bristolWhen you're on the M4 from London, just before you get to Bristol you'll see a sort of milk depot thing on the right, with huge shiny silos. Well, if you look left almost as soon as you go past you'll see a rundown looking house, just behind some trees.
I used to live there with about 10 madmen.
One was seriously into UFOs. He would spend hours staring out the window at Mars or Venus on the horizon asking us over and over what it was. He wanted to buy a video camera to film them, but 'not an expensive one, cos the aliens can break them.' Total fruitloop, used to paly in a local band but only seemed to be able to play 'Kingston Town' on his keyboard. For hours.
We had a open fire, which was the only heating in the place. We never cleaned the chimmeny and one day about 15 tonnes of soot decided to fall down it, covering everything in the kitchen/sitting room, and making us look like some blacked-up '50s variety show. We also set fire to the chimmeny several times by raiding the nearby farmers woodstore and building indoor bonfires in the huge fireplace.
The local water company decided to cut off our water for a month, saying that there records showed we had a private supply. We asked the landlord, and sure enough there was an old fashioned hand pump in the back yard. We had to use that for all our water. If you left a jug of it out for more than 3 or 4 hours it turned green, but it was all we had.
One bloke was a mad irish lunatic. Imagine the Brad Pitt charater out of 'Snatched'. It was him, only not so well balanced. He spend most nights sitting at his open bedroom window shooting at rabbits with a fuckoff shotgun which made cycling home in the dark quite exciting. The whole building would shake when he fired that cannon.
Me and the only other sane guy in the place discovered we could get free phone calls on the house payphone by sticking a knife into the coin slot to get credit. We were so bored stuck out in the sticks we took the piss slightly, and would ring up random numbers with an australian prefix, and try and have conversations with the bemused aussie on the other end.
When the bill came in, it was about 300 quid, and there was only about 25 in the phone.
The landlord blamed Brad Pitt and finally had the excuse to chuck him out.
We left shortly after.
(,
Thu 20 Nov 2003, 20:28,
archived)
I used to live there with about 10 madmen.
One was seriously into UFOs. He would spend hours staring out the window at Mars or Venus on the horizon asking us over and over what it was. He wanted to buy a video camera to film them, but 'not an expensive one, cos the aliens can break them.' Total fruitloop, used to paly in a local band but only seemed to be able to play 'Kingston Town' on his keyboard. For hours.
We had a open fire, which was the only heating in the place. We never cleaned the chimmeny and one day about 15 tonnes of soot decided to fall down it, covering everything in the kitchen/sitting room, and making us look like some blacked-up '50s variety show. We also set fire to the chimmeny several times by raiding the nearby farmers woodstore and building indoor bonfires in the huge fireplace.
The local water company decided to cut off our water for a month, saying that there records showed we had a private supply. We asked the landlord, and sure enough there was an old fashioned hand pump in the back yard. We had to use that for all our water. If you left a jug of it out for more than 3 or 4 hours it turned green, but it was all we had.
One bloke was a mad irish lunatic. Imagine the Brad Pitt charater out of 'Snatched'. It was him, only not so well balanced. He spend most nights sitting at his open bedroom window shooting at rabbits with a fuckoff shotgun which made cycling home in the dark quite exciting. The whole building would shake when he fired that cannon.
Me and the only other sane guy in the place discovered we could get free phone calls on the house payphone by sticking a knife into the coin slot to get credit. We were so bored stuck out in the sticks we took the piss slightly, and would ring up random numbers with an australian prefix, and try and have conversations with the bemused aussie on the other end.
When the bill came in, it was about 300 quid, and there was only about 25 in the phone.
The landlord blamed Brad Pitt and finally had the excuse to chuck him out.
We left shortly after.