A music video that I starred in directed by a colleague, the final part of my Narcissism trilogy, a blogging project that should take all of February, a strange story about my weed-smoking former neighbour and another neighbour who had a nasty accident, and of course the end of the dullness that is January. This in turn will lead to new ideas. New projects. New opportunities.
I’m always on the lookout for new places to try for tea on a Monday night. This week I found the eccentric but hearty Pieminister on Deansgate, and indulged in their pie and mash classic meal.
Saturday night was tapas night at Saddleworth’s Reclamation Rooms. Parents and I shared a range of meats, veg and bread. Well worth a look if you’re in the area.
If you haven’t yet, read Part 1.
It took years for me to figure out the collective mindset of Hicks and his group. I always wondered, why did they want me to come out with them at all? What did they get out of it? Before I explain, there are a couple of other examples I’ve endured without realising.
Around the time this was happening, mid 2010s, I had a manager called HS. Although I’m reluctant to discuss work, this was a long time ago and this woman doesn’t work for my employer any more. Traditionally good-looking, tall, a go-getter, young-and-upwardly-mobile, HS had moved to my building from head office, where she’d apparently well suited the corporate world.
My office (now closed) wasn’t anything like that. The visitors we had lived with certain health and cerebral conditions, and they preferred it more homely and laid back. That obviously didn’t go down to well with HS. She joined the team a little after I did, where she realised that the reception work I was doing wasn’t really right for me. There was too much happening at the same time, and too many individual responsibilities to remember, so she was right to take me off that work.
I went to a back office in the building, but immediately, she gave me percentage work to do.
I explained this wouldn’t be right for me, that numeracy is a particular weakness due to my memory difficulties. When memory issues are lifelong, performing multi-step tasks like maths equations were always going to be particularly difficult.
HS responded with nothing other that a platitudinous pep talk, the ‘I believe this is something you can do’ spiel.
The next day I gave her a copy of my psych assessment, ironically that was performed and written in the same building a few years before. It clearly outlined a problem with numeracy. She reluctantly took the percentage work off me, but then replaced it with seemingly endless addition project, counting up the numbers of people coming through the building and their reasons for attending. Again, I told her this is not appropriate for me.
Her response? ‘There’s nothing else for you to do.’
Science news site Psychology Today tells us ‘Narcissistic overachieving elicits some of the worst traits of narcissism, including grandiosity, egocentricity, conceit, false superiority, condescension, snobbishness, and contempt.’
I remember HS coming into my team’s room one time and telling us, out of the blue, ‘Everyone was celebrating in my office because I smashed a PB in the gym this morning.’ She was met with a certain air of bemusement.
After she’d left the room, a teammate commented, ‘I don’t give a stuff.’
‘Everyone was celebrating? It’s all a bit North Korea, isn’t it?’ I asked. ‘Dear Leader has smashed a PB! We must celebrate!’
Another incident involved a woman going through the process of being assessed and diagnosed wth autism. She'd been placed into our office as part of her treatment, possibly on a voluntary basis. The work HS gave her to do was so inappropriate and beyond the client's abilities that the woman burst into tears. HS refuse to take the work off her, instructing 'no more tears.'
In retrospect, I should have grown a set and gone to the union. HS eventually resigned. After this, another manager told a story of HS’ move from head office, where someone had warned the other manager: ‘she thinks she’s really good, but she’s not.’ In essence, she ignored the needs of others around her, something WebMD defines as a key trait of narcissism.
The revelation of yet ANOTHER police officer being done for rape – this time the Met’s David Carrick – reminds me of a pretty sour story from either 2004 or 2005, from some girl I met while working in Walkabout in Oldham.
I’d apparently met her at Halloween, when I’d been dressed in some old fireman outfit that a university friend had donated to me. I thought it looked ridiculous, but… women in the bar had other opinions. I pulled a LOT of girls. They mostly got angry with me and I collected virtually no glasses all night.
Some weeks later I got a midweek text.
Hello mr sexy fireman.. how come you not in work? Nothing to look at without you here! Gem – the pissed up one who grabbed u! X
Well, that doesn’t number it down, I thought.
I went out to meet Gem in my local bar area a few nights later, midweek. She looked kinda familiar. Dark hair, a little younger than me, okay looking. Total loudmouth, it seemed. No idea whether I’d kissed her or not the night I met her.
Quite quickly I felt like I didn’t want to know. I got serious chav vibes from her and all of her mates. Well, I met her in Walkabout. What do you expect. I should have called it and gone home, but she invited me to an after party, and something made me follow my nose.
