24th Birthday

Yesterday I turned 24. What have I achieved in the space of days since my last birthday?

I lived alone for 6 months in a flat next to Southampton airport that featured holes in the windows and a mocking impression of what you and I know as central heating. At the height of winter my record for layers worn at one time reached 8 (I’ve never been happier that I kept my old fat clothes). The noise of flights landing at the airport every ten minutes has allowed me to sympathise with survivors of the Blitz, and every Friday morning when the bin lorry passed under my window I leapt from my bed convinced I was under attack from the USS Enterprise.

I was unemployed for the last 5 weeks spent in my flat. On one occasion I went 9 days without speaking to another human being. However, I kept the increasingly unlikely notion of my own existence alive by befriending an out-of-date copy of the Yellow Pages. His name was Chris. He froze to death when I left him on the porch and the snow hit. I comfort myself in the knowledge that he now spends his days in a sepia photograph mounted in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel.

I had sex once.

I survived a 300ft drop mostly unscathed. Rather than a miracle, this is because I was attached to a rope. Two months later, I still have lower back pain from the force of being quite a spectacular twat and jumping feet first.

I started doing stand-up comedy. In seven gigs, this has earned me exactly 1 applause break and approximately 1,753 gazes of stupefied boredom/naked bare-faced hatred. It’s been worth it to bellow ‘CUNT’ to a room of over a hundred people. The idea of doing stand-up was to meet some new friends. Since January, I have made exactly 0 new friends.

I saw 0 superhero movies.

I reached the end of my novel. By my next birthday, I am determined that the world will see it in one of 2 ways: either it will be published and be a tremendous success and I will be gifted a ticker-tape parade through Times Square in the Pope-mobile, or it will be chief evidence in the investigation of my death when the manuscript is found bound in rejection letters next to the canal from which they dredged my bloated fish-nibbled corpse.

I had 2 dates. Both went badly.

I have taught 4 separate university classes, using my natural optimism and lust for life to nurture their dreams, ambitions, and bizarre sexual fantasies.

I joined the gym and have somehow persevered in attending pretty much every morning for 8 months. My body is now marginally less gelatinous and my muscles marginally less comparable to sun-bleached skeletons picked clean by vultures. Better known as Madonna.

I met Crazy Gym Guy who deserves to be some kind of Twitter sensation. On three separate occasions he’s told the story of how he was caught in an earthquake in west London. He didn’t feel the earth quake, nothing fell down, and the news didn’t report it. But it was definitely an earthquake, because he woke up and the birds were making noises ‘what didn’t sound right.’

Biggest achievement of the year: filling a Shakeaway loyalty card and cashing in my free milkshake.

Flavour: Aero Mint Bourbon.

Heartbreak #1

When a guy likes a girl, there are two methods of pursuit. The first is the socially acceptable summon some cajones and ask her out/get her drunk on a night out and take advantage. The second, and increasingly more popular way, is the lurk around her Facebook/MySpace/bedroom window and hope that she somehow comes to see you as a god. There is a third way, but it carries a twenty-year sentence.

The first girl I ever truly liked received a combination of these methods. I lurked, I prayed, I gifted, before eventually asking her out. But only after she’d fallen for my best friend.

I’d met her in a lecture, and we’d talked a bit, and she was quite lovely. A few days later in town I found myself drawn to the shop where she worked, just to bathe in her presence. Before I knew it I’d bumped her into my top eight MySpace friends. This was getting serious.

Naturally I didn’t think I stood a chance and vowed never to act on these feelings. And naturally, the mice crawling inside my skull elevated any contact with her into signs, signals, and maybe, just maybe...

Soon enough an (altogether innocent) obsession developed. Turning up at nightspots I knew she frequented, buying her painstakingly innocuous presents, hiding what I believed to be cryptic messages of love in my MSN Messenger display name. Who says romance is dead? In hindsight it’s all terribly pathetic. But at the time I believed I was in love, and had no better idea how to go about it.

The signs kept coming that perhaps she was interested too. Where most men would just ask for a date, I invited her over to play videogames. It’s remarkable what the line ‘Can I come round and play your Wii?’ can do to a boy. She came. She played my Wii. She briefly met my best friend and housemate and then I chivalrously walked her home. It was Christmas-time. The air felt full of magic. Apparently I hadn’t yet learned that Christmas miracles are bullshit.

