NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL CAB!

[turnstyle]

I've been an official member of this forum for 14 years now, and there are still some posts I think about years down the line that get me tittering like a twat.

So, if you were going to construct your very own Now That's What I Call CaB volume, what would be your top picks? Here's a few from me that are over a decade old but still pop up in my head regularly:

From the 'Post your most humiliating experience' thread in 2007:

When I took a brief one day interest in bestiality about 7 years back, punched in the words: horse interracial blond for Jeeves to dutifully investigate, found an appropriate site and then promptly had a Grand Mal seizure. My wife found me foaming on the floor with my pentium 200mhz struggling to complete a glorious picture of an ebony temptress being buggered by a donkey.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16349.0.html

This next one was from a thread called 'How repulsive are you?' from 2009. I can't find the original thread now, weirdly. There's a 'redux' version from 2011, but the original seems to have vanished. Not to worry though, because I actually kept a copy of this post from that thread, as well as a couple of others. Not sure who the author of this one was:

All this talk of cocks however, reminds me of when I was 10 or 11 and I was helping my parents to clear my uncle's house after he had been found dead from a heart attack. I was alone in his bedroom and rooting through a pile of old photographs. One photograph featured my uncle and his office workmates. Suited and booted and obviously drunk beyond reason, they were posing raucously and for some reason my uncle had his cock out. He was holding it in one hand and presumably waving it about and cheering. As you do.

Now, like many prurient, prepubescent boys, I was rather fascinated by penises. And not, I repeat not, in a gay way. Honest. You didn't get to see them in those days the way you do now, what with their being no internet and all, and I really wanted to know if the slug between my legs was normal. I had at the time seen something somewhere about hermaphrodites and was convinced that I was one. (I was a strange child all told.) Anyhow, so I stole this photo of my uncle's cock and examined it guiltily in my bedroom. Then, fearing that it would be discovered and I would be put in stocks and pelted with lemons, I tore out the detail of the photo that contained my dead uncle's cock and threw the rest away. So this was a piece of an old photo, maybe a couple of centimetres square, with a cock, in a hand. So I put it in my back pocket and went about my business.

A day or two later I returned home from playing football and my jeans were not in my bedroom. My mum had been trawling the house for things to wash, which was something she did occasionally. So I went downstairs and, sure enough, the washing machine was on, doing its thing. I remember beginning to assume that the cock would have gone undiscovered in my back pocket and was currently, like my guilt, in the process of being washed away. Then I saw it, sitting there on an otherwise uncluttered kitchen table. My heart started beating like a bastard. My mum was in the other room. Quickly, I picked up my uncle's cock and ran up to my room.

I didn't really know what to do at that stage, but I knew the cock had to be destroyed. So I chewed it up as best I could, and swallowed it.

I kept a low profile in the house for the next few years and my mum, to her credit, never mentioned it again.

Not particularly repulsive, but a bit weird I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, name and shame your classic, Now worthy posts from the rich history of this very website.

[gib]

wanking den
how i taught my cat to lick me off
my fight with a gipsy

[Mobius]

I've never seen that uncle cock story before, that is fantastic.

I was just gonna mention wanking den too

[idunnosomename]

cack hen mammoth turd in tinfoil

[turnstyle]

wanking den
how i taught my cat to lick me off
my fight with a gipsy

Wanking den was also in the 'how repulsive are you?' thread that I cannot find. Luckily, it was one of the others I had saved.

Aged about 13-14, some mates and I discovered this abandoned house.  Evidently it has been home to an old lady who had died, leaving it in a state of disrepair and it was years and years before her family decided to sell the house on.  Essentially it was this big 1930's house that had had its downstairs gutted.  We went and sniffed around and broke in.  We kicked in a kitchen window and then we kind of took over the house.  What furniture there was was taken upstairs, keys were found and a fridge was positioned in front of the broken window to keep people out.

Essentially we turned this house into a wanking pit.  We pooled our stash of porn and left it all there, covering the walls with the centerfolds.

It was all quite genteel initially.  We'd wank in the same room but we'd turn the chairs to face the wall and at no point did it devolve into mutual masturbation or a gang-bang.  The wanking was fine, the problem was the by-products.

Essentially we went through a lot of tissues.  Initially we just slung them in a bin but nobody ever emptied it so it went mouldy and we had to basically chuck the bin filled with mouldering spunk-encrusted tissues into a side room.  We had the house for about a year and there were five of us and essentially everyone popped in for a wank on the way and back from school.  That's a lot of tissues and they started to pile up in bin-bags in this side room.  By this point people had also started shitting in binliners and pissing in bottles and storing them in the loft.

Then one of us mentioned to his parents that the house existed and the parents then mentioned it to some friends who were looking for a place to live and they demanded that they be allowed to visit the house.  At the time, the parents thought it was a kind of club house where we drank beers.  They were not aware of the porn, shit and zizz-rags.  We had to clear it all out and decided to stick it all up in the loft.

By this point the people living in the next door houses had realised something was up and had started snooping around so the group descended into paranoia.

One day, two of the group happened to arrive at the house separately.  The first one was evidently wanking away upstairs when he heard a noise downstairs.  Terrified that it was one of the people who lived nearby he went and hid in the loft, which was now half full of bags of rotting shite, mouldering jizz-rags and bottles of piss.  Bloke number two arrives, sees that there's nobody there and starts having a wank.

This is when I arrive.

The second bloke also panics and decides to go up to the loft.  The first bloke hears someone coming up the ladder to the loft and overcome by fear, panic and the awe-inspiring smell faints, falling into a bag of unspeakable foulness.  The first bloke notices the slumped corpse and the unspeakable foulness all over him and promptly vomits really loudly on his own lap.  I hear this and think that they're up in the loft mucking about and I start up the ladder.  The first bloke thinks that he's trapped and essentially opens the door to the loft and starts flinging down bags of shit and cum rags onto me.

So all three of us had to walk home smeared in rotting shit.  Rotting cum-filled tissues.  Piss.  And vomit.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

EDIT: Never Mind.

[Mr_Simnock]

A huge thread about global warming where biggytitbo didn't move an inch over the 2 years the thread ran. However one of the best threads for me ever is the 'fucking cunt' mystery record thread, solid platinum from start to finish. Tags, so many of those have made me laugh so much, big shame they aren't around as much.

[flotemysost]

I think it was probably from before my time here, but I've seen it quoted - I can't remember if it was from that same "repulsive" thread or who the author was, but there was a great anecdote about someone shitting themselves at the pub.

Uncle cock story is superb, the ending is the cherry on top, almost Gothic.

[MoreauVasz]

I am delighted that the wanking den story lives on in legend.

[BlodwynPig]

I think it was probably from before my time here, but I've seen it quoted - I can't remember if it was from that same "repulsive" thread or who the author was, but there was a great anecdote about someone shitting themselves at the pub.

Uncle cock story is superb, the ending is the cherry on top, almost Gothic.

Soiled boxers still there even though pub is now a walk-in centre

[non capisco]

I think it was probably from before my time here, but I've seen it quoted - I can't remember if it was from that same "repulsive" thread or who the author was, but there was a great anecdote about someone shitting themselves at the pub.

Doomy Dwyer. That post was an absolute masterpiece. "The pants were obviously a write-off. They were pants in name only. They'd seen things that people who make pants had never considered, even in their vilest imaginings." Worth quoting in full as it's probably my favourite thing I've ever read on here and still cracks me up every time I read it. 

There's no menstruation involved, but plenty of shit. This is a bit of an odyssey.

