Previously on Roguetrader1980….

Sorry about that over dramatized intro but after indulging in God knows how many bingeable series on Netflix recently, the previously recap voiceover seems to be the best way to open after what probably seems like an eternity between blogs, much like a new season dropping after a covid delayed hiatus, I imagine many of you have forgotten about me and need a recap on where we are.

January, ah yes that time of year with the inevitable bullshit motto “new year new me” that gets trotted out by Huns and fat fucker February gym quitters the length and breadth of the country on a daily basis. While mocking these outliers of society, this also happened to be the thing that gave me the much needed nudge to scribe this sequel to keep people enthralled as I give my own summary, not on the new year of 2023, but rather looking back over the past year of 2022, written in my own unique and inimitable style, replete with sexual innuendos and puns that have all the subtlety of a trackless tank. You may also be questioning why I am talking about new years when this was published in April?

As with all my blogs, this is about as punctual as Govia Thameslink Railway, but given how this arrived within 5 months of the intended date then, like trains that arrived outside of their scheduled time this blog can also be considered “on time.”

The real reason it is so late, is due to plugging my personal trainer and making more of the gym references, sadly after stopping using him due to the cost of living crisis and his schedule just not gelling with mine (nothing to do with his ability as a PT) he seemed to take offence at this and unfollowed me on social media, as a result I figured it better to avoid any direct references to him altogether, so had to rework this draft version which, all of which took time and delayed me getting this out there.

However I must confess that as does often happen with many other wordsmiths, I very nearly emailed this draft to a national newspaper before finishing writing the newer version.

I hear it happens to the best of us.

For no real identifiable reason, all of my musings about incidents in 2022 were weirdly comparable to Whitney Houston tracks and lyrics, hence the title I have chosen to make a play on words with, by drawing parallels with me groping her left mammary gland and the title of her 1999 hit “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay!”

So moving on to the actual content and what 2022 was for me.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life is going well, another falls spectacularly to pieces. Putting aside how relatable that is, the eagle eyed amongst you may also have had an “aha” moment and recognised that I totally stole that very PC phrase from Bridget Jones like the unashamed thief I am.

To paraphrase Helen Fielding’s words she used in Bridget Jones in my own inimitable style, you can find that no matter how joyful an experience you are currently undertaking, the dildo of fate is never far away, ready to pounce, (or perhaps should that be pound) without warning, and believe me, this thing rarely arrives lubed up.

I have to confess that I also stole that less than PC phrase as well, albeit having undergone a little tweaking. Fear not that this is where the plagiarising ends, as from here on in it is wall to wall plugs.

The point of the quotes is well made that no matter how your good life appears to be going, the next disaster is just around the corner, ready to ruin your day as well as your hairline. I’ve sadly discovered that life as an adult just seems to be one disaster after another, and in my case the disasters are not only around the corner and limited to being in front of me on this journey..

They are also behind me…

And gaining speed…

As well as above me crashing from the sky too….

And potentially in the opposite lane ready to crash through the central reservation head on…

I’ve also discovered they are not polite enough to be one after the other….

They are all at once

CONSTANTLY

NEVER ENDING!!!!

Now that I have suitably conveyed the true sense of despair that is my life, and in keeping with what disasters have derailed my blogging, my last blogs were started in good faith, but had to be hidden from public view due to the subject material being embroiled in legal proceedings that started in February 2020 and have rumbled on to now, at the point of scribing this in the dizzying heights of the Holiday Inn Express Walsall Tempus 10, the case is still awaiting judgement, with six days of courtroom appearances in March and September, including one defendant being The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, one Kwasi Kwarteng. A name few had heard of during this court case, but someone who ascended VERY quickly to one of the 3 great offices of state, shortly after his involvement in our proceedings….

(update: we got a verdict in December 2022 but sadly was not exactly what we hoped for – more on this in upcoming spin off episodes)

If and when the court case concludes I may be able to amend Now it has ended I am able to conclude the weeklong blog series, or just start again if needed. Regardless of the when, the why is that these blocks on blogging content midway through, impacted my overall mojo so I didn’t utilise the immense time I had during lockdown to blog about much else as I had f*ck all going on to actually write about, much less any motivation to do so.

