Author: Domingo Cullen

25 days, one dangerous eye infection, one fucked knee, ten days in and one rider down, 15 more days, relentless rain, 38 degree heat, one endless mountain range that became an unending desert, another fucked knee, two mental breakdowns, 3 hours of snatched sleep a night for a week later, a sorry whimpering excuse for a human being crawls to the Mexican border fence at Antelope Wells, extends a skeletal finger and grabs ahold of it, drops to his knees and passes out in a cardiac-arrested heap of stinking crap on the desert floor.

Perhaps not that dramatic.

I cracked a not so ice-cold Bud took a sip and passed out.

Felt good though.

Tuesdays.

Yea you.

Giles Coren is best known as the angry man who writes scathing reviews of restaurants. But some years back The Times gave him an opinion column on Saturdays from which to pontificate over things above and beyond the culinary.

Yea exactly.

But one idle Saturday of early April Giles ripped up the script. In my time as a seasoned attendee of the broadsheet milieu I can put it down as one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my career. I felt the need to tell him. He said ‘thanks’.

In defiance of Murdoch’s paywall I Assange’d the situation and transcribed the thing last night while my mate stood me up at the pub. And I can’t type very fast. It took me ages. I even threw in some pictures to season the sirloin.

*

Leaving aside such tedious familiar responses as “me wife” and “me kids” and “me ‘elf”, the most important thing in my life is my Kindle. It’s not just that it has doubled the number of books I read in a month and tripled the number I buy – doing immense service both to my brain and to the coffers of a desperate publishing industry – nor that it has rid my walls of decaying organic matter, nor even than it has revolutionised my packing for holidays, creating a space in my luggage where 20 paperbacks used to be that can now be filled with budgie-smugglers in every imaginable hue. Above all, what my Kindle has done is give me a new way of reading and thus led me to new ways of thinking.



For most of my life, I read one book at a time. The old-fashioned textual delivery method encouraged a teleological commitment that drew one inevitably to the end of each book before starting the next. But since moving wholesale to electronic formats, I find myself reading at least two, but more usually four or five books at once. I always have one vast work of non-fiction on the go for reading on public transport, alone in restaurants and while sitting on the sofa watching Tom and Jerry with my children (when distraction is called for, but plots cannot be followed). And also a modern, ambitious literary novel for a quiet hour in bed before sleep, when the deep, private part of the brain can be fully engaged.

Then I have usually a collection of letters or diaries standing by to offset the tedium of the morning stool and some sort of cheap sadomasochistic pornography for lonely nights in provincial business hotels. Add at least one awful book by a friend that has to be ploughed through for a single nugget of praise that can be delivered without actually laughing, and you have five books being read at once in a sort of literary jigsaw that previously never existed. Certainly not in a portable form that could be accessed without plan or forethought and with a single unifying typeface, page size, colour and heft.



And what happens then – which is quite fascinating – is that these unrelated books begin to read to and against each other, existing as they do almost simultaneously in my imagination, and to make new books that did not exist before and generate ideas their authors never intended. So i found myself reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success at the beginning of this year alongside the third volume of Fifty Shades of Grey, and thus endlessly musing on why one person should come to be confident and accomplished at rough sex, and another not. Genetics or education? Practice or natural gift?



I read Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life (a collection of psychoanalytic case histories) page for page with Ian McEwan spy novel Sweet Tooth, at times when Will Self’s giant neo-modernist riff on mental illness, Umbrella, was more than my head could handle, and found myself unwittingly formulating a psychoanalytic model for the causes of the Cold War that would blow your mind. And a simultaneous reading of Bring Up The Bodies with Claire Tomalin’s life of Dickens, Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography and the letters of Ronald Reagan gave me a massive new story of how public power has emerged out of individual solipsism across five centuries.



This is the post-structuralist dream of the truly free text, unhinged from all notions of authorial intent and cultural location, at play in the world in a Derridean loop of self-generated semantic crisis. This week it reached its apogee for me in a simultaneous reading of Max Hasting’s Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 and Dave Eggers’ The Circle.

