I’ve been sitting my sister’s house for the last week as they’ve been away. Now perhaps I shouldn’t have, but when I saw it there, I just knew that I had to. “Had to what?”, I hear you call. Well it’s like this, I’d gone ostensibly to water the tomatoes, but since I needed a pee I went upstairs to the toilet. On my way up there I couldn’t help noticing that my brother in law had a copy of Frankie Boyle’s book, which is somewhat provocatively entitled, My Shit Life So Far. Mmm.

It is a very illuminating read. Especially from the point of view of his drug and alcohol addictions. He claims, not unreasonably, that the alcohol that he has consumed over his lifetime has resulted in his forgetting certain chunks of it, whilst the vast quantities of drugs which he ingested lead directly to many interesting pieces that he has written. That got me wondering if it wold have been possible to come up with some of the more obviously drug tinged music and literature of the later twentieth century without having first taken them. Or at least once a few great songs or novels or whatever had been produced, surely it was then possible to simulate their effects when coming up with further such works? Who knows, perhaps some of the great works, produced supposedly under the influence were in fact not produced under that influence or influences.