Read Online My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle - Free Book Online

Awards I assumed that he’d had a change of heart. Mike must have had an epiphany, I reasoned, surrounded by these braying crooks at their annual backslapper. Realising what he had done with his life he must have tried to bring the whole place down about their heads like a modern-day Samson! I did a gig at that hotel recently and the staff told me that he’d started the fire because they’d stopped serving him at the bar. My dad always had a generally socialist outlook. His philosophy was a strange mixture of apathy and class war. He didn’t want to smash the state but he wished that someone would. The good thing was that he would talk to us about stuff like that and we had an idea that the world might be a bit different from whatwe saw on the news. Once, my headmistress held a discussion about nuclear war, a subject I had questioned people endlessly about due to fear.
    ‘Did you know that there are underground bunkers where key people will go when there’s a nuclear alert?’ she asked the generally baffled class.
    ‘Yes Miss! My dad says that all the top politicians will go there.’
    ‘That’s right Frankie, a lot of key people will be taken there, so that the country will be able to keep running.’
    ‘Dad said that if he knew where one was, he’d get a shotgun when the four-minute warning went off and shoot everybody as they went in!’
    My music teacher stood in a Glasgow by-election. He was a foaming Nationalist and once demonstrated the battle tactics at Culloden to us using a clipboard (shield) and pen (sword). He got a party political broadcast, which he sung. We all rushed home to see it.
    ‘Oh, these are my mountains!’ he cried, gesturing at some tower blocks. ‘And this is my glen!’ He was pointing into a local canal, full of rubbish. It was fantastic.
    There were pupils who struggled to get through life at school but it was the same for some of the teachers. There was a maths teacher called Mr Hughes: an unfortunately camp heterosexual who for some reason chose to wear shoes with little golden buckles. Everywhere he went kids sang ‘Mr Hughes, the Elephant Man’ to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He was alightning rod for spitballs, paper aeroplanes and any kind of improvised missile.
    There was a game where kids would inch their tables forward when the teacher turned to write something on the blackboard. Mr Hughes just didn’t have the personal confidence to address it, so we’d all end up crowded round his legs. Sometimes his face would be pressed up against the board. One time he made a joke.
    ‘What would you measure a waistline in, centimetres or metres or kilometres?’ he asked.
    ‘Metres’, said Harriet Adams, a reputedly slack lassie, being deliberately unhelpful.
    ‘I suppose it might be measured in metres if you were Cyril Smith,’ quipped Mr Hughes, chortling at his own joke.
    We all laughed too, and kept laughing. There was an instant telepathic understanding that we were never going to stop.
    People outdid each other trying to laugh the loudest, the most gratingly, screaming like animals until it started to become genuinely hilarious. Tears were running down faces and people were gasping for air, shrieking. A boy clawed at his throat like he was going to suffocate. Mr Hughes stood entirely passive throughout, staring not at but through the back wall.
    Mr Hughes decided that teaching was not for him and left to become a bus driver. Fate is cruel and his route took him directly by the school. People would run out in their lunchtime to the busstop and sing the ‘Elephant Man’ song at him when he opened the doors, waving their arms up against their faces like trunks.
    Our science teacher was called Mr Clarkson. He was always drunk and would drop things on the floor so he could try to look up the girls’ skirts. Every week he gave a mumbling, incoherent lecture called ‘The Life of a Battery’. It didn’t appear anywhere on the syllabus and even with