I’m not sure who’s house it was – some guy’s, who she incessantly flirted with in front of me. We’ll call him Pete, as I have no clue what his name was.
You can have her, I thought.
We all watched Monsters Inc, which is regarded as a classic Pixar movie these days, but I only saw it that one time, and my memory of it is tarnished by the scenario.
After the film, we were sat on the couch and Gem told me she was a nursing student and she had uni the next day. Here she was getting steaming, pulling an all-nighter. (In retrospect, maybe chronic underfunding isn’t the only problem impacting the NHS.) She described having public sex with men outside bars. She complained that she was "going to die" when she got into class.
Gem told me that, a few months ago, she’d found herself in a fight with another girl outside a bar. For my American readers, a ‘fight’ isn’t an argument. She had traded blows.
“Can you see this scar on my hand?” She showed me something barely visible but behind her highest knuckle. “That’s when I was punching this girl on the pavement.” She explained, and tried to justify, that she’d pinned this girl to the floor and began punching her in the head. She was drunk, unsurprisingly, and her hand slipped and she’d punched the pavement to one side of her opponent’s skull. Gem couldn’t feel it, though, presumably due to a combination of alcohol-induced numbness and adrenaline, and the knuckle had slid back into her hand.
At this point, sirens. A man’s hands had gripped her and she was flung into a brightly lit Transit van, into a small corner cage, and taken to the local cells to sober up.
After she’d nodded off, in her words, she didn’t get much chance to sleep. Two coppers rushed in and beat the shit out of her. They dumped her on the street the next morning.
“I didn’t report it,” Gem claimed. “Who’s going to believe the word of a drunk 19-year-old over 2 coppers? So anyway, I went to Pete’s and we drove to the police station and waited. We saw a few coming out, so we knew a shift had ended, but these 2 guys were taking their time. Eventually they did come out and Pete filled them in.”
Pete's party dragged on further until it was time for him to go to work – some blue-collar job requiring a van.
He dropped me off first. “Aren’t you going to give him a kiss?” he asked Gem. I was kinda relieved that she wouldn’t.
Despite the lack of a spark between myself and the delightful lady Gem, she persisted in texting me all morning while I was trying to sleep.
My mum says I don’t have to go in, she informed me. Probably for the best. This went on for a few hours while I was trying to sleep, until she said, If you don’t want to talk, just let me know so I’m not wasting my time.
I should have told her not to talk to me. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I just wanted to figure people out. In retrospect, there’s little to figure out about a drunk chav who lets guys rail her outside Conservative clubs. We talked via text for a little bit.
The next weekend, Gem came into Walkabout while I was working. She couldn’t see me any more because, she said, she was pregnant.
Then why the fuck, I thought, would you come into a rough as fuck bar full of idiots kicking off and getting turfed out all night? You don’t think you’re putting your baby at risk? But then, I’m a firm believer that, although we’re all different, you get certain types of people in certain types of bars. Gem was far from the only lunatic I dealt with specifically in Walkabout.
I’m proud to say I haven’t been to any Walkabout outlets in a long, long time. And I’ll keep it that way.
The latest in a series of neurotic blogging projects is this one: shin rolling.
Between 2000 and 2007 I trained at Knuckles Muay Thai, a gym in Oldham teaching the Thai martial art. The sport has its roots in Buddhism and can be traced back to 650BC.
A lot of the fighters at the gym would roll down their shin bones with a kitchen rolling pin to round of the edge of said bone. This in turn would kill off the nerves and prevent pain when blocking kicks (done with the shin). It’s something I tried to get into a routine of doing, but I was too busy at college when I first started training.
Some people roll, some people scrape wood down their shins (bad for the skin I expect) and some people tap their shins with a thin stick, all to condition the bone from a sharp tender edge to a round, dull edge.
22 years later, I occasionally throw a few kicks on the bag in my local gym, although I think the staff aren’t too keen about it. Apparently, it breaks the concrete in the middle of the bag, and it forces all the stuffing out eventually. I’ve not seen anyone else throwing kicks, so… can I take credit?
Anyway, I’ve always found pain to be a big problem in training. Shin rolling would have been a great benefit to me at that time, but with age comes wisdom and all that. It’s been my intention for years to get back into shin rolling. January is the perfect month as no-one is doing anything.
If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I like to dual things – reading and planking, reading and cycling, chin-ups and a Netflix series, etc. I decided on a season of Viking show The Last Kingdom. I watched Season 2 in a day and rolled down my shin bone the whole time.
