I'm just going to leave this here while I get my padded trousers.
I think I'm going to need them with the spanging I'm about to get.



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(Mon 4th Feb 2013, 12:03, More)

» Blood

Warning! This story contains partial nudity, vomiting and needles!
The year was 1986. I was no more than a tiny Devlet, aged six and a half. I was a sickly child, and on this particular occasion I had been admitted to hospital to have my tonsils removed, my adenoids taken out, and to have grommets put in to my ears.

In short, I must’ve been an ENT Surgeon’s wet dream. If they were in to that sort of thing, I mean.

And here starts my tale of surgical woe. I had been in hospital a year previously to have a *ahem* delicate operation on my manly maracas. As it was, I lay on the hospital bed in the comforting arms of my mother, wrapped in a surgical gown, crying about how I "didn’t wanna" have the operation done, as I knew it’d be all "hurty afterwards." My mother cooed and soothed me with words like “don’t worry darling. They’ll come and give you a magic drink that will make you go to sleep, like last time, remember?”

“P-p-promise?” I snuffled.

“I promise.” She gazed down in to my eyes, and I trusted her.

Then, the nurse entered the room. As I had been clinging on to my mother, my surgical gown had come open at the back, revealing the pale peach that was, and remains to be, my bottom.

“That’s what I like to see!” she cried and, with athletic grace, gleefully drove a needle deep in to the flesh of my rump.

Half an hour later, they managed to prise me off of the ceiling. I’d already learned two things that day – the NHS is staffed purely by psychopathic nurses and grown-ups always – without exception – lie. I was beginning to feel woozy as they placed me on the bed, and started the journey to the operating theatre.

The next thing I remember I awoke to see a lady in a green mask, leaning over me with a mask attached to a tube in her hand.

“Would you like to play space-men,” she said “or would you like to play with the gas?”

“Play wi’ th’ gas...” I replied.

With that, the mask came down on my face. “Count to ten for me, sweetheart” she said (well, perhaps they’re not all psycho after all). “Easy!” thought I “10... 9...” – and that was it. Sent deep in to an anaesthetic sleep to dream of robot sheep.

Some 24 hours later, I awoke (even now, I have notes in my records advising medical staff that my body’s reaction to anaesthesia is to sleep for ages). Blearily, I looked around. I saw my mother and my father standing at my bedside, looking tired and stressed. I saw Fred, the Pound Puppy I had been brought to keep me company, on my pillow. Mum leaned in, smiled, and said:

“How are we, my brave soldier?”

“BLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRCCHHHHHHHHH!!” I replied, with some force. Straight in to her face.

Now, the thing with tonsil operations in the 80’s was the tool they used was, without a shadow of a doubt, evil. They place a loop around your tonsil, then slid a knife down the length of the handle, cutting the tonsil off. It would then drop neatly in to a small basket under the loop. This would leave the freely bleeding wound to pour huge amounts of blood straight down your gullet.

So now I was throwing up my own blood on to the angelic face of my mother. She hurried aside to clean herself off. Dad approached, with an appreciable degree of caution, holding a sort of plate for catching sick on.

I greeted him:

“ BLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRCCHHHHHHHHH!!”, the force of my vomitus rebounding off the plate and leaping in a graceful arc in to his face.

“ BLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRCCHHHHHHHHH!!” I said again, this time covering the length of my beadsheet with a river of crimson sick.

One by one the other children on the ward were waking up and, as if in some kind of grotesque call of the wild, began throwing up.

“ BLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRCCHHHHHHHHH!!” we all sang in unison, the many and varied colours of our projections staining the sheets and walls and parents of the ward, the assorted smells of post-op bile filling the air.

I learnt another thing that day. Parents, no matter how much they say they love you, can look mightily disappointed when you upchuck your own blood in to their faces.

As a small epilogue to this story, my tonsils actually ended up in a teaching hospital, as an example of the biggest tonsils they’d ever seen. Dunno what happened to my adenoids though, I guess no-one cares about those.
(Mon 11th Aug 2008, 14:35, More)

» Spoilt Brats

Just Say No.
There was a time, just after I’d finished University, when I really did feel that I wanted to build a career in the Restaurant industry. I had spent my spare time and vacations working bars in Restaurants. It was easy work, it tipped well, and I enjoyed it.

