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Ache.

Monday, June 28, 2010

When I was 18 – like with my 16th birthday – I decided a festival would be fun. How I came to this conclusion after Guilfest, I’m not too sure; perhaps I am secretly a masochist. The festival a couple of friends and I decided to go to was the Edinburgh Fringe. Here seemed a festival that suited us; one that had no sweaty muddy congregation of hideous people with all of their drunkard noise and stink. One where the night life consisted of sitting in theatres or pubs and being lullaby’d with laughter. Yes, the Fringe was a festival that would be more my style.

However, there were a few things that I hadn’t considered, a few things that slightly marred this luxurious idea I had of the few days we would spend. First thing, accommodation would cost close to a trillion pounds for a long weekend in a bed and breakfast. Instead, we opted to camp just outside of the city which cost about £60. Much more reasonable. Secondly, the cheapest way to get to Edinburgh was by coach, since none of us had a car to drive up. The coach was a 12 hour drive from London to Edinburgh costing about £30 return. This, too, seemed reasonable.

We decided that, since we wanted to get the most out of the short time we could afford to be there, that we would take an overnight coach on the way there, so that then we would have a whole day in the city without having to pay for a night of camping. This seemed smart.

We arrived at Victoria Coach station at 11:30pm, geared up with our massive rucksacks and our tickets eagerly in hand to embark on our vessel on which we would slumber to energize for a day of wandering the grand city of Edinburgh. We hadn’t realised that, actually, National Express coaches are not first class airliners, and their seats are not comfortable places to be for any extended period of time, let alone sleep. Not only that but the driver was obliged to stop every three or four hours so to wake himself up. Of course, if you managed to sleep, this also woke the passengers up too. That night, I think I managed to get a collective hour and a half of sleep. When we arrived the next morning at 11:30am, our next mission was to find where we would be staying.

This being my trip, I was sort of in charge of directions and knowing where shit was. If you have ever been somewhere with me, you will know that I regularly get lost, particularly when getting off the plane or ferry and trying to find the hotel. I have gotten myself lost in Islington and Farnham, both on journeys to see universities, and I have gotten myself and my girlfriend lost in Ipswich and Paris, both on the way to a hotel, as well as on countless other little occasions. In July I’m going to Venice with her and currently have a bet going on whether I will lose us again. I think the wage currently stands at my eyeballs, but she is willing to take my life. On the occasion in Edinburgh, my friends and I stepped off the coach and were immediately lost. I knew we had to get the bus to the campsite, and I knew the bus number, but I had no idea where to get the bus from. After walking down Leith walk with our heavy and awkward bags as per one local’s instruction, we realised that the bus stop was actually way back up the top of the hill we just walked down. Cross, sweaty, and desperately tired, we hauled ourselves back up, grunting and sighing like over worked mules, bleeding from inside our shoes, passers by crossing the street as we dolefully lumbered towards them.

Once the bus had taken us to where we thought we needed to be, we were instantly lost once again, not knowing at all where the campsite was. We walked, dragging our blistered feet, for about a mile, when we approached a bus stop and realised that we could have gotten off a stop later. The agony of the futility, the needless venture down and then up Leith Walk and now this painful trek down a meandering path, signpost-less, was about the same as the actual physical pain. Once we had found a signpost directing us to the campsite, we witnessed one of the most disheartening sights I have in my memory; the steepest hill leading to our resting place. It was like dying from having your legs crushed by a bulldozer, only to realise you must drag your bodily form up Everest before being allowed though the Pearly Gates and able to abandon your bones and flesh. It was only about 200 yards, but it took us half an hour, I swear.

The excruciating journey became a defining precursor for the rest of the Fringe. Being behind on sleep by a day and then missing a few hours each night due to relentless rain meant that we were never fresh. It was made worse for my friend who was told, before he came, that he had some sort of stomach problem meaning he had too much acid. This meant he couldn’t smoke, drink, or even have a cup of coffee, else he’d run the risk of being violently ill. My other friend, who is a general optimist, a spark of life and energy, seemed to become more subdued as the days continued and our moaning droned on and on. We never properly ate either, surviving on fast food lunches and cans of stuff that we heated on our portable hob after returning to the campsite from a gig. We became so hungry that, smelling rotten and looking dead, we hobbled into a pizza express and spent a lot of money on a lot of food.

