If you’re anything like me you can probably think of 101 things you’d change if someone put you in charge. Well, I’ll tell you this – it’s pretty scary when suddenly it looks like you might get a chance to actually do it. I never expected any of this but, now it’s happening, I reckon with your help we can get some stuff done.
There’s a lot of people wondering how I ended up where I am. All that ‘Britain’s Bravest Brickie’ stuff and Mayor and now having a crack at the big one. Well, don’t go thinking any of it was deliberate. I’m still just Joey, same as I ever was.
Go back far enough and I was a bit hit and miss at school, to be honest. Good at what I liked, rubbish at the rest. Better with my hands I suppose, but not stupid either. I sort of liked history – all those people making decisions and hoping for the best, and then stuff happens.
That’s the thing about all this that makes my head hurt most. Thinking about all the history textbooks. How one day I might be in them and there’d be some roomful of poor bloody kids being told they had five minutes left to finish their exams on ‘the causes of Joey Bland’, like I was the First World War or something.
But it’s funny how you don’t need exams to be an expert. Look at all them folks who reckon they know how this started – how a nobody like me popped up and suddenly I’m the biggest thing since the Beatles. If they’re so clever I wish they’d explain it to me – ‘cause I don’t have a clue how it happened, and I was there for most of it.
But if you ask me, I reckon it didn’t start in any of the obvious places. I reckon it started in lots of little moments the experts don’t ever know about. Being a kid, school, stuff like that – same as most people, I suppose.
But mostly it started at a party, just before I dropped out of Sixth Form, when Steve Sullivan wouldn’t take no for an answer and there was only me who’d stand up to him.
And when I made that bloody stupid promise.
After that, everything sort of burned away slowly ’til it all went mental and here we are now.
I wonder what’s going to happen next?