» Out of my depth

Another acid story...
At the age of about 19 or 20, walked into my local and had just ordered my pint when the bloke who organised the pool team said they were one person short for the match that night. now my prior pool-playing experience consisted of a couple of games whilst at college, where i quickly established that hitting balls into pockets is not one of my skills. at all.

so we hurtle off to the opposing team's pub. on arrival, and before the match starts, there's me and my two mates in the toilets dropping acid (which i've never done before). cue much hilarity involving an ever-shrinking pool table, balls of all one colour, and an LSD-induced god-like ability.

so with 3 of the 5 of us tripping our nuts off, we won the match 7-2, i won all three games i played, and ended up on the team for a year, during which time i never played anywhere near as well as that first night and had to get moderately drunk before i could even sink anything.
(Fri 15th Oct 2004, 2:32, More)

» Scary Neighbours

Not so much scary...
but i swear my quiet librarian-type female neighbour was a high-class miss whiplash.

she seemed timid and nervous on the outside, but drove a little red sports car and had a regular stream of late-night male visitors all driving very nice expensive sportscars.
(Fri 26th Aug 2005, 4:03, More)

» My first love

ze germans
when i were a nipper, every year three generations of family squirrel would go on holiday to cornwall, and we'd stay in the same b&b. one year there was a german girl and her parents in the room next door. we hung out loads, our parents didn't mention the war, and at the end of my holiday she gave me a rather pretty crystal which i promptly left by the side of the road on the way home when we stopped so i could do something about my carsickness.

thinking about it if we'd been ten years older i would have probably got a much better present and lost something else.
(Thu 20th Oct 2005, 22:29, More)

» Misunderstood

Working in a call centre the other day...
selling Readers Digest subscriptions and trying to peddle special offers to deaf and stupid old people...

part of one attempt at a conversation goes something like this:

me: can i take your phone number please?
old biddy: (rattles off number, less area code)
me: and what's the area code there?
biddy: (gives me 4-digit postcode)
me: no, i mean the area code for the phone number.
biddy: oh, i don't know what that would be.
me: well, where are you calling from?
biddy: i'm calling from home.

at which point i'm starting to find it very hard to keep a straight face...
(Thu 6th Oct 2005, 23:34, More)

» The Police

How could I have forgotten this one earlier...
One of two encounters with plod in my mis-spent youth, the other being when I very cleverly got done for drink-driving on a deserted country lane late at night (and about 20 metres away from where i was going), was when me and a couple of mates went to buy some smoke from an acquaintance.

Just after the transaction has been made and we've all got our puff (and in one bloke's case, three pills), we're suddenly surrounded by the most coppers i've ever seen in one place in the town (aside from the cop shop or cake shop across the road from it), and told to "keep our hands where they could be seen".

So i'm carted off in the paddy wagon with the other two, we're all fairly bricking it, most of all the chap with the pills. We're booked in at the station, individually strip-searched and put in separate cells.

Eventually i'm interviewed and let out at about 3am. So I wait outside for my mate who had the pills, the other bloke having been interviewed earlier and set free.

After about 45 minutes, the most off-chops person i've ever seen stumbles out of the police station, and we head off.

As it transpires, when the cops took him in for his strip-search, they started off by getting him to empty out his pockets. When he threw the 1/2oz of smoke on the cell bed, both coppers looked at it, giving him enough time to stuff the three pills wrapped in clingfilm down his neck.

What then happened would go some way to explaining why he was ringing the bell to be let out for a smoke or to have some water every five minutes, and would totally explain the bizarre game of I-Spy we played through the small gap in the cell doors.

He played me the interview tape a few days later, I don't think i've ever laughed so hard in my life.
(Tue 27th Sep 2005, 16:03, More)