I loved the Edinburgh Fringe. I have some genuinely great memories from that trip and we saw some genuinely great shows in a great city with a great atmosphere. Which, again, makes me wonder; did the good times outweigh the pain, or am I indeed a masochist. Eh.

PnL.x

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Replicants.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

If being 14 was like being invisible, being 17 was not. It was like suddenly realising you belonged to this large long-lost family after years of assuming yourself to be an orphan, and upon realising your heritage, relatives become naturally inquisitive, only, the more questions they ask and the more they pry, the more you feel you’re being ripped to shreds by savage dogs, having your identity picked at with their claws and jaws, all the while wishing you were an orphan again as you sit in your new bedroom of your affluent father’s mansion, staring at the intricate furniture that has suddenly been bestowed upon you, all of which is built with the intent of evoking character and feeling but still void of your own soul and love, stroking the emotionless Victorian letter opener and its detailed handle that depicts a seaside forest in Cornwall and the smiling children playing with the sticks, then rubbing its slender and engraved blade, imagining the swift moves you could make to return to your orphan life. That was how it felt to be 17.

Moving up into sixth form meant you became a new species on school grounds. When I was in the lower years, I always looked at the sixth form students with reverence and awe. They were grownups in their own life. They were embarking on a career rather than attending a compulsory education. They were few, and gathered in small sized classes. They were in their own clothes, and yet immaculately dressed. They were elite.

Then, when our turn came, we felt elite. We went out in the summer holidays and bought smart shirts and trendy ties in bulk. The first day, our teachers spoke to us like people rather than students. We were given the freedom of free periods in which we could do some extra research in our very own fancy library, or grab some food from our very own fancy cafeteria. We had our own fancy building and, my oh my, did we feel fancy.

Unfortunately, by about the second week I realised the fanciness was just a masquerade. For all of the teachers big talk about giving us responsibility and treating us like adults, it became quickly apparent that it was very much a teacher/student relationship. Our fancy clothes came under scrutiny and regulations saw the daylight, making us realise that our “own clothes” weren’t actually our own at all, except in the sense that we owned them. After a couple weeks, it was obvious that this was still school.

The one thing that had changed was the dynamic. Since a large amount of the year dropped out or moved to different colleges, the focus was all wrong. There were no ‘celebrities’ anymore; we were not fixated to one set of people that occupied our attention. Instead, due to the fact that there were enough of us to do so, we all paid attention to each other. There wasn’t under growth to hide in anymore. Camouflage washed away. We were all more aware.

The lack of enthusiasm for my courses, particularly due to the fact that I was forced into doing subjects I didn’t enjoy since it was how the timetables worked, mixed with my growing disdain for others in my year who seemed more curious in my life and determined to be influencing factors, meant that I spent a lot of my time not at school. Thankfully I had a good friend who was in each of my lessons; being an outsider to the ‘group’ I belonged to meant that this friend was separated from their interference, and also acted as a reason to turn up to class and learn. However, in my free lessons, I would walk back home, which only ever took 5 minutes.

As this progressed, I began missing morning registrations before my lessons, since I had found they were pointless. We already did registration in our first lesson, I didn’t see why another registration was needed before that. This philosophy bled over and I soon deduced that I could also just not go to one particular lesson called “Critical Thinking” which was a ‘compulsory’ course that was unrecognised by universities, and so therefore pointless.  This ‘insubordination’ meant that my form tutor became increasingly cross with me and began sending me many letters telling me I had to see her. Since I didn’t, she employed other tactics.

In the sixth form common room, TV’s had been installed around the room in the various corners. These were used to display slideshows to notify the students of goings on. Sometimes they would feature a daily riddle or fact. After a while, they began flashing the names of those that needed to be seen. They implored students to tell those who were named to see the head of sixth form. They began to detail why these names must be apprehended and spoken to. They resembled a fascist regime that must be avoided and rebelled against. Suddenly, when my name appeared on there, when I became aware via a friend telling me so as I was not in the common room enough to see them, it became a game. It became an adventure like in the movies. Like Blade Runner or The Fugitive. I was Harrison Ford. Teachers and the head would skulk around the common rooms, the hall ways, the various passages of our totalitarian civilisation, and I would feel like I was being hunted. This was the maximum amount of enjoyment I could squeeze from sixth form collage, and so dammit, I was going to milk it.

For me, being 17, aside from the occasional parties at the weekends and general girl drama, was about being spied upon, and being watched. And, like the teenager I was, I turned it into a game. One that eventually got a lot of teachers pissed off with me. I felt like I had found my true rebellious calling. It wasn’t in violence as I had attempted when I was 13. It was in being an elusive and non-compliant nuisance. And it felt good.

