I am going away over the weekend but will write something on Monday.
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Thursday, May 24, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Abi and Georgie's Barn Party (15/05/07)
I do not have good luck when it comes to my car and parties. Last party I went to, I may/may not have run over a small kitten. This time, I got a parking ticket about three hours beforehand. Eighty bloody quid for parking on a road I have parked along dozens of times with nary a drop of complaint! It was bloody annoying. Although I guess I was bang to rights - not only was I parked across TWO clearly marked residents parking spots, I wasn't even properly parked there, and was kind of sticking out across the road. And as it happened, it turned out to only be £40; they halve it if you pay within two weeks. However, the cheeky knob who gave the ticket folded it over inside the little plastic wallet so when I picked it off the windscreen I could only see the £80. I think that this is all part of a cunning ruse; they hope that people will see the ticket, only see the eighty, and then be like 'SCREW THAT' and throw the ticket on the floor and drive away. Then when the time rolls along when you are forced to actually PAY the fucking thing, you have to pay eighty instead of the forty. Clever, Kingston Borough Council, very very clever. So I was annoyed about that for the entirety rowing session we had beforehand. However, my head coach gave me some good advice which really made me feel better about it.
"I once got a parking ticket for £50," he solemnly told me. "I ignored it and then it went up to £100!" He looked really pleased with himself. Then he added "But that's ok, because I was at a GIRL'S house! Having sex!" I think expected me to yell "BOO YA! HIGH FIVE!" and do that jumping chest-bump thing with him. As it was I kind of glared blankly and then slowly, silently, turned around and walked briskly off.
I'm not sure how this parking ticket actually relates to the party in question, other than the fact that this party will forever be known as 'The Party When I Got The Parking Ticket'. I also started to relate everything to how much it cost compared to the parking ticket. I had a shower and got dressed. The clothes I wore were some socks and boxers I didn't pay for, the KAZAKHSTAN tshirt that cost me £11, some awesome jeans that cost me £40, some shoes stolen off my little brother that probably cost about £29. So in monetary terms, the option was 'Park on a road illegally for an hour' or 'Buy the clothes that I went to the party in'. Not gonna lie, I preferred the clothes. Oh yeah, I also wore my amazing Boat Club hat, which I will discuss later.
The party itself was held in a big-ass barn thing at a golf club. According to a poster on the wall of the toilet, to rent the golf club for the evening cost £200. So the option was 'Park on the road', or 'Rent an entire golf club for an hour'. Not impressed.
Inside was filled with smoke and the hideous writhing bodies of nubile teenage girls and the ironically bouncing spectres of far-too-cool-for-this teenage boys. I'm going to estimate that 80% of the boys were wearing stripy shirts. I'm also going to estimate that, other than one knob wearing a flat cap, and a wifebeater OVER his stripy shirt, I was the only one wearing a hat. The hat in question is from a limited run of Hampton Boat Club hats produced by our school shop about ten years ago. They were so ugly and hideous that they couldn't sell them and ended up shifting them at cost of about £2. Naturally, I bought two. They are literally the biggest ugliest hats you have ever seen. Formed of some weird foam/cotton hybrid, there has not been a person born who has managed to wear one of these hats and not look slightly ridiculous. The only real way to carry it off is to just place it at an angle on the side of your head and pretend that you are being ironically gangsta. Therefore, I kind of bounced sideways into the party, walking with that 'My pelvis is jelly' swagger that typified the gangsta genre, singing some ghetto music and ignoring any greetings that came my way.
"Tom! Hello! How are you?"
"Ladies come, ladies go through my revolving door, some ladies never come back - most come back for more."
"What?"
"Aint no need for me to brag about the way I'm hung, lets just say I got the skillz to get the flyest girl hung."
"What?"
"I'm gangsta."
"... yeah."
It is imperative not to underestimate the impact of wearing a huge ugly black hat at a party. For reasons unknown, people at parties are fascinated by hats. Frankly, my hat had a bigger impact at the party than I did; I must have had about 20 conversations about it over the course of the evening. It was constantly twisting through an endlessly repeating cycle of being stolen, placed on my head, rotated, flipped, argued over and reclaimed. At one point I thought I'd lost it for good; some random chav was wearing it and was refusing to give it back. However, I managed to rationally defuse the situation by calmly explaining that I indeed had purchased the piece of habidashery for £2 several years before, and thus the hat did technically belong to me, and as he was not a member of the Hampton Boat Club, there was no call for him to be wearing it anyway; he understood my argument and returned it without any quibbles. Nah, joking, I just got Rose to jiggle her boobs at him, then when he was distracted got Amy to steal the hat. Then when he was trying to get it off Amy I stole it back and ran away. And so I bought her and Rose a lemonade in thanks. That's teamwork, right there.