I'd just started a new job and in my first week there got invited to see one of my new colleagues' band play in Camdens fashionable Dublin Castle public house. I thought it'd be a good chance to get to know my new workmates in a less horrifically artificial environment than the office, and also, the bloke who was in the band was someone I'd worked with previously, so loads of our former colleagues would be there as well and it would be a right royal rave up. It ain't normally my sort of thing to be honest, I spend enough time with work bastards, I don't want to hang out with the fuckers moaning about the fucking stationery cupboard in my spare time too - but I thought I'd make and effort and create a good impression 'cause deep down I'm a nice guy. I went down there on the bus with my missus and everything was groovy.

As soon as we walked in the door, things began to take a turn for the worse. My temperature seemed to shoot up about a hundred degrees, I was suddenly drenched in sweat and I felt like the Vision had done that thing where he alters his density and passes his intangible hand through your poor old guts before craftily partially re-materializing it, creating a sense of inner turmoil of the very worst kind. I just put it down to nerves and continued on my way through the busy and unfamiliar pub toward the bar and safety, all the while feeling steadily sicker with each footstep. While I was doing this, the band guy clocks me and shouts "Oi! Oi! Doomy" from the stage, alerting my already present new workmates to my entrance, who all turn as one to give us a wave, giddy with post work euphoria and the prospect of some imminent Rock 'n' Roll justice about to be meted out by one of the most ruthless and respected Reps in the West London area. Also, a contingent of the people I used to work with all give me the thumbs up, whooping and cheering in an unsightly frenzy of raw emotion because we haven't seen each other for the best part of a week.

Me and my beloved get to the bar. I tell her to get a couple of bevvies in as I've got to get to the khazi like quick, smart and in a hurry because I'm in a bad, bad way. I didn't go into detail because time was a factor. I just started to blindly push my way through the thickening throng - haircuts and students like some bespoke nightmare tailored to my exact specifications - with no real idea of where the toilets lie, just working on pure animal instinct. Some sort of survival mechanism had kicked in, I suppose. Finally I see the gents, and I break into a canter, there's a stool in my path which I clamber over, unfortunately my leading leg lands in a puddle of beer, causing me to perform the splits. Now, I don't now how I didn't just shit myself there and then. I was younger I suppose, my reflexes were quicker, my bowels in optimum condition, my sphincter as limber as an Olympic athlete. Somehow, mustering every ounce of my will power, I kept whatever foul contagion that I held within me, within me. I picked myself up and carried on my sweaty lurch, towards sweet sanctuary.

Of course, I get in there and all the traps are full and now I'm dancing, foot to foot like Ali, singing in a whisper to distract my arse and talking to myself, a sort of desperate mantra. And I'm clenching like I ain't never clenched before, like I was trying to crack a macadamia nut between my treacherous buttocks. I can feel the heat inside of me, like molten lava. I can feel the churning, almost hear it, like those swamps or tar pits that bubble and go 'Gloop'. After a wait of what seemed like hours, I hear that glorious sound of the flush, the rustle of clothing being adjusted and that unmistakable jangle of the belt as the trousers are firmly secured. The bolt slides back, out comes the punter, and I penguin it in like Flynn. Yesss.

It's a universal law that increased proximity to a toilet both increases the sense of urgency and instils a feeling relaxation paradoxically at the same time. Never relax is my advice. Not until you are seated, trousers down and preferably pants also. This was my fatal error. In trying to move slowly and carefully so as not to disturb my critical mass bowels I tarried too long. I'd barely got my belt unbuckled when the first torrent was unleashed, instantly filling my strides. I felt the level rising, actually up my back - hot, liquid and rank. The stench made me gag and retch, I experienced a moment of shame and disbelief that my own body could produce such an evil, cadaverous smell. I'd have spewed if I hadn't been so busy shitting my very essence out of my poor beleaguered arsehole. I managed to tense just for a moment, the time I needed to remove my long coat and hang it on a hook on the back of the toilet door, out of harms way. In a flash I ripped the belt free and in one swift, almost graceful movement, lowered my massively soiled dung filled trousers and pants. In doing this I must have relaxed again, coating the rear wall of the cubicle in huge waves of shit, like some Satanic water cannon. The moment had a hallucinatory quality, what with my high temperature, the physical and mental turmoil I was undergoing and the sheer stress and danger I was experiencing, I felt as though I was observing myself from above, I hung suspended above the cubicle watching a fountain of brown water gush from my arse. I managed to sit down, but it was far too late, the damage was most definitely done. I sat there, weak, drained and disgusted while my bowels continued to emit whatever dregs remained, little drips, followed by the occasional swift burst of slurry, then...nothing. I was spent. A sort of soothing calm filled the cubicle.

But not for long. I was caked. My clothes were ruined. Most of the cubicle was coated with several coats of shite. The smell was outrageous. My mind turned to thoughts of escape. I tried to formulate a plan to clear up as best I could, salvage whatever clothing remained wearable , find the missus and get as far away from Camden as possible before all my colleagues – past and present – were alerted to the carnage that had taken place this day. Gathering what scraps of usable toilet roll I could, I began to scoop out my jeans (black, fortunately). They would obviously have to be worn in order to re-enter the bar. When I'd completed the scooping I began to slowly, very slowly and with utmost care to remove the jeans. The pants were obviously a write-off. They were pants in name only. They'd seen things that people who make pants had never considered, even in their vilest imaginings. One sock was filled with shit, the other, amazingly, was pristine, which was a great comfort to me strangely. My t-shirt was drenched with crap, that'd have to be discarded. Luckily I had an over shirt (also black), that I could just about still wear, although it probably wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny. I was wearing big old bike boots, and after pouring out the excess excrement, these weren't too bad. Together with my long overcoat, I reckoned there was an outside chance of getting out of this mess.

It was then that I became aware of other toilet users voicing their horror and disbelief that anything human could have produced such a monstrous stench. They were coughing and moaning. I barely had any energy left, but joined in with their protestations, naked at that point, save for the one good sock. I cursed the filthy bastard who'd been in the cubicle before me and threatened to complain to the management about the squalor of his amenities. I don't think they were convinced, but I've got my pride and felt I had to do something to maintain a veneer of dignity. I dressed as quickly as I could, then set about cleaning up the cubicle, which proved to be a fruitless task. I hid most of the shitty clothes in the cistern, scraped up what shit I could and flung it down the pan, but there were just piles of it everywhere. Heaps. Although it had felt largely liquid when it was being expelled, my shit had begun to solidify into a brownie-like mass. It began to look like one of those cross sections of the earth that you see in books of natural history with the different layers of crust denoting different eras. It was quite fascinating to watch, but there was no time, the clock was ticking. I did my best to compose myself, put on the overcoat which covered most of my sins and waited 'til the complainers had left, then tentatively exited from the ruined trap, washed myself down as best I could, then made my way back to the bar.

I saw my blessed turtledove, my one and only, still standing at the bar with a look of grave concern on her angelic features. I'd been gone a good half hour. I hurried toward her and told her I'd just shat myself in the most heinous way possible and that we'd have to leave sharpish before anyone alerted the authorities that some atrocity had taken place on the premises. I downed the pint she'd bought me like I was ice cold in Alex and we began to leave. As we did so we were immediately surrounded by my colleagues, old and new, asking where I'd been, how I was and on several horrific occasions, hugging me tightly. I tried to squirm free from their embraces without displacing too much of the toxic fug that my coat contained. I told them I was just nipping out for some fags and that I'd see them later. I left at high speed, never to return, homeward bound and toward the first of many showers.

That was nearly seven years ago. Now I only ever leave the house to stock up on adult diapers and brillo pads.

[Old Thrashbarg]

I am delighted that the wanking den story lives on in legend.

And the thread still exists.

I think it was probably from before my time here, but I've seen it quoted - I can't remember if it was from that same "repulsive" thread or who the author was, but there was a great anecdote about someone shitting themselves at the pub.

It was Doomy Dwyer in the redux version of the repulsive thread.