I was working, at the time, in a very posh restaurant just outside of Wakefield. This was the sort of place where we actually had some customers who would come to lunch - on their helicopters. Dickie Bird ate there regularly (and he’s a miserable old sod). I had the pleasure of talking to Sir Ian McKellen. In short, I was enjoying my lot. I’d been there for a few months, and a promotion to Assistant Manager was in the air.

And then, in one fell swoop, my attitude to the whole thing changed.

The fog had just begun to burn off from Emley Moor on the crisp October morning when my life changed. We had been at work for a couple of hours when we opened our doors and began the lunchtime service. The restaurant was filled with happy chatter, the clinking of glasses, the scrapes of knives on plate and white-shirted waiters buzzing back and forth. Occasionally, the door to the kitchen would open, and you would hear a brief clattering of pans as a smiling waitress span away from the door piled high with plates of perfect food. It was a good day.

And then, the entrance door opened, and in they stepped. A family of four people. He, clearly a carpet warehouse owner from Huddersfield, She, a trophy wife, and They, the collective sputum of his over productive loins. Without waiting to be shown, they threw themselves at a table, grabbed menus, and began their systemic assault on the staff.

The worst of them all, however, was the youngest child. At a guess, I would say she would have been around six at the time. As I approached the table to take their order, I could hear her whiny, nasal braying.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” She wailed, while her father quietly ignored her.

“Excuse me,” I said, “are you ready to...”

Noticing me, the girl wailed:

“I WANT A STEAK TARTARE.”

Now I’m flustered. I turn to the parents for help.

“Sir, the Steak Tartare is raw. In that it hasn’t been cooked. Maybe it’s not the best choice for your daughter.”

There followed a brief but heated debate: “Darling, you won’t like it.” “But I want it.” “Darling, it’s not cooked, sweetheart.” “I don’t care, I want it!” “Darling...” “WANT!”

By now, other eaters are starting to look over. Eventually, the parents cede to her demands, and a Steak Tartare is ordered.

When it is served, it is almost immediately sent back.

Soon after, the girl achieved the pinnacle of spolit behaviour. At the restaurant, we served a brandy (Louis XIII, if you’re interested) which came out at a modest £75 for 25ml. You could buy the bottle for £1,500 or, if you just wanted to impress the neighbours, you could buy an empty bottle (made from cut crystal) for £1,000. Apparently, one had never been sold.

As this family were leaving, the daughter spies the empty bottle on display. She began pulling at the coat of her father.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! I want that bottle, Daddy! Get me that bottle!”

The giant of a man looked down at her. She scowled back up at him. Their silence spoke a thousand words and eventually the shoulders of the man who looked so strong sagged in defeat. He turned to me.

“How much for th’ bottle, lad?”

“Erm. It’s, ah, a thousand pounds sir.”

“A grand?”

“Yes, sir. It’s cut crystal, see, it’s very expensive.”

With visible resentment, he chucked his AMEX at me. I ran it through, bagged the bottle, and handed it over. As I opened the door to the car park to show them out, The Evil One began her whining once again in earnest.

“Daddy! I want to carry the bottle, Daddy! Daddy!”

The bag was handed over. She grasped it by the handles, and began swinging it around like it didn’t contain a very expensive drinks container. As they were about half way to their car, her grip slipped. The bag fell to the ground, making a very audible crack sound. The family was ushered in to the car with red-faced anger, and we never saw them again.

So it’s true. I want never gets.
(Tue 14th Oct 2008, 10:36, More)

» Will you go out with me?

Will you still love me tomorrow?
If nothing else, this story will prove to you just exactly why drugs are bad, m’kay?

2005 was a very strange year. I’d moved back to the Metropolis of London, my heart having been well and truly broken, and had got myself a job in that most vaunted and worthwhile of careers, recruitment consultancy.

(“A Recruitment Consultant?” one potential squeeze once said to me, “That’s just one step above being an Estate Agent!” – but I digress.)

Not only was I a recruitment consultant, I was an IT recruitment consultant. The scum that floats on top of the scum, if you will. And this, dear friends, was the time that I met the oft-talked about but never fully introduced Mad Saffa.