Frankly, I can't really remember much more about this party. It wasn't because I was drunk, it was just because not much really happpened. Kris got really drunk, I guess, and started doing imitations of people and animals. "Do a chipmunk!" we cried, and she started acting like a gorrilla and making a stern face (?). "Do a mouse!" we yelled, and she just closed her eyes really tightly. "Make some sunglasses with your hands for your eyes!" I suggested, and she sort of punched herself in the face. Then she picked up a chair and started waltzing with it, at which point the burly black security guard stepped in. There was a brief tug of war for the possession of the chair, but fortunately the black security guard won over the 5ft pissed Kazaksthanian (KRIS IS FROM KAZAKSTAHN! I pointed this out to her in relation to the tshirt and she kind of stroked the picture of the mountains on it) and order was restored.
That was pretty funny.
In conclusion.
Horribly Unimpressive Photographic Summing-Up of the Soirée
"I once got a parking ticket for £50," he solemnly told me. "I ignored it and then it went up to £100!" He looked really pleased with himself. Then he added "But that's ok, because I was at a GIRL'S house! Having sex!" I think expected me to yell "BOO YA! HIGH FIVE!" and do that jumping chest-bump thing with him. As it was I kind of glared blankly and then slowly, silently, turned around and walked briskly off.
I'm not sure how this parking ticket actually relates to the party in question, other than the fact that this party will forever be known as 'The Party When I Got The Parking Ticket'. I also started to relate everything to how much it cost compared to the parking ticket. I had a shower and got dressed. The clothes I wore were some socks and boxers I didn't pay for, the KAZAKHSTAN tshirt that cost me £11, some awesome jeans that cost me £40, some shoes stolen off my little brother that probably cost about £29. So in monetary terms, the option was 'Park on a road illegally for an hour' or 'Buy the clothes that I went to the party in'. Not gonna lie, I preferred the clothes. Oh yeah, I also wore my amazing Boat Club hat, which I will discuss later.
The party itself was held in a big-ass barn thing at a golf club. According to a poster on the wall of the toilet, to rent the golf club for the evening cost £200. So the option was 'Park on the road', or 'Rent an entire golf club for an hour'. Not impressed.
Inside was filled with smoke and the hideous writhing bodies of nubile teenage girls and the ironically bouncing spectres of far-too-cool-for-this teenage boys. I'm going to estimate that 80% of the boys were wearing stripy shirts. I'm also going to estimate that, other than one knob wearing a flat cap, and a wifebeater OVER his stripy shirt, I was the only one wearing a hat. The hat in question is from a limited run of Hampton Boat Club hats produced by our school shop about ten years ago. They were so ugly and hideous that they couldn't sell them and ended up shifting them at cost of about £2. Naturally, I bought two. They are literally the biggest ugliest hats you have ever seen. Formed of some weird foam/cotton hybrid, there has not been a person born who has managed to wear one of these hats and not look slightly ridiculous. The only real way to carry it off is to just place it at an angle on the side of your head and pretend that you are being ironically gangsta. Therefore, I kind of bounced sideways into the party, walking with that 'My pelvis is jelly' swagger that typified the gangsta genre, singing some ghetto music and ignoring any greetings that came my way.
"Tom! Hello! How are you?"
"Ladies come, ladies go through my revolving door, some ladies never come back - most come back for more."
"What?"
"Aint no need for me to brag about the way I'm hung, lets just say I got the skillz to get the flyest girl hung."
"What?"
"I'm gangsta."
"... yeah."
It is imperative not to underestimate the impact of wearing a huge ugly black hat at a party. For reasons unknown, people at parties are fascinated by hats. Frankly, my hat had a bigger impact at the party than I did; I must have had about 20 conversations about it over the course of the evening. It was constantly twisting through an endlessly repeating cycle of being stolen, placed on my head, rotated, flipped, argued over and reclaimed. At one point I thought I'd lost it for good; some random chav was wearing it and was refusing to give it back. However, I managed to rationally defuse the situation by calmly explaining that I indeed had purchased the piece of habidashery for £2 several years before, and thus the hat did technically belong to me, and as he was not a member of the Hampton Boat Club, there was no call for him to be wearing it anyway; he understood my argument and returned it without any quibbles. Nah, joking, I just got Rose to jiggle her boobs at him, then when he was distracted got Amy to steal the hat. Then when he was trying to get it off Amy I stole it back and ran away. And so I bought her and Rose a lemonade in thanks. That's teamwork, right there.