PnL.x

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Ablaze.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

The summer I turned 16, as a birthday present, I got tickets for a festival with a few friends. When I concocted this idea and managed to get my parents on board with it, the people I wanted to take and I got very excited. I’ve now got to a stage where being around a cosmic amount of inebriated people in a sweaty, muddy, loud field sounds like torture, but at the time it sounded like the height of enjoyment; the rock’n’roll lifestyle, which was apparently popular.

We then had much fun deliberating which festival we should go to, trying to plan out our enjoyment. This was a mistake as it meant that all the tickets for festivals we might actually want to go to had sold out. Glastonbury had gone, Reading had gone, V had gone; all the ones that were on TV and were dictated as ‘cool’ by infuriating people like Fern Cotten, were gone. Sold out. So, determined to go to a festival if it killed us, we got some tickets to go to Guilfest. The festival in Guildford.

I don’t know if anyone reading has been to Guildford, Surrey, but it’s a place that’s rather difficult to get excited about. It’s best known for the Guildford Spectrum; a large indoor leisure facility that has a bowling alley, ice rink, water slides, and a laser quest. Unfortunately, these are not all joined as the same activity, which would make it the most amazing place in the world. No, it’s just a collection of almost interesting things. And some fast food restaurants. But, hey, we thought, Reading’s not much cop, but it’s one of the most famous Festivals in the country.

The headline acts didn’t help convince us. Ah-ha and Billy Idol are the two I remember. And Nizlopi, an acoustic folk band that were known for five minutes for their song “JCB” which apparently caused grown men to cry. It’s okay to cry as a grown man so long as it’s about a truck. That’s fine.

Due to the lack of music to get excited by, we decided that we would go and soak up the festival experience, it would be training for following years at festivals. Learn how to cope with a few days of being dirty, learn how to survive with the food, learn how to conserve money, that sort of stuff. By day two we were rather bored and spent a large part of the afternoon sitting in front of the stage which, despite having someone on it, wasn’t really being paid attention to. One band then came on, me and my friend were barely listening, when suddenly our ears perked and we decided we quite liked the sound. We got quite enthusiastic and for the rest of the day would go on about this good band. We looked forward to getting home and finding some of their songs to play for others, to show off this good band we saw. The more I think about it, the more I realise we were just desperate to hear something slightly decent, because I don’t remember even typing their name in Google. I can’t even remember their name. I suppose I probably got home, recharged my iPod, put my earphones on, and completely forgot who they were.

Anyway, after three hours of sitting in the scorching sun, we got up to go and find some food. It was at that moment that I realised my legs smarted a bit. I was wearing three-quarter length shorts and my ankles had gone from my usual pale to bright red, burnt to tender pulp. If I had prepared them with curry spice three hours earlier, we could have just dug into my calves for dinner. No worries, I thought, they’ll be fine so long as I stay in my three-quarters so nothing rubs against them.

After a questionable chicken kebab thing that cost about £10, and after moaning about the price, taste, and size of the tiny thing, inexperienced of the crafty ways of the food vendor at festivals, we decided to queue up for a Silent Disco. A Silent Disco is a tent with the usual lighting of a disco, dark with strobe lights and so on, but with two DJ’s at the front. Everyone on the dance floor has a set of wireless headphones of which they switch to either of the DJ’s and dance. A great experience, one of which I actually didn’t mind dancing because it’s such an enclosing situation. Everyone seems to be out of time and dancing wrong because the room is split into listening to two different songs. And then, every now and then you would remove your headphones to look round a room of silent gyrating, stomping idiots. So I danced. And while I have never felt so comfortable to dance, I have never regretted it quite so much. My lower legs flared into chunky neon lightsabers, illuminating the ground below me in a soft crimson while sending excruciating stings through to my bone. Several times I opted to sit by the side of the room, hugging my knees and blowing on my ankles, suddenly realising, despite the room being full of people dancing to seemingly nothing, I was the biggest weirdo in there. I would try and pick myself up to dance – I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend in the middle of the dance floor – but it became more than just a burn, and turned into phantom pain. I could have sworn I was floating from the knees on a deep, numb puddle of fire.

