Three reasons to say No

(Alan, Andy and Tom)

Drugs. Don't do it. They might make you feel great and make you love everyone and make all the colours swirl together and Anne Wilkinson wearing a bikini and go-go dancing, but it doesn't stop Elvis from being some kind of closet Nazi. Here are three more drug episodes to learn from.

a) Acid Alan

I'm working in the pub. Alan comes stumbling up to the bar. "What do you recommend?" I pour him a pint of ale. Handing him back his change, his money goes flying all over the bar. "Are you okay?", I ask. "I'm trying to.. moving.. requires a re-calculation.. of.. architecture...". He goes to sit outside. Eventually Nick and Rosanne come and find him. As he leaves, he utters "There's something .. is there? is there something I should or should not be doing?" He produces a £5 note. "Do I need to buy a drink for the person who is going to replace me?". No-one really can answer this question. Nick has a half. Alan goes with Nick and Rosanne.

b) Andy and the Jehovah's Witnesses

Andy is alone in town on Saturday night. He goes to a drum'n bass night and someone gives him four E tablets. Andy eats them. He dances the night away to pounding drum and bass music. At nine in the morning he wakes up on the seafront, all spangled and confused. He decides to walk off home. On the way home, he passes the Brighton Centre, where the Annual Jehovah's Witness convention is going on. Andy decides to reconcile himself with his Jehovah's Witness past, and goes in. He spends three hours in the Jehovah's Witness convention, talking to Jehavah's Witnesses, twitching, muttering and rolling his eyes. He is discovered asleep in Weatherspoons at half past two.

c) Tom and the Performance Enhancing Drugs

Rosie, Cosmos and Tom end up going out and taking some kind of heinous chemicals. Greatly spangled, they gradually make their way back to the house, and time rolls round to 7 o clock. Already twitching, blinking and trying to devour his way though a sturdy wooden spoon, Tom decides to take copious amounts of more heinous chemicals, and then go to work. Despite sneaking off to the toilets to take more throughout the day, he "entered more data than ever before", and "I don't think they noticed."

* * *

This bloggue entry isn't supposed to be bigging up drugs, or denouncing my friends as the fiends they must sound here. These, I can assure you, are isolated and suprising incidents. And that ain't a word of a lie.

Camping Trip

Evidence of Daniel Taylor's escalating madness no. 1
Originally uploaded by bumpoowilly.

So this is the thing. So this is where we are. All this is meant to be is a blog entry about our camping trip to Devil's Dyke. But all that imposes on my tongue are bitter lines about adultery.

"So write the script - illness and debt,
a ring thrown away in a garden
no moon can heal, your own words
commuting to bile in your mouth, terror -

and all for the same thing twice."

It was a camping trip. There was no adultery.

In fact it was a spendid camping trip. It's such a good thing that a short bus-ride out of Brighton leads us to the downs, owls and rabbits and badgers and foxes and possibly some kind of psy-trance rave coming over the hill.

Tents. Cooking. Gin and Tonics. Anna's Birthday. Daniel Taylor getting up at seven each morning and walking back into Brighton for work. "They're tents. They don't have walls." A thunderstorm. We found a park ranger who was going to show us some adders, but we never saw any. At one point, we went for a walk, and were all lying on our backs in the field. As this includes Jacob, it looks like we were all lying callously around a poor man in a wheelchair who had fallen over and couldn't get up.

A splendid weekend out. When we got home, we ended up at a street party in Erica's street. Musicians, cider, bathtubs. Phone Nast Dave. Rosanne; "I've got three hours off. I can drink a bottle of wine in three hours." She sure could. Dom is going to get married. He didn't let us meet his Fiancee.

There's a lot of it about

The heat. The terrible heat.

Walking up Trafalgar Street, suddenly fat drops of rain begin to fall. Within a few seconds, they are everywhere. A sudden torrent of heavy drops scatters around me. People dash into pubs, under trees, into the doorways of shops.

By the time I reach North Gardens, the rain has stopped. The street is already steaming.

So anyway...

Nicole meets the Manatee
Originally uploaded by dulcelife.

