it up at least we haven't got shit loads of Brussels rules and regulations to tick off before we tackle it all ..... All you need is some Tommy can do attitude .... Ok let's have a brew then come on you wankers lets get at it !!!
This was followed by some peculiar comment about the spirit of Isambard Kingdom Brunel with Nelson announcing that he was heading outside to build a suspension bridge on the grounds of the possibilities having become endless. I was unable to find the comment when I went back to look for it, so maybe he'd deleted it, having discovered that Brunel was the son of French immigrants.
Anyway, the pattern had been established, this pattern being our social media interaction being limited to politics. The one exception was some comment I'd made about the Sex Pistols which he'd somehow read as a criticism and accordingly jumped to their defense on the grounds of the Pistols at least having been better than all that New Romantic stuff which came after, which was all a bit gay. Otherwise, I might submit all manner of posts to my facebook page, photographs of things I'd painted, myself stood on the surface of the moon, selfies taken while bowling with Prince Philip and the Chuckle Brothers, and never so much as a dickie bird from Nelson, but the moment I mention Jeremy Corbyn, as if by magic...
Sad to say you are wrong Lawrence on the simple premise, once an anarchist gets what they want they simply cease to be an anarchist and morph into something more wildly extreme like Che, Pot, or dare I say Hitler ? Or they swing the other way and conform to line their own pockets !
Corbin typifies for me the very essence of anarchy in attacking the establishment - be careful what you wish for !
The thing I found the most mystifying about this one was the bewildering conflation of Che Guevara with Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler, almost as though he had no fucking idea about who Che Guevara actually was but was simply pulling names out of his ass. Under other circumstances I might have asked did you even go to school, but I quite clearly remember that he did because I was there too.
It didn't get any better when I opined that the Conservative party comprised mostly amoral money-grubbing shitbags who shouldn't, under any circumstances, be re-elected at the end of 2019. My argument was based on the idea that if all of the country's problems were, as fuckwits claimed, the fault of the previous Labour government and the Conservative government had spent its time in office correcting their mistakes, their apparent inability to correct those mistakes despite having had nine years in which to do so would seem to suggest they might not be the right people for the job. Additionally, Conservative solutions to Labour's mistakes had included the extradition to Jamaica of old age pensioners who had arrived in England at the age of just three months, and austerity policies, by which those physically or mentally unable to work were denied benefits just to see if it might inspire them to pull their socks up and get a job, at least in the cases of the ones with legs. As my mother's job is to provide legal advice to such people, I'd met a few of them and therefore had direct experience of their problems being absolutely life threatening and genuine. The argument that they all get given free cellphones and live a life of dole scrounging luxury never sounded like much of an argument to me, but apparently it worked for Nelson.
Anyone remember the lovely note left on the treasury wall from the last government 9 or 10 years ago ? Well it read like this ..... money all gone, good luck !
Life is fab till the moneys all gone...then some poor fucker has to go in and clean up the mess then gets blamed for the shit not of their making !
Just saying
I wanted to argue against this drivel, to suggest that maybe the whole point of government was finding ways of raising money to pay for essential services - because I'm pretty certain government funding isn't based on whatever small change the previous lot dropped down the back of the fucking couch - but I knew I was in essence arguing with the contents of a right-wing opinion column, something which waves a hand to make some general point about those people, then orders another pint. I was wasting my time.
Money greases the wheels, when you run out guess who suffers the most ....go ask any Cuban when Russian turned off the tap ....and its those in over paid jobs top 5 or 10% pay 70 to 80% of the tax in this country ...where the fuck do you think they will do when they get taxed 99p in the pound as they did back in the 70s ?
Yeah great idea let's eat cake and caviar for a week and starve for a month after month after month, because the money,s ran out ...that's really good for the poorest and most in need like those in hospital or unable to work.
Still there will always be a room at Chequers and massive debt owing to those you ought not to have borrowed from.
Still the needy will have free WiFi and a £600 phone to check if their benefits are in their bank account ! ....well until such time the treasury is empty ?
The thesis, as I understood it, seemed to be fuck those dole-scrounging sponge monkeys and will no-one think of the millionaires?, a thesis I can have delivered direct to my earhole by phoning my dad, should the need arise.
I'd tried with Nelson but I should have known better. I didn't really know him at school, and I don't really know him forty years later beyond that he plays a lot of rugby and holds views such as those given above, delivered with the same bullying tone as the one about all the little kids he'd beaten up that week. He was setting me straight whether I liked it or not.
I shuffled him off into a subgroup of facebook friends, one bound by settings which mean they don't see any of my posts or get to comment upon them...
...not because I prefer an echo chamber but because I can already read and if I'd wanted to carry on reading the opinion column of the Sun I probably would have stayed in England. Regurgitating what you heard some bigger boys saying does not constitute a viewpoint, not even when framed in matey terms as though we ever had anything at all to say to each other. I'm sick to the back teeth of those actively working to make the world worse, those who believe anything told them by a nice man in a suit. I'm tired of the xenophobes, the good company men, the good little soldiers, the loyal snitches, the teachers' pets, the police informants, the head boys and girls, the neighbourhood watch award winners, the apple polishers, the people who are only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on someone else, life's Manchester United supporters, kisser's of the royal arse, grateful Ygors, goodly serfs, those who ask can I carry that for you, master?, and anyone who ever described themselves as proud without having actually done anything to be proud of beyond being born in a certain place.
Life has been better since, at least that part of my life involving social media. My curiosity about whatever became of has reduced to almost zero because most of them apparently turned into arseholes, thankfully with a couple of exceptions.
So that's another lesson learned. I probably should have learned it back when he first cut one of the figures out from something it had taken me hours to draw.
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