Jail Break

I’m back home and it’s already Thursday. Everything went okay down south in the the Cent Kountryside. It was very warm for this time of year by Glasgow standards and so I got the chance to top up my tan. Re-meeting Trish’s parents was a fairly painless affair. I had only ever met them once before for a grand total of about two hours so I was ready for the Spanish inquisition. But it was more of a Dutch inquisition. Because Trish’s parents are Dutch. Pa De Vries’ opening gambit was ‘Hi’…blah blah…’You look like you’ve just got out of jail’. In the face of such an assumption I had only two options. Either tell an elaborate story about selling cigarettes and getting dodgy tattoos etc. (not actually that far from the truth), or simply announce the fact that I, in fact, had not been residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure in the recent past. I opted for the latter on the basis that it is the truth and amazingly it paid off. Moreover, Pa De Vries retracted his wild claim and actually said ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that blah blah’… And I said ‘It’s okay, my mum would have said the same thing’, (which is true) and the situation was diffused. Then we got on well. I was plied with fine wine and steak and even played croquet on the lawn. Politely losing of course.

We made it into London and didn’t see as much as we hoped on account of the heat and the actual size of the the place. I did get time time to meet Toby Z (iegler) who I met at East. We chatted over coffee while his son tried to eat poisonous berries from a nearby shrub. And then we went to see David Blaine the evil magician. He is, of course, currently suspended in a plastic box beside (not above) the Thames. And the trick? He will not go out, have any human contact, eat or drink for forty days and forty nights. Well, we’ve all done it. Except he’s invited people to watch. Wow. He was just sitting there in his pants, fidgeting a bit, probably hungry and bored. Seemed like a standard hangover to me. I watched him for a full five minutes. Occasionally he would look around at the amassed throng of idiots and wave a bit, so I waited until he looked in my direction, gave him the fingers and left. It felt like my duty.

When I got home the flat was not burnt down or otherwise worn in on account of the death threat that I gave Rob before I left. Impressive. I think I might actually up his rent (massively) in order to pay his (minimum) wages as a janitor. There’s an idea.

Tonight I went round to Toby Webster’s place to sort out his computer. Sue Tompkins was baby-sitting Honey and I was slightly too late for chicken nuggets but I did get to see a bit of Stuart Little. A mouse in a washing machine and a talking cat. Now that’s cinema. Then I got the computer fixed up. I’m pretty sure that the www in http://www stands for World Wide Webster.

Then I went to the pub for Steve Sutcliffe’s birthday. I asked him what he wanted to drink (he looked like this had already happened a few times) and he said Nice one, a pint of lager. I said It’s your birthday, what about a nice whisky or something. And he said Oh, whisky makes me go mental and I said Okay then, I’ll get you a whisky as long as you go nuts. And he said Okay then, Highland Park. The bastard guzzled the drink and didn’t even make the slightest attempt to wreck a single thing. Maybe next year.

The bus journey home took place in the company of Alex Frost and Alan Michael and was made all the more enjoyable by their presence. Frosty shat in the gutter while Alan Michael single handedly wrecked the bus stop.

On my travels I made it to my old flat to pick up mail and I was delighted to find that the former Nut residence is now home to a couple of pasty looking neo goth types with mohawks, piercings, bad attitudes and a drum kit. And probably chemistry degrees. They gave me a huge pile of mail that they had saved up and I said thanks and told them the flat was haunted.

I’ve smoked six cigarettes in the time it’s taken me to write this and I have to go and open up the rest of that mail. I only opened up the interesting looking packages which turned out to be rubbish in disguise. And I’ve also got to go for a dyslexia test for the dole tomorrow. It makes them feel better about helping people back to work and explains why I’ve been trying to cash my giros at the ticket office in Central Station for the past year.