Edit: beaten to it.

[flotemysost]

Haha, thanks both!

[non capisco]

A more recent one I really loved was from a thread about a woman in (I think) the US who claimed to have captured footage of a goblin in her driveway that was blatantly her skinny son dicking about with his shirt over his head and doing a daft knock-kneed walk. The thread title was something like "Is this a goblin or her son being weird?". The post that really got me was by Thomas and said "It is her son being weird, but he is also medically a goblin."

"But he is also medically a goblin", like "they were pants in name only", is probably a set of words that will entertain me for the rest of my life.

I also have to give a massive shout out to Gregory Torso getting shitfaced, watching a YouTube video of The Birdie Song over and over again and live posting his reactions. Astonishing.

[Enzo]

A huge thread about global warming where biggytitbo didn't move an inch over the 2 years the thread ran. However one of the best threads for me ever is the 'fucking cunt' mystery record thread, solid platinum from start to finish. Tags, so many of those have made me laugh so much, big shame they aren't around as much.

Was that mystery ever solved? I was hooked on that thread.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

I still harbour fond memories of Buelligan's deathless line " and me, a lovely lady " ( said in fine tones of faux- affrontery, rather than naming herself as the last person in a line- up , or something). I believe , upon first witnessing it, I laughed for five minutes straight.

[pancreas]

this cunt

But in particular, for a recent outing.



Here I am then, back again, the Buzby of failed relationships and sad childhood memories, with a sideline in dawn realisations that hit you like Springsteen's Freight Train.  The latest one, lain dormant for thirty years, is the kind of unescorted horror that could only drift ashore on a sticky, open-windowed night where you sweat the best of yourself inch deep into the mattress.  Unbeckoned and unwanted, it came in fully-formed and ready to hurt.  This one was that when Mum used to shout AA! as a signal for me and my brother to intervene in a (sometimes pretend) argument she was having with dad, it wasn't, as I had always presumed, the fourth emergency service that she was calling out for, but Alcoholics Anonymous.

Try making breakfast after that.  There is no other place I can put that so it'll have to live here, else I whisper it to lone men at matinee screenings.

Always one to go back to a lit firework,  I think about those holidays and the time of them in idle stretches of introspection and I can neither grasp them or let them go, the well trod-on path of leaden nostalgia perfectly encapsulated in Ted Lucas' siren song to the estranged heart, Baby, Where You Are, particularly when twinned with the candied infantilism presented here in this video featuring the moon-eyed Muppet Babies.

The gelatine hue, warm and pink, of the early nineties dances like the starting grid air at Silverstone.  Soundtracked by reggae, neon ankle socks and hayfever it is, to use the appalling parlance of our time, my safe space.  My Proustian Port.  My Elysian Field.  My Grimsby Sex Hut.  And staring blankly at that starting grid was how I spent most of my indoor time with my grandparents, the frantic drone of engine ushering out yet another bloody Sunday, a dull lament to an enormous waste of time. 

We could have instead been watching Gazzetta Football Italia and my first homoerotic love Roberto Baggio, history's sole justification for both pony-tail and perm, show off the football skills that made him famous.  The control of the telly though is adult's business. Specifically man's business.  But specifically dad's business.  And he was the dad of even my dad, so on it stayed.  The same telly, by the way, that spent its first decade in the drawing room, a gaudy embarrassment he foisted upon Nana and perhaps the only purchase he ever made without her explicit approval.  A colour set was unnatural, dangerous even she said, so it was kept in the television room (née drawing room) no one ever went in.  It gradually, with the softening of the times, made its way to the living room where it lived out the rest of its life sat in the corner revealing cars.  I like to picture the months it spent inching its way up the corridor between the rooms with sombre, Japanese duty, a week or so spent chatting to the telephone table in the hall.

The house itself was, like all haunted aphorisms, a crooked mess high up on the hill.  1974 trapped in treacle, amber air thickened by the incessant chiming of the hours.  The marbled eyes of a stone menagerie, either a warning or a welcome, made the winding climb to the front door a cross between the La Brea tar pits and Hibernian Narnia.  Like Canada the house got carried away with itself the further you went up into it, a series of shifting, slanted rooms whose layout would change depending on what chapter you were on.  Grey Gardens written like House of Leaves, Little Edie played by Edith Finch.

Rifling through drawers and trawling through people's personal effects is a cowardly, lifelong pastime I've always enjoyed immensely and one of the few recreations from my shop-worn youth that I am yet to abandon, along with dipping my fingers in hot candle wax and breaking women. 

So when I got bored of the red car winning I would slip out of the room and shamelessly poke about a bit.  Exploration was infrequently rewarded when, hidden amongst the timeless tat, we would stumble across a treasure from their time in the Far East.  Not much was known about their life there, even then.  My dear dad, a man who thirty years sober doesn't deserve the opening paragraph and wouldn't have it were it not for my craven desire to open doors too abruptly, attempted a series of retrospective interviews with them both to help add water to the ink.  I don't know where the recordings have gone but it doesn't really matter as they were both closed as clams throughout and my grandmother (who had never before left Wales) said her main memories of arriving in Singapore in the early 1950s was that it was hot.  When gently shoved by my father for more information or, god forbid, emotion, she thought for a while, the years flickering through her mind like a Rolodex, and said 'aye, it was quite humid, too'.

The ancestral inquest stopped there and we never really found out what Singapore was actually like or why they went.  Just that she had to write to her mother for permission to marry him (he's English but such a good man) and that there was an incident with his father and a train that was never really cleared up, but resulted in Grampa taking a newly ownerless motorbike and riding off from his Lincolnshire farm straight down to Portsmouth where he (illegally) joined the Merchant Navy as an actual child.  I suppose the truth of that has died with him, or at least rusted like an abandoned motorcycle.

Similarly I interviewed my then 90-year-old great-grandmother as part of a primary school history project as she was a teenager throughout the Great War and a mother during the even Greater one, surviving the bombs on Tiger Bay.  In keeping with the castro house style (bombast and plagiarism) the opening salvo was a direct quote of hers that read 'War is all well and good until you find a kid's head in a tree'. 

Carpeted almost exclusively with dog hair it was a busy and boisterous house, at least when we were there, with a near constant supply of out-of-date Penguin bars and council pop, Nana liable at any minute to dive head first into the chest freezer and hook out a Marathon ice-cream.  They were, if it's not already apparent, a generous and eccentric couple.  Christmas presents were always the cresting wave of Nan madness and without fail you could expect shampoo (the ingredients always in Arabic), Hooch (I was eleven) and, wrapped in paper but no plastic bag, topsoil.  Then it would be off to the front room for an Iceland buffet and the Box Game, in which Nan would present you with a Doritos box with a hole cut through and you stick your hand in and guess the fun mystery object, be it wet catfood or a housebrick.  A lifetime on and I'm still seething I didn't get a point for mayonnaise when she had in actual fact filled a dog bowl with salad cream.

Taking half a dozen children on holiday was perhaps the twentieth century's most difficult and thankless job, with an honourable mention for Babu, the Auschwitz clown.  But they did it every summer for a decade and when we got too old they took their son's ex-wife's new child (and later her foster children) instead.  Last week's episode saw Nana dice with rabies and rationale, Grandpa's trailing finger louchly resting on the tiller, not speaking much and when he did only to say 'Get that will ya Barb' when the phone rang.  Here the mania is toned down slightly, perhaps because the wisdom of crowds curtailed her greater excesses.  And if radical layabout and gravity pervert kittens can look after an animal (if not himself), raising a tadpole to (probable) adulthood then Nan can be trusted not to kill us for a week.  So warm up the Volvo gal, throw the kids in the boot and pack a thousand fish fingers because we're off on another Summer Holiday, this time with the added peril of the other people.  Toot toot!

