» Eccentrics

Alexander Thomas Jeremiah O'Malley
It had been a long day in work, and I'd gotten to the point where laying out letterheads and reformatting copy had made me want to drown my sorrows under a vast lake of ale, so on my way home I decided to stop in at one of the nicer pubs in Liverpool (I know, I know, that's got to be a contradiction in terms, right? Well no, wrong. Anyway.) and get my drunk on.

I'd barely touched my lips to the top of the head of my first pint of Cains Victorian Beer - a seasonal brew that I was going to take full advantage of - when a cheery-faced middle aged bloke turned to me and said, in a clear and precise RP voice, "Long day at work, then, was it?"

"Like you wouldn't believe," I said, trying not to laugh at the toy frog that was poking out of this guy's breast pocket.

"My name, sah, is Alexander Thomas Jeremiah O'Malley. Would it be alright for me to talk with you for a bit?"

And so we did. Two whole hours, he regaled me with stories of how he'd travelled the globe; how he'd been in the Royal Marines and the SAS, protecting Queen and country; how he, single-handedly, had solved drought issues all over Africa, and how he had invented a car that would run on nowt but water and some booze. He was a loon, certainly, but everyone in there seemed to know him, and so the idea that he may well turn violent or angry never really crossed my mind.

"So what brings you to Liverpool," I said, four pints down and at least another two more to go. "Well, I always loved the Beatles, and I always loved... uh, rivers, and tracksuits," he replied, a bead of sweat forming on his brow.

"But surely there are nicer places than this in the world," I said, confused.

"Aah, well, quite, but there's none with a pub like this," he replied, making a broad, sweeping gesture with his arm as he did so.

And with that we continued to drink.

It was another hour and a bit later when I noticed that he was pronouncing words incorrectly. And not in a "yyyou're great you, fuckhnnn love yew yer me bezzzt mate" pissed sort of a way. No. His clear and precise received pronunciation was becoming a garbled mess. And then he turned to me, suddenly, as I was nearing the end of what was to be my final pint that evening.

"So. no_offenc. Do you mind... do you mind if I ask yew a questyern?"

"Go ahead mate," I replied, "I'm off after this'n though so you'd best make it quick."

"Where..... wheeeere would yewwww say I'm from?"

"...I honestly couldn't tell you. Oxford? Somewhere down South, at any rate... why?!"

"Aaahahahahahah, I can't believe you fell for it, you stupid bugger!" he said loudly, tearing up with laughter.

"What do you mean, 'fell for it'?" I asked, somewhat confused.

"You mean you didn't pick up on it?" he replied, his voice suddenly lower pitched and utterly, utterly Scouse. "You soft tit! You only went and fell for my accent tricks!"


Length? Far more than a yard of ale, I can tell you.
(Fri 31st Oct 2008, 12:19, More)

» Spoilt Brats

What I did in my summer holidays (when I was 19) by no offenc (aged 23)
There was a brief period of my life (well, a summer holiday when I was at uni, if I'm to be honest) when I was dossing down in London with a couple of mates I'd made in my teens. One of these mates was Billy, a lovely lad, if a bit dimmer than most. He'd wound up vanishing off to live the dream after school - by that, I mean he wanted to be a rock star, and went to seek his fame - and so it came as a bit of a shock when I got a phone call off him saying he was back in the UK (I never knew he'd left!), and would I like to come down and stay with him and Paul, who he'd apparently bumped into down there whilst working. Of course, being 19, freshly single and skint, I jumped at it, and a few days later I was down in the Big Smoke, rucksack over my shoulder, wondering exactly what the fuck I was playing at. I'd sulked when my mam said I couldn't have money for a ticket, and she only relented when I started giving her the silent treatment. I was a kid and wanted to see two of my better mates from school, couldn't she understand that? Obviously looking back now, I was acting like a spoilt knobhead, but at the time I felt justified as fuck.

Anyway, I'd gotten there on a Saturday morning, so the next two days were spent getting reacquainted with the two of them in the most traditional of ways - buying copious amounts of cheap knockoff booze from the offy and proceeding to knacker our livers and brains. It was sometime on Sunday morning when Billy pointed out to me that he should probably lay off it once it gets to tea time because he was in work tomorrow. "Work?" I asked, as if the concept was alien to me. Actually, who am I kidding; I was a media student, of course it was fucking alien.

"Yeah mate, I've been given a fuckin' fantastic job, I get to work with royalty and everything!" He said, looking smugger than R Kelly probably did when he got off that kiddy diddling charge. "Really," says I, "What doing?"

Of course his face turned red at this; perhaps he'd thought bragging he worked with people from Buck House was enough to sate my curiosity. He was wrong. "Well... actually, to be honest, it's not that great," he said, now shame-faced and beginning to regret he'd a) drank so much and b) told me about it at all. "I work..."

"Go on," I said.

"...ah Jesus. I work in the fuckin' laundry, okay?"

"The Royal laundry??"