That night was spent in my tent oscillating between boiling hot and freezing cold within seconds, and always on the verge of vomiting, while all my friends went off to the tents of some others we had met there for a midnight party, getting drunk and high and the like, listening to some guy strum his shitty guitar and sing huskily as the rest beat little African drums.

I got home and was told I had had a bad bout of sun stroke, and that next time, if I go to a festival, I should probably put some damn sun cream on.

I’ve only been to two festivals since. One was the Edinburgh Fringe, which was constantly overcast from the moment we arrived, and the other was a food festival, at which I stayed in a hotel.

PnL.x

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Hyde.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

My first proper experience with alcohol was when I was fifteen. On the last day of school in May, before we went on a ‘study leave’ to get in the zone for our GCSE’s, we all went a bit mad. As you’re meant to on your last day. Everyone gathered in the park before school, all signing each other’s shirts, girls put on excessive make up and gave each other and the boys big red lipstick kiss marks. I sprayed my hair green; something a couple of annoying, weedy little kids would then tell me would get me sent home. It didn’t. Then, about 15 minutes before registration would start, we marched on Cheam High, singing songs, mostly just shouting, crowding the suburban roads and enjoying the angry horns of pissed off drivers, honking back with our aerosol horns.

The day continued with a similar amount of discord. We went to classes, but we barely did a thing in any of them. We had an end of year assembly, but nobody really paid attention. The entire day was lived in the breaks between lessons, signing books, signing shirts, basically writing on whatever we damn liked. By the afternoon, my green hair dye had made it round the social circle, and I ended up, like everyone else, with a head of half green, half red, with black and white spots and the odd purple stripe. We were all loud, obnoxious caricatures for a day. Eventually this started to grate and people started to get irritating. And the only thing that makes irritating people more irritating is an irritant. Drink.

After school, everyone marched back off to the park and a group of us sat by the shut down cafe that was next to the playground. Once we were done with hanging around there, we migrated through the wood and to the green behind the park manor. Passing around was a bottle of coke to which rum was added. Once this had run out, and by the time we were done with the little amount of beer that each of us had managed to steal from our parents, it was time to get more drink. I went with a couple of friends in an older brother’s car who bought us WKD and Fosters. We arrived back at the green behind the trees and manor and were ambushed by thirsty teenagers. It was like wearing a coat of rotting fish on a light swim in “Shake Bait Cove”.

Somehow – I still have no idea how – none of us were caught or sent away by park marshals. We saw their range rover cruise around but we simply moved to avoid being found out. In lower years we had heard tales of how the leaving students went and got absolutely shitfaced in the woods, so you’d think the school would have picked up on this was going on and notified the police, but there you go. It’s also a surprise that no one was murdered or lightly stabbed. A couple years later, my friend and I were chased by three figures all in black in the same park.

By about 5pm, most people were comfortably drunk. By 6 – slightly more. At half six me and a friend went to the nearest supermarket and tried to by bread to calm the stomach of a few others. Instead, we thought it was a great idea to buy iced lemon buns. They actually seemed to aggravate the sickness, and a couple people threw up quit a bit. We were then removed from future food gathering duties. At 8, everyone was pissed.

Being a naughty and delusional boy, assuming that I was just having fun and that this was what fun felt like, I went out the three or four following nights and got similarly drunk, and so the entire week is a bit of a haze. (Of course, almost immediately after I realised that wasn’t fun at all and fun actually consists of being boring with tea and biscuits and not caring.)

There was a lot of drama that night; I managed to annoy several friends by howling that I hated them when they told me I should go home as I was too drunk. Then, when they took me home, I went back out to the park. Not smart. Other drama included the wry and hysteric girl who wouldn’t be returning to school for sixth form the next year, like a couple of other people, but was extra crazy since no one was paying attention to her sadness. Another girl got her boobs out. Just, out. Other relationships fell apart, new ones sparked, all in this clumsy mess as about fifty kids congregated in this littered pit in the middle of the woods. Some were breaking glow sticks and flicking the inside liquid across the trees and floor. The drama, the offsetting colours, and the general noise (a sort of hum of conversation and argument that was unaccompanied by any music) created a swirly hole in centre back of my brain when the memory should be.

After a few days of being stupid and drunk, I had my first GCSE exam. I think it was half way through the two hour torture of silence and sitting still that still felt like a crowded and busy thump, as I was trying to remember the German for ‘Railway station’ (Bahnhof), I said to myself, for the first time, “I am never going to drink again.” And I didn’t … no, ha, I did, I did.