It is hard to imagine two more different books. One is a vast, rather butch anatomy of European politics in the run-up to the First World War and the slide towards mass slaughter, the other is a slim American science-fiction novel rooted firmly in the 20th-century dystopian prophetic tradition of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, set on the campus of a Californian technology company that has already consumed Facebook, Twitter and Google and is on the point of “closing the circle” so every lived moment is accessible online and all human activity is controlled by an invisible, omniscient, commercially motivated will. But both, I suddenly realised in bed last night, are about the same thing: humanity rushing dumbly towards its doom.



In 1913-14, the world stood on the brink of a confrontation in which the old would collide with the new in a most horrific way. Modern technology – originally developed with the best of intentions – would sweep away a generation that had rushed eagerly into the fray, polishing its new boots, winking at girls and singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. All that was good and sound and beautiful would be lost because nobody thought the worst could happen and once it had started to happen nobody had room to manoeuvre out of it.

We stand there once again, exactly 100 years later. On the brink. The shift of everything we know – communication, social interaction, sex, shopping, sport, morality – from the physical to the digital universe is happening so fast that it is now out of our hands. The world we knew is in its death throes. The lamps are going out. Our young people are marching off into a future where every single element of their life is filmed, phoned, liked, poked, tweeted, retweeted, slapped… (I begin to run out of terms and sound old and fatally disconnected) and every facet of human existence is validated exclusively by its digital mediation (even I am aware, for example, that this rather esoteric* column will not attract the attention I get with one of my “ban all triangular things and lock up the Belgians” pieces, so will not make the “most read online” league table come Monday morning, and will be judged therefore as worthless by our marketing department).



I see young people, shackled to their phones and tablets and their lifeless jobs of pointless information-sharing and I see lions led by donkey Zuckerberg, the donkey Gates, Jobs, Brin, Dorsey and Wales – whose names will live in infamy alongside Haig, French, Rawlinson and the rest – sending millions of young men and women to their doom in the blind service of their own reputations and fortunes. A whole generation brainwashed not by the twin mirages of king and country, but by something else altogether. Though I am too old to understand what it is. Connectivity?

It does not have an anthem to lament it, this doomed youth. But I see young people at restaurants, in pubs or at the cinema, hunched over their flickering interfaces, pissing their very lives away, and I think, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks… an ecstasy of fumbling… his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin…” They churn and moo outside their schools, grazing the internet for tiny molecules of sustenance and I think: “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”



There isn’t any turning back now, as there was not 100 years ago. And just like 100 years ago there are vested interests, in cold alliance with lazy thinkers, telling us to stop worrying, it is all going to be fine. But it wasn’t then. And it won’t be this time either.



[If you spotted the grand irony that i only arrived at this gloomy realisation through the technological advance represented by my Kindle, congratulations. But i never meant to suggest technology was useless, only that it is murderous.]

Shout out from UberFacts.

At the end of Blow, Johnny Depp’s character does this monologue from jail assessing the manner in which he has lived.

And drops this bomb:



Life passes most people by while they’re making grand plans for it.

A mate of mine with a ropey beard alerted me the other day to some cat called Jedidiah Jenkins, who on turning 30 had decided to embark on a 7,000 mile bike trip for reasons he felt central to his existence. Describing it as ‘a choice to look squarely at the decisions we all feel like we have to make, and the priorities we all forget’.

When you’ve read a fair few accounts of voyages of self-discovery and the various motivations behind them, it’s rare that you come across something written in a way you’ve never seen before.

The spice of life coughs up many different people in this world, with a range of different priorities, some of whom are never going to embark on this kind of mammoth physical hardship. That’s not the way the world works comes the chorus from the office blocks. Fair enough. But I dare even the most resolutely realistic of you to not take something from the below.

Some more comfortably than others, but at the end of the day if you’re reading this, odds-on the manner in which you live is a choice you are able to make.

*

There was something about drawing close to 30 that felt like I was losing something. The newness of life and career and cities and friends began to find their comfortable patterns, and once you see the pattern, time speeds up.


That’s why we hear old people always warning us of how fast life passes. It really doesn’t pass by any faster than those long childhood summers, but we just lose fascination, or I should say we lose wonder.


We are no longer astonished by the way the world works.


Human beings amass comfort and minimize risk as they age. I get it. I can see the value in that. But both of those things have a tendency to diminish character.


I am 30 now, and I don’t want a mortgage. I don’t want property-based responsibility because I think it’ll change my brain chemistry.