Indeed, in the following months I relentlessly saw hope where I should have seen warnings. A handmade storybook Valentine’s card garnered me, after a few days of silence, a message of thanks. I didn’t realise at the time that in those few days I was undoubtedly blocked on MSN Messenger out of embarrassment. When the message arrived, I ran a joyful lap of the house worthy of movie montage.

It was always the same way. Messages returned days later. Yet never did the gaps alarm me.

It was a misunderstanding that made me see the truth. Someone had given her the impression that my best friend didn’t like her. They’d met a few times by now. He’d admitted to me that he quite liked her. He didn’t want her to think badly of him, so he sent her a quick message. She replied instantly. And then instantly again. And again. Where I had waited days, my friend waited minutes. Suspicion bloomed in my mind but I stamped it down.

Their conversation blossomed. Other small signs appeared online to stoke my suspicions. This would end badly if I couldn’t halt it.

Finally, I decided to ask her out. I hoped it would somehow make her forget my friend. Only, I didn’t have the courage to do it in person. I wrote an e-mail. A confessional statement agonising in its effort to remain casual. My friend sat behind me as I wrote it, helped best he could, and wished me luck when I pressed send.

The rejection was the fastest reply I’d ever had from her. It was kind and clichéd, insisted we remain friends. To my own surprise I suffered no suicidal alcoholic rampage. It had simply confirmed what I knew all along. It was fine. I was fine.

Three days later she pulled my best friend. We were on a night out, and as soon as she arrived she had him cornered. I sat outside their conversation and made the occasional desperate attempt to distract her. As an appropriate amount of inebriation approached, conversation became dancing. I stood at the edge of the dance floor and convinced myself that I was fine. They danced closer and closer, until inevitably they kissed.

It turns out that panic attacks aren’t much fun. I fled the club and braved the long walk home. For the first time in years I cried, and my chest constricted like I was being bear-hugged by Andre the Giant. In essence, I acted like the female protagonist in a rom-com at the end of the second act, but without the knowledge that it’d all be alright in the end.

In the morning I received his guilty confession. A character in a rom-com would have fumed and declared it the end of friendship. I did quite the opposite. I told him to go for it. She was too good a catch to throw back and I wanted my friend to be happy. I acted like it was fine. And behind closed doors I bashed my head against hard objects and didn’t eat for two days.

I’m unsure how to end this story. I’m not lobbying for sympathy nor do I wish to apportion blame. In the months that followed I grinned and bore them being together. Then very swiftly she left my friend for someone else and he felt just as bad as me. It’s an event that affected us both quite profoundly.

Perhaps the moral here is carpe diem. Alternatively, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, perhaps the moral is Never Try.

Or maybe morals are stupid.  

DisneyWorld Swimming Pool Nature Diary

1 x Girl determined to catch the sun only on her legs and posterior. Most commonly seen in diminutive bikini bottoms. Upper half unobserved due to precisely positioned shade cover.

Name: Unknown. Commonly referred to as: ‘Arse.’

1x Fat woman with legs like doner kebab shanks upholstered in tan leather and breasts with the buoyancy and size of pro-quality medicine balls. Defining features include skin like the hide of a neglected leather couch. Most commonly seen rupturing an inflatable sun-bathing float that had only one day left until retirement.

Name: Unknown. Commonly referred to as: ‘Holy shit that’s disgusting.’

1x Clearly under-age girl in swimsuit that bellows sex via megaphone rather than suggests it. Most commonly seen luring men into an extended prison sentence with evocative poolside struts and underwater acrobatics. Sometimes observed with overweight disapproving mother in tow.

Name: ‘Jayda.’ Commonly referred to as: ‘Oh, Jayda. I love her, dude.’

2x Jailbait hiding in the pool to conceal their miniscule bikinis from their grandparent chaperones. Warning: mating ritual involves lengthy targeting of chosen individual via flirtatious/terrifying glances before victim is singled out from friends and invited to late-night pool rendezvous. This is likely to result in feelings of shame, guilt, and remorse, with any dash of elation quickly suppressed by angry American grandparents with shotguns.