As previously/relentlessly mentioned I grew up in seaside town with a famous Butlins so it made both logistical and financial sense to drive a hundred miles east to Somerset and to Pontins, a cheaper and therefore worse version of holiday centre behemoth Butlins.  In the years we crossed into England Grampa, upon approaching the border, would try to get us to take off our hats as he slowed down the Volvo to a 'respectable speed', whilst we sang songs about Ronald Koeman's free kick and fizzed with heart-bursting excitement, which is why I think one year I pushed my brother in the boating lake about ten minutes after arriving.

Pontins, the connoisseur's choice, complimented the Jonestown type dizziness of the cottages and also gave me the chance to pretend I was somebody else for a week, until you forgot half an hour later and revert to twat.  A practise I have employed 2005-present  Go to university adopt a limp.  Backpack around Cuba salute everyone.  Reach 36 have an identity crisis and start wearing nail varnish.

I was concerned that writing about those lemonade summers veered tragically into a Facebook poem about a never England, a time before the twentieth century overstayed its welcome.  And if it did then the antidote is perhaps latter day Pontins and its playground pushing, now older and crueller.  Week long marriages with girls with mad fuck accents who smelt of menthol cigarettes and damp who shouted at their mums.  Or petty posturing whenever bigger boys were around and practising spitting.  I hope we weren't too awful by the end.  And if we were, that Nana and Grampa didn't notice.  Towards the end of the affair, at fifteen perhaps, I took weed with me.  I don't think I smoked it as I was still only practising at being a cunt.  But I remember carrying it around me, hot in my pocket like Chekhov's gun.  The Death of Innocence.  Purity dutifully trudging away like the lone penguin in Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, alone on the tundra, walking to death.

Like Che Guevara, Nabakov, Camus and other radical free-thinkers (Peter Shilton) I am a goalkeeper, a netminder, a fun negator.  We are the bastard drummers of football and understand more of the game because we are not a part of it, but above it, both operationally and spiritually. They let us use our hands in the same way they let a jockey use a whip.  When I play for my team I wear my Bangor Comrades shirt commemorating the (failed) 1919 communist uprising of North Wales and other less important places like Berlin, Budapest, Glasgow and, bizarrely, Southampton.  A glimpse of how things might look had the revolution lasted more than eight minutes can be seen, architecturally at least, in the depersonalised, tessellated lodging found throughout Britain's holiday camps of the period.

I know that nowadays, because of the dissipation of public esteem and personal accountability, Butlins is primarily bang face weekenders and ITV darts tournaments, but 25 years ago it was the closest Britain got to agricultural collectivisation and stood, unconsciously no doubt, in tacky,  pulsating defiance of Thatcher's venal superego.  The Soviet style accommodation and egalitarian zeal/artificial equality puts me in mind of a probably apocryphal story I was told last year whilst on holiday in Belarus (the kids are enormous fans of brutalism). 

It goes, A Russian bureaucrat was sent to Minsk to issue them just enough money to keep them poor, thus ensuring they were kept in Mother Moscow's thrall for another winter at least.  After a meeting with top brass at the Politburo the diplomat, red of heart and cheek, now pissed on potato wine, stumbled out onto streets that looked remarkably like those back in the capital, purposely so, except not quite as nice (also purposely so).  Streets so eerily familiar in fact that he, having never before been in the city, could find his way to a district that looked identical to his back in Moscow, and then an apartment block that mirrored his own, staggering through its parallel corridors to find a flat identical to his, where he took out a key for a door a thousand miles away, opened it and waded over to a bed and woman the same as his own, where he slept the good sleep of men whose every step in life is ratified, affirmation of a correct decision.  The theory goes that he could have done the same in any one of the satellite cities that orbited the Great Mad Bear.  And although it probably never happened, and I'm not sure if it was meant to revere or ridicule the Union, there is a truth to it, and much the same happened to me and my eldest cousin Matthew when we walked into the wrong chalet and ended up staying for tea.

Modern capitalist governments, like Nancy Sinatra's unfaithful partner in Bang Bang, don't even take the time to lie.  Whereas the Soviet Union, relentlessly and brutally, took the time to deceive you constantly.  Because they cared, pathologically so.  It must have been a comfort to feel that this globular, amorphous power knew who you were, to an obsessive degree, a Chechen dentist living modestly in rural Kazakhstan, and loved you so much they wanted to squeeze the life out of you. The closest we ever got to that was New Labour trying to be your mate, straddling a backwards chair and doing a rap about staying in school.

Pontins, the third way, had a strange National Service fervour.  The hive-like accommodation, the Crocodile Club's morning marches, the eerie, intrusive midday anthem and tannoyed public information from a rusted megaphone up a tree.  The archery and rifle shooting felt like a paramilitary training in case they ever fancied another pop.  The what would now no doubt be called a food court resembled more an officers' mess built by King Midas if everything he touched turned to tin.  The very concept seemed like it was designed to piss off the French and whether it was because 90% of my Primary School curriculum was about the Second World War (away win) or the fact that we built corrugated-iron dens on the Somerset dunes, I felt the excited dread of an Evacuee watching London disappear, albeit it one who played five hours of air hockey a day.

The uneasy, imposed conviviality was bookended by some kind of bogus Blitz spirit, cast against the pall of Vera Lynn (I was delighted...) whose hit song, We'll Meet Again, was played every night after the Cabaret to usher out the children who would, unaccompanied, snake their way back to their uniform bunk-beds like refugees of war, whilst the adults stayed to get pissed and watch a show.


Refracted time (in red and bold)

Grandpa controlled our budget for the week in a vain attempt to teach us a lesson about fiscal responsibility and the importance of note-taking.  He was a life-long militant note-taker and carried on his person at all time a slim pocketbook the colour of Thatcher's handbag in which he would jot down not the day's event but the numbers that pertained to them.  Timetables, expenses, phone numbers.  The real poetry though lay on the last page.  A record of every car he ever owned, its number plate, the mileage driven before and after his involvement with them, the list slowly swelling over the years, the records carefully transferred to a new notebook every year, a sonnet to the automotive industry. 

At the start of the week Grampa would present us with two options.  We could each receive £2 at the start of every day (accruing £14 by the week's end) or take now the ten pound note pirouetting coquettishly in front of our hungry eyes.  We, obviously, snatched the tenner immediately and had spent it on absolute shite by about half 11 on Monday morning.  Meaning we had to spend the rest of the week pretending to play the demo mode on arcade cabinets, or worse, watching other people play video games decades before it became a million-dollar industry.

Perhaps my fondest memory of all the holidays, encapsulating them as a couple and the Britain I left behind like a forgotten book on a bench, took place during the exquisitely naff Cabaret on our Last Night, a night already swimming with bitter-sweet poignancy for a child that can't accept loss. 

The show was abruptly halted mid turn for a special announcement which stirred a giddy murmur from the audience before the Blue Coat called my nan up to the stage by name, with all us grandchildren in tow.  There they revealed that she had unknowingly locked my grandfather in the chalet toilet whilst we were getting ready to go out and had not noticed his absence in the intervening three hours.  Using all the guile he learnt from the Korean War (he used to watch M*A*S*H), he decided for reasons lost to time and death to undress and attach his standard-issue granddad white briefs to a stick and wave them impotently out of the small, bathroom window.  Basically I think he panicked and tried to surrender.  Eventually a passing holiday-maker spotted him and instead of trying to section him she alerted Pontins HQ who knew better than to pass up a good news story like this as it would go down well with the Barrymore plebs lapping up any old shite in the Cabaret lounge and would also eat up five minutes stage time and they wouldn't have to do the tombola.  There followed rapturous, ITV primetime waves of uncontrollable laughter amongst the tables before they gave Nan a bottle of champagne for services to misandry.

