No stranger to the P45 - Dan W.Griffin (the mitten read aloud .TXT) 📗

When it comes to rates of alpha decay and spontaneous fission, particularly in relation to the isotropic content of spent nuclear fuel, one finds that about 75% of the total content is due to Plutonium240, a figure we arrive at via a study beginning with a particular alpha decay rate of Uranium235. Any simpleton knows that rate is 7.94x10-4 (dis/sec-g), thus we determine our conclusion from the even more obvious rate for Plutonium242 of 1.44x108.
Oops. Sorry. Wrong book.
I’d very recently started a new job. I was White Van Man: hurtling along the M4 at ninety towards my (soon to be evicted from) flat. My battle of wits with the Mayor of London’s army of sour-faced parking attendants (or Bastards, as I prefer to call them) over for another week. My friend Jon phoned to ask how I was, what was I up to, and now, considering my latest vocation, just how many jobs had I actually ever had?
It was a question that occupied my mind long after I’d reached home, much of the remainder of the journey having been spent reminiscing about crippling the faintly-famous, being pursued by Oasis-seeking paparazzi in a limousine with Noel Gallagher’s wife-to-be, upsetting the Russian Mob, and accidentally causing eleven thousand pounds worth of damage to a restaurant in Blackpool as a result of my ineptitude with an industrial belt sander. For almost the entirety of that return journey I had sat grinning like an idiot, my foot pressed hard against the accelerator pedal as the engine screamed like a bag of lawyers in a vice.
Arriving home, shortly after wading through the piles of unopened bills, threats and court summons I fired up my certifiably-insane laptop, waited impatiently as it whined, whirred, beeped and crunched into life and then for no apparent reason rebooted itself, and twenty minutes later set about listing each and every job, role or vocation throughout my sometimes surreal, frequently chaotic, and quite absurd career. Ninety-nine: the final tally. The mention of which to one friend met with uncontrolled hilarity and to my parents’ complete horror, shortly before they disowned me.
Unable to ignore that ridiculous figure I continued to recall those rather odd incidents of leaping from a blazing BMW with a pistol in my hand in a desperate, albeit significantly flawed attempt to impress a girl whom three weeks previously had been entirely oblivious to my existence. My stalker, herself as dumb as a bag of hammers, a flying crocodile, a bizarre time-travelling incident with the actress, Jenny Agutter, and, of course, my attempted assassination at the hand of a tree-hugging hedgemonkey while getting pleasantly drunk with the comedian, Johnny Vegas.
I thought too about each of the business ventures that I’d attempted as time after time I’d embarked upon World domination: my antipreneurial endeavours, if you will. And I recalled my attempts to become an internet millionaire, a movie producer and a nightclub impresario, albeit not all at the same time. I had attempted product design too, attempted to sell fortune cookies and holographic lollipops. And I had attempted to make a living from buying and selling anything and everything from cars to coffeemakers to cranes, and from skis to plastic skulls and Betamax video players that didn’t even work. It was simply inevitable that early one morning I’d find myself the target of a rather reluctant hitman; financed by someone hell-bent on making my life very unpleasant indeed.
Anyway… It was a couple of days after the phone call from Jon, with my list of career failures increasing by the minute while wandering through Waterstones it struck me that I had something of a tale to tell. I had quite a few, actually. I decided on one final push. I decided to become a writer. I decided to write, No stranger to the P45. Sorry about that.
This book is the autobiographical account of my arguably-chaotic career to date: of those sixty-nine jobs, roles and vocations and the thirty-plus misadventures in business that I have enjoyed (a particularly loose and rather inaccurate term) throughout my many years of toiling and troubling and being run out of towns by gangsters and their merry thugs intent on snapping my legs like Twiglets.
I have been mistaken for the actor, Tim Roth, which is odd since I more closely resemble Shrek. And for a police officer and an assassin too. I have co-hosted a radio talk show, made a movie and a television advertisement and featured on a prime-time documentary on the subject of middle-class crime. I have also been a chauffeur of a high-profile actress and during a VIP tour of The Whitehouse could almost have caused World War 3. I have hung chickens upon a rack and mislabelled boxes of creosote. I have also robbed a shed.
Welcome to Danland.
Welcome to No stranger to the P45.