She’d managed to wangle a job in the same company as I by virtue of the fact that she knew my boss. She’d arrived in the UK four weeks previously, and had a year’s work permit. And the author was pretty well instantly smitten.

The only problem with her was that she was a massive cokehead. And I, being desperate (once again) to ingratiate myself with the cool kids, ended up with a nearly crippling addiction to the white stuff, something of which I am not proud and, after some counselling and a good old fashioned does of friend based intervention, I am now completely clean.

But that’s not the crux of my story. The Mad Saffa had now departed from my life, leaving me with a heart that was not only broken but now shattered in to a thousand lonely pieces, yet I was still shovelling drugs in to my face like there was no tomorrow. And that lead me to a windowsill in a side street off of Fleet Street at 11pm on a Thursday night with three other similar idiots, one of whom happened to be yet another girl that I was trying to charm the pants off.

I leaned over and breathed in sharply, taking the drug deep in to my nose. And then, seconds later, there was a rumbling deep in my bowels that indicated something was about to happen, and it wouldn’t be an innocent little fart. I attempted the ‘tester’, and tried to see if I could relieve some pressure without shitting myself.

I leaned against the wall, surreptitiously raised a leg (but the chances of anyone seeing me while the hoarded around the little bag of white powder like a pack of vultures were minimal anyway), and attempted a little release of gas.

What I actually released, however, was a small piece of poo.

Oh, if you’ll forgive the pun. shit. What to do? What to do?

There was only one thing for it. Find an alleyway, ditch the pants, get back to it. That sounds like a plan!

“Oh, guys!”

Sniff “Yeah?” Sniff.

“I’m just off to er... Well, I’ll be back in a minute, OK?”

Sniff “OK.” Sniff.
I waddled away, hoping against all hope that my precious cargo wouldn’t make a bid for freedom via my legs. I found an alleyway, pulled off my trousers and carefully, oh so carefully, removed my boxers. I thought it best, at that point, to use them to give myself a quick wipe to avoid staining.

Just as I pressed the fabric of boxer to the bare crack of my arse, the girl who I was trying to impress walked around the corner.

We froze in a grotesque tableau – her, mouth agog, staring at me. Me, naked from the waist down (save for a pair of socks), a balled up pair of boxer shorts stuffed up my bum, looking for all the world like I’d been caught with my knickers down. Which, of course, I had been.

“Er...” I muttered, flushing beetroot “I, er, um, had a small, um, accident. I’ll be back in a mo.”

She turned tail and fled. I did my best to clean up, dropped the boxers in a bin (something which I remain excruciatingly embarrassed about) and made my way back.

To her credit, she had told no-one. And, soon after, the incident was forgotten. As we walked back to the tube at the end of the evening, I walked with her, her arm in the crook of mine, and we looked upon London’s nocturnal beauty. We stopped. We faced each other. I looked in to her eyes and said:

“How about dinner next week?”

And she replied:

“Do you promise not to shit yourself?”

We were doomed from the start.
(Mon 1st Sep 2008, 10:57, More)

» Thrown away: The stuff you loved and lost.

Innocence Lost! If found, please call!
You might think that alcohol is a wonderful thing. I used to too. However, I was forced to changed my opinion about that one late evening in the autumn of 2006.

Let me take you back... *wavy lines*

I was living, after the disastrous breakdown of a relationship, with my Mum back in Essex, having made the decision to return to my native south from the frozen wasteland that calls itself Wakefield. By strange coincidence, my mother’s marriage had fallen apart at pretty much the same time.

So there we were, mother and son, still smarting from the breaks that still marked our hearts. We sat in the garden, soaking up the last of the setting sun, smoking John Player Specials, setting the world to rights, and drinking – without pause or hesitation – a huge bottle of Bacardi between us. It was a great evening, the first time we had talked (properly talked, I mean) in years.

And so it was, at about 10 o’clock, that my mother decided to throw away something that I will never get back. Right in front of my face, no less. My childish innocence that I was conceived by immaculate conception and my mother remained pure as the driven snow.

Shakily, she sat forward. Solemnly, she placed her glass on the table, and fixed me with one of her crystal gazes.