Keep your eye on the news. Great things are afoot. Run, you fools. The battle of the Pomme. He weighted the same as a Baby Whale. Three suits and a violin. The pure gold of the music hall. The eye of the swarm. The man who can clap with one hand. These premises were TOTALLY DESTROYED in a zeppelin raid. A more realistic fear-of-death than Nietsche had imagined. Library Square in red paint. Just a half, eh? The crushing of small animals in the novels of Virginia Woolf - Discuss. The Canaries of the Sea. To hell in a handcart. Grind technique. Jerry Fodor's No. 1 Stalkathon. These are the things that made us laugh when we were young. Lucy Lucid. One twelth of a teaspoon. Little humbug with legs. Jason rubbing salt into the wound. That's not a thumb! He bought a tent factory. A selective mute as a child. Her glass eye was my hard boiled egg. Back straight, don't shirk technique. Skimming lessons. I am disabled - communicate with me. Picnic tables and joggers. Party mix. Geeta's Lime is Sweet and Squeezy. Having a traintrack lifestyle. Breakfast of Champignons. The steeple emerged from the water as a reminder. Desperate, Chris, or Disparate. The sensation of insects crawling in the ear. How brittle? Peanut brittle. A floor as thin as a cigarette paper. The butter in the tent. Everything's coming up Millhouse. It's Special Brew-o-clock. I want to be a chin slammer. Cats in the womb. Her greatest fear was a smoked list. An obsession with abstract nouns. A loving coo at oysters. Two different types of grasshopper.

Consider the use of tenses in this sentence;

" And as I watched her, before she became aware of me, I whispered to myself; 'Everything begins here' "
- Julian Barnes, Talking It Over

"Daily reminder...Thursday.

"Purchase feeble public access cable show and exploit it."

Whoa. I feel sorry for whoever that is.

ham hands

The siblings (Nicky P's birthday 2006)
Originally uploaded by Sandygermsmanson.

This is my current favourite family photo. You will see here me with my younger siblings.

1. Brighton Hip Hop Festival. A lovely day. Shame about much of the music. "Hello, are you Shiny?". That's neveer happened to me before. Actually it's kind of on a par with being recognised as Bob the Fish at various points in my past. That was cool.

2. A terrifying tent in the Medieval area with sounds and images coming from all directions around Maya and some musical act with a mannequin puppet child doll dancing on the stage all pale ald lit and fires blazing in the hot sun as we crawled under a V shaped sandwich board, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Morrised one off. The sound of sticks hitting sticks and well timed bell twirls, handkerchiefs existing only in potential.

3. Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to being a unulele and a harmonica bob-dylan-stylee strap to Jimmy's Ukulele night. And then try and play the ukulele. And also drink stupid amounts of cider to pluck up courage to play an instrument I can't play. And sing. And recite poetry. I think it went quite well.

4. Fresh victims in the wars of religion.
a) Cat Stevens (killed by a plane)
b) Salman Rushdie (killed by a plane)
c) Mark Chapman (killed by Paul Mc Cartney)

Advert.

up close and personal
Originally uploaded by gail on the web.

I am looking for someone with a lot of money and a good sense of humour up for pulling off the BEST PRACTICAL JOKE EVER. If this is you, then please do get in touch. When I say a lot of money, I mean helicopters, kidnapping of large animals, etc. That sort of money.

Words

Chris's poster
Originally uploaded by Sandygermsmanson.

We met a stumbling teenager called Tim who; despite the crumpled can in his fist and stack of can-husks at his feet, could still name every King and Queen of England since 1066.

"Hey Tim! Who was king or queen in 1558?"

"Elizabeth the First"

We couldn't find the moles and slept in a clearing next to a massive tree, arms sticking out everywhere. In the morning, my telephone had gone.

In the morning, we got a train to St. Albans. Parkinsons, olives and garlicky cheese. Andy got cussed bad by my teenage sister. We met the beanbag.

25

hitler snowman
Originally uploaded by Dolores Luxedo.

I'm sitting in the desolation that is my flat. Tommy is cooking breakfast and I have a Doraemon mask. I am 25 today. Daniel Taylor has a new voice and has given me Sherlock Holmes - The Card Game. There are two dogs in front of me; a Squirrel Doggie and a small yellow dog with high heels. Andy gave me a Bob Dylan Harmonica Holder. There is red wine on my white linen suit. Rosanne gave me a wallet made from capybara skin. You can see the fish-like scales. Last night we sat on the concrete jetty at the end of the Groyne for a while as the waves lapped around us and Earnest played the banjo. My mother and father gave me a teatowel with the nautical flag symbols on it. This morning I woke up in the front room on a mattress with photos taken of my semi-clad sleeping form. Tom, Andy, Cosmos etc have made scenes in all the late night shops they could, and at the Car Boot sale at six in the morning, they bought new sunglasses. Tom buys a new set of sunglasses every time he gets spangled. By this means, we gain sunglasses but lose wooden spoons.

We're going to go to a gay dog show.

Lottie stood in front of the mirror, and smiled knowingly at her reflection. She was 37, but looked as if she wasn't a day over 29. At this rate, by the time she hit sixty, she would still appear to be a fresh-faced 45. "Forty five?" She shuddered, hands fluttering to her face as if to sooth the wrinkles that would one day arrive. The mirror would have to go.