21 November 2012 - Dear Dairy #21

Dear dairy,

Happy 21st! Award yourself a free gold-top and a third of a pint of orange juice.

Gold-top puts hairs on your chest and lines your arteries to keep the heat in during cold snaps.

Today I spent three hours in a water park known locally as the A370. This is not an American strike aircraft built by the redoubtable Northrop company, but a ribbon of tarmac connecting WSM with B, via the Mendips. Today it was rather wet.

I saw things that I have never before seen at close quarters, such as water cascading over tall dry stone (joke) retaining walls and gushing through the stone-work onto the road like a scene from "The Dambusters". Very pretty, though I did consider the more imminent aspect of my mortality as I drove through the feature - having seen what it did to the models on "The Dambusters" set.

I feel like I am being propelled through life like a pimple-faced drunk being escorted out of one of York's finer hostelries with a bouncer under each arm and legs cycling in the air. I miss York. The chick-fights in Rougier Street. The bloodied Ben Sherman shirts. It's hard to find that kind of class.

Things are hectic and not getting any less so. Soon I will be dead. Soon we all will be.

There, I feel better now I know I'm taking you all with me.

Fun is under-rated.

I think...

The strange thing about fun is that when it comes immediately after work, your whole being tells you it isn't fun at all, but some kind of hardship. You ought to be going home to bed so that you can wake refreshed for more of the shit you have just endured in the last eight hours.

What does the brain know about life?

So you drag yourself out to Bristol Acoustic Night in Gloucester Road and spend four or five hours being stimulated among some of the nicest beings ever created. Then you drive home with Ryan Bingham (brother Ryan - bet he doesn't go home early to wash the pots and hit the sack) sweating in the CD player above the heater vent and blasting your ash out of the window.

And the gaps diminish, and the days join up and you just don't know what the fuck is going on anymore.

Well, I still remember sitting in a shitty estate pub in York, drinking shitty beer with uninspiring people, when not working my shifts in the chocolate factory. Fights, darts and dominoes, with the occasional jackpot on the fruit machine.

No fucking brainer. If I get through the next year and a half, I'm chucking it all in to be an ex-pat in Madrid. Say it like the Spaniards do, with soft Ds. Ma'ri'

Me encanta Ma'ri'

I learned that in Spanish class tonight.

' luego!