It makes you focus on protecting what you have rather than fighting for what could be.


It seems like the observable transition from idealism to conservatism. As for now, I do not want that. 


I want to pursue wonder, appreciation, and adventure. I want to meet people and learn from them and write their stories and tell others. I want to become a man that pursues virtue and character and colour and romance. It feels like the people in our lives who seem to have done that are the ones we love most. If I have a family some day, I want to give them a father full of stories and whimsy and love for being alive. I see too little of that.


You may think I am prolonging adolescence and avoiding responsibility. Well, I can simply say that I am not impressed by grownups or their society. But I will also say that I disagree with you.


The choice to pursue a dream, at the destruction of my comfort, with the loss of safety and certainty, all for the purpose of doing something that inspires others to a fuller life of wonder and creativity and quality, to me that is a burden of responsibility worth carrying.


To me, that is growing up.

From my armchair I nurse a glass of just-sodastreamed refrigerated tap water and exhale the breath of time immemorial and as the evening clock strikes seven I turn on the Channel 4 news. And I see people bobbing about in whirlpools of political terminology, hanging themselves by their colourful ties, forgetting the real issues at stake.

Take the fall of the Berlin Wall for example. Throw the end of Communism at me, the pulling back of the Iron Curtain, the rise of democracy, the collective clenched fist of a city at breaking point after three decades of subjugation, but let’s be honest now.

Let’s look a little closer.

The Nike Air Flight Hi’s.



Oh gawsh.

This is 1989.



This is no re-release. 



We’re talking OGs.

No construction in history was going to withstand the weight of footwear that heavy.

When people say life is more simple than it appears.



Don’t ever believe them.

Madlib:

I did not know you ate oysters?




Doom:

They taste just like pussy. That’s why.

Introducing the new standard of latte.

My thinking is that the new standard of latte might be not too far removed from the old standard of latte, which means for three quid you’ll be the recipient of an over-frothed watered-down airy cup of liquid tenuousness that would make Giuseppi from La Casa Del Caffè Taza D’oro a mere stone’s throw from Il Pantheon spit out his triple ristretto.

But why keep going on about Starbucks bro?

I can think of four reasons.

Firstly this absolute honey works in my local and unlike most of the people who populate the Starbucks environ she smiles once in a while and could probably walk in straight line without falling over if you asked politely.

Secondly I like the bottles of iced coffee frappuccino they sell.

Next up without the sour the sweet can never be so sweet, and spending all of five minutes in there every morning brightens up my day in the knowledge that things can’t get that much worse.



Last but by no means least, what other coffee house can lay claim to caffeinated libations expertly served up by Super Heroes.

t h e

g r e e n


a p r o n

Can’t say he didn’t warn us.

Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries: nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.

Daniel Defoe 1660-1731 writer, wig enthusiast

But I say unto you, that whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew: Chapter 5, Verse 28

This is Eddie, the legend who works in the local dry cleaners up on Hackney Road.

I spotted this tat on his forearm the other day and asked him what it meant.

He said it was Arabic for ‘prisoner to music’.

You like your tunes then, yeah? I ask.

He stops, no-look hits the off-switch on the enormous dry-cleaner behind him, and stares me dead in the eye. The place falls silent.

I live for beats, my brother.

I smiled, paid and went about my day. Prisoner to music? I’d struggled hard to act surprised. With the amount of Celine and Britney that man pumps out of his speakers on the daily, I’d say prisoner to music is about right. Hey if Chumbawamba plan a reunion anytime soon, odds-on our man Eddie’s headed straight to solitary.

*

My mate Mim then pointed out his tattoo didn’t even mean anything.

Which made even more sense. When I asked him how it was pronounced he shrugged, said he didn’t have a clue, said he didn’t speak Arabic.

Today is a very special day.

Today I’d like to toast three decades worth of repressed homosexuality and wish my beloved brother Miguel the happiest of happy birthdays! He has filled my life with physical pain, but on a day like today and with an AK pressed to my temple I’ll happily admit all this is water under the bridge. Apparently blood runs thicker.

He’s the Clark Kent wannabe on the right.

How to best describe him. 



Unpredictable? Violent? Offkey?

He is none of those things when he’s getting lucky. But somewhere down the line shit went a little snafu in my brother’s lovelife. Truth be told.. Ladies no longer react. These days even his Don Juan banjo routine doesn’t batt an eyelid.