Most of you visit my blogs for either the cynical sarcastic humour or the consumer rights angle, some of you may even hate me and are just stalking me for things to use to bring me down *cough cough Nigel Crook cough*

Therefore I feel that I need to prefix that despite what dire depths we will plum to during this blog, at times appearing to drown in darkness and despair, we will be surfacing back to survival, with humour being the life ring that will get us through.

1. So Emotional

The dire experiences that punctuate the last few years are often shared experiences, we have the Covid 19 pandemic and its equally shit partner in crime, the lockdown.

A global shitshow that gets 1 out 5 Trip Advisor stars from me.

Totally would NOT return to and would NOT recommend to anyone.

As terrible as the events of lockdown were, one bizarre by-product of only having social media to communicate through meant I did strike up a friendship with a straight guy who lived down the road from me. We shared walks and very intimate daily voicenotes and texts, this was a weird by-product of lockdown whereby talking to one another everyday for months it became as intimate as any relationship without anything physical ever happening. Things did appear to be building to something physical, but I got stood up for an evening at mine watching a movie with an excuse of having a busy day and not realising the time. During lockdown this excuse didn’t really hold water, other times meeting up then got met with “falling asleep” and similar. Our friendship culminated in having my birthday wallpost message on Facebook deleted the day lockdown was lifted, I sense maybe out of embarrassment at our friendship as I suspect he too felt this weird connection to a guy, but being straight this confused the hell out of him and he overanalysed how his friends would see this. Regardless of the why, this deleting my message of Happy Birthday still felt cheap and as lockdown ended, so too did this weird situational and time compressed friendship we had.

It is very weird to think that no other relationship I have ever had progressed like this and felt so nice, sharing so much emotionally with one another without some physical lust attraction underpinning it all, and without an enforced lockdown I doubt I will ever experience anything like this again.

That said I am by no means wishing for the lockdown 2020 and lockdown 2021 to attempt to go down the trilogy route purely as a means to drag this story out, but after lockdown ended, the one positive experience that I had during it of a very close emotional connection was missing and something I pined for during 2022.

So for me 2022 was quite a damp squib with work and other things in both of our lives to distract us, our friendship during the past year was pretty non-existent. However everytime I think back to those dark moments of lockdown, I get this warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach at how close emotionally I got to another human being. If my love life in 2022 had a theme, then “So Emotional” thinking back to what we shared in 2021 and lost certainly sums this up.

No smutty pun here, and that alone should tell you all need to know about how deep this thing got in my head.

2. Same Script, Different Cast

I’ve made light of this in my previous blogs and my close friends will know how I turn a lot of stuff into a joke as my way of coping, but the truth is that when I was sexually assaulted several years ago, this did end up having a lasting impact on me. Me choosing to use humour as a way to discuss this should in no means diminish what I went through as though there is some perceived tariff on suffering, with an invoice of emotions or actions that one has to settle before being deemed suitably a victim of events. Nicknaming your attacker “Pissy McRapist” is just a coping mechanism that I used. I am always eternally gratefully at how things unfolded, as when you learn this person is serving a 12 year prison sentence for an unexplained death of their partner, you start to realise how you dodged a bullet on the level of if Diane Abbott had been elected as Home Secretary in 2019.

The only reason the death of Pissy McRapist’s victim is unexplained, was that matters were complicated by him not having any memory of events through having a few too many one night. I am unsure if any of us have ever been in this situation before, but in a nice bit of foreshadowing of all of about 3 minutes, I have to say that this scenario of having a body in my house and how I would react is something I have actually thought about a great deal as the next song subject will cover.

Suffice to say my reaction would be notifying the authorities. If we were playing Pointless with Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, assuming no psychopaths were surveyed, I am pretty sure that the Pissy McRapist approach of setting the flat and the car on fire and abseiling out of the second floor window would forever be a pointless answer. They could never prove he killed him nor tried to use the car to move the body due to a lack of forensics, but you have to ask why any innocent person would do this.

If you think being sexually assaulted by someone who could go to these lengths, realising you could quite easily not be around to scribe this is pretty grim in itself, then I am sorry to say matters get much worse.

