I used to think pirates were cool as fvck. Bad boys of the sea. I’m not talking about pirates like Jack Sparrow here, because he’s shit. I’m on about real pirates. Like Captain Hook. Killing whoever they wanted; stealing loads of shit; drinking until they passed out; parrots; wooden legs; eye patches. Cruising around the ocean like you see chavs cruising the streets in their juiced-up Micra’s with the latest Bonkers CD on full-blast. Except pirates wouldn’t even go so low as to own a Bonkers CD. They’d have something good on like James Blunt. They’d be singing ‘You’re beautiful’ over and over again as they lay another cannon-ball into some doomed ship they’re going to steal gold from. The stupid twats in the London Riots had nothing on these boys. Perhaps they should have read Treasure Island and taken some advice from Long John Silver before they went out and stole some PS3’s.

Yeah, I used to think pirates were awesome. It was my dream to be one when I was a kid. So, as you can imagine, when I found out that pirates these days don’t tend to have wooden legs or even walk around with parrots on their shoulder, I was devastated. My dream: gone. The woman in the Job Advice room in school was pretty pleased, though. She didn’t have any advice on how to succeed as a pirate so she was pretty shit at her job. She gave me a leaflet on taking the first step into the world of work. I used it as an eye patch.

It was pretty demoralising to find out pirates don’t dress cool as fvck any more, but I didn’t let it get to me too much. It’s been years since I left school but I still find them really interesting and look up stories on the web about them every so often. One such story I came across was about a Somalian pirate called Six Toe Joe who’s been on the run for a bit but has now been caught by authorities. Six Toe Joe! How brilliant is that name? Sounds like a guy from the Bronx, rather than a Somalian pirate. He’s known as that, though, because he has 6 toes on each foot (obviously), 5 fingers on each hand and 2 thumbs. Who needs a wooden leg, or even an eye patch when you’re born like that? This is the best picture I can find of his boyz and him trying to get away on a tiny little boat:

And here’s one of his foot:

Apparently, the Navy’s been after him and his posse for a while and when they did finally catch up with him, he had a stash of weapons the average Al-Qaeda member has in their sock drawer: loads of grenades and a few rocket launchers. He and his compadres were also aboard a hijacked ship. He’s off to jail for a few years now. See, if he was around when cool pirates were around, he wouldn’t have got caught. He’d have got his sword out and battled his would-be captors to the death and then rolled their corpses off the plank while slugging from a bottle of rum.

I can only dream…