Frankly, I can't really remember much more about this party. It wasn't because I was drunk, it was just because not much really happpened. Kris got really drunk, I guess, and started doing imitations of people and animals. "Do a chipmunk!" we cried, and she started acting like a gorrilla and making a stern face (?). "Do a mouse!" we yelled, and she just closed her eyes really tightly. "Make some sunglasses with your hands for your eyes!" I suggested, and she sort of punched herself in the face. Then she picked up a chair and started waltzing with it, at which point the burly black security guard stepped in. There was a brief tug of war for the possession of the chair, but fortunately the black security guard won over the 5ft pissed Kazaksthanian (KRIS IS FROM KAZAKSTAHN! I pointed this out to her in relation to the tshirt and she kind of stroked the picture of the mountains on it) and order was restored.
That was pretty funny.
In conclusion.
Horribly Unimpressive Photographic Summing-Up of the Soirée
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
A list of 8 Excellent things that I have seen in recent days (in no order)
1: The new banner to this blog. I know that I technically made it before seeing it, but frankly every time I clap eyes on it my breath is taken away by how simply Excellent it is. It's well cool innit. In fact, it is more than cool. If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to come up with one word to describe it, would I say it was cool? NO I WOULD NOT. In fact, I would totally describe it as 'Hardcore'.
Man, just look at it. It is so hardcore I can barely breathe. Its more hardcore than Steve, my hardcore friend who goes to clubs and dances really hard and then takes drugs and then is so happy on the train ride home that she just can't stop herself from CRYING and then she is so hardcore that she gets thrown out of her house. It's more hardcore than a bunch of guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon starting their own alt-indie-wuss-rock band and then playing to a packed concert hall filled with more guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon. It's more hardcore that that slashy-faced guy in Ichi the Killer. It's even more hardcore than how hardcore the centre of the earth would be if the centre of the earth was made out of diamond, or reinforced concrete, or possibly Vinnie Jones. That's how hardcore it is.
2: The other day, I was driving down the road. I was stuck behind a bus and was a bit annoyed as buses move at about -1mph and stop every time a leaf blows across the road. However, fortunately the bus stopped at a bus stop and I thought to myself "AHA, time to make a cheeky little overtake". So I quickly pulled out. But then all of a sudden, a group of like 6 little chavvy kids leapt out from behind the bus stop. They screamed and jabbered in their native tongue, and then, with lethal force, violently hurled something at the back of the bus. It was a spherical object. Brown. It splintered and shattered upon impact, covering the bus and the road with yellow and white material. As I overtook, I managed to catch a brief glimpse of what they had thrown.
It was a scotch egg.
I really wish I had some sort of secret camera into the mindsets of certain people. I would just like to be a fly on the wall at the executive meeting when all of those chavvy kids sat around a table in leather chairs and made the decision to go out, buy that scotch egg, and then throw it at a bus. Why a scotch egg? Why a bus? What were they hoping would happen? What is the best possible outcome from throwing a scotch egg at a bus? And why a scotch egg? Why not an oatcake? Or a black pudding? Or some tapioca? Or an entire box of Sunny-D? So many questions, so little time. Humans are interesting.
But it was Excellent.
3: This picture:
NB: This was not the cat that I ran over. Well, I hope not.
4: There was a bee at the Boat Club today. It was just chillaxing on the floor and its legs were covered, COVERED I SAY, in pollen. It looked like it had little MC-Hammer Stylee Bee trousers on. It was really Excellent. Naturally we all laid down on the floor and peered at it. Everything was going nicely when suddenly the bee moved and, being the manly men we are, we all screamed hysterically and like, THREW ourselves backwards as though pulled by little invisible bungees. Our cox, who is a hardcore motherfucker called Andrew "Felix" Curruzzlywuzzly, was not impressed. "Boys, you are meant to be the 2nd VIII, you have to be harder than that. You can't let a bee push you around or else you'll just be letting ABINGDON push you around." Our cox likes to relate everything to Abingdon. But this was enough to pump us up so we leant back and really gave that bee a verbal battering the likes of which it had probably never experienced before.
"Stupid bee!"
"Twat!"
"Your yellow legs look dumb!"
"Knob!"
"Your dad's a coward!"
The really Excellent thing was that, due to the amount of pollen on its legs, the bee was unable to fly away to escape our verbal rinsing of it or attempt to verbally cuss us back. Of course, there is no real comeback to "Your dad's a coward" (except for, possibly, "Your mum's boring!"... however luckily it was a bee and thus incapable of articulating speech). However, we were distracted for a second by Northern Mark from the North, our coach, and when we looked back the bee was gone.
All of the above actually happened, by the way. And it was Excellent.
