» The B3TA Confessional

It happens to everyone
Let's get the really embarrassing confession out of the way first of all... I love a good McDonald's. My girlfriend is vegetarian and in the last year I've started jogging to try and shift the last of my man-gut, but I still can't resist a properly filthy Bic Mac. The sort of burger where you're sure barely 5% of it was ever alive, and all the better for it. Don't pretend you don't know exactly what I mean.

Returning from InFest the other day, my appetite finally started waking up after three days of being stomped on by massive drugs. When we pulled into the service station the first sign I saw was for Marks & Spencers. Thanks to the missus I'm quite partial to their stuffed vine leaves and other poncey wares, and was well up for easing my guts back into action in a luxurious manner.

Until I saw the Golden Arches looming in the distance like a glorious beacon of ill health and filthy living. Yes please mate, double cheeseburger, actually make it two, lovely, cheers. First meal in three days, gone in five minutes. Fuck yeah. This is how we do it.

I should really have seen my metabolism's revenge coming, and paced myself. The first rumble informed me that I would not be leaving Ronald's house with my dignity intact, but the lack of squelching clamed my nerves; I was only going to pass gas, not manure. Now, to pucker my flaps and attempt to emit an SBD... no! No, it's too late for such desperate measures! The toxins are on their way out! This would be an excellent time to panic!

Genius is oft born of seemingly impossible situations. I likened my masterstroke to Ultra Magnus' decision to perform an emergency separation of the Autobots' shuttle, allowing Galvatron to destroy the bulk of the vessel and throwing him off the scent. The music in here is pretty loud and surprisingly bangy, thought I. Just wait for the crescendo and... release! In perfect synchronicity with the beats! Yes! Beautifully done! Now, to rise gracefully from my seat and leave the other conoisseurs to enjoy my stenches.

...but why is everyone - EVERYONE - staring at me with such rampant disgust? And why is McDonald's in-house radio playing "Lying Sack of Shit" by Combichrist?

I'm listening to my iPod, aren't I

oh dear

RUN
(Wed 1st Sep 2010, 14:06, More)

» How clean is your house?

From September until December of 1998 I lived in a student flat with three other men.
Whilst I could just let you use your imaginations, I will elaborate. The truth may even be more disgusting than what your terrifying brains can conjure. But I'm willing to be proved wrong :-)

Our story revolves around two pints of milk in a plastic container thingy (what are they called anyway? They're not cartons. Cartons are made of cardboard) which quite literally sat in our kitchen, unclaimed, from September to late November. Our kitchen was, as you might expect, fucking disgusting. There were four of us, so it took about a week to get to the point where if you wanted to cook, or eat off a plate instead of out of takeaway wrappings (rare), or drink beer from a glass instead of from the can (Guinness nights only), you HAD to wash up. But none of us ever washed up more than what we needed right there and then. So two pints of milk just blended into the general carnage until it visibly solidified under the plastic.

I never knew milk could turn black.

A bit of background. Being a boys' flat we were not big on originality. We played Tekken 3, a lot, watched films, drank beer and wound each other up. This last point is especially pertinent to the story. When first I moved in I drove up from Nottingham with a carful of stuff, none of which I still own since I came to discover DVD players/a modicum of fashion sense/a more attractive woman than my then-girlfriend. The others had already moved in and informed me in advance that they would be in the pub when I arrived. Steve said he'd leave a key inside the bathroom window, so I just needed to pop round the back and reach through, then let myself in.

Steve failed to mention the full condom he would enclose the key in for "security" purposes.

The bathroom window was one of those frosted affairs so I was reaching in blind. Imagine the horror. I was expecting something hard and metallic; instead my fingers found a prophylactic filled with a suspicious cloudy white liquid. Try to guess how it feels to work out what you're holding as you drag it back through the window.

So I did what I'm confident any one of you would have done; I let myself into the flat, washed my hands incredibly thoroughly, was a bit sick, unpacked the car, marched over to the pub, bought a pint, downed it, bought another pint and walked into the bar where my flatmates were playing pool, loudly referring to Steve as a disgusting cunt. After they'd finished laughing, by which time I needed another pint, Steve assured me that the worrying substance my key had been swimming in was garlic sauce.

"Don't believe me? Smell your fingers"

Nice. My revenge was a long time coming - not because I believed it was a dish best served cold or anything (spaff is usually quite warm in my experience) but because creativity abandoned me in my stereotypically bombed student mindset. Until I asked, for the hundreth time, whose fucking milk was turning black in the fucking kitchen you disgusting fuckers. And then I had an idea.

Many of you will have worked out where I'm going with this. Bear with me, it was fucking funny.

Steve was, and still is to my knowledge, I don't know, I haven't seen him in years, look him up on Facebook if you really want to know, cyber-stalking is so easy these days, seeing a lovely girl called Donna. We all liked her, and I almost feel sorry for how much she had to suffer as part of my hideous prank. I timed it for when they had a weekend away at her parents'. I took a bowl from the kitchen - picked one which had curry smears around the rim for extra "eeewww, fuuuuckk" factor - and decanted as much of the substance formerly known as milk into it. This remains one of the most hideous experiences of my life. The stench of three-month-old milk is ungodly. It rates somewhere between "Rancor" and "Gillian McKeith" on my patented disgustingness scale.

I then placed this bowl under Steve's bed.

Alongside a box of tissues...

...and a borrowed (honest) copy of "Red Hot 60+" magazine.

I then closed the doors and windows of Steve's room and forgot all about it until the Sunday night, when Steve and Donna returned to our flat for a night of "oh thank god we're out from under the parents' watchful gaze let's have lots of sex" sex.

Myself and the other lads were watching TV in the front room until we heard a frankly inhuman noise coming from Steve's room next door. I muted the TV and sit upright in alert, gleeful anticipation. With hindsight, this may have identified me as the culprit. After a series of half-choked exclamations were crescendo'd with a very, very loud "WHAT THE HOLY FUCK?!!", Steve stormed into the next room demanding to know who had sucked the air out of his room and replaced it with camembert in a gaseous state.

I wish I could tell you I said something witty about garlic sauce, or smelling his fingers, but I was laughing so hard that witty repartee was even further from my grasp than normal. Again, not helping any claims I may have laid to innocence. Steve was proper angry. Apparently the stench and the discovery that her boyfriend was rubbing one out over grannies then keeping the produce of said self-flagellation in a bowl under his bed for long enough for it to turn black and solidify like some hideous splunge Star Trek villain (think of the episode where Tasha Yar dies) was a right turn-off for Donna.

I calmed down long enough to assure him that I'd planned for this eventuality and he could keep the mag for as long as was necessary.

And then he hit me.

Totally worth it.

Length... three months, in a warm kitchen, before it was unleashed into a hot room. Think about it. SO proud of myself.
(Fri 26th Mar 2010, 14:59, More)

» Waste of money

Fucking guidance counsellors
A while ago Ms Foxtrot and I were having some pop-pop problems. Sexwise. Nothing to do with aged grandparents, I've no idea who wrote that first definition but they obviously don't have as excellent a knowledge of Arrested Development as I do.

Anyway, things had fizzled - we've been together a long time, all our energy was spent dealing with the stresses of work and dancing lessons, and look at me for gods sakes. All the usual stuff that makes a couple less inclined to get jiggy with it (everyone dances, right?). I couldn't quite bring myself to ask the advice of any of my male friends - I get enough in the way of gay jibes as it is without admitting that I was finding it difficult to muster the energy to fuck a woman none of my mates can work out how I managed to pull - so I decided to seek professional help.

I had my doubts to begin with, which I seriously wish I'd heeded. Basically I was going to cough up my hard-earned in exchange for advice on how to cough up cock yoghurt from my hard-boned. Christ that was laboured. Sorry, everyone. I'll start again.

I had my doubts to begin with, which I seriously wish I'd heeded. Is paying a professional for sex advice tantamount to hiring a prostitute? Of course it fucking isn't, I hear you spluttering from behind your strawberry cream frappucino. But that's the sort of spent, frazzled headspace I was in. I was desperate to put the lead back in my pencil so I braced myself for the mockery, the embarrassment, the bill, and went to see a guidance counsellor.

The experience itself wasn't bad at all - my counsellor was very understanding, made lots of platitudes about how it happens to a lot of people, and gave me some unusual advice. Highly unusual, however I figured that was what I was paying for - thinking outside the box (hehehe). Newly determined to remind Ms Foxtrot of the man she was first attracted to all those years ago, I strode home and left her a message to meet me, when she got home from work, at a farm a few miles up the road (unlikely? I live in Norfolk. Thousands of the bastard things).

Things did not go as planned.

Ms Foxtrot entered the barn, presumably thoroughly excited by my note promising an atypical sexual adventure. I suppose she was expecting an al fresco roll in the hay. She was most distressed to find me oiling up a piece of farm machinery in a state of undress, performing a sexy striptease and eyeing up the exhaust pipe in a most unseemly fashion.

Apparently my explanation clarified matters but did not make things any more palatable. My counsellor's expensive advice was that in order to seduce Ms Foxtrot, I should do something sexy to a tractor.

I thank you
(Thu 30th Sep 2010, 15:42, More)

» Winning

This counts, and I don't care who says otherwise
My best mate works at Jewsons, right. Yesterday - May the 4th - he was asked by his yard manager to contact the sand people about a delivery. The sand people. On May the 4th.

He wins because he replied "There's no-one there at the moment, but they'll soon be back, and in greater numbers."
(Thu 5th May 2011, 10:10, More)

» It's Not What It Looks Like!

I'm more concerned with what it must have felt like
During my Uni days we had various crap "entertainment" evenings down the Union, only one of which really sticks in my mind. It was one of those events when many factors combine and produce a moment of absolute magic, if magic can be indelibly seared onto the retinas of those who witnessed it.

So this one night we had a hypnotist. I've never really investigated the science, or whatever, behind this, and have no idea whether it's all a bunch of hocus-pocus or whether people really can be lulled into a semi-conscious state and encouraged to act abnormally by a stranger with a microphone. Luckily, this being a student night, there was enough alcohol sloshing about to ensure such activities would probably go off without a hitch anyway. But this time, on a stage.

The poor bloke trying to entertain a load of half-cut middle-class dickheads with a ludicrous sense of entitlement, mostly called Ollie and Marianka an' that, was having a particularly hard time of it because the night coincided with one of the Rugby team's many, many socials. Eventually he gets tired of the abuse and invites them to come up on stage and be hypnotised. Much macho posturing and bullshit bravado later, he has seven hulking volunteers on stage, all keen to prove that they were so hard as to be unhynotisable, which is totally a word.

There was a glint in the conjurer's eye as he sat them all down and put them under. Those of us who thought the Rugby team were mostly pricks (ie, everyone in the room who wasn't on the Rubgy team) were thoroughly looking forward to seeing what humiliation they'd be subjected to. We got more than we bargained for. But not as much as the hypnotist.

Once the lumbering dullards were drooping in their chairs, the practioner of stage magic told them "you will obey my next command TO THE LETTER..." turning to the crowd to flash an evil grin, he rounded on his victims with a flourish.

A little too much of a flourish. He tripped over the microphone cable, and as he hit the deck he cried out "Fuck me!"

What happened next will haunt me forever
(Fri 10th Dec 2010, 9:53, More)