Names: Unknown. Commonly referred to as: ‘Ohio,’ ‘Jailbait,’ and ‘Man, it’s a good thing I had a wank yesterday.’

1x Large American family ignorant to the terms ‘contraception,’ ‘diet,’ and ‘general hygiene.’ Family headed by mother. Defining features hidden behind rolls of glistening blubber. Most commonly seen raising the pool’s water-level while tearing into the corpse of a giant Mickey Mouse-shaped rice krispy cake. Once cloyed, the family bask in asteroid belts of sodden sea-going cereal kernels that fan out to attach themselves like tics to the skin of anyone else trying to enjoy the pool.

Names: Unknown. Commonly referred to as: ‘That fat-fuck family.’

2x girls in golden Princess Leah bikinis attempting to lend their skin a similarly lambent hue. Defining features include pasty English tourists assigning number ratings on a scale of attractiveness. Warning: often accompanied by inconspicuous family friend positioned to overhear such chauvinist meanderings. Recommended course of action is to loudly amend original ratings to fall within the 9-10 region and/or generally beg forgiveness. Further warning: also often accompanied by impossibly large black NFL superstar husbands with a propensity for aggression toward pasty English tourists and their lascivious eyes.

Names: Unknown. Commonly referred to as: ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ 

Molested

On the very first day of my final year in primary school, I hit the proto-pubescent jackpot of being felt up. Rather than mark the genesis of my soon to burgeon sexuality, the incident was the first indicator that, despite popular opinion, I wasn’t gay. To my distress, I was felt up by a boy.

The class seating arrangement had been chosen at random. Year six harboured more serious pretensions than previous classes, so there were to be no more groups. Now it was strictly two per table, the pairings chosen, I can only assume, by how much the teacher hated each individual.

The boy I was seated with was not a friend of mine. Nor were we enemies, I knew him mostly for his fondness of riding around the neighbourhood on his bike no-handed and quite garishly topless. His assignment to me was neither a boon nor disappointment.

I soon discovered that he would laugh at any joke I cared to utter. No matter how stupid or inane, as I’m sure they all were at that age, the boy would laugh as if nothing were funnier. For a shameless class clown such as myself, it was all I could have asked for. The only problem was that every fit of laughter was accompanied by a hand on my leg.

At first it was only the knee. As the day progressed, the knee became the thigh. And alas, by day’s end the situation had progressed dangerously close to the crotch.

Initially I let it go. It was the start of the year. Perhaps it was a misguided mode of establishing a friendship. The assault persisted throughout the second day. And the third. What had been strokes turned into squeezes. I knew it had to stop.

At that tender age, I didn’t know why it made me feel so uncomfortable, only that it did. I was like a comely young maiden who had moved to the big city just at the time of her flowering, attracting new attention that I couldn’t understand.

There was only one escape: a painfully embarrassing admission to my mother.

‘Mum, the boy I sit next to keeps touching me.’

She answered more like an enthusiastic voyeur than my mother. ‘How does he touch you?’

It was enough at least to be taken seriously. The next day I marched into the classroom, straight to the teacher’s desk, and handed her a letter. I don’t know what it said. Possibly My son has become the class bitch. Whatever the content, I was swiftly assigned a new seat across the classroom, and some other poor soul took my place at the school’s equivalent of the prison shower.

Unsurprisingly, I did not remain friends with my abuser. But we did end up at the same secondary school. Here the significance of the incident paled during a bizarre spell where a group of the tougher kids (large black guys all) took to roughly grabbing the unsuspecting arses and crotches of the rest of us as we went about our daily business. If it had occurred to me at the time, perhaps I would have missed the softer caresses of my year six amour.

I still saw him from time to time, riding the streets with chest bared for all to see. Another boy had befriended him. They bonded over a love of cars, karate, and other such masculine pursuits. 

I spoke to this new beau once and mentioned his newfound companion.

‘Yeah, he’s really cool,’ the boy told me. ‘But he does touch me a lot.’

Water Torture

Only once did being fat ever cause an injury. Conveniently, the injury was to someone else.

My secondary school only ever managed one ski trip before the concept was abandoned. I like to think that this incident, along with other stories to come, went some way toward the defeat of my teachers’ international ambitions.

