By and by things happen for the worse. Ghost of the bloke from the car park keeps coming back and back, repeating on them like bad curry from the Taj Mahal on High Street and freaking everyone out. The haunting drives them crazy and the land itself is poisoned too. Crops won’t grow, river won’t flow. All politics schemes of the kids go wrong, the gods desert them, dead man brings disaster. Some bitch photographer called Dorothea Lange starts hanging round the shack, taking pictures. Before long the river bed looks like crazy paving at Cromwell Street and ma’s tits are dry too.

Come Springtime the whole family goes walking into town not as astronaut Kennedy princes but as paupers. They barefoot, they ragged. You can see their ribs and the people in the mall look at them funny cos they dressed so unfashionable. GAP don’t sell that kind of thing anymore. Dumb clothes and wide empty smiles.

Crash Family Robinson end up living in an underpass. The kids beg. Ma drinks and dad reads. He reads about HEAVEN and REDEMPTION, he reads about POLITICS. He reads anything he can.

Through the year of 39 the family die one by one. Palsy, dropsy, plague, AIDS, Clap, two murders and a suicide. The babes of course are taken into care – adoption fodder for rich non-whites overseas – never to be heard of again. Only Blood Head, of the others, survives – getting a job in a pub on the Manor Estate and acting as an unofficial bouncer in the Bookies round the corner.

Days, years and months pass. Blood Head works hard, stays warm in the winters, gets stock in the Bookies and invests it wisely. Before long he is head of the company – a monument to hard work. He marries, has kids of his own, gets a life. But no matter how much Bahaman Holidays and Rum Fucking Punch on his desk or in his wallet there’s a photo what shows the CRASH FAMILY ROBINSON all round their table in the outback, in happier times. Each day Blood Head still looks at that picture and each day he cries.

In the wings of history the ghost of the queer bloke laughs loudly at how it all turned out and shuffles his chains muttering the old lie:

Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.

Some kinds of dying take longer than others.

Wendy’s Daughter

Wendy’s Daughter

When Wendy went on TV’s LOW BUDGET QUICK QUIZ the host Bob Peter asked her where she came from and Wendy told him; “Hell”.

Her words had a ring of truth abt them – the place she lived was near Doncaster (near junction 38) and various gangs had run long there and run loose too, breaking windows and stealing milk on the council estates.