With shades of Stephen Port and how the Police handled this, when I saw Pissy McRapist in the papers, I decided to get over the embarrassment of what happened and report it. Yes you read that right, this is apparently a normal reaction to sexual assault and I have to say from personal experience, quite a chasm to traverse before talking about it.

I’ll be covering this wholly sorry saga of Police corruption in a series of separate blog entries, but the abridged version here is that after giving a statement about this in 2015, and then some 8 years later and reporting how I have been suffering unending harassment, revenge porn uploaded of me, false bank accounts and credit agreements opened in my name, fake social media accounts of me created sending people to my house to score drugs, this sexual assault is still NOT logged as a crime, with epic failings from both Northants and Thames Valley Police forces, not through procedural mistakes or human error, but through apathy, corruption and pure undiluted bias from the very top with Chief Constable Nick Adderley, all the way down to the those at the sharp end.

The short version is how Police have lied that a statement was taken, refused to comply with Subject Access Requests, deleted evidence of contacts made to them and when finally called out with my statement I gave being used in the murder investigation of Pissy McRapist being something on public record they couldn’t cover up, they changed positions.

Apparently there is no evidence I wanted to be treated as a victim of crime when giving the statement, as though writing everything down about being raped with a Police officer, signing it and being given a reference slip detailing me as “the victim” was just an average Saturday coffee morning and chat. I needed to make it clear I was not actually cool with matters and needed to make double and triple sure, this high flying member of the keystone cops, knew I was not just chewing the fat with him and wanted to be treated as a victim with this incident being logged as a crime.

If you think this was not bad enough, when logging the harassment I discovered in 2022 that the officer I reported this to, rather than bother to actually log it as a crime, he asked his senior officer that given the illegal nature of the selling drugs, prostitution and other things that these fake social media profiles of me were portraying, if there was any crimes I could be charged with.

Yes you read that entirely correct, if when approaching the Police as a victim of crime, it seems that it is too much work for them to do, they adopt the creative approach of closing the reported crime down and try to bump up their arrest figures by seeing if they can charge the victim with any crimes as he is already in the station and this presumably saves on shoeleather.

So if you have read the Baroness Casey report about the institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the MET Police and wonder if this is an isolated problem, then I am sorry to say this is endemic across all forces. While there may be the odd decent officer, the vast majority of serving Police are lazy and corrupt from the very top of the tree all the way down, and 2022 showed me time and again they will lie and cheat and cover up for one another to mask their inadequacies and prejudices, or to put it a different way if you are ever a victim of crime, just like Whitney sang……

“Lights, camera, now you’re on, Just remember you’ve been warned, Enjoy it now ’cause it won’t last, Same script, different cast”

3. Missing You

The next issue of the weird and the wonderful is where people talk about sex and being someone’s first time. Statistically many people will have been someone else’s first time, some without even knowing it. I have to say that I have had my fair share of V plates that I have taken, actually I’ve probably a lot of other people’s fair share as well. Yes cue deafening chants of me being a hoe. Perhaps people will psychoanalyse me and see a link between the aforementioned sexual assault, and the level of sexual humour I litter these blogs with as a cause and effect scenario. Given how much a decent shrink costs, I’ll take any free insight anyone wants to offer to help put my broken pieces back together.

Now being called a hoe, that I can deal with, and being someone’s first time is maybe a little niche, but it is by no means exclusive. The weird incident that I doubt many people of a certain vintage reading this blog can attest to is being someone’s LAST time!

Yes you did read that right!

No I did not commit murder after doing the deed.

I did however have the very weird experience of having a date die on me, just days after we did the deed. To clarify (so far as I know and I am relying on the inquest here) I played no part whatsoever in the death. I just figured I had been ghosted or they lost interest in messaging me as much and things had fizzled out. Suffice to say after finding out the truth this puts a whole new spin on the phrase being ghosted.

Having the knowledge of someone dying after your date really opened up all kind of scenarios running through my overactive imagination.

• Was the date or the sex THAT bad it finished them off?
• What would you do if someone died while staying over in your bed and you wake up next to a corpse?
• What if, even worse they die whilst on the job?