5: I went up to London with Rose on Saturday to buy an esoteric CD. We wandered through Covent Garden, which was filled with those mime guys whose job it is to stand really still dressed in silly costumes. There was a woman in a dress with a big camera who was paying them money to take photographs of them. Now forgive me if I am wrong, but if the entire gimmic is that they stand still, not moving, for long periods of time, taking a still photograph (in which everybody is standing still) will surely not capture the whole effect of the stillness. Maybe if she had taken a video it would have gone some way to capture the essence of the moment. I quite wanted to go and reason with her, but I figured that I really could not be bothered. So instead I chuckled to myself at the Excellent nature of this circumstance.
6: Gimmicky tourist postcards in the shape of Princess Diana's face, the hilarious and Excellent possibilities for comic tomfoolery inherent in such objects, and thus the following photograph:
How exciting, this is the first photograph of me to ever appear on this blog. When we were taking it, people looked disapprovingly at us. I think that it is ironic that you get frowned at for using Diana's image to spread joy and laughter, but not for printing it out on cheapo cardboard and then letting people write on the back for 50p a pop. Very ironic.
7: My excellent new T-Shirt, which I am modelling in the above photograph. It is blue. It has mountains on it. It says "KAZAKHSTAN". I look like quite a catch in it. Yesterday, I caught myself modelling it in the mirror and thinking to myself, "I have turned into quite a man in recent weeks." I like T-shirts. They give me hope. You wouldn't get that from a cardigan.
8: This little fanzine that we found in a little indie record shop. It was named "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK", and was like a little pamphlet. In it, some clever wag had cunningly cut up and rearranged headlines from newspapers next to the faces of prominent politicians. Thus, for example, a headline ORIGINALLY about the levels of obesity in Britain was thought-provokingly placed next to a picture of fat-pie Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. "Ah," I thought to myself when I saw it "John Prescott is indeed fat. They make a good point." As I read on, I was amazed to find more and more of my previous misconceptions and beliefs about our political system simply TORN TO SHREDS. There was a picture of George Bush next to a headline saying "He flies in, flaps about and leaves a mess behind". The Labour party was juxtaposed with a headline describing how some chavs had broken into a house and smashed all of the things and then probably thrown a scotch egg at the owner. It was horrific.
Then on the final page it turned out that "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK" was actually NOT an accredited political journal, but in fact a flier advertising a combined art/rock show. On the back was written "Art Exhibition + Live: Tiger Force and Optimist Club and Abi Makes Music! Plus - ART!" I love the Plus- ART! Imagine if that was the Tate's new marketing drive. 'An overpriced coffee shop, loads of esoteric books on style and a big metal slide! Plus - Art!
Thinking about it, I really want to go. I literally cannot imagine anything better. OH NO IT'S TONIGHT I MISSED IT. Grumble. It kind of makes me a bit sad that the only place that flier exists is in the hearts and minds of the people who made it. And me. There is no history of it anywhere, no recording of its existance. Once the combined art/rock show is over and the flier reduced to landfill, then, to the collective consciousness, it never existed.
How sad.
But equally, the fact that it exists at all is Excellent.
Take that, Kilroy!
Man, just look at it. It is so hardcore I can barely breathe. Its more hardcore than Steve, my hardcore friend who goes to clubs and dances really hard and then takes drugs and then is so happy on the train ride home that she just can't stop herself from CRYING and then she is so hardcore that she gets thrown out of her house. It's more hardcore than a bunch of guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon starting their own alt-indie-wuss-rock band and then playing to a packed concert hall filled with more guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon. It's more hardcore that that slashy-faced guy in Ichi the Killer. It's even more hardcore than how hardcore the centre of the earth would be if the centre of the earth was made out of diamond, or reinforced concrete, or possibly Vinnie Jones. That's how hardcore it is.
2: The other day, I was driving down the road. I was stuck behind a bus and was a bit annoyed as buses move at about -1mph and stop every time a leaf blows across the road. However, fortunately the bus stopped at a bus stop and I thought to myself "AHA, time to make a cheeky little overtake". So I quickly pulled out. But then all of a sudden, a group of like 6 little chavvy kids leapt out from behind the bus stop. They screamed and jabbered in their native tongue, and then, with lethal force, violently hurled something at the back of the bus. It was a spherical object. Brown. It splintered and shattered upon impact, covering the bus and the road with yellow and white material. As I overtook, I managed to catch a brief glimpse of what they had thrown.
It was a scotch egg.
I really wish I had some sort of secret camera into the mindsets of certain people. I would just like to be a fly on the wall at the executive meeting when all of those chavvy kids sat around a table in leather chairs and made the decision to go out, buy that scotch egg, and then throw it at a bus. Why a scotch egg? Why a bus? What were they hoping would happen? What is the best possible outcome from throwing a scotch egg at a bus? And why a scotch egg? Why not an oatcake? Or a black pudding? Or some tapioca? Or an entire box of Sunny-D? So many questions, so little time. Humans are interesting.