I got a C in German. Which I was pretty happy with, to be honest.

PnL.x

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Fame.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Being 14 was about on par with being invisible. A couple things happened that I was proud of; I got highest marks in my music year on a test, which went vastly unnoticed rather expectedly by the other students, but also by the teachers; I won an art competition which would mean that my winning drawing of beetles and worms crawling through the dense mud of the rainforest be immortalised as a mural across the arch into the library, a project that never ever saw inception never mind completion. This, teamed with the entire fact that I was just a kid in a school full of kids, meant I went unnoticed. If I had a plan, this was certainly the objective, just for survivals sake, but it got boring. I wasn’t close to being celebrity.

Some of the others who walked around the halls had stature and menace. These kids had almost certainly already had some form of sex, which was still something you did when you were older, as a grown up, as far as I was concerned. These were the kids that you laughed with when they would verbally torture other kids with some of the meanest and funniest comments, while praying that they would never do the same to you. They played football and their mums let them have GTA. And they smoked. Probably.

It was at this age that I went Skiing in America with the school. I can remember being practically passive aggressively shoved into going through a series of psychological guilt trips from my friend, who was desperate to go. I was little more anxious because we would be the only few year 9’s going, everyone else being a lot older; not just celebrities but the older siblings of the celebrities in my year. I imagine it’s how the friends of the younger Baldwin’s feel before they meet Alec. Except Steven’s friends, of course. They’re all ghostly, angelic hallucinations that linger from his formative years.

Eventually, I was convinced. After a journey which consisted of a stopover in Iceland on the shittyest airlines in the world that only played Robbie Williams and R.E.S.P.E.C.T by Aretha Franklin through a headphone jack for hours on end (remember, these were the days before parents would buy an iPod for their child, the days of CD players that died after half an hour on two AA batteries, so we were forced to either listen or start pulling out each other’s teeth in boredom), we arrived.

Boston was beautiful, the snow was thick and the breakfasts were heavenly, massive things that shortened my life by each bite. The skiing was hard. The first day was spent on a slope crowded by miniature ski suits in oversized goggles that slalomed past at breakneck speeds whilst I hesitantly skidded with my skis tapered to an arrow and my poles held tight. Not only did you have to master the ability to not be scared of falling over and hurtling down a 5% decline slope, knocking down children like skittles, but you had to master the chair lift.

Sauntering closer, swaying slightly, it looms downward as you and your three ride-mates stand with bated breath. Then, as it moves behind the revolving pillar and out of sight, you position yourself like the pretty boy of a prison that just wants it over and done with, face grimacing in preparation. You think you know when it will come because you’ve monitored the speed at which it has approached. You think you’re ready. And then suddenly, almost the second it’s gone from your sight, it moves like a camera shutter and thwacks you in the calves, swooping you away. No matter how many times I embarked on the chair lift, I was never ready. I could have sworn there was a sadist in booth somewhere playing with a speed dial, the bastard.

Waiting in line for a chair lift, therefore, took some time, as people seemed to be falling off or being knocked aside every now and then, holding the line up. And so the ‘celebrities’ got bored. When we were waiting in line, the year 11’s would harass in such a way that you weren’t entirely sure if they were actually harassing or if they had become mentally retarded. While waiting in line, to bide their time, they would poke their ski polls between our legs from behind and move them up. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t done in a way that they were trying to hurt us, but they got a right fucking laugh out of it. The pole would appear between your ankles and then quickly move up past your knees. When you looked round, they would pull it out and fall into hysterics. I wasn’t sure if I was being bullied or raped.

Anyway, as well as this, they had many other little games that were obviously designed to piss off everyone else through sheer bemusement while they found much mirth from seemingly nothing. One was to yell, “Here it comes.” as people waited for the lift to take them away, the chair obviously being nowhere near to coming, hopefully causing them who were waiting to brace prematurely and fall. This never happened. However, one fateful accent, as a group of ‘celebrities’ gathered on the launch pad, or whatever, one guy, one heroic and clearly aggravated guy piped up and softly called, “Here it comes.” Two looked over in the general direction of the voice and, before their hideously underwhelming minds had time to process the concept that someone had stolen their game and used it against them, they were catapulted forth off their skis and face first into a pile of snow, shortly thereafter receiving a blow to the back of the head from the chair lift as it swung back forward and up the slope.

I was rather glad not to be a celebrity. They were douche bags.

-

I’ll post about being 15 later on tonight.

PnL.x

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