» Trolls

Wardrobe trolls
When I was about 8ish, my imagination fuelled by Point Horror tales, I used to terrify my little brother with stories about how the troll in his wardrobe would crawl out and eat him while he was asleep. (This was many years pre-Monster's Inc - the royalties cheque must have got lost in the post.) It got to the stage where I'd convinced him that the only way for him to be truly safe was by turning the lights off, knocking 3 times on the wardrobe door, spinning round three times, and saying "I'm not afraid of the trolls in the dark!" three times before getting into bed as fast as possible. After a couple of weeks he was doing this every night

Those of you with siblings can probably see where this is going.

One night, the second after he'd finished the final, "I'm not afraid...", I leapt out of the wardrobe wearing my glow-in-the-dark Spiderman pyjamas, a sheet tied round my neck (as a cape obviously - all wardrobe trolls wear capes!) and a Leonardo (turtle not Renaissance painter/inventor) face mask roaring my head off.


20 years on, my brother swears to this day that he's never been more scared in his life.


He screamed - very loudly - for a long time, and my parents quickly arrived on the scene. It didn't take Poirot to figure out what had happened - my brother was curled up in a ball on the floor bawling his eyes out, I was standing (dressed very dashingly IMHO) in front of the now open wardrobe looking guilty as sin.

Mum went to comfort my brother and eventually calmed him down. Dad found the whole thing quite amusing right up until the point he realised my brother had literally shat himself, on the carpet, by treading in it.



Epilogue:
The next morning was Sunday. I was grounded, my brother was still slightly traumatised. After breakfast, Mum sent me upstairs to spend the morning tidying my room.

As I went into my room, as usual, all the sheets were now on the floor. But when I went to pick them up they leapt up in the air at me going "Rarrrrggghhhhh!"

To this day I swear I have never been so scared in my life. I shrieked, in not a particularly manly fashion, and turned to run out of the room. In my panic I tripped over some of the many other items on the floor and fell headfirst into my bedside table.

When Mum arrived, I was sitting on the floor, blood streaming down my face, looking stunned. Dad was sheepishly comforting me, still holding onto the sheet.

She said nothing, just went to get the car out of the garage for what was one of many trips to Casualty me and my brother made in our childhood.
(Thu 19th May 2011, 12:41, More)

» Devastating Put-Downs

The Joys of Autumn
Walking back from the station the other day I was happily indulging in the simple pleasure of kicking all the piles of fallen leaves.

Approaching me in the other direction was a lady with a little girl who was similarly amusing herself (the little girl not the lady). As I walked past them the following exchange took place:

"Georgia, stop kicking the leaves!"

"But Mummy, that man's kicking the leaves too"

"Well his Mummy's not here to tell him off is she"
(Sun 27th Nov 2011, 10:36, More)

» That's me on TV!

Not on TV as such but nearly the silver screen
A few years ago I was down from uni visiting a mate who was studying at LSE. After a heady night out in the East End where much beer and curry was consumed we stopped off at one of his mates halls to continue the party. The fact that he claimed to have the 'finest weed known to humankind' (debatable but it did its job) and Withnail and I on DVD made this a no brainer.

Round about 4 in the morning we decided it was time to leave. Now John's mate lived close to the Royal Courts of Justice while John's halls were down in the west end. The simplest route was to head down the Strand, cut through Trafalgar Square and then home from there.

Somehow along the way I lost everyone else. Not a problem, as even though pissed and stoned this is still my home town and I know my way around. Stumbling on I ended up wandering down a little side street into Trafalgar Square.

As I made my away across my fuzzy brain slowly came to the realisation that there were some people around me. Bit odd for that time of night, especially as it was the middle of October.

But hang on, it's not just a couple of people, there's hundreds of the fuckers!

And not only that they're all in some sort of cult. No joke, they were all identically dressed in black capes, pointy witches hats and had these horrific white masks completely covering their faces!

I was now seriously freaking out but desperately trying to stay inconspicuous lest they spot me and then ritually disembowel me in front of Nelson's Column in some weird phallic fertility ritual.

But it was all to no avail. As if on some psychic signal the whole lot of the fuckers suddenly starts running straight fucking at me!

Needless to say subtlety be damned. I bloody legged it. Straight out the square, round the corner of the National Gallery, flat out for about 10 minutes. I ended up hiding behind a skip, felt like I was about to have a heart attack. I had to have about 4 cigarettes in a row until I was calm enough to move.

Somehow I stumbled back to John's place and crashed out on the sofa. The next morning I wasn't sure if I'd dreamt it or not. There was nothing on the news about some invasion by a devil-worshipping cult tearing up Soho. It was a total mystery.




Then 12 months later V for Vendetta came out, things made a lot more sense and I felt a complete plonker.
(Fri 12th Jun 2009, 10:12, More)

» Will you go out with me?

The N29 (booze did help)
For once I actually have a relevant(and true) story for this.

I met the current Mrs Threepwood on one of Mr Livingstone's finest innovations, the night bus. It was about 2am on a Saturday morning and I'd staggered on around Tottenham Court Rd after a Friday night spent in various less than salubrius Soho establishments.

I sat down next to this attractive petite brunette but the only thing I really noticed was that she was reading a book as that was a bit odd for that time of night even in London.

Anyway we got as far as Camden and a couple of wasted Camdenites (trilbys, skinny jeans etc) got on with their Maccy Ds and started talking loudly about Razorshite or some such while playing something similarly crap on their phones at full blast.

At the start I thought it was quite amusing as they were so pissed they were struggling to stand. But then one fell completely arse over tit and deposited the majority of his coke in my lap.

I was pretty pissed by this, but stayed sitting and conveyed my disgust verbally in a suitably sarcastic fashion. He however jumped up spitting obscenities in my face.

Before I could react, the girl next to me got up pushed him backwards while yelling something along the lines of "Why don't you just fuck off? You're dressed like a cunt and noone gives a monkey's fuck about your shite music!"

He looked a bit stunned by this. Then stepped forwards like he was going to start something further. However she curtailed this by punching him in the nuts (I've since found out she's been doing jujitsu since she was 15, whether this was a regulation move I don't know).

Wisely he left it at this and him and his mate got off rather sheepishly a couple of stops later.

This was quite a good ice breaker so we started chatting and it turned out she lived just a couple of stops before me. We exchanged numbers and it went from there.

I'm still shit scared of her, but that's by the bye.
(Fri 29th Aug 2008, 12:45, More)

» Terrible Parenting

I have twin brothers
Whenever one was acting up my Dad would threaten to send him back to the hospital because they'd got a spare.
(Thu 16th Aug 2007, 11:21, More)