But it was Excellent.
3: This picture:
NB: This was not the cat that I ran over. Well, I hope not.
4: There was a bee at the Boat Club today. It was just chillaxing on the floor and its legs were covered, COVERED I SAY, in pollen. It looked like it had little MC-Hammer Stylee Bee trousers on. It was really Excellent. Naturally we all laid down on the floor and peered at it. Everything was going nicely when suddenly the bee moved and, being the manly men we are, we all screamed hysterically and like, THREW ourselves backwards as though pulled by little invisible bungees. Our cox, who is a hardcore motherfucker called Andrew "Felix" Curruzzlywuzzly, was not impressed. "Boys, you are meant to be the 2nd VIII, you have to be harder than that. You can't let a bee push you around or else you'll just be letting ABINGDON push you around." Our cox likes to relate everything to Abingdon. But this was enough to pump us up so we leant back and really gave that bee a verbal battering the likes of which it had probably never experienced before.
"Stupid bee!"
"Twat!"
"Your yellow legs look dumb!"
"Knob!"
"Your dad's a coward!"
The really Excellent thing was that, due to the amount of pollen on its legs, the bee was unable to fly away to escape our verbal rinsing of it or attempt to verbally cuss us back. Of course, there is no real comeback to "Your dad's a coward" (except for, possibly, "Your mum's boring!"... however luckily it was a bee and thus incapable of articulating speech). However, we were distracted for a second by Northern Mark from the North, our coach, and when we looked back the bee was gone.
All of the above actually happened, by the way. And it was Excellent.
5: I went up to London with Rose on Saturday to buy an esoteric CD. We wandered through Covent Garden, which was filled with those mime guys whose job it is to stand really still dressed in silly costumes. There was a woman in a dress with a big camera who was paying them money to take photographs of them. Now forgive me if I am wrong, but if the entire gimmic is that they stand still, not moving, for long periods of time, taking a still photograph (in which everybody is standing still) will surely not capture the whole effect of the stillness. Maybe if she had taken a video it would have gone some way to capture the essence of the moment. I quite wanted to go and reason with her, but I figured that I really could not be bothered. So instead I chuckled to myself at the Excellent nature of this circumstance.
6: Gimmicky tourist postcards in the shape of Princess Diana's face, the hilarious and Excellent possibilities for comic tomfoolery inherent in such objects, and thus the following photograph:
How exciting, this is the first photograph of me to ever appear on this blog. When we were taking it, people looked disapprovingly at us. I think that it is ironic that you get frowned at for using Diana's image to spread joy and laughter, but not for printing it out on cheapo cardboard and then letting people write on the back for 50p a pop. Very ironic.
7: My excellent new T-Shirt, which I am modelling in the above photograph. It is blue. It has mountains on it. It says "KAZAKHSTAN". I look like quite a catch in it. Yesterday, I caught myself modelling it in the mirror and thinking to myself, "I have turned into quite a man in recent weeks." I like T-shirts. They give me hope. You wouldn't get that from a cardigan.
8: This little fanzine that we found in a little indie record shop. It was named "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK", and was like a little pamphlet. In it, some clever wag had cunningly cut up and rearranged headlines from newspapers next to the faces of prominent politicians. Thus, for example, a headline ORIGINALLY about the levels of obesity in Britain was thought-provokingly placed next to a picture of fat-pie Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. "Ah," I thought to myself when I saw it "John Prescott is indeed fat. They make a good point." As I read on, I was amazed to find more and more of my previous misconceptions and beliefs about our political system simply TORN TO SHREDS. There was a picture of George Bush next to a headline saying "He flies in, flaps about and leaves a mess behind". The Labour party was juxtaposed with a headline describing how some chavs had broken into a house and smashed all of the things and then probably thrown a scotch egg at the owner. It was horrific.
Then on the final page it turned out that "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK" was actually NOT an accredited political journal, but in fact a flier advertising a combined art/rock show. On the back was written "Art Exhibition + Live: Tiger Force and Optimist Club and Abi Makes Music! Plus - ART!" I love the Plus- ART! Imagine if that was the Tate's new marketing drive. 'An overpriced coffee shop, loads of esoteric books on style and a big metal slide! Plus - Art!
Thinking about it, I really want to go. I literally cannot imagine anything better. OH NO IT'S TONIGHT I MISSED IT. Grumble. It kind of makes me a bit sad that the only place that flier exists is in the hearts and minds of the people who made it. And me. There is no history of it anywhere, no recording of its existance. Once the combined art/rock show is over and the flier reduced to landfill, then, to the collective consciousness, it never existed.
