My best, best friend Caitlin Larne called last night for one of the longest girlie chats I've had in ages!!!!
She's planning a trip up to Smethwick to visit me in late-November... How great is that?!! I'm just sooo excited now!!!!
I haven't seen Caitlin since last Christmas.
That's because she's been really busy this year since landing herself a great new job at the BBC's "Olive" magazine. I'm only slightly
bright green with jealousy, of course... Caitlin gets to lord-it down in London; swanky office, free lunches, dinner-dates at top restraunts and the mobile phone number of one particluarly lucious UK TV actor!!! [Don't worry Caitlin... Mum's the word]
And what do I get to do, sitting in my "studio apartment" [!!!]in Smethwick? My days are spent trawling through emails, trying to make sense of page after page of C-RA data, as it continualy burbs its way through to me from our field base near Veracruz.
Well, I have John Bell [my
steadily growing and very lively kitten] for company at home. I have my good friend Kerry, who lives not too far from here... and of course I have my great and good friends living... all over the world.
But I can't remember the last time that I went on a good night out.
It was probably when Kerry and I went to see that truly awful Stone Roses tribute band play in Walsall... Or was it the Julian Cope gig at the Oxford Zodiac?
Julian was doing his best transvestite-Night-Porter bit... He played for hours that night, and Kerry and me got talking to these two guys from Bicester.
Kerry REALLY "liked" one of them and some way into the gig, she disappeared off into Cowley Road with him. When she returned she said, "We're stayin' in Oxford tonight!"
"Why?" I asked her.
"Cos Mat [her new found friend]knows Julian really well... Mat lives in a shared house near to here... and we're all gonna have a bit of a party... Apparently Julian's really into the Oxford scene"
Kerry [who has a decent, normal job working for Sandwell Council] is really into animal rights... [and all the accompaying aggrevation]. Mat [not his real name] was really into animal rights... and hardcore veterinary drug-use [!!!]... I kid you not...
The party that Julian was supposed to turn up to, was in this dingy old town house off Walton Street... When I arrived, Mat was in the kitchen, constructing something he called a "Pithwick-Dunce" - a large pyrex dish full off boiling water, a large rubber funnel stretched over its rim, a rough-cut section of white plastic pipe bent upwards and taped into a circular hole cut into the bottom of a battered biscuit tin. And then I noticed part of a school recorder sticking out from what appeared to be a big bendy straw. The whole contraption was sealed with layers and layers of silver gaffer tape and Mat was yelling for people to "Step this way folks... take the rest of the week off... those of you who dare"...
Kerry was giving him big girlie cow-eyes and rubbing his shoulders.
Mat knelt on a chair and angled the Pithwick Dunce to hang slightly over the edge of a large table. There was a stack of smelly-looking pillows on the kitchen floor, and the first person to take up Mat's challenge was a sad-looking hippie girl aged about 17.
She removed her glasses at Mat's request and slowly layed down with her head resting on the cushions. Her whacked-out boyfriend sat crosslegged near to her head. His t-shirt said 'My Way Or A Takeaway; he lit a cigarette as Mat told his girlfriend to 'stand by'.
Mat then placed a black Zippo lighter beneath the upturned biscuit tin: something bubbled, steamed and then belched - an ominously brown liquid started to drip from the end of the smoke-scarred school recorder.
The hippie girl opened her mouth and caught a few drips of the waxy liquid. She closed her eyes and her boyfriend held her head still. She then screwed up her face and jerked up her shoulders, before taking a couple more drops then rolling over onto her side to begin a startling coughing fit.
I saw her later that night, standing motionless by the big living room window; staring blankly out into the empty black street. She had wet herself. Her green satin skirt was on back to front and the wet patch was spreading. She looked like she'd been shot. She was evidently far, far, far away... smacked into docility then jettisoned into some vast undiscovered headspace. I worried about her for all of a minute before my real concerns turned to Kerry.
I knew that Kerry would be getting butt-achingly wrecked with her new outer-limits companion Mat. But I didn't want her to end-up ruined by the experience - Y'know, crying in office with a drenched sanitary towel stuck to her bum cheeks.
Next morning, driving North: Kerry was silent, glazed and visibly ill...
As we approached the unspectacular comfort of Smethwick, she dropped her singular comment - a heavy wet fart that collapsed nosily into the car-seat and smelled like last week's shepherds pie.
She has never really talked to me about what went on that night... only to swear that Julian Cope DID turn up, and he sang "Pristine" whilst sitting on the toilet; a small crowd sat waving their lighters in the doorway of the downstairs loo.
As for
my new friend I made that night?
Gary, you are a true gentleman... and yes, a scholar of sorts...
'Condi Loma' is indeed a syphilitic lesion, and not as I first thought, the first woman to successfully photograph Barchan Dune Traversal.
Caitlin, I've done it again haven't I? I don't know when to stop.