All of this was hard. Not just the pain, but the angle. The sitting on the floor, leaning forward, over a slight gut that wasn’t there when I was training in Muay Thai, whilst looking up at the screen, trying to follow a plot. Not great for posture. I tried the couch, but that wasn’t much better. Too soft, too much movement. I found it’s important to keep your foot flat on the floor when doing this. The temptation is to lift your foot, but this activates the tibialis anterior, the strip of muscle that helps control your foot, and when tensed covers and protects the shin bone. A flat foot allows the rolling pin to flatten the bone.
As for Last Kingdom, I love the Viking era but, goddamn, it’s complicated. It’s not spoon-fed condensed history, like History Channel’s Vikings show. Thank God (Odin?) for Wikipedia synopses. Season 2 sees protagonist Utrecht – born Anglo Saxon but sold into Viking culture as a child – wrestling with his loyalties while living in 878AD England, all the while trying to reclaim his ancestral homelands. If I’ve got that right.
You’ve really got to concentrate, which is difficult when you’re trying to flatten both shin bones with a piece of wood. I don’t know if this has had a positive effect, and I won’t until I can get on the bag at the gym. Really, a little bit of this every day will eventually deaden the bone and turn it into a fighting tool. Really, a solid binge that took 8 episodes of an hour each, punctuated with regular breaks due to pain, isn’t going to immediately condition shins. Perhaps a short episode per day might be more appropriate.
Duh.
Shaggy dog story, this. Bear with me.
Back in April ‘17, on a whim, I decided to trek up to Newcastle on my tod for a Miss Swimsuit UK competition. I’d blogged about the Manchester heats previously, like this Manchester heat from 2016, and I’d been on nights out in Newcastle prior to that. It’s a great city. I figured it would be a challenge to travel there alone and see what happened. The events were fun and the special guests – cast from Ex on the Beach and Love Island – were usually friendly people. I got talking to couple of girls, Vikki and Emmerald. Emmerald Barwise is a professional pin-up model.
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| Newcastle Miss Swimsuit heat |
This week, Emmerald was a subject on Channel 4’s Know Your Shit, a programme about bowel movements and gut health. Episode 1, featuring Emmerald, is available on the Channel 4 website, along with the rest of the series.
The producers grasped the nettle (without wiping with it) and interviewed brave contributors who have problems in that, uh, area. It’s all delivered in a trendy and quite matter-of-fact way, with the intention of (I guess) flushing away the taboo around pooing. Contributors stepped forward with their problems, and medical experts in the field of proctology advised them on how to poo properly.
News to me that Emmerald had these issues, but then I haven’t seen her since 2019 after she invited me to another Miss Swimsuit competition. She didn’t, at the time, however, tell me where this competition was. I couldn’t find much info online. On the night of the event, she’d not replied.
This is where things went dumb.
I decided to head out to Manchester and see if I could figure it out. There was no publicity over social media, certainly not from the Miss Swimsuit UK account. Eventually, a few Instagram stories started to emerge, from reality TV stars who tend to judge hte competition or just appear as a guest.
I pinned the building down to an office block in Spinningfields. Just out of curiosity – of I-started-so-I’ll-finish mentality – I waited to see who came out. The Miss Swimsuit CEO emerged, as did Emmerald, and a few women (presumably competitors). They got in a taxi and headed to Cirque, at the time a newly opened club in the former Press Club unit on Deansgate. The traffic was that bad I could walk faster than they were driven.
I spoke to Emmerald outside the club, and she was predictably standoffish. She’d got guestlist for her group. She left me outside.
I felt a bit guilty for practically stalking her, but, for fuck’s sake, she invited me out. She told me about the event. I went home and blocked her on all platforms.
It was just on a whim this week that I decided to have a look at her insta and saw that she’s a contributor to the aforementioned poo programme. I unblocked, but didn’t follow her.
There were a few other Miss Swimsuit UK competitions that I attended, some with Emmerald. Back in 2017 she needed a lift to Liverpool, where she was competing in a heat, so I figured I’d go with her and write up the event afterwards. There’s a lot, however, that didn’t make it into the blog post.
After the competition, there was an afterparty in Heaven, the gay club. There’s another (non-gay) story to tell about that, but that’s another blog post. After that afterparty, a few of us headed to The Hilton, where someone had booked a room, I’m guessing the Miss Swimsuit CEO.
A room of about 6 of us sat talking, telling jokes and stories ‘til the sun came up. It seems we’d made a bit of noise. A large, African security guard knocked on, telling us there’d been complaints. One of the guys had answered the door, and was trying to placate the guard. We’ll keep it down.