“D’you wanna know something?” She slurred, her eyes crossing slightly.
“Wha?” I replied, trying to work out which of her I should be paying attention to.
“I’ll... I’ll bloody well tell you. Listen. No, listen. “ big pause. And then:

”I’ve never had an orgasm.”

My brain took about three quarters of a second to process this. Synapses fired, my liver went in to overdrive, and I sobered up in a quarter of a second. One second after this gargantuan bombshell had been dropped, and I was stone cold sober. And, for the first time in my short but colourful life, speechless. But she wasn’t finished yet.

“I was married to to to him for TEN YEARS, and I could count the amount of times we had sex on one hand.”

Oh no. Oh Baby Jesus, NO! Why is she telling me this? Quick, change the subject.

“Oh look mum, we’ve run out of cigarettes, I’ll go and get some more...”

“No you won’t. Siddown. Three times I’ve been married. THREE. TIMES. And the nearest I got to sexual gra... gratifi... grantnfication was driving on the rumble strips on the way to Tesco.”

After that, she collapsed in to mumbling. I retired to bed, shell-shocked. We have never spoken of it again.




Until, that is, she enthusiastically told me that she’s never had it so good, or so often, as she has with her new man. So good for them.
(Fri 15th Aug 2008, 10:14, More)

» Celebrities part II

DiT, and the day Patriotism Died...
It was cold. So very, very cold. My breath fogged in the air as I cycled past Smithfields market on a freezing February evening in 2008. I had just purchased a shiny new red bicycle, I was riding it home, and all was good with the world. The market had closed for the evening, and there were still a few city workers straggling around the pubs and eateries that EC1 has to offer the world. Strangely, for this part of London, all seemed at peace and, I reflected, this was a wonderful city in a wonderful country.

That is, until the first police motorcycle shot past me at approximately 1,000 miles an hour, siren blaring (and if that wasn’t enough the rider was blowing on a whistle like his life depended on it). Screeching to a halt at a set of traffic lights, he continued blowing on his whistle for all he was worth while giving all sorts of hand gestures. The officer was stopping traffic with manic efficiency.

No sooner had this little mission been completed than a cavalcade of no less than seven police motorcyclists screamed past, each of them securing roads and blowing whistles and generally getting in the bloody way. “What’s this?” thought I, “Someone important approaches!” – never one to miss a signal, me. Carefully, I dismounted my bicycle, and stood to the side of the road. One, two, three Land Rovers with blacked-out windows sped past and then, emerging from the London night like a sleek, black Rolls Royce, came a sleek, black stretched Rolls Royce, travelling fairly slowly to negotiate the corner it was coming around.

And in the back seat of the Roller was a lady who looked very familiar. I had the oddest sensation that I’d licked her face on several hundred occasions, and that she tasted of glue. She was joined by an elderly chap who I was sure, if he had spoken to me, would have found some way to insult me. And then the penny dropped.

It was the bloody Queen.

The Queen! At Smithfields! And Phil was with her! And I’m stood right next to the car that is right now trying to get round the corner, with my new shiny red bike. What should I do? What should I do?

I’m afraid to say, dear reader, that I panicked. I didn’t display my behind, nor did I rush the car and start a revolution, nor did I flip the reigning Monarch the traditional ‘bird’. No. Somewhere, out of the deep recesses of my memory of my time in Air Cadets, came the idea that I am to respect and admire the Queen and so – and oh Lord is this shameful – I drew myself up to my full 5’ 7” (and a half, thank you so much), and I saluted. Long way up, short way down, eyes front. Respect.

What on earth did I think would happen? That Elizabeth Regina would call to her driver to “put the blady brakes orn”, leap out of the car and give me a knighthood plus land, a cash prize and a free go on Zara Phillips for being such a good, upstanding and patriotic citizen of the Empire?

Did she bollocks. Not a bloody flicker. I stood there, in the freezing cold of a February evening, saluting a woman and a man who were sat in the back seat of a stupidly long car by dint of coming out of the right womb, and they didn’t even look my way.

However, the people in the pub behind me were looking. And oh, how they laughed.

Thanks, your Majesty. Thanks a lot.
(Tue 13th Oct 2009, 14:21, More)