[Captain Z]

I'm basically egg,
I'm basically Greg,
I'm basically mizbet and poon,
My dad is a scarecrow,
My mum is a ghost,
They call me the Mull of Lak Toon

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Sam/Twit 2's description of Alan Sugar is an all time high point, of course.

[pigamus]

I revisit the Cerys's aunt/Morrissey tags often.

[Ray Travez]

I'm basically egg,
I'm basically Greg,
I'm basically mizbet and poon,
My dad is a scarecrow,
My mum is a ghost,
They call me the Mull of Lak Toon

Angrew Lloyg Wegger's setting of that to music is a truly wonderful thing

https://soundcloud.com/cobbugger/the-mull-of-lak-toon

[Mr_Simnock]

Was that mystery ever solved? I was hooked on that thread.

Yes, it was basically about Gary Newman.

[Twit 2]

this cunt

But in particular, for a recent outing.



Here I am then, back again, the Buzby of failed relationships and sad childhood memories, with a sideline in dawn realisations that hit you like Springsteen's Freight Train.  The latest one, lain dormant for thirty years, is the kind of unescorted horror that could only drift ashore on a sticky, open-windowed night where you sweat the best of yourself inch deep into the mattress.  Unbeckoned and unwanted, it came in fully-formed and ready to hurt.  This one was that when Mum used to shout AA! as a signal for me and my brother to intervene in a (sometimes pretend) argument she was having with dad, it wasn't, as I had always presumed, the fourth emergency service that she was calling out for, but Alcoholics Anonymous.

Try making breakfast after that.  There is no other place I can put that so it'll have to live here, else I whisper it to lone men at matinee screenings.

Always one to go back to a lit firework,  I think about those holidays and the time of them in idle stretches of introspection and I can neither grasp them or let them go, the well trod-on path of leaden nostalgia perfectly encapsulated in Ted Lucas' siren song to the estranged heart, Baby, Where You Are, particularly when twinned with the candied infantilism presented here in this video featuring the moon-eyed Muppet Babies.

The gelatine hue, warm and pink, of the early nineties dances like the starting grid air at Silverstone.  Soundtracked by reggae, neon ankle socks and hayfever it is, to use the appalling parlance of our time, my safe space.  My Proustian Port.  My Elysian Field.  My Grimsby Sex Hut.  And staring blankly at that starting grid was how I spent most of my indoor time with my grandparents, the frantic drone of engine ushering out yet another bloody Sunday, a dull lament to an enormous waste of time. 

We could have instead been watching Gazzetta Football Italia and my first homoerotic love Roberto Baggio, history's sole justification for both pony-tail and perm, show off the football skills that made him famous.  The control of the telly though is adult's business. Specifically man's business.  But specifically dad's business.  And he was the dad of even my dad, so on it stayed.  The same telly, by the way, that spent its first decade in the drawing room, a gaudy embarrassment he foisted upon Nana and perhaps the only purchase he ever made without her explicit approval.  A colour set was unnatural, dangerous even she said, so it was kept in the television room (née drawing room) no one ever went in.  It gradually, with the softening of the times, made its way to the living room where it lived out the rest of its life sat in the corner revealing cars.  I like to picture the months it spent inching its way up the corridor between the rooms with sombre, Japanese duty, a week or so spent chatting to the telephone table in the hall.

The house itself was, like all haunted aphorisms, a crooked mess high up on the hill.  1974 trapped in treacle, amber air thickened by the incessant chiming of the hours.  The marbled eyes of a stone menagerie, either a warning or a welcome, made the winding climb to the front door a cross between the La Brea tar pits and Hibernian Narnia.  Like Canada the house got carried away with itself the further you went up into it, a series of shifting, slanted rooms whose layout would change depending on what chapter you were on.  Grey Gardens written like House of Leaves, Little Edie played by Edith Finch.

Rifling through drawers and trawling through people's personal effects is a cowardly, lifelong pastime I've always enjoyed immensely and one of the few recreations from my shop-worn youth that I am yet to abandon, along with dipping my fingers in hot candle wax and breaking women. 

So when I got bored of the red car winning I would slip out of the room and shamelessly poke about a bit.  Exploration was infrequently rewarded when, hidden amongst the timeless tat, we would stumble across a treasure from their time in the Far East.  Not much was known about their life there, even then.  My dear dad, a man who thirty years sober doesn't deserve the opening paragraph and wouldn't have it were it not for my craven desire to open doors too abruptly, attempted a series of retrospective interviews with them both to help add water to the ink.  I don't know where the recordings have gone but it doesn't really matter as they were both closed as clams throughout and my grandmother (who had never before left Wales) said her main memories of arriving in Singapore in the early 1950s was that it was hot.  When gently shoved by my father for more information or, god forbid, emotion, she thought for a while, the years flickering through her mind like a Rolodex, and said 'aye, it was quite humid, too'.

The ancestral inquest stopped there and we never really found out what Singapore was actually like or why they went.  Just that she had to write to her mother for permission to marry him (he's English but such a good man) and that there was an incident with his father and a train that was never really cleared up, but resulted in Grampa taking a newly ownerless motorbike and riding off from his Lincolnshire farm straight down to Portsmouth where he (illegally) joined the Merchant Navy as an actual child.  I suppose the truth of that has died with him, or at least rusted like an abandoned motorcycle.

Similarly I interviewed my then 90-year-old great-grandmother as part of a primary school history project as she was a teenager throughout the Great War and a mother during the even Greater one, surviving the bombs on Tiger Bay.  In keeping with the castro house style (bombast and plagiarism) the opening salvo was a direct quote of hers that read 'War is all well and good until you find a kid's head in a tree'. 

Carpeted almost exclusively with dog hair it was a busy and boisterous house, at least when we were there, with a near constant supply of out-of-date Penguin bars and council pop, Nana liable at any minute to dive head first into the chest freezer and hook out a Marathon ice-cream.  They were, if it's not already apparent, a generous and eccentric couple.  Christmas presents were always the cresting wave of Nan madness and without fail you could expect shampoo (the ingredients always in Arabic), Hooch (I was eleven) and, wrapped in paper but no plastic bag, topsoil.  Then it would be off to the front room for an Iceland buffet and the Box Game, in which Nan would present you with a Doritos box with a hole cut through and you stick your hand in and guess the fun mystery object, be it wet catfood or a housebrick.  A lifetime on and I'm still seething I didn't get a point for mayonnaise when she had in actual fact filled a dog bowl with salad cream.

Taking half a dozen children on holiday was perhaps the twentieth century's most difficult and thankless job, with an honourable mention for Babu, the Auschwitz clown.  But they did it every summer for a decade and when we got too old they took their son's ex-wife's new child (and later her foster children) instead.  Last week's episode saw Nana dice with rabies and rationale, Grandpa's trailing finger louchly resting on the tiller, not speaking much and when he did only to say 'Get that will ya Barb' when the phone rang.  Here the mania is toned down slightly, perhaps because the wisdom of crowds curtailed her greater excesses.  And if radical layabout and gravity pervert kittens can look after an animal (if not himself), raising a tadpole to (probable) adulthood then Nan can be trusted not to kill us for a week.  So warm up the Volvo gal, throw the kids in the boot and pack a thousand fish fingers because we're off on another Summer Holiday, this time with the added peril of the other people.  Toot toot!

As previously/relentlessly mentioned I grew up in seaside town with a famous Butlins so it made both logistical and financial sense to drive a hundred miles east to Somerset and to Pontins, a cheaper and therefore worse version of holiday centre behemoth Butlins.  In the years we crossed into England Grampa, upon approaching the border, would try to get us to take off our hats as he slowed down the Volvo to a 'respectable speed', whilst we sang songs about Ronald Koeman's free kick and fizzed with heart-bursting excitement, which is why I think one year I pushed my brother in the boating lake about ten minutes after arriving.