Much to the relief of my snobbish superiority complex, I wasn’t born in Frome where I’d go to school, have some rather crappy jobs and in a case of mistaken identity one evening be dragged out of a kebab shop by some pissed-up moronic chav. I was born in Bath on June 26, 1972 at about 9.27am. It was a Monday. It explains a lot.

Many years ago my parents purchased a house in the sleepy (nay, dull) village of Great Elm, about three miles from the market town of Frome at the foot of the Mendip hills. It was quite a large house with about five acres of land for Dad’s nursery and landscaping business, and it was here where I (arguably) grew-up learning such vitally important lessons in life such as: pouring petrol on already blazing bonfires is not the smartest of things to do, hanging a sit-on lawnmower from a tree is an altogether pointless exercise, and going to school in Frome was about as advantageous to my career development as trying to play the pavement with my teeth.
All things considered I had a great childhood. Because we actually lived about a mile or so out of the village itself in a sort of sub-micro-hamlet type-of-thing I had a huge playground of wide open spaces with woods and fields, a valley and the odd hill.
Great Elm was almost quite a nice village. There was not really a great deal to it apart from a village hall and a duck pond, but it had a farm in the centre from which Mum would buy fresh bread each morning. Monty Norman, the man responsible for the James Bond theme lived there but that’s almost irrelevant. I say ‘almost’ because Eon Productions, the company responsible for the movie franchise, would one day try to sue the living piss out of me, which would in turn result in my being awoken at 3am one morning by a hitman who moments earlier had jemmied open my front door with a screwdriver... but that’s another story. Great Elm had a church and an old disused school too, together with a row of pebble-dashed council houses with Ford Capris and Astras parked on blocks out front. Aside from that, like I said, it was almost quite a nice place.
A couple of miles to the west, beyond the ruin of the abandoned iron works lies the village of Mells where I went to school. It was, and still is a very pretty place with dozens of old stone cottages with thatched roofing and a charming little pub known as The Talbot. There were about sixty kids at our school and I do remember it quite well. I remember playing football in the yard (probably the last time I ever did) and kicking the ball over a fence into the caretaker’s garden where his huge St Bernard dog named Borg, far more Cujo than Schnorbitz, would pounce upon it and tear it to shreds, thus making me the object and target of ridicule and harassment for the rest of the day (see Book). We were all petrified of that dog. I remember how fortunate I was never to be sent to the Headmaster’s office to have my backside thwacked with the cricket bat, and I remember my duffel coat and my mittens. Actually, I really don’t remember a great deal else. Err... sorry about that.
Ho-hum...
Anyway. Since Dad ran his landscaping business from home there was a large area for us to explore and my friends and I had many things to play with. As one gawped from the rear of the house one would see a lawn and below that the orchard with its dozens of apple and pear trees. Across from the orchard was a field in which Dad had decided to build an arboretum (of-sorts) and it was filled with shrubs, trees and saplings, many of which would often be attacked by wild rabbits. Below the field was a small copse and his yard in which stood a couple of greenhouses and sheds to house the absurd quantities of clapped-out and dilapidated lawnmowers (12), rotavators (9), vans (3) and tractors (2) that he would use for his business. Over the years I’d make the most of this vast playground and its arsenal of highly dangerous toys, very nearly getting myself torn asunder and incinerated on numerous occasions.
Like many, I am sure that there was some time during which my father had high hopes that I would follow in his footsteps and take-over the business one day. I guess it’s kind of like doctors who hope their children will enter the medical profession too, or perhaps military folk hoping that their offspring will become military folk as well. In a way, it’s a bit like all those mindless Jeremy Kyle-fodder chavs in tracksuits: many of whose parenting skills lead their spawn to becoming mindless, Jeremy Kyle-fodder chavs in tracksuits too. But despite growing up surrounded by all the flora and fauna and defunct machinery, even at quite a young age I was unable to muster up any enthusiasm for a lapis lazuli... and, if I’m honest, I still don’t know what one is. Despite his efforts, I think that Dad gave up on the idea of me following in his footsteps long ago. Still, it was inevitable that during those first eighteen years of my life I did often attempt to ‘assist’ my father in his business. I would sometimes accompany him on jobs and dig holes in the ground with a piece of machinery. Sometimes I’d mow lawns, plough-up gardens with rotavators or simply burn