In between the doomed attempts to snowboard in spite of my girth, the school laid on a number of other activities. These varied from bowling and saunas, to the contraction of crippling food poisoning that caused many of us to evacuate our bowels whenever the coach hit a bump in the road (On Austrian mountain passes, this was more often than desired).

The best of these was swimming. The pool was large and clean, the locals hairy but mostly clothed where it mattered. Best of all, there was a water slide.

With all the usual egalitarian grace of thirty teenage boys, we had soon frightened off any and all children and claimed the slide as our own. Of course, there are only so many times you can barrel down the chute and land arse-first on a disgruntled local man with more hair outside the borders of his Speedo than in before you start searching for more elaborate enjoyment.

The game was suitably violent. Ten or so boys would launch themselves down the slide at once. Half way down, the frontrunner would wedge himself to a halt and see how long he could hold the throng behind him at bay. The water slide was constructed from two halves of a pipe bolted together in the middle, leaving a ridge easy to grasp even with wet hands.

My particular role in this game was unique. Once I had overcome the terror of publicly removing my top (the boy accustomed to trilling ‘Boobies!’ at every such occurrence was not on the trip), I was invited to be an Unblocker. As the fattest, and therefore heaviest, who better to send down as the last man to dislodge the tangle of beached bodies?

I positioned myself at the back of the queue and waited for the first boy to leap into the tube. The rush of water carried him away, and one-by-one the others followed, disappearing around the first bend until only I remained. I allowed a gap so that the brunt of my impact would be felt all the more. Then I waddled to the water slide’s mouth and let the current take me.

The rapids threw my weight around the first bend, down a decline and into another corner. I spied the convoy as I exited. Nine of my peers jammed fast in the cylinder. A whoop escaped me as my momentum slammed into the back of them. The noises they returned were less appreciative. A chorus of oofs and ows and You fat fucks! Only one noise rose above them. The genuine scream of horror from somewhere near the front.

The blockage disbanded suddenly. I surged forward on the heels of the boy ahead. As the tide sucked us down, I noticed with dismay that the water was full of blood.

Screams greeted me as I tumbled out of the tube. Clouds of blood here too. I struggled out of the pool and saw the source. The boy who had been at the front was in tears, blood streaming from his hands. The Austrian life guard, an 80-year old man who looked about to faint, was trying to staunch it with a towel while the teachers crowded round to contemplate premature retirement.

It soon became apparent that in his efforts to block the slide, the boy had wedged his hands tightly into the ridge where the tube halves met. The plastic sliced his fingers half to the bone.

He was taken to hospital, while the rest of us were ushered into the changing rooms and instructed to not be so bloody stupid ever again. That very same night, when the teachers had retired to bed, we spent until dawn climbing and jumping between the chateau balconies four storeys off the ground.  

WWAD? (What Would Arnie Do?)

The first thing I did at university was drop a television on my face.

I had said goodbye to my mum and was left with the few pieces of home I had brought with me, piled into boxes and stacked around the room. Most accessible of these was the new TV/DVD combi, purchased so I needn’t be without my Schwarzenegger collection for more than a heartbeat.

The room was so full that I had wedged the door open to allow for overspill. I manoeuvred the television to where it might maximise my viewing pleasure: the top of the wardrobe. It was high, and the television heavy. WWAD? (What Would Arnie Do?) I hefted it up with mighty strength.

There were a number of shortcomings. It was too high to watch unless I stood on the bed. Worse, there was no socket even remotely in reach. It would have to be moved.

I reached up to place a hand either side, and slid the television slowly toward me. Very suddenly its weight pitched forward, and I lost my grip.

What followed is perhaps the least exciting slow-motion moment of my life. The television was falling. My hands were already engaged in failing to hold it. I had two options. I could step back and let my brand new television drop to the floor where not only would it shatter but along with it my dreams of snuggling beneath a warm duvet gazing moon-eyed at the glistening muscles of the Austrian Oak. Or I could catch it with my face.

WWAD?

The television struck my forehead with a thick glassy thud. The impact shuddered through my body. I was quite unable to move. The television on my face, hands still clasping it either side as if I were trying to balance it there.

It was this moment which my room neighbour chose to introduce herself.

‘Are you alright?’ she asked from the doorway.