How sad.
But equally, the fact that it exists at all is Excellent.
Take that, Kilroy!
Friday, May 4, 2007
A Horror Story
The handsome rower looked down with disgust at the crumpled body that lay at his feet. It had been there on the landing stage when he arrived back from his rowing session, slumped flat over a blanket that a helpful biology teacher had provided. There was no blood, but the shape of the neck (too many corners) gave the impression that it didn’t have much time left before it shuffled off this mortal coil.
“So,” said the handsome rower musingly, “We meet again, eh?”
The duck – or was it a goose? - rolled over slightly and froze him with cold, black eyes that brimmed with hate and promised vengeance. The handsome rower stared back and for a second, the balance of nature shifted. Before his eyes, everything was transformed and he saw an entire eonic cycle of death and biology spin madly around inside this malevolent creature’s eyes. Evolution had given the goose feathers, webbed feet, and made it hungry for bread scattered by small children, but at its biological core it was still a dinosaur, plain and simple. These were the same eyes that had sat comfortably within a velociraptor, and the handsome rower, just for a second, was transformed into a spineless protoceratops, happily munching on grass one second, looking up and seeing those unworldly glowing lizard eyes bearing down on it the next. All of his previous confidence sluiced away through his feet and he shivered noticeably. He took a step back.
The goose shifted slightly, possibly in an attempt to reach round and bite off the rower’s uncovered toes, but it seemed too weak. It flopped back. The eyes glazed over. The handsome rower tentatively leant over and peered. Silence. Stillness. A small insect walked across the beak. The rower leant closer. Suddenly the goose jerked up and he leapt back with a cry of horror. Something grabbed him from behind.
“Hey!”
The handsome rower screamed. His legs suddenly pulsated weirdly. He fell on the ground. The duck fixed him stoically. “Now”, it said silently, “We are on the same level. And so help me God, I will gorge on your intestines before the day is out. I will dance on your face and I will spit on your grave.” The handsome rower scrambled to his feet, next to the second handsome rower who had joined to peer at the corpse. The second handsome rower was not as handsome as the first, but he was still not bad, as far as the general population is concerned.
“That can’t be the same one, surely?”
“What?”
“You know, the goose we hit on Sunday? I mean, it looks the same. But that was a week ago! Surely it would’ve died by now. I mean, look, its neck is screwed.”
The handsome rower was in no mood to argue. His mind was taken back to the previous week and a series of images flashed across his cranium. The hardcore rowing piece they were doing. The flash of the oar. The crunch of bone and feather as it collided with the goose. The weird way it flopped over and then flopped back. The look of confusion and hate splayed on its face. It was a look that vowed revenge.
“Yeah… I guess,” muttered the rower, then took a step back. The broken thing on the floor unnerved him. He knew that it was the same goose. It had waited for a week, patiently biding its time until the river carried it to the boat club. So that it could have its revenge.
“They phoned the swan sanctuary to come and pick it up. But it’s not a swan! They’re gonna feel dumb. Anyway, Mark wants to talk to us about the session. Let’s go.”
“What? OK.”
Not taking his eyes off the goose, the handsome rower backed away to where Mark – the coach – was waiting with the rest of the crew to discuss the session.
“Right, boys, now we’re all here, I think that was a pretty good session really, but…”
The goose rolled over once.
“… looking very tired, though, you really need to concentrate on getting your catches in and…”
The goose’s neck flopped over. And then back over again. It looked like some horrible primeval tentacle, wafting at the bottom of the sea to catch angel fish and those weird toothy fish bastards.
“… and Robbie, you need to sort out your back, you are basically just upright all the time, really think…”
The goose violently thwacked its head against the ground with a crack. The rower flinched. It did it again. Then fell still. The post-outing talk finished with no other event and the assembled rowers and coaches scattered. The handsome rower was alone on the landing stage. Alone with the goose. It lay prostrate, staring at him from afar with splayed wings and a come-hither expression on its face. The rower came hither, tentatively, one faltering step at a time. He could not fight the urge to approach one more time.
He reached the goose. It was silent. It was still. A thin trickle of brown stuff came out of its beak. There was some seaweed on its foot.
The rower sighed with relief and turned away. It was dead. There was nothing left to fear. He got two steps when there was a sliding, crunching sound from behind him. He kept walking. There was movement. He took another few steps. There was a deathly squelching sigh, like a sponge having a apoplectic fit. The rower broke into a jog, reached the door of the boathouse, then looked round.