Meanwhile, Emmerald has stripped out of her dress. “Watch this,” she says, pulling her knickers down. She approaches the guy from behind. “Babe?” she asks, in full few of the guard. “Are you coming back to bed?”
The guard toddled off, and so did Emmerald and I not long after (and after she’d but her clothes back on, obviously), back to Manchester.
Episode 2 airs this Tuesday, Ch4, 8pm.
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| Manchester Miss Swimsuit heat |
Back in 2015 I cut out a whole bunch of people that I had been ‘mates’ with for 7 years. It’s now been as long since I saw them as I’d spent hanging around with them.
In that time, I’ve done my therapy. I’ve been in the support groups. I’ve read a lot of books on psychology, on people, on human behaviour. I’ve learned a lot. Very recently, I’ve realised this group of people were narcissists. And they used me.
Rather than a standard piss-and-moan about something that happened ages ago, I want to warn people so that they don’t fall into the pitfalls that I repeatedly did. A narcissist may not come to you saying, ‘I am brilliant’ (although they might). If they are slightly less subtle, how might we spot them?
To start with, what exactly is a narcissist? Is it just someone who loves themselves? WebMD describes it as ‘extreme self-involvement to the degree that it makes a person ignore the needs of those around them.’
Bearing in mind, this particular bunch had known each other since they were 11, and went to the same private school. To get in, an applicant would need to pass an entrance exam and their parents today would pay £12,600p.a. in tuition fees. This kind of environment is known to foster arrogance and self-entitlement. This group would refer to a ‘hierarchy’ that they claimed informally existed in the school. I met them when we were in their mid 20s and I stayed mates with them ‘til we were in our early 30s.
Then I came to my senses.
They were incredibly self involved, and definitely put their needs above mine. They were obsessed with their local drinking places, a bar strip so utterly shit that both Panorama and Cops with Cameras would film their TV shows there as they knew there’d be a cavalcade of drunk knobheads kicking off every weekend. Most of these people would be blue collar, low-skilled and low-paid workers blowing their wages on booze. My group were in management positions.
Yet they were, just like most other people on Oldham’s Yorkshire street, desperate to prove themselves. One of them, we’ll call him Hicks, smashed up his hand in a street fight then went into work in his office two days later, overseeing his team.
Years after growing a set and ditching this group, and after stumbling across an online article, it dawned on me that this group were narcissists. It also dawned on me that all the signs were there, and had been completely oblivious to them. After a bit of research it turns out what I’d been subjected to was Narcissistic Supply, a need to be watched by other people: to have an audience.
Until I was maybe 29/30, I lacked the confidence to simply say, ‘no thanks, that’s not my kind of thing.’ I’d get myself roped into all sorts of shit nights out – and with numerous dodgy characters in various groups of mates – all because I couldn’t stand up to others and say no. (I say no a lot now, to many people’s dismay.) I’d find myself protesting, saying I didn’t want to go there, only for the main culprit, Hicks, telling me, ‘but it isn’t about where you go. It’s about who you’re with.’ He would say, ‘We’re you’re mates. If you don’t come out with us, what are you going to do?’
I was usually, by choice, designated driver. When I was learning to drive, my instructor told me that when waiting at a red light, you must apply the handbrake to secure the car. If someone runs into the back of you, and they slam you into the path of oncoming traffic, you are partially liable as you hadn’t secured your vehicle. RAC seem to confirm this.
Ferro and Hicks, who both also drove with full licenses, thought this was absurd. They were so infuriated by this that they would call me ‘an actual physical retard.’
This is abuse.
Of course, I didn’t recognise it as such. It would be dismissed as ‘banter.’ When you lack confidence, you find yourself ushered into the ‘audience’ role – there so the narcissist has someone to watch them.
Back in 2012 I went to Warehouse Project with Hicks and maybe a couple of others. We’d not particularly discussed how we were going to get there, but Hicks told me a few of them would meet at mine. Immediately, they were taking cocaine in my bathroom. Regrettably, I partook too under the assumption we’d be getting a taxi.
I drove to Trafford Park.
Thankfully, I was fine. Nothing happened. But why would Hicks do this? An intelligent bloke, in a management position in work. Why would he not stop and think, wait, this is a bad idea? And why didn’t I? But to my defence, I’m brain damaged and was in special needs in school. He’s privately educated. It makes no sense.
