bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

On my phone, I have a template which says ‘I saw an image of a ghostly dog in that room you were just in’, which I regularly send in to Most Haunted Live, hosted by Yvette Fielding, who you want to punch in the face, apologise to, and then punch in the face again. I do this because I watch a distressing amount of late night telly, to the extent that I now use Most Haunted Live as an admittedly fairly limited social networking site. “I saw the image of a ghostly dog in the room you were just in’ is my calling card, or screen name I suppose, and it has been on the horizontal scrolling text at the bottom of the screen loads of times, although I manifest variously as Paul from London, Paul from Middlesborough, and sometimes would you believe Paul from Margate. I like to do this, as it gives me an air of Scarlet Pimpernel-like mystery, which I think you’ll agree only enhances to my generally raffish and dashing persona.

Anyway. That’s a Friday night for me, making up the same spectral canine over and over again and texting it in to Most Haunted Live. I do, however, have a bit of history in this field as a mate of mine and I still have an outstanding £100 wager on who can get a letter – which must contain the word ‘Hubby’ – into the ‘Aren’t Men Daft?’ column of, I think, Take A Break magazine. I assume that the thing readers of Take A Break magazine are taking a break from is reading other magazines very similar to Take A Break, as they don’t look like pioneering neurosurgeons or Nobel Prize winning physicists to me. They do, howver, look like the kind of people who buy tattoos as birthday presents for their mums.

[Hitting Read More now will bring forth more ghostly revelations]

On the subject of Most Haunted Live, though, if you were dead and a medium somehow managed to contact you through the spiritual plane, your first response would, surely, be to say ‘Oh My God! You’re a medium! I never used to believe in all this stuff! Fuck! I can’t believe this! Do humans live on Mars now?’ or perhaps ‘Right hang on, I can sort it all out for you, all the stuff about is there a God and what happens when you die and all that, get a pen and paper, this is going to be amazing’ or whatever, rather than ‘Irene, the keys to the greenhouse are in the cupboard under the sink’ or ‘Dave – don’t worry about the ladders’ which is pretty much the most that mediums ever manage to wring out of the deceased. Both sides are just wasting a golden oppurtunity. Foolish. Actually, I totally believe in ghosts, but I don’t believe that Yvette Fielding is the person to conjure them up, although yeah she seems to have conjured up a career from fuck all so who knows.

That said, perhaps I should stop mocking bollocks psychics, as when I was writing this using my mad touch typing skillz, I must have shifted my hands slightly to the left, as when I was writing the word ‘for’ in the first sentence, it came out as ‘die’, and when I went to correct it, it came out as ‘die’ again. Try it yourself. It’s easy to do. Or is it?

Photgraphs: Top – group of Stables Market food traders wearing emo style trousers fashoinable in 2003 discuss whether to use cat in Peking Duck, or stick to tramp. Market Place, Camden Market.

Middle: Louis the Goat Bag Man and Anthony smoke fags sponged off Pikey Dave. Early morning, mid summer, East Yard, Camden Lock.

Bottom: Steve Bibs setting up, and being heckled by a passer by for having the most 1990’s haircut ever. East Yard, Camden Lock.

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