» Intense Friendships

Friends of long standing
I'm still very close mates with the folks I bacame friends with aged 11 or 12, more than half my life ago. I realise that's not very funny in itself, but we had some laughs.

It occurs that with a post title like that I'm probably not living up the billing at all, sorry.

A mate and I had moped/scooter/gently motorised push bikes when we were 16. Despite that fact that mine was dirty gold and his was covered in yellow fairing and had pedals, and despite the fact that we were both lanky streaks of piss who looked like praying mantis's doing yoga on these bloody things, we decided that we needed to be in a biker gang. We both wrote, in permanant marker, "Gonads of Death" on our 'machines'.

I actually suspect that's more 'laugh at' than 'laugh with' funny, and I can't tell you how sorry I am about the whole thing.
(Fri 28th Jul 2006, 14:52, More)

» I hurt my rude bits

Hot Hot Hot lovin'
Back in the dim and distant past, my wife and I merrily rutted away as if our lives depended on it given the slightest opportunity. On a couple of occasions however, while we were both impressed by our staying power, some marathon sessions gave way to some chafing pube-on-knob rubbage that gave me friction burns on my pork sword. Ouch, and as I'm sure I said at the time, ouch again!
(Thu 20th Jul 2006, 13:42, More)

» Encounters with Royalty

Tesco Value royalty
One of the feckless blue-bloods - Andrew or Edward, I can't tell them apart and I didn't care then and I don't now - came to open the 'new and refurbished' Eastgate Shopping Centre in Ipswich. It must have been about 1987. I went into town with a mate and we had no idea what was going on until we got through the crowds to find barriers and police and saw His Uselessness. What can I say; massively underwhelmed. I guess the fact that we could almost wander to the front while not being interested suggests something about his pulling power. And the Eastgate Shopping Centre was the crappest shopping precinct ever. I think even on this auspicious day the only places open were a Christian bookshop where all the posters were of books with rainbows and doves coming out of them, and a shop that sold buttons.

An even more tenuous one was when I was in Copenhagen. You can wander all around the outside of the palaces where the royal family live. It being a long day I sat down against the wall of one of them in a fairly main square until a man with a big gun shouted something in Danish that I managed to translate as "get away from the wall or I'll schoot you!". I did. So I didn't meet the Danish King or anything, but I like to think he'd have had the decency to turn up at my funeral to look contrite at such an over-reaction had I in fact been shot...
(Thu 3rd Aug 2006, 16:30, More)

» Rock and Roll Stories

re: misteroz
I have to click 'I like this' for 'misteroz' as it just struck so many chords (though not musical one's of course.

As a 12/13 year-old my friends and I formed The Blue Arsed Flies. The name was my sole creative input to the project and after three or four 'practice sessions' where we craply plucked away at guitars to the back-beat of a Yamaha DD-6 drum machine looking desperately at each other in the hope the someone else would suggest playing Amiga instead, we packed it in.

Oh, and agead far too old not to know better a group of friends camping decided to form a band. Named it, devised the first album and photographed the cover art, wrote the track listing and I think three songs. Then dis much the same for the 'difficult second album' and then (I believe) devised the story of how we split up due to musical differences. One or two of us repeated the process for our solo projects!

Deary, deary me!
(Tue 4th Jul 2006, 17:03, More)

» Mugged

Bloody Romans!
My favourite failed mugging attempt was in Rome, when I was walking through some cloistered piazza or another, past street cafes and bistros, admiring the architecture and stuff. A group of about 8 little gyppo kids apparate in front of us and start holding out their hands for money. We weren't about to dip our hands in and show where our stashes were, so we politely ignored them and persevered.

Switching to plan B the little sh1ts then crowded round us and started padding down our pockets to work out where to dip, so I'm surrounded by grabbing kids who then get more bold and grab at my camera that I've tied to my bag (on the inside). At this I got all indignant and using my Lonely Planet Guide to Western Europe On A Shoestring as a bludgeon, firstly to coax them away, and then to knock them off. From nowhere I also developed an Imperial British Officer voice and started calling them curr, rapscallion and reprobate. I've no idea why, but it felt good.

Seeing it escalate the locals looking on in the cafe's are roused to assist and chase the little buggers away, cursing them more effectively in Italian.

So, they got nothing, but I still say, apart from being able to walk the streets in safety, what have the Romans ever done for us?!
(Wed 21st Jun 2006, 11:50, More)