"Well it's not like I wash the Queen's frillies, it's mostly just the guard stuff like." He then proceeded to tell me, in detail, just how manky and disgusting the guard's uniforms get from standing outdoors in those stuffy little guard boxes, and how they had to stick them in giant vats of stupidly-hot water to literally cook the smell out of them. Especially so in the summer, as it was then.

After this, we carried on drinking. Billy more than myself or Paul, probably so he could get a nice hangover on for the next day's work. At some point during the evening, I made a proposal - if I could finish the rest of the cans and save Billy from puking into a big tub full of coats or bearskin hats, I got to go into work with him tomorrow morning to see the inner workings of the Palace, and maybe help him out for a bit of sly cash on the side. I'd even made him sign a badly-scrawled affadavit saying yes, I (Billy) agree to let you, no offenc, do all of that if you finish the last of the booze.

So I did. I awoke the next morning with sick in my mouth, which isn't pleasant when you realise you've forgotten your toothbrush and your host doesn't seem to have one of their own that you can borrow. I leapt out of the couch and into the kitchen, where I deftly gobbed the vomit into the sink and washed it away. A quick half-pint of Thames Water's finest, and I felt at least marginally human. And then I spotted the piece of paper from last night. And it all came flooding back.

The ride to work was unpleasant to say the least. As much as I'm a fan of public transport (it's cheap, it's generally reliable, and in plentiful supply) when you're riding a bus with what seems like an entire officeful of people and a raging hangover, it's not in the slightest bit fun. Even less so when you've got to stop your also-hungover mate from sicking everywhere. Thankfully we got there without as much as a dry heave, and so Billy snuck me past the guards (well, no, actually, there were no guards, it was just a door with a clock-in thingy, but anything to make a dull story more interesting) and we got changed. Apparently one must wear special overalls when working in the royal laundry. Whatever.

We wandered down the corridor from the changing room to the main laundry room, and upon opening the door the most foul, sweaty, ripe stench struck me in the nose. I very nearly spewed my hoop there and then. Thankfully I must have been made of stronger stuff than I thought.

"Christ, what's the smell?" I said, gagging from the hangover and wondering if they kept pegs down here. "The smell?" quipped Billy, looking a bit green but grinning at me as there was a joke I wasn't in on, "'s boiled bear-'ats, innit?"

Length? I barely even KNEW 'er.
(Wed 15th Oct 2008, 11:30, More)

» Darwin Awards

Intrinsically stupid
It was a good few years ago now; I'd just fixed my girlfriend's broken watch for her after some fat get had trodden on it. We'd been down at the seaside. Got a nice photo of us to commemorate it. We were back at work and I'd been checking out some new equipment in the laboratory. We met up for lunch, and I went to take it out of my pocket - would you credit it?? I'd only gone and left it down in the lab! So off I go to get it.

Of course, me being a bit of a dickhead, I only go and get locked into the intrinsic field removal chamber, don't I? The last thing I remember is the air getting warmer, Janey fucking off because she's a blatant shithouse and every atom of me screaming out of existence. Typical.

Still, mustn't grumble, I suppose. They were all calling me a dickhead and a stupid get for getting locked in there, but I bet they ate their fucking words when I managed to reform myself. Of course, I glow a bit, don't really have any emotions and can blow people up with my mind; but at least I'm not old and cancer ridden like all the knobheads that took the piss out of me. Eat that.
(Wed 18th Feb 2009, 11:28, More)

» Mini Cabs From Hell

on the way home from town after playing a gig:
We had to do three dropoffs from Liverpool back to Huyton (6 miles from the city). The first was in a shopping area about ten minutes from the city centre, about a mile or two out, and the driver took about half an hour to get there, racking up around 8 quid or so on the machine. He then proceeded to drive round for approximately 15 minutes looking for this girl's house. He didn't know the area and was probably fucking deaf as well (or a bloody chancer) because he kept asking us where to go and we kept shouting "WE'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE!!"

Following that, we took another ten minutes to escape the housing estate maze that we'd gotten into in the first place, and got back onto the motorway. We had to yell at him to take the first slip road, and then when we told him he'd need to turn left here please, he just carried straight on, then said "Whoops!" and carried on driving, with a grin on his face. When we eventually got to MY dropoff point, after I shouted around four or five times, "JUST ON THE LKFT HERE, TA.", he then proceeded to stop nearly five minutes' walk from where I'd asked him to stop originally.

No idea how the rest of the trip went, but suffice to say it took almost three times as long as it normally takes, and probably cost as much as well. And so we've never gotten a black cab again, bloody bastards.
(Wed 26th May 2004, 22:16, More)

» Common

Up here in Liverpool...
There seems to be a trend amongst people of... well, all ages, really, to use the term "thrun" when they mean "threw" or "thrown".

Example: "So 'ow did you gerrin to 'is khaar then Kev"

"Fuckin' thrun a brickhh frew the winder likhhe"

It's not that I'm being snobbish at all, I mean the meaning they're trying to convey is obvious, so whatever works, I suppose. But it is awfully common, in the literal sense of the word. And I have no idea where the christ it's come from, I didn't hear it til at least the end of the 90s. Almost as if somebody flipped a dialect switch.
(Fri 17th Oct 2008, 11:04, More)