I fell into the same patterns of victimisation until 2015, where I went on a stag do. The weekend, based in a European holiday destination, was a few weeks prior to the wedding of one of the group. We’ll call him Ferro. There was a fancy dress theme, and I wore an outfit that involved a plastic helmet that rested on the head and the bridge of the nose. As the helmet was round, and shiny, there was some urge from these neolithic yuppies to slap me over the head, cutting the helmet’s visor into the nose. I was walking around the town with blood all over my face. You can see the cuts here:
I had met this group through Hicks, whom I had trained in martial arts with for some years. Another member, we’ll call him Crowe, I hadn’t seen since I was first in the group. He’d fucked off to Dubai or somewhere to teach sports, I gather. Now he was back in the UK and had joined the stag do.
He started to ask me about the training I’d done. I hadn’t said five words before it dawned on me what he was going to say in response. I was right.
‘Yeah, it doesn’t mean shit though. I could batter you whenever I want. But I won’t, ‘cause you’re a mate.’
Bullshit. He, like everyone else, still felt the primitive urge to slap me around. And while he was saying this, it dawned on me he’d said it before, years ago, when I was giving him a lift. It also dawned on me that the reason I didn’t do anything with his sister – who had tried it on with me a number of times – was that I couldn’t stand him. I just hadn’t connected the dots. I brought this up with Hicks, and he dismissed the situation. It was ‘only a joke,’ he ‘didn’t mean it,’ etc. Even when Crowe squared up to Hicks’ brother-in-law-to-be, Hicks only made a passing comment that it ‘wasn’t a good situation’ and that ‘if any two people were going to kick off it would be them.’
After the stag do I turned up at the reception, cuts still healing, after which I didn’t speak to them again. I’d been in enough therapy to know better than to keep meeting them. After blocking them on 3 social media platforms, I never heard from them.
After dragging my weight down from a Mirtazipine-induced 90kg to a drug-free 72kg, I allowed myself a few cheat meals. 2 months on and I’m now back up to 77kg. This can’t go on, or I’ll be back at top weight, even without antidepressants. And that’s, well, depressing.
This week I made an attempt to burn off fat in one long endurance project at the gym. This time, my plan was to start at 14.1kph on the treadmill, something I could do for 10 minutes a decade ago. (Then I went to Ibiza. Make of that what you will.) I wanted to perform a series of runs,with abs work in between, each time bringing the speed down until the pace was comfortable enough for me to run for 10 full minutes.
On Thursday 12th I got into the gym just after lunchtime, after a long sleep and a hearty breakfast. I was 77.6kg. I warmed up on the cross trainer for 10 mins. Then I did some abs. Then I started running. Here are the speeds and lengths of time I could run before gassing out:
14.1kph 5:00
14.0kph 4:00
13.9kph 3:00
13.8kph 3:15
13.7kph 3:00
13.6kph 3:15
13.5kph 3:15
13.4kph 3:15
13.3kph 3:30
13:2kph 2:30
13.1kph 2:30
13.0kph 2:45
12.9kph 3:00 (Here I started to feel a slight twinge in the outside of my left knee)
12.8kph 3:00 (At this point I knew something wasn’t right with my knee and I didn’t want to push it. The back of my right knee was also starting to hurt and my car was a 5 minute walk away from the gym, up a hill. With age comes wisdom. This 40-year-old called it a day.)
I left the gym weighing 76.8kg. I lost 800g in 4 hours. Pathetic.
But whatever. I’d been meaning to try this particular workout to see how slow I’d have to run to do so for the full 10 mins. It seems I’d have to do 1 run per session if I want to keep my knees in working order to find this out. But then, the results of each of these runs would be better as I’d have more recovery time (usually at least a day).
I may try that.
Before I get into this, I’m the patient. Not a doctor. Don’t copy me.
I made a decision in March of last year to come off Mirtazapine, an antidepressant that I’d been taking for 4 years. I went down to a dose every 2 days, then ran out in June. The reason: it was making me fat, and bringing me down. The whole point of being on antidepressants… well, I shouldn’t have to explain, but the weight gain was in itself harming my mental health. I came down from 90.1kg at my heaviest to 72.2kg. (Sadly I’m somewhat heavier than this now, around 76-77kg.)
Yesterday I went for a routine check-up with a doctor. I’m seeing a different one every time, it would seem, as I’m sure are many these days.
Things are pretty positive. Blood tests came back good. Cholesterol is a little high, but has come down since the last check-up (although I can’t remember when that was). I’m below average for my age.
Coming off Mirtazapine will have been the driving factor behind this success. I really need to maintain my weight and stop buying junk food like a child. If I’d just do this, I could stay at a healthy 72kg instead of bouncing around all over the place. The progress I’d make at the gym would be a lot more consistently evident.
So… Let’s go back to what I called social dieting – only cheating on diet if I’m with other people. I have many other fitness plans to act on this year. But let’s start with this.