The unknown thoroughbred

Having reached the grand old age of 85 Martin Branthwaite should have been able to feel a sense of pride in the fact that he was an octogenarian still very much capable of pissing like a racehorse and maintaining an erection. Sadly for the old timer his impression of a thoroughbred came an hour or two after he'd fallen asleep and the erection would come and go during the night without him having ever been aware of its existence. Still he mustn't grumble, unlike those few friends that remained who hadn't yet met their maker he didn't need two dozen pills daily to keep him alive, just the seven did the trick for him. He enjoyed the company twice daily of a young Filipino carer who let herself into his tiny shoebox he now called home which cost him more per month than the upkeep of Buckingham Palace cost the King of England. He called her Flo which she took for British eccentricity or forgetfulness on the old boys part not realising he'd heavily redacted letters from the county of her origin having been brought up in a time where racism was a fully acceptable part of a country's culture that had once had an empire that stretched across two thirds of the globe. He didn't mind when she tutted and rolled her eyes at him carrying off his bedsheets to be washed as it reminded him of his late wife Rose who had departed for a better place - Buckinghamshire. She'd finally had enough of the silly old bugger and had shacked up with another man sometime in late 2019 although the split had been amicable and she'd send him a postcard with love from her sojourns in territories around the globe that the British Empire no longer controlled in the modern day. He also sought solace in the fact they at least he didn't shit the bed though that was more down to his constipation and the fact his sphincter was held in the grip of an iron fist which he took upon calling Thatcher after his least favourite cunt, sorry, politician. Having never known political correctness was a thing until it was too late for anyone to try and correct it in him, Martin had from 1984 onwards taken to berating any Irishman he'd encountered for their fellow countryman's inability to get the job done properly in the Brighton Bombing of that year during the Conservative Conference. Weirdly no one he'd ever mentioned it to in all those years hailing from the Emerald Isle and who was of an age old enough to remember, had ever taken any offence and largely had nodded in agreement and called it a fecking shame. 

With the little money that remained in his pocket not forming enough for an entertainment budget he had to make his own much like he'd done in his youth. There's people in the East End of London who've somehow managed to live there all their lives who'll happily tell you how the city was better in their day and how you didn't have to lock your doors, conveniently forgetting to mention that no one had anything worth nicking anyways. You could let your kids play in the debris of bomb sites left after the Blitz and no one would knock on your door from social services and take them away into care. If they happened upon an unexploded bomb and their youthful mischief set it off and they lost an arm or an eye, well, that's why God gave you two of ‘em. They'll get by. A lack of money and a lack of mobility meant that entertainment largely consisted of slowly making his way to the end of the drive of the shelter complex with his good friend and neighbour Bert, some 83 years young himself. There if the weather was nice enough, they'd prop themselves up against the large red brick wall and moan about everyone that passed them by. Girls whose vocabulary had seemed to have shrunken to not much more than I know, shut up and like. Their mouths all looking like they'd gone a few rounds with Henry Cooper or Frank Bruno. You know what I mean ‘arry? Then there was their makeup applied like a Geisha girl off her tits on MDMA. The boys walking with hoods up, heads down like they'd joined a Bénédictine order but who weren't deep in prayer and contemplation but instead staring intensely at their phone and not where they were going. Occasionally, with the small and feeble weedy looking ones, he'd plant his walking stick at an angle for them to trip over and berate them. I'm an old man, you should look where you're going. Only when they were out of view would he enjoy a good chuckle with Bert. As a potential national sport they probably could have sold it to Channel 5 and picked up a few extra Bob from the repeats on Dave. 

Every second Tuesday he'd make an effort to go out there come rain or shine knowing that he'd bump into Dolly who's old man lives in one of the other shoeboxes close to his own. Even at the age of 59 she still has more sauce than Heinz and a range of reinforced bras that somehow provided the illusion that her ample bosom was still where it was supposed to be and not where they actually lived when free which was somewhere around the bottom of her rib cage. She'd take him by the arm and in doing so put an extra little spring in his step so that maybe he walked back at a pace of one mile an hour rather than at a rate normally only found in Galapagos tortoises and his good friend Bert. She didn't mind as it cut down her visiting time with her old man that had long since had a fucking clue who she was anyway. It was also nice for her that at least one old codger remembered her name. She reminded Martin of one of those old postcards you used to get from a little shop down by the sea front or the large wooden cut outs you'd put your head through and have your photo taken and put into an album in the days where people still owned actual cameras and printed the film. If you owned a camera and you wanted to be in the shot too you'd have to ask someone to take it for you and trust they wouldn't run off with it, manage to get you in focus, not cut the top of your head off, catch you mid blink or have part of their finger over the lens. If you were really flush you might have used a 36 Shot film roll rather than the standard 24 and taken two rolls over the course of a week away compared to the several hundred shots kids take on their phones everyday, 95% of which are themselves and for some bizarre reason 5% of which are what they're about to eat as if anyone gives a shit. The sum total of people that would ever see the photos largely defended on how many people you had in your family and how good your friends were at feigning giving a toss about seeing your holiday snaps. A like meant someone actually saying oh I like that one but you'd have forgotten about it after the first drink. Babycham for the wife and a pint of shandy for you because you're driving and you wanted to make sure you all got home safely after six or seven pints down the local. At least in those days when you swerved all over the road there was very little traffic and people parked their cars in their garages rather than filling them full of crap that would only see the light of day again either when they moved and people shoved it all back in a new garage or when they died and their kids chucked it all in a skip going why the fuck have they kept all this shit? Anyway the point being there weren't cars for yours to bounce off and they were much better times for it too. Didn't make that Thatcher any less of a cunt though.