This particular housemate was a slightly older, quite unfathomably attractive girl with the sort of northern accent which makes chubby socially-maladjusted boys with televisions on their faces weep with lust. I lowered the television and mumbled some sort of greeting

It transpired that four of my housemates were worryingly attractive girls. Unbeknownst to me, the unpleasantness with the television would set the blueprint for our encounters.

I don’t make friends easily. Especially when those friends are women. Most people would try basic conversation as a means of establishing relations. I chose a more stunt-based approach.

There was the time I heard them conversing in the kitchen, and attempted to join in by claiming a bad back required me to lie on the hard floor. After half an hour of being ignored I gave it up. On another occasion I feigned a noisy fall in my room. This garnered a knock of concern, followed by an expression as if I had defecated in her favourite shoes. Often, after a particularly ambitious binge eat, I’d leave the leftovers in the kitchen to be shared. Hours later, my stomach emptied, I’d steal upstairs and return them to my room.

Shortly before the end of the first semester, I visited the kitchen to cook dinner. All my housemates were gathered there, every area of the oven engaged. They were having Christmas dinner together. I had not been invited.

Arnie would have demanded a seat at the table, snagged the finest cuts of meat, pulled all the crackers by himself and not left the room until every girl present was sufficiently pregnant. I am not Arnie. I returned to my room and went hungry.

Speech Therapy

In the early years of primary school, there was a rarely a lunchtime where I didn’t suffer some kind of ridicule. This was commonly by my own hand – my inability to kick a football without falling down; running to the dinner lady in tears because my toy Jaguar car had been stolen; asking oh so naively to participant in games for which I was not remotely popular or athletic enough.

Without fail, a singular form of ill-deserved piss-taking would be visited upon me as I sat at the edge of the playground. I would be packing up my Goofy lunchbox (with the lid that, incredible to me at the time, was also a flask) and lift my head to find myself faced with my sister and a group of her friends. She was three years older than me and in the upper echelons of the school.

‘David – say ‘Tissue.’’

For some reason, it never really dawned on me that this was mockery. Dutifully I would scrunch up my face and give it my best effort.

‘Tissoo.’

My sister and her friends would ripple with laughter as only nine year old girls can.

‘No, David – ‘Tish-shoe.’’

Always, I would keep trying. They were laughing. They were paying attention to me. Unlike anyone else, they had included me in their game.

‘Tiss-oo.’

Once again they would laugh, and once again I would smile as if I had earned it.

‘Now say ‘Sausages.’’

This was a trickier prospect which I was far less keen to attempt. ‘Sausages’ was a word I could not manage. ‘Sausages’ and ‘Hospital.’ I can’t remember quite how I mangled them, only that their correct pronunciation was an impossibility.

A mild speech impediment was but one of a number of issues. For quite a while I struggled to hold a pen, requiring a special rubber grip to assist me. I was far behind the class in reading ability, and, despite countless hours in front of Sesame Street, I could not recite the alphabet until I was eight.

To address these oratory inabilities, I would once a week be plucked from school at lunch time to attend Speech Therapy. Strangely, all I recall of these sessions is arriving at the office. Every week the therapist would ask me what I had learned at school that day. Every week I would only reply ‘Can’t remember.’

Something must have worked. I do remember conquering the fearsome ‘Sausages.’ I was sat in the Abbey National waiting for my mum, a grand time for the flicker of a usually dim light bulb.

‘I can say ‘Sausage’’, I said, looking at the weekend queue. ‘And I can say ‘Jizz.’’

Like a particularly slow-witted ape grasping a club for the first time, the concept was clicking together in my head.

‘So if I just say them together... ‘Sausage’... ‘Jizz.’’

‘‘Sausage’... ‘Jizz.’’

‘‘Sausage’ ‘Jizz.’’

By this time I had caught the attention of quite a number in the Abbey National queue.

‘Sausages!’ I shouted in true triumphalist fashion.

Many years later, I knew a boy in secondary school who suffered similar, less pork product specific issues. As he put it, ‘I don’t speak good.’ Years of my own spent overcoming such problems did nothing to stop me laughing at him with all the others. I would clamour to pounce on his mistakes and wring them for all the mirth I could.

After we’d left school, the same boy lost a leg in a moped accident. When I heard, I laughed about him then too.