I’ll try to keep this short – not least because after so long writing nuffink, I’m not sure I have the energy to blather on – but I must ask you to dwell awhile on what I’m banging on about.

The concept of trust has always been very dear to me, probably because my family history required that I use a lot of it. Briefly put, I knew I had two brothers and two sisters in Canada, plus a father, and I knew that my mother had left them all behind and was devoting her life to bringing up me… so somehow my trust in her needed to somehow accommodate the fact that she’d left the rest of my family a few thousand miles away.

Maybe that’s been my (unrealised) problem through most of my life: blind faith in what I needed to believe in order for my life to make sense. Leaving the sometimes painful personal stuff aside for a moment to deal with life’s practicalities, I therefore found it easy to trust all of the institutions, organisations and various human-groupings that were supposed to have my best interests at heart.

The twist came in my early school years, when I learnt a great lesson from our headmaster.

Background: I used to live in a part of South London that that nice Mr Hitler had tried to re-arrange with his sexy aeroplanes. Lots of bomb sites, disused factory buildings and basically amazing playgrounds in which a twelve-year-old could immerse himself for hours. One day, three of those twelve-year-olds were passing the time chucking hand grenades (i.e. rocks) at the already broken windows of a factory that hadn’t produced anything for many a year. Not from the street you understand – from within the wasteland that constituted the ex-works’ car park.

Scene of the crime(s)

Some snotty little herbert told a teacher, who reported us to Mr Lewin, the head.

Now, I was a good kid – mostly because I wanted to be so – the rebel in me restricting his activities to not liking mushrooms, sweetcorn or tea. Being sent to the headmaster was scarier than anything I’d ever experienced.

So there we were, sitting up straight (but inwardly cowering) in the dread Mr Lewin’s office, expecting the unimaginable worst, which would at best be painful, and worst… unimaginable.

After a little talk about how we’d let him down, the school down… etc, he said that we needed to learn about or local heritage in order for us to appreciate what had been laid down before us.

“You will write a twenty page essay on the history of Southwark, using the local library, interviews with your families and the school’s and your own resources… but not in the school’s time. It will be illustrated and referenced and properly presented in a folder, and you will bring it to me in [I think] two weeks’ time.”

Gulp. Relief that no physical pain was involved. Utter panic that none of us had ever had to do anything as remotely academic as research stuff in a library. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: the perfect punishment… although we didn’t quite see it that way.

But yes it was the perfect punishment. During the next two weeks, you couldn’t get any of us out of the local library – unless it was to sit around to discuss how the building of London’s bridges had so influenced the affluence of the borough.

By the end of the fortnight, we had actually transformed as bright little humans, eyes and brains wide open to the possibilities of thought, experience and what the world had to offer. How proud we were when we took our beautifully designed, meticulously researched historical masterpiece to show our oh-so-clever head.

How utterly, damnably, humiliatingly crushed we were, we he took it from us, chucked it to one side and told us that he hoped we’d learnt our lesson. The fucker probably never even bothered to open it, and we certainly never heard about it again.

Yes, I learnt my lesson: trust in the world, until it fucks you over.

Just about all of the institutions, organisations and other human-groups have now fucked me over.

• The banks have (in fact constantly) given me a right old rogering.
• The government has evolved in such a way that its only raison d’être is to be voted back in: there is no democracy any more, because all politicians must lie as a matter of course (e.g. no of course you don’t have to pay so much tax with us… we’ll find the money from elsewhere for your hospitals, infrastructure, pensions and transport).
• The media has become totally rapacious in its need to tell stories that keep the majority happy and nodding in blank-brained agreement.
• The religions have broken out of their churches and gone to war against us, each other and anyone else who disagrees with their corrupt, stupid, inane, ridiculous bollocks  (in some cases, themselves). Plus fiddling with our children, of course.
• The youth (yeah – the yoof) have totally bought in to everything that was there before them, sporting corporate logos, spraying/gelling their hair with products that make them look as though they just got up, making ‘music’ that’s utterly derivative, safe and untroubled by the need for actual musicianship, and wearing white fucking trainers. All so disappointing.
• The BBC’s gone ape-shit-bongo-crazy, eating itself from the inside by hiring number-crunching suits who have no sense of the fact that it’s the greatest media organisation in the entire history of the universe and should be fought for by people with wit, brains and yes, love for what they do.
• The Bank of England has just appointed a new big cheese who’s Canadian – no, that’s not the biggest problem (damn foreigners, coming over here and taking our jobs) – no, it’s that fact that he’s ‘ex’ Goldman Sachs. Good fucking grief: during and after all the shit that’s been going on, does nobody see what’s happening here?! These bloody people have somehow shafted most of the world in the most brutal, in-your-face, so-what-you-gonna-do-about-it way, and not only are they getting away with it, but they’re ending up in fucking charge!
• Oh, and our parents, for finally leaving without having the good grace to tell us why oh why oh why.

Calm, calm.

So yes, I’ve lost my trust in just about everything and everyone. I no longer give a flying fuck about what any institution thinks of me and the only things now that keep me on an even keel are the two other bits of my home, Darinka and Isabella, plus my friends, family, all those people who want a better world, all the little children… OK, I love you all.

But I don’t trust you the tiniest little bit.