I luckily avoided all of these but still felt this weird sense of involvement. A large part of some poor mother’s grieving is going through her child’s final days, trying to piece together their movements and find some explanation for what caused this. I found myself thinking “should I offer any support at filling in blanks?”

The content of our NSFW Whatsapp conversation in the days leading up to shuffling off the mortal coil was probably already enough to traumatise the poor woman enough without me adding more fuel to the fire.

Still the point is well made that someone in their early 20s dying randomly of a health condition, really does mean we all have a death date stamped on us at birth, a specific date when fate will determine that our allotted time on earth has expired and we get served our eviction notice by the grim reaper.

The line from Missing You reciting how “There was so much of your dreams, That were never told” seemed perfectly apt for one who died so young

This situation was quite an introspective one (that means looking inside yourself for the uninitiated, and despite the comedy potential of filth usually seen on this blog I’ve not gone down that route ((there’s another pun within a pun there inside itself (((there is another, Christ on a bike this is getting very Inception like isn’t it))) shame on you if you read into that in a filthy way)) I am just going to leave the puns to your imagination) now where was I, yes introspection, the art of looking into ones self…..

As mentioned a death of anyone can often leave you thinking what mark you will make on people’s lives when you shuffle off the mortal coil, and if your death will end up as some referential footnote on some cynical consumer rights, wannabe comedian writer’s blog?

This could however all be some elaborate hoax and the most convoluted way to avoid ever speaking to me or seeing again without incurring all my usual rage and shaming on my Instagram, if so then I’m filled with as much respect as I am anger.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that with 2 deaths and a failed romance, my summation of the year in the rear view mirror couldn’t get much more grim. Sadly there is still possibly worse to come as this blog is packing more bucket kicking than a Final Destination movie.

4. I Learned From The Best

I found out (weirdly enough last time I was in in a hotel at this same location on Tempus 10 listening to the M6 whizzing by) through scrolling my social media feed that my friend Cher had died a few weeks earlier in a road traffic accident, I had done some legal work for her and still have all her files from taking her bank to court after they ripped her off, the same bank I used to work for and was a whistleblower for fraud….not totally relevant unless you’re a conspiracy nut

Finding out a close friend has died is bad enough, but doing so while scrolling social media and trying to make sense of it is quite the sucker punch. For someone still in the prime of her life with a loving family around them really makes you realise how fleeting life is. Without taking away from the family’s grief, this hit me pretty hard too as Cher was the perfect juggler of family, friends, responsibility and social enjoyment. She never complained or moaned about others, she quietly made the best of a situation and got on with it, providing for and helping others where she could. She was the kind of person you always wanted as a supportive friend or co-worker and a much loved person you would aspire to be like.

Her passing has left a very big Cher shaped hole in mine and others lives, and even though she was named after the great musician Cher, it is still Whitney saying how I learned From The Best that resonates with this utter nadir of sorrow that punctuated the middle of the year in June of 2022.

You will all know that we also lost the Queen in 2022, irrespective of your thoughts on her you need to admire her dedication and service and how she could sum up a situation succinctly and with dignity and poise. If we cast our mind back 30 years to the start of 1993, she commented on her take on 1992 after it provided her with her children’s affairs culminating in divorce, several scandals and her Windsor Castle home catching fire, this all amounted to what she deemed “annus horribilis” translating to a horrible year.

Don’t get wrong, there were some good points in 2022 and I am grateful for many things such as having a roof over my head, sufficient work to keep me able to fund my home and heating and not living in a warzone of Ukraine, but sadly 2022 will not be a year that I will look back on fondly nor wish to go through again as the debit column far outweighed the credit column.

So while counting my blessings for all I have but while still voicing my woes of the horrid toll 2022 took on me, in honour of QEII I can borrow from her Latin phrases, with my summing up of 2022.

If 1992 was as QEII put it “annus horribilis” a horrible year….. then for me the only way to describe 2022 was “annus anus” an arsehole of a year!

If you enjoyed this cynical take on matters and want to know more about the subplots above, then rest assured there are more juicy details coming. #Police #Corruption #NickAdderley #NorthantsPolice #KwasiKwarteng #Queen #Death