REBEL WITHOUT A CLUE

The other week, I sat down and watched a documentary about Ginger Baker, the "bad boy" percussion artist and self-styled greatest jazz drummer of his time. The story it told was of his lifetime spent crashing through and burning all of his bridges, but also of how he seemed to have had a fine old time in doing so.

At least from his point of view. I will admit to admiring his talent, but am also very aware that I don't think that I'd have wanted him to come around to my house and I'm fairly sure that we could never have been great pals.

My loss, I'm sure… Or maybe not.

Interesting stuff.

It's called "Beware of Mr Baker" and it's a very entertaining documentary and very worth watching if you're not easily shocked by excessive swearing and seeing a seventy-year old man beating up a film crew with his walking stick.

It did make me wonder, however, about whether I should have been more of a rebel throughout the years and if I would have had a more enjoyable life if I'd taken more risks and tried to have a little bit more fun.

Or would I just look into the mirror and hate myself even more for what I'd done...

And then there's the tricky little matter which the pathological non-rebel has to consider. How exactly do you become a rebel if rebelliousness is not something which comes easily to you? I was, after all, the "squarest of the square" when it came to being a teenager, and used to avoid almost every vice because I knew it would upset my mum and dad if they found out about such things.

Oh, I know that I can be quite cutting about the safe, predictable lives of others, and occasionally, when I'm feeling particularly brave, I might mouth off about certain things with people who know me well enough to appreciate that I'm just going off on one, but it's hardly the same thing.

Sadly, I believe people just look at me and think that it is just me going off on one, and hardly anyone actually takes me seriously. Well, not unless they suddenly take massive offence at something that I considered to be fairly innocuous, which is always difficult for me to handle.

In those situations, I find myself getting so upset at having upset them that I find myself full of even more self-loathing, which is hardly the strongest of foundations for building a rebellious persona.

"Mostly harmless" that's me.

But how do you go about becoming a rebel anyway?

My capacity for excessive drinking seems to have fizzled away to virtually nothing, and I got so mortified about myself the last time I became an unpleasant and angry drunk, that I pretty much swore myself off the stuff there and then. The true rebel simply would not care, I feel. Besides which, I really, really used to dislike losing my weekends to hangovers, whereas the rebel would positively revel in the pain and then crack open another bottle, or be stuffing the sort of powder up their nose which we non-rebels wouldn't even know how to get hold of, or know what to ask for if we did.

Perhaps I should blow all of my wages on the gee-gees? Ah yes, I know that sudden, unexpected riches can bring their own rewards, but if you believe that you should never gamble more than you can afford to lose, then you're never going to make it big amongst the rebels, are you? And anyway, I'd only worry about paying the bills.

Maybe I might like to try to persuade women I ought not to to accompany me to seedy hotels for meaningless, shallow, empty sexual encounters? Somehow, I feel that the proper cad wouldn't have to just "try", he'd just do it, and probably without facing the horrible truth that I would of knowing that such a suggestion would just end with me and my potato-headed features and the feeble, gravity-affected pasty lump I call my body being laughed out of the room, and I don't think that it would be the hotel room, either, seeing as we'd never have the remotest chance of getting that far.

Still, all the "lay-dees" love a "bad boy" they say, but I imagine that they can spot a fake one from a thousand yards, probably just by the vaguest of scents on the breeze.

Anyway, such activity would - quite rightly - be frowned upon by my nearest and dearest, and it would be a very foolish man who would want to risk that kind of thing in my situation.

And, to be perfectly honest, I think that none of that sort of thing, however, is really me, and I've never been particularly "Rock'n'Roll" about anything very much and, because you all know that I'm basically a wuvvly and fri-kenned wittle pussycat behind all of the bravado, and wouldn't know how to have fun if it walked up to me wearing a "fun" tee-shirt and screamed "FUUUUUUUUN!!!!!" into my eyeballs,  you already know that I never would anyway.

Documentaries exposing my "wild ways" and my life as a "wild type" are almost certainly never going to get made.

My mum always expected (and perhaps even hoped) that my rebellious phase would turn up eventually, maybe just so that she might get to feel better about her own tendency towards being a little bit wild. In the end, hover, and perhaps to her utter dismay and bitter disappointment, it never really did, even though it was once suggested (and only once) that I might be a "bad influence" upon one of my pals when I was a teenager.

I wasn't. If anything, the reverse was true, but that's perception for you...

I think, perhaps, that I'm getting far too old and conservative now for starting to think about becoming rebellious anyway, and I really think that I might just have missed that particular bus. So I might as well settle down to a dull and uneventful old age and get used to the idea of fading away without being able to look back upon a misspent youth, middle age, or any other part of life you may be able to think of, at least not unless I suddenly move into "Last of the Summer Wine" territory and start seeing the appeal of heading downhill in a bath on wheels.

Mind you, it might be nice to have just a few reasons for having the occasional wicked glint in the eye as I fade away into anyone's less than fond memory, or hurtle headlong into that reservoir…