The goose was moving. It was on both feet. It was chasing him. Well, ‘moving’ seemed too vanilla a word to describe the motion going on in the frame of this creature. It was hardly movement as we know it. It was almost as though the limbs and neck and muscles and sinew of this creature had ceased to exist in the traditional sense, and rather every appendage of the animal were now being used as purely muscular leverage to heave it onward. Its wings, legs, neck and torso were being used to propel it forward across the landing stage at an ungodly speed, sideways, backwards, upside down and back to front. Although ungainly and inelegant, this movement was terrifyingly fast, and in a matter of seconds it had covered half of the distance and was getting faster; inside the terrified alarm bells and buzzers going off inside the handsome rower’s stricken mind, he was vaguely reminded of those old vintage movies in which all of the action seems about half a second too fast. They were funny. But this wasn’t.
It looked like a large feathery crab. And the rower was terrified of crabs. He was terrified of crying reanimated geese even more, so he turned tail and fled into the boathouse as far as he could. The duck followed, crashing into a wall as it went and leaving a bloody imprint of itself (rather like that guy with the hat in Cabin Fever).
Where to go? What to do? The rower had no time to think, as he sprinted wildly though the boat bay. Already the flopping screaming behind him was catching up. The back of his ankles started to feel very vulnerable and due to the open-plan nature of the boathouse there were no doors to simply lock or cupboards to hide in or stairs to climb and oh God it was getting closer and there was a dead end coming up and it was going to catch him and then he would be that protoceratops again and they’d find him the next day in a pool of blood with his tendons ripped out and his eyes pecked out and his body savaged to death. It was pretty bloody scary and he waved his hands about in the air madly as he sprinted through the deserted boathouse.
Suddenly, a proverbial lightbulb went on and he took a left, a right, and then launched himself into a toilet cubicle with a cry of fear. Just as the goose was about to leap at him, he slammed the door shut and bowled it over with a feathery crunch. It gave a strangled squawk of muffled pain and fell silent. The rower clambered onto the top of the toilet and pulled his legs up as far away from the floor.
For a few second there was nothing but a snuffling scraping from outside the cubicle, the hiss of the cistern and the terrified gasping of the handsome rower. Then there was nothing. For a long five minutes nothing happened. The rower’s panicky breathing faded to nothing and his heartbeat slowed. Very slowly, he climbed off the toilet bowl and nervously bent down to peer under the door.
THE GOOSE SUDDENLY FUCKING WENT FOR HIM FROM NOWHERE. It actually bit his unprotected toe, sheared through his skin and drew loads of blood. The rower squeaked, leapt onto the bowl and stared, terrified, as this fucking goose bastard attempted to squeeze its entire body under the toilet door. Its neck flapped madly back and forth, spraying brown stuff everywhere and emitting a mad croak that sounded like a whistful giggle. Blood from the rower’s toe landed on its head and made it all gross and bloodlusty and stuff. It was well scary.
The rower was like fuck this and sprang theatrically from the toilet bowl onto the top of the cubicle partition. He awkwardly hung from it for a second and then heavily fell over the other side with a crunch that winded him. The goose immediately scrabbled back from under the cubicle door and leapt at him with a war-cry, slashing open his leg. He squealed and totally sucker-punched it in the head, kicked it back, attempted to leap to his feet, got halfway up before it bit down on the tendon on the back of his ankle with a razor-sharp death rattle, screamed, fell over again, tried to protect his face from its bite, felt it shear off half of his ear, threw it bodily against the wall again, then scrabbled onto all fours and fled the toilet. The goose followed. Covered in blood and mangy water and moving like a boneless brakedancer, it looked like something rejected from Silent Hill for being ‘too patently fucking terrifying’. The rower peered, terrified, over his shoulder and realised that it suddenly had a beak full of sharp teeth and a long forked tongue. The skin revealed by its moulting feathers was scaly and slimy. It suddenly stood up on its two legs, flapped its wings, and flipped its broken neck up in the air like a yo-yo. It roared.
The rower came to some stairs and desperately crawled up them. The goose followed sedately. It knew that there was no escape now. Its prey was injured, bleeding and hobbled. It was just a matter of time.
The rower reached the top of the stairs, turned round the landing, and realised, with horror, that it was a dead end. He scrabbled at the wall for somewhere to hide, spreading gore over the beigeness, but there was no escape. There was just a blank wall, with a ceremonial rowing oar attached to it. He pressed himself against the wall as flat as he could, but there was no escape. There was nowhere else to run.