But are the girls really to blame when he rocks this kinda shit?

It’s not like the rest of his garms pass the acid test.

My mother has recently started alluding to her granny credentials. But manz can’t bring theyselves to tell her the closest Miguel is getting to having a kid at the moment..

is perving the hell out of them buttnaked in public parks.

We’ve all had our dry-runs admittedly, but as he prepares for yet another month of drudgery wandering the planes of the Gobi desert, it strikes me that even Prince of Dryness Westwood would be lost for words.

J U S T  K I D D I N  B W U O



 Cunning linguist prop-forward manna lettaz strong like bear living legend.



Let’s all raise mad beers to broheim

and wish him a poppin night and an even more poppin year


 (if you’re a broad and you see him about tonight please do us all a favour and lunge him)

FELIZ CUMPLE FIERA X

Shit is deep.

Just now I was making coffee by the island at around three on a Saturday in late January and watching Christopher Eccleston break down in tears on Good Morning Britain recalling a time he had bullied a sensitive kid at school and I saw the effort he was making with his cheeks to contain his face from cracking on breakfast television and my face cracked for him, it wasn’t sadness, it was something like sadness but a lake of sadness rained over by clouds of goodness, the good was falling over the sadness and I was crying because of the beauty of everything, the unending pain of humanity, that all the time around the clock we are suffering, all of us unendingly at different times, one unending stream of suffering and I felt like I was crying for everyone, a shared pain, to be with them and share in their grief and bring them strength and to bring us all strength. And I thought how open I felt, that this whole experience that had shaken my heart in a way I had never felt, had left me open, open to emotion in a way that was so beautiful and so good. My suffering had made me aware of real suffering, and to see it as a gift, and feel the pain of being a human much more deeply, if I am suffering like this so must so many other people, and fifty times worse, and I cry for them and for us all, and for beauty despite the sorrow, and that in the depths of the pain is beauty itself. To feel so much, just to feel.

Somebody recently wrote an article for Vice about the irony that 85% of his muslim brothers who wholeheartedly called for the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, had never actually read The Satanic Verses. He ended it with the sentence, ‘The Satanic Verses is to Muslim intellectuals what Infinite Jest is to hipsters. It’s on everyone’s shelves, and they all have strong opinions on the author, but most haven’t read past the first 30 pages.’

Bulls–eye my brother.

As you can see from the above copy, I didn’t get past the end of page 2. But like many people rolling around Hackney with no socks and shoes on, I do have a weird interest in the author of the book, David Foster Wallace. In the words of the Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky who followed him around for a week in 1996 at the back end of his book tour:

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through school, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated, went to writing school, published a thousand-page novel aged 32, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

They recently made a film about this exact encounter, the week Lipsky spent rolling around with Foster Wallace interviewing him, called The End Of The Tour. It’s totally brilliant. Try and watch it.

Given our generation’s newfound affinity with an attention span most akin to that of a housefly, the following is going to be a long-shot. But save it for a rainy day or a cycle-ride or an especially uneventful afternoon at work. It’s an interview with David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy about her brother, and it’s amazing and heartbreaking and an insight into an incredible mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLEdNmbvsA&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=ElectricCereal

In 2005 he went to Kenyon College to make a speech to the graduating class of 2005. It was recorded, and now known as ‘This Is Water’.

It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard I think. And reverberated around in my brain for weeks afterwards. It touches on many things, and in twenty minutes there doesn’t seem to be a sentence out of keeping with the message of the talk. His voice is so calming that it wraps you up in a blanket and takes you smiling with lids half-closed every step of the way.

About the things staring us in the face, right under our noses, to which we have become so accustomed, we are no longer able to see them. He speaks of the importance of trying to see these things again.

There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys.. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other one and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

Happiness.

Hmmmm.

Happiness strikes me as some smarmy piece of crap prince from a Pixar film I pretend not to know the name of who’s just bounced into the room and begun spewing smarm all over the place from his eyebrows.

Hey buddy.