Pontins, the connoisseur's choice, complimented the Jonestown type dizziness of the cottages and also gave me the chance to pretend I was somebody else for a week, until you forgot half an hour later and revert to twat.  A practise I have employed 2005-present  Go to university adopt a limp.  Backpack around Cuba salute everyone.  Reach 36 have an identity crisis and start wearing nail varnish.

I was concerned that writing about those lemonade summers veered tragically into a Facebook poem about a never England, a time before the twentieth century overstayed its welcome.  And if it did then the antidote is perhaps latter day Pontins and its playground pushing, now older and crueller.  Week long marriages with girls with mad fuck accents who smelt of menthol cigarettes and damp who shouted at their mums.  Or petty posturing whenever bigger boys were around and practising spitting.  I hope we weren't too awful by the end.  And if we were, that Nana and Grampa didn't notice.  Towards the end of the affair, at fifteen perhaps, I took weed with me.  I don't think I smoked it as I was still only practising at being a cunt.  But I remember carrying it around me, hot in my pocket like Chekhov's gun.  The Death of Innocence.  Purity dutifully trudging away like the lone penguin in Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, alone on the tundra, walking to death.

Like Che Guevara, Nabakov, Camus and other radical free-thinkers (Peter Shilton) I am a goalkeeper, a netminder, a fun negator.  We are the bastard drummers of football and understand more of the game because we are not a part of it, but above it, both operationally and spiritually. They let us use our hands in the same way they let a jockey use a whip.  When I play for my team I wear my Bangor Comrades shirt commemorating the (failed) 1919 communist uprising of North Wales and other less important places like Berlin, Budapest, Glasgow and, bizarrely, Southampton.  A glimpse of how things might look had the revolution lasted more than eight minutes can be seen, architecturally at least, in the depersonalised, tessellated lodging found throughout Britain's holiday camps of the period.

I know that nowadays, because of the dissipation of public esteem and personal accountability, Butlins is primarily bang face weekenders and ITV darts tournaments, but 25 years ago it was the closest Britain got to agricultural collectivisation and stood, unconsciously no doubt, in tacky,  pulsating defiance of Thatcher's venal superego.  The Soviet style accommodation and egalitarian zeal/artificial equality puts me in mind of a probably apocryphal story I was told last year whilst on holiday in Belarus (the kids are enormous fans of brutalism). 

It goes, A Russian bureaucrat was sent to Minsk to issue them just enough money to keep them poor, thus ensuring they were kept in Mother Moscow's thrall for another winter at least.  After a meeting with top brass at the Politburo the diplomat, red of heart and cheek, now pissed on potato wine, stumbled out onto streets that looked remarkably like those back in the capital, purposely so, except not quite as nice (also purposely so).  Streets so eerily familiar in fact that he, having never before been in the city, could find his way to a district that looked identical to his back in Moscow, and then an apartment block that mirrored his own, staggering through its parallel corridors to find a flat identical to his, where he took out a key for a door a thousand miles away, opened it and waded over to a bed and woman the same as his own, where he slept the good sleep of men whose every step in life is ratified, affirmation of a correct decision.  The theory goes that he could have done the same in any one of the satellite cities that orbited the Great Mad Bear.  And although it probably never happened, and I'm not sure if it was meant to revere or ridicule the Union, there is a truth to it, and much the same happened to me and my eldest cousin Matthew when we walked into the wrong chalet and ended up staying for tea.

Modern capitalist governments, like Nancy Sinatra's unfaithful partner in Bang Bang, don't even take the time to lie.  Whereas the Soviet Union, relentlessly and brutally, took the time to deceive you constantly.  Because they cared, pathologically so.  It must have been a comfort to feel that this globular, amorphous power knew who you were, to an obsessive degree, a Chechen dentist living modestly in rural Kazakhstan, and loved you so much they wanted to squeeze the life out of you. The closest we ever got to that was New Labour trying to be your mate, straddling a backwards chair and doing a rap about staying in school.

Pontins, the third way, had a strange National Service fervour.  The hive-like accommodation, the Crocodile Club's morning marches, the eerie, intrusive midday anthem and tannoyed public information from a rusted megaphone up a tree.  The archery and rifle shooting felt like a paramilitary training in case they ever fancied another pop.  The what would now no doubt be called a food court resembled more an officers' mess built by King Midas if everything he touched turned to tin.  The very concept seemed like it was designed to piss off the French and whether it was because 90% of my Primary School curriculum was about the Second World War (away win) or the fact that we built corrugated-iron dens on the Somerset dunes, I felt the excited dread of an Evacuee watching London disappear, albeit it one who played five hours of air hockey a day.

The uneasy, imposed conviviality was bookended by some kind of bogus Blitz spirit, cast against the pall of Vera Lynn (I was delighted...) whose hit song, We'll Meet Again, was played every night after the Cabaret to usher out the children who would, unaccompanied, snake their way back to their uniform bunk-beds like refugees of war, whilst the adults stayed to get pissed and watch a show.


Refracted time (in red and bold)

Grandpa controlled our budget for the week in a vain attempt to teach us a lesson about fiscal responsibility and the importance of note-taking.  He was a life-long militant note-taker and carried on his person at all time a slim pocketbook the colour of Thatcher's handbag in which he would jot down not the day's event but the numbers that pertained to them.  Timetables, expenses, phone numbers.  The real poetry though lay on the last page.  A record of every car he ever owned, its number plate, the mileage driven before and after his involvement with them, the list slowly swelling over the years, the records carefully transferred to a new notebook every year, a sonnet to the automotive industry. 

At the start of the week Grampa would present us with two options.  We could each receive £2 at the start of every day (accruing £14 by the week's end) or take now the ten pound note pirouetting coquettishly in front of our hungry eyes.  We, obviously, snatched the tenner immediately and had spent it on absolute shite by about half 11 on Monday morning.  Meaning we had to spend the rest of the week pretending to play the demo mode on arcade cabinets, or worse, watching other people play video games decades before it became a million-dollar industry.

Perhaps my fondest memory of all the holidays, encapsulating them as a couple and the Britain I left behind like a forgotten book on a bench, took place during the exquisitely naff Cabaret on our Last Night, a night already swimming with bitter-sweet poignancy for a child that can't accept loss. 

The show was abruptly halted mid turn for a special announcement which stirred a giddy murmur from the audience before the Blue Coat called my nan up to the stage by name, with all us grandchildren in tow.  There they revealed that she had unknowingly locked my grandfather in the chalet toilet whilst we were getting ready to go out and had not noticed his absence in the intervening three hours.  Using all the guile he learnt from the Korean War (he used to watch M*A*S*H), he decided for reasons lost to time and death to undress and attach his standard-issue granddad white briefs to a stick and wave them impotently out of the small, bathroom window.  Basically I think he panicked and tried to surrender.  Eventually a passing holiday-maker spotted him and instead of trying to section him she alerted Pontins HQ who knew better than to pass up a good news story like this as it would go down well with the Barrymore plebs lapping up any old shite in the Cabaret lounge and would also eat up five minutes stage time and they wouldn't have to do the tombola.  There followed rapturous, ITV primetime waves of uncontrollable laughter amongst the tables before they gave Nan a bottle of champagne for services to misandry.