The goose turned the corner and saw its quarry. Its head – dragging on the floor behind it – twinkled blankly. It squawked. The rower stared at it, and in that instant he realised – this was it. There was no fleeing it now, no anaesthetic from the facts of the truth. His faced was pressed into the grinding cogs of the evolutionary fight for life. Questions sped through his beleaguered mind. When it came down to it, would humanity ever be able to survive? Were we ever truly deserving, ever truly equipped to come out top of the evolutionary power struggles that defined how this world was to be? Had Mother Nature had enough of us, had she simply decided to squeeze humanity out of existence once and for all? Why the fuck had the architects who designed this building constructed a staircase that led to a dead end?
The goose’s head flipped round and they gazed at each other again. There was a sense of mutual understanding. All of the questions and the fear faded. He knew what he had to do. There was no point fighting it.
The goose took a step forward. The rower came to a decision. He climbed to his feet. It was time to prove that humanity still deserved to exist on the planet. It was time to assert his right to exist. He certainly wasn’t going to led this feathery little twat decide that he wasn’t going to live any more.
He grasped the rowing oar. It was too long to get a proper swing – there was barely enough room in this corridor to swing a cat. He’d have one chance before the goose was upon him. Suddenly, a clever line occurred to him.
“Hey,” he said solemnly. The goose stared blankly at him. “Hey, goose. Duck.”
It didn’t. He brought the oar slamming down with a piercing whistle that reminded him of a rowing outing that now seemed a million years ago. The animal almost BLURRED around the blade, twisting like pasta. It popped with a dull crunch, spraying feathers and goo all over the shop. It thrashed madly about, squealing like a pig in frustration and pain. The rower let go of the blade and it remained where it was, deep inside the unholy thing that now spasmed and twitched on the floor. Its mouth opened a few times and its wings flapped weakly. It stared balefully at him.
“Oh, piss off, cunt”, sighed the rower, then stepped over the animal and staggered downstairs. As he went, the goose attempted to bite him. He tripped and stumbled to the bottom of the stairs, where he lay in a little pool of blood, exhausted and beaten by his encounter with the goose. He passed out for a few minutes, until a voice awoke him.
“Hey, what happened to YOU?”
It was the second handsome rower. The handsome rower looked up wearily.
“Goose,” he said “Attacked me. I got it with an oar. Up the stairs. Make sure its dead.”
“But I just came from up there… there’s nothing but a broken oar, a load of feathers and some blood. The goose is gone!”
The rower looked up and his face was literally, like :-o !!!!!!!
THE END???
Man that was fucking intense. I should totally write for Hollywood. If any movie producers feel like taking “The Goose” or “The Feathered Demon” or “Quack Quack You’re Dead” (whatever I end up naming it), and producing it into some kind of multi-billion dollar horror franchise (I’m thinking that I get played by either Kevin Costner or that guy from the Natwest adverts), please get in touch. And the incredible thing about the story is that every word of it was true. Well, up to the words “…nothing left to fear”. After that I kind of started taking some artistic liberties. Man that goose was fucking terrifying. I’m shivering just thinking about it. Look, I made a picture of it:
Well, I say 'Made', I mean 'Cut out a picture of a goose and stuck it onto a floor image on Photoshop'. I would have added some blood or something, but look, it's terrifying enough as it is. SERIOUSLY. Geese have TEETH. And fucking tongues! That's some bad shit, right there.
“So,” said the handsome rower musingly, “We meet again, eh?”
The duck – or was it a goose? - rolled over slightly and froze him with cold, black eyes that brimmed with hate and promised vengeance. The handsome rower stared back and for a second, the balance of nature shifted. Before his eyes, everything was transformed and he saw an entire eonic cycle of death and biology spin madly around inside this malevolent creature’s eyes. Evolution had given the goose feathers, webbed feet, and made it hungry for bread scattered by small children, but at its biological core it was still a dinosaur, plain and simple. These were the same eyes that had sat comfortably within a velociraptor, and the handsome rower, just for a second, was transformed into a spineless protoceratops, happily munching on grass one second, looking up and seeing those unworldly glowing lizard eyes bearing down on it the next. All of his previous confidence sluiced away through his feet and he shivered noticeably. He took a step back.
The goose shifted slightly, possibly in an attempt to reach round and bite off the rower’s uncovered toes, but it seemed too weak. It flopped back. The eyes glazed over. The handsome rower tentatively leant over and peered. Silence. Stillness. A small insect walked across the beak. The rower leant closer. Suddenly the goose jerked up and he leapt back with a cry of horror. Something grabbed him from behind.
“Hey!”
The handsome rower screamed. His legs suddenly pulsated weirdly. He fell on the ground. The duck fixed him stoically. “Now”, it said silently, “We are on the same level. And so help me God, I will gorge on your intestines before the day is out. I will dance on your face and I will spit on your grave.” The handsome rower scrambled to his feet, next to the