You can’t count on this guy. If you let him, he’ll make you feel good about yourself, but experience will tell you to be wary of him. As quickly as he comes around, he’ll drop you and move onto the next coolest guy in the banqueting hall, while you’re left there on your tod thinking what the hell happened. The problem with happiness is that it is transient. Or to use the Word Of The Day that landed on my desktop this morning, it’s ephemeral. Like the smarmy Prince’s affections, it doesn’t last.

Coming and going like you know who.

The interesting thing about happiness is that you only really begin to investigate it, once you start feeling like crap. You only start deconstructing the fickle piece of crap Prince once he’s deserted you. It strikes me that happiness can’t be a constant. Because happiness is not a permanent state. Contentment might tick that box, but contentment is a different thing altogether.

Happiness is a high.

And from great heights we must inevitably descend.

People who are perpetually happy are morons.

And it’s probably a cover up anyway. 

Hundred per cent, off-camera, I bet even the Chuckle Bros had beef.


*


I’ve got a tattoo on my left arm, the last line of a poem called Desiderata.

Out of context, the line seems like a fairly banal Hallmark card kind of platitude. But what makes it interesting is that it’s the parting shot of a very long poem that touches on all sorts of incredible stuff; silence, love, death, truth, courage, and more. And the author chose to end with this.

When all was said and done, Max Ehrmann still deemed personal happiness as the grail of our worldly objectives. But crucially what he was saying wasn’t be happy. He was saying more than this. He was saying strive to be happy. Because the world is a cruel playground, and much of your time in this playground will be spent running from the 6ft 8 skinhead with the thyroid problem who’s constantly throwing rocks at your head with unerring accuracy. Every single break-time whether you like it or not. The striving is important, because odds-on there’ll be times in your life when you’ll have forgotten what happiness feels like. 

You can’t be happy all the time.



Just look at the Chuckle Brothers. 

Well, maybe they can.



Whatever, my point is this.



I think we should be wary of the hallowed Pursuit of Happiness.

You can’t just be happy. Perhaps you shouldn’t even strive to be happy. Because happiness should never be an objective. Happiness is a by-product of something else. Happiness isn’t the beer garden of some country pub at the back end of a 36-mile hike through the Lake District. Happiness is the fleeting moment when, rounding a corner into a glen, we see a host of golden daffodils. It’s something that creeps up behind us and taps us on the shoulder, and just as quickly as it appears, it’s gone again. If all we aim for is the beer garden, we run the risk of disappointment. The beers won’t be cold enough, and some especially red-faced man in flip-flops will be working his way through the last four yorkshire puddings left in the kitchen.

If we set out our stall on happiness, we’ll never have enough of it.

Same thing as chasing a high.



And that never ends well, however good your shit is. 



Toni ever strike you as that happy?

*


Contentment on the other hand is different. Contentment doesn’t need highs.



Contentment counts its blessings, and is fine with the way things are.



Contentment is looking in the mirror, and the mirror looking back and saying yo.

Contentment is The Fonz.

I watched a lot of Happy Days without ever understanding how Fonz got to be as cool as he is. He was just cool. I don’t remember any montages of him busting around in a leather jacket as a kid, or his moms telling Richie and Chachi how her little Fonz had a tricky adolescence. All I remember was whenever he walked into a room, chicks on the soundtrack went mental. Fonz was cool. He was cool because he was content. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t need to do shit. Not because he looked great already, but because when he looked in the mirror he knew who and what was staring back at him.

This is all a question of semantics, these are all just words, but if the search for happiness can be downgraded to being cool with contentment, then Fonz can teach us a lot. 

Fonz was cool because he was true to himself.



And contentment, ergo happiness, has a lot to do with personal truth.



Like Shakespeare said..

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

The truth is one of the most difficult concepts to get our heads around, because we spend so much time trying to force-feed it with what we want to justify. So it becomes blurred and indistinct. But at the end of the day, the truth is so obvious. It’s so clear. Nothing is more simple than the truth. Our problem is that we’ve become experts at pulling the wool over our eyes and blinding ourselves to it. In 1953, a Palestinian diplomat at the League of Nations when asked a question by the League, on the rack, replied simply… 

That is a very difficult thing to answer, so I will tell the truth. 

Deep, deep down, 20,000 leagues under our posturing and day-to-day fronting, we know what our truth is. Each person’s truth might be unique to them, but it isn’t anything else. It’s just the truth. Like the fruits of 83% of my flatmate’s well-intentioned stints in the kitchen, the truth isn’t easy to stomach, which is why we soften it with self-pity and cheapen it with our protestations. But it’s still always there.