Thanks for highlighting that as I missed that at the time. Castro and Torso are by far my two favourite wordsmiths on CaB. Everyone else is 2nd place and that includes some brilliant and funny writers.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Gregory Torso's Birdie Song marathon in Oscillations

[Dex Sawash]

Dear friends,

I wrote the underneath a couple of years ago when Neil suffered a temporary bout of insanity and allowed people to post regretful, personal stories under a blazer of anonymity.  I haven't posted anything for a while due to an ongoing cockroach war in my house which is getting increasingly more futile and violent and is in my own little way a tribute to the Battle of the Somme and her war dead in this most auspicious of years.  And also because I have for whatever reason some type of writing block where the only new idea I've had in the last six months is to alphabetise my fridge.  I feel, creatively, a bit like a windsock on a still day.  This is an attempt to keep my hand in.  I have also recently realised, because of Brexit, the academisation of state schools and Channel 4's Naked Attraction, that I will never again return to live in South Wales, except perhaps to die, which may amount to the same thing.  Therefore any legal or career ramifications of silly behaviour no longer matter because I will always live outside the reach of British law.  And also because I will never have a career.  Moral implications don't trouble me for a similar reason.

It has lived in the inbox of the esteemed Doomy Dwyer ever since.  I sent it to him because I wanted him to like it and because I want to write like him or be like him, whichever is easiest.  I also sent it to young, absent Thomas in the hope he would copy my mistakes and a drug addiction could be a new and interesting character development for him.

I know it's long.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following is a life event that even I'm ashamed of and I have only a meniscus of shame left.  I start sweating cold milk every time I think of it and the potential horrific and life-altering consequences there could have been if not for Lucy Luck.  A slice of fortune I certainly did not deserve.  I know it will sound unbelievable, even for my usual self-aggrandising egomania, but it happened and is probably the closest I came to the Bukowski levels of down and out self-destruction I was searching for.  Of all my post party, birds-waking-up anecdotes it's the only one my girlfriend instructs me not to tell people and the only one for which she is truly disappointed in me.

I had been stumbling around the world for a year and was still utterly bereft after having my fragile little heart wrung to fuck.  I had drank every day for around 18 months partly as some kind of spiritual experiment and partly because I had no choice, and had latterly developed other, more exotic breakfast addictions.  In the new spirit of anonymous sincerity I should probably say that I had originally left home with the idea of drinking myself til death in the sun like the heartbroken selfish cunt I aspired to be.  A bronzed, limp statue to the death of love.  There were a few occasions throughout the venture when I thought I was about to die but I'll save those for the next time Neil forgets to take his pills.  I only made it alive that far into the year due to a caeser's salad of fortune, fortitude and the compassion of various women.  The dog end of which saw me arrive to the States having spent or lost the entirety of my life savings, where I had a fortnight left to either find an amusing way to kill myself or, much worse, think about how I would possibly cope with life back home.  An incomprehensible steel umbrella that I had ignored for the best part of a year.  No job, no house, no money, no woman.  I know this sounds like an underperforming but grammatically competent wannabe Kerouac twat hungering for the bright burning truth of the road, man, but there we are.  It's how I felt or thought I felt.  This is the green screen to which subsequent events must be viewed, but not justified.  I was a dangerous physical and emotional mess and not to be encouraged.

After watching Obama get elected and thinking that yes, we all could, I drove down Mexico way despite not having a piece of paper saying I could drive, because I couldn't really drive.  It was with a temporary woman, a Canadian Pole who sang like Janis and presided over two of the most impressive tits I've ever seen.  She eventually left like women do and I came to, shipwrecked in San Francisco, the Brighton of America.  Alone again, I shared a room but not a bed with this English rose who, before leaving, gave me a business card with a website on and nothing else, urging me to check it out.  She could give me no details, but she put upon it a lot of import and I trust heavily in pale women.  I went to an internet cafe, told mum I wasn't dead and set about following the clues.  After solving a few riddles, just enough to test my patience, the site gave me a phone number to ring so I did.  My very own film noir (black film) and I'm both the lead actor and its only audience.  A man answered, gave me an appointment time, an address and a password and then hung up before I could tell him whether or not I had understood him.  Again like people do in films.  I could hear some jazz in the background and was curious enough to spend my final night going there.  V San Fran. 

The address, or as the Americans pronounce it, the address, was in some anonymous building in the rough downtown area quite a way out from the tourist friendly city centre with its bars and liberalism and electricity.  I tentatively knocked a big brass handle.  A guy opened the door on a chain.  He was dressed like Bugsy Malone and gave me the once over.  I told him the password and, with the all the professionalism of an out of work actor, he looked up and down the street to see if I was being followed before coldly beckoning me inside.  Inside to my own aesthetic heaven.  Of how I would draw utopia.  Wall to wall gin and skirts and hairgel.  My very own Tracey Island.  Greta Garbo brushes past and keeps saying everything 'is a gas'.  Gatsby is slumped in the corner with a beautiful silver cigarette case full of cocaine resting in his delicate hands.  Noel Coward will arrive soon and satirise the wine list.  It really was dizzying.  Flapper girls, barmen with those brass rings round their elbows, cocktails, architectural consideration and swing.  It was a speakeasy and the closest I'll ever get to living in the past, the place where I'm happiest.  It is worth remembering that this was 2008 and consequently the concept of hipster was still, for me at least, an unknown abhorrence, an unassuming mole where cancer sleeps.  For someone so preoccupied with my own demise I was densely happy for half an hour until they threw me out on to the street and I stepped out into stark 21st century reality.  From a warm bath of the golden age to a gritty HBO drama in a hotstep.  Modern life couldn't compete, not even with a black president.  A bad night never started so good.

I was drunk but not drunk enough to forget about my flight home the next day.  This wouldn't do, and I'd have to accelerate things.  I started walking aimlessly, one of my favourite things to do, and before time ended up in some kind of homeless citadel under a bridge.  I had never seen anything like it in my life.  Stateside, as twats say, is a place where everything is done on much larger scale than necessary.  The cars, the houses, the people.  Everything's just so big.  That's why they've never paid any mind to town planning or have a concept of design or space.  This bigness goes too for social disparity, and the poverty and homelessness there is breathtaking and certainly worth remembering when complaining about some of the endemic problems in British society.  Modern life this side of the Atlantic, by comparison, looks like a watercolour of a croquet lawn in the Long Edwardian Summer, sleeping in a forgotten drawing room.  If the Americans are the best of us, or the loudest of us at least, then humanity really is fucked.  I was walking though hundreds of make-do houses and corrugated iron shants, faceless eyes staring at me from beyond the cardboard, needles everywhere.  I was being cat-called and, I suspect, followed, but it was too late to turn back as I hate to lose face.  Streets abandoned by the government, society and the light.  A Hogarthian disgrace.  It would be a good place to buy some drugs, I thought.

Anything to block out the pressing terror of the clock.  So I went up to a guy sitting on one of those stoops they have there and made him a proposition.  I don't want to judge someone superficially but if he had a house, or even rented one, I'd be pleasantly surprised.  I have never seen a black man so grey.  In both colour and demeanour.  After introducing myself and going through various accents of the British Isles until we found one he understood, we got to work.  You get them, I'll pay for it, we'll share it.  Not only would we get high but I'd also introduce the concept of socialism to the Americas.  Like Wimbledon FC of the early 90s, everyone was playing to their strengths and, although it wouldn't be pretty, we would grind out results.  The Crazy Gang rides again.  Book your tickets for the reunion tour.  Also an integral but unspoken part of the deal was that he was to protect me if anyone has a lunge for me or asks to see my bum.  I could only see him by the dim light of a fire in a bin, but he seemed to have a kind face, albeit one almost entirely destroyed by years of hard drug abuse.  I bet he knew the best places to score, and if he didn't then he had no business being a homeless drug addict.

I was ideally after a smoke to delay relentless reality for a bit and make the walk home seem a little more like that Mr Soft advert.  I only had about $30 on me so we traipsed around the city's ripped backside at midnight trying to get a good deal.  It turns out most homeless drug addicts aren't much in the market for a relaxing spliff while discussing the merits or otherwise of John Cale's solo work, and did in fact want something much harder to obliviate the complete apathy life shows them.  We had an absurd conversation where he tried to increase the severity and illegality of what we would buy, real top shelf stuff, and I tried to haggle him down to coke.  We walked around for hours, sipping whisky from my hipflask and having a polite but distant chat about our two admittedly very different lives.  He'd leave me outside some derelict hotel fuck knows where, while he went inside with the last money I had in the world for 20 minutes at a time.  I'd be stood on some corner looking like the whitest boy in the west as this hoard of societal debris drifted past.  It was like The Wire but without all of the boring bits.  I was petrified and didn't give a fuck at the same time.  When you got nothing you got nothing to lose.

He was, for a habitual drug user, really shit at buying drugs and he would, without exception, come of whatever derelict building he had entered saying they've all run out.  That it wasn't on the menu tonight.  The locals have gone off the stuff.  They actually find it quite brackish.  I now realise he was probably gradually spending my money whilst up the on little bumps for himself, as he was quite right to do.  I was starting to lose my confidence in the whole affair and was sobering up enough to realise how shit an idea this was.  Not to mention how incredibly dangerous it was getting.  I was rehearsing my break up speech to him, working out exactly how much of the money I should leave with him, when this giant, shoeless woman came bowling down the street with a shopping trolley.  This sounds like a scene a first year college student would write about inner-city ghetto life but it did in fact happen and I can't change it to make it seem less like of a cliche.  'Got vials, got ya vials!' she screeched, and the zombies descended.  I have never seen such wanton capitalism and greed.  She was like a big, black Gordon Gecko.  There was a speedy bit of business that I couldn't keep up with.  She was doing five transactions with two hands.  Arguing, selling, and laughing in a flurry of sass I couldn't understand.  Like Billingsgate but with heroin instead of hake.  It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.  It's great to see someone who is truly talented in their natural environment, whatever it is.  That's why I watch Ronnie O'Sullivan even though I hate every inch of snooker.  Someone complained that she had bought them cheaper up the road and was charging too much commission.  She actually, really actually, said the phrase 'Did y'all go up there and get them yourself?  No, y'all didn't.  I did.  Buy for one, sell for two motherfuck'.

The story's only true hero, our homeless guy who's name I couldn't remember, if he did indeed tell me which I doubt, did both me and himself really proud and tussled, fought and scratched his way to the front of the trolley and got what he, and we (but mostly he), wanted.  Well, almost.  He had, the big loon, bought crack despite me explicitly telling him not to do so.  Actually he didn't know if it was crack or crystal meth and said we'd have to find out the old fashioned way by tasting it.  I was forced to give him a written warning about his conduct there and then.  And that was that.  Business over.  All sold out.  The cupboards are bare.  A supermarket trolley half full of class A life enhancer had disappeared in 5 minutes fast following a tsunami of the desperate.  They shuffled off down alleyways to unwrap their presents and she boundered down the road her trolley like the kid in The fucking Road.

I was too far gone to back out now, so we went in search of a nice cosy spot in some shop doorway.  We sat down, about 3 hours after our noble quest began, and he sparked up the pipe and gave it all he got.  He offered it to me and, in a wilful desire to hit rock bottom so I might one day come up again, I huffed it all down into my tummy.  You really do bring out the very worst in me, homeless guy.  Then the final, incredulous denouement.  Probably the worst minute of my life, and that includes that time I saw a colleague wipe her fanny with a Greggs paper bag after having a piss in the street.  Sitting back in my shameful fog, staring into a numb space and feeling a bit like the fuzz between two channels on an analogue TV, looking into nothing, or thinking about the immortality of the crab, as the Spanish might say.  About 12 seconds into this wonderful absence a cop car pulled up not five feet in front of us, waiting at a red light, and stared the living fuck out of me.  A 40 year old black hobo and a 23 year old blond Lonely Planet twat with too many bracelets and a crackpipe hidden in his hand, a million miles from home and a million miles from happiness.  The original odd couple. A right pair of likely lads.  Some mothers do 'ave 'em.  My heart prolapsed.  I wanted to run for it, using my innate knowledge of the back streets of San Francisco, but my legs wouldn't work.  The cop was now boring into my soul, I suppose trying to work out whether or not I had been kidnapped.  The longest however-long of my life.  Long enough to contemplate American jail, the phone call home, the missed flight, the criminal record, the embarrassment at being caught with such a tacky drug.  Our friend whispered kind, reassuring words.  Stay still and they'll go, man.  Don't move, don't look away, or they'll get out.  It is quite difficult to maintain eye contact with an American police officer, trying to not look confrontational or scared, 30 seconds after smoking crack for the first time in your young life.  To look like you belong here, at 4am, on the street corner, when really you don't belong anywhere.  But you should always trust professionals.  He knew his business.  The lights changed, they slowly pulled away and my heart did the boogaloo.

My lesson finally learnt, I decided to get out of there and walk off this terrible high.  I did, after all, have to either die or get on a 12 hour flight in a few hours (a comedown locked in a metal tube ten thousand feet in the sky will really teach you a lot about your mental strengths and weaknesses, incidentally).  We weren't a million miles away from where I was staying by now and, just before we parted ways with a handshake, mine cricket, his baseball, I said the stupidest, naive, most Church of England thing I've ever said.  (Brief context:  A few days before I had made some Welsh cawl for that Canadian girl to try and fool her into thinking the Welsh had retained some kind of distinct culture.  I had some left over in ziplock bag).  What came next was probably a lower moment than the decision to inhale.  Before you go, mate, oh, and keep the change and all that, yeah?  Think of it as a finder's fee.  Before you go, do you want some traditional soup from my country I made?  There's loads of it and I'll be damned if I'll finish it all myself.  It's cold and it's a few days old and in a bag, but it's still good.'

He stared at me, a look of bewilderment and utter disdain on his face, and said in a very jivey way

'Motherfucker, you just seen me smoke crack.  The fuck I'm gonna do with some god damned soup from Ireland or wherever the fuck you're from?  Fucking soup!'

And with that we parted.  Our night time affair drawn to a close.  Dawn coming up now, the pale sunlight making the last six hours feel almost tawdry.  He walked away, shaking his head from side to side and mumbling 'white boy offering me soup'.

I can't look at soup anymore without thinking of this

[Norton Canes]

Wigan Fatty Fuck.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Am I in the minority in thinking that Castro Diaz is a birrova try way- too- hard merchant, in an " I take what Doomy Dwyer does and extend it"  vain?

[Twit 2]

Yes.

[shiftwork2]

Wigan Fatty Fuck.

One of humanity's greatest achievements from Ange, up there with moon landings.

[shiftwork2]

Twit 2's description of Alan Sugar is an all time high point, of course.

The 'I'm not a man, I'm Lord Sugar' was priceless. It's a line delivered with the earnestness of a goblin king in a 3rd rate fantasy story. Made all the more ridiculous by the surname 'Sugar'. Lord Sugar could be a decrepit Hugh Heffner figure, adorned in a cum stained kimono, engaged in the exploitative wooing of a limitless supply of peroxide wastrels. They must call him Lord Sugar as they waft around his saggy balls; all the while he grins with satisfaction in his tatty house, built on artifice and cemented with liquified mascara, tears and disapointment.

The Apprentice features egomaniacal fuckheads, desperate to upend their soul-husks and shake out any vestiges of humanity into the whirling shitpool of corporate cuntery, in exchange for a paltry monetary reward, to be held aloft to noone.

Presiding over it all is a man who proclaims himself as an antiquated nobleman of baking, with no trace of irony. He looms over the doomed ones, tragically same, yet writ large by dint of his animmalistic coarseness. He's succeeded through grubby stubble and shouting, a toad squatting in a foetid waterway, croaking the odds to the gathered shit flies, in a forsaken swamp trickling like sick over an ill-begotten land.