Kate Tempest:

And then… on the skies we can sail.

*

Every King, every councillor, every CEO, every underground carpark attendant, every Neo-Nazi, every pious priest, every Sunday League ref, every mother, father, son, daughter, pet hamster etc, resting their heads down on their pillows at night, in the depths of their solitude, knows what the hell is really going down. I think so. Beneath layer upon layer of justification and erring our inner voice is ever-present, softly whispering to us from a private interior room, what is right and what it is we know we must do. Whether we can hear it just depends on how hard we try to listen. Perhaps this is what is really meant by our moment of truth.

And guess what sets you free, apparently.

The happiest people in the world are those who have just been freed from some sort of shackle.

Forget happiness, aim for contentment, through truth.



Then we’ll get closer to radness.

This was deemed one of the all-time top dropthebeatonit moments by the fanbase.

It concerned an email altercation with my ex-girlfriend back in the day. The content caused a great deal of debate amongst the sexes, I received aggressive levels of hate-mail from the female populous and more than a few muffled fair play‘s and missed high fives from the mandem. Yet more proof if ever it was needed that the biggest chasm in our fragile world remains not rich or poor, black or white, young or old, but male and female.

*

Monday 16th April

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned I was Dog House bound for the foreseeable future.



There was me thinking I was out.

But no it seems I’m back once again.

So languishing here at the bottom of the garden, scrutching around sniffing my balls and perspiring through my tongue, I figure I might as well enjoy it while it lasts and share the root of my predicament with all you people. Below is an email thread between me and She Who Must Not Be Named. Another way of describing it would be to call it a stunning attack of vitriol based on extremely little circumstantial evidence, in response to a pretty great joke.

I’ve selected my favourite bits and blown them up for your viewing pleasure.



*

‘Stupid little email’ cut me deep since I thought it was a pretty funny email, not to mention a valid request at the time. I like it though.


*

‘Spoilt little teenage brother’ is also good. I’ll take it.


*

MacGyver-style diversion tactics, a classic for the scrapbook.


*

 
Repetition of the word ‘off’. Ouch.


*


Last but not least the killer parting shot. Not even any kisses at the end. Cold.

Apparently this is ‘Not on’. Which leaves me wondering what is on? As far as I’m concerned I’d hope some sausages might be currently on the grill turning and spitting nicely, and my pants be on the bed washed and neatly folded. Let’s hope this doesn’t get blown out of all proportion, but in case it does I feel there are two lessons to be learnt from this debacle. One is never mess with a man with his own blog. And in light of this and in my defence, the other comes straight from the mouth of the original gee Oscar Wilde.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about. And that is not being talked about.

*


Suffice to say the post sparked some healthy debate.

*

With some years of hindsight, it seems fitting now to mention there is not a snowball’s chance in Hades I would ever have deigned to write something like that were it not for the preternatural dopeness of said aforementioned ex-girlfriend, one I saw for breakfast this morning and whose coolness I was once again reminded of, as well as a warm fuzziness I feel to have spent all the time I did in her intimacy. Sorry again for the dirty pants and socks Skye. Still can’t believe you fell for the ‘don’t worry about all this I’ll do it’ before you left line.

Definitely still a classic for the scrapbook.

Some time in the winter of 2014 my mate Wilma and I spent 96 hours doing little more than cycle, eat, feel numb, cry, attempt to sleep, cry again, and cycle some more. We made it from the northern tip of Scotland to the little toe of Cornwall, enduring the onslaught of the coldest March since records began. Whenever the hell that was. It was an experience we won’t ever forget. We’ve tried.

But unfortunately we can’t. Because it got made into a film.

Which toured the world as part of the Bicycle Film Festival.

It came back to Brighton one weekend, so a few of us cycled down to watch the film on a big screen in front of a packed audience. It was cool watching our melons on a massive screen keep company with some pretty major bike films. Like the twelve year old hanging out with his older brother’s crew, necking Hooch. Enough time had passed for us to see the film for the first time from an onlooker’s perspective, without being so emotionally wrapped up in it. Which was a trip, and made us look anew upon the scale of our achievement. It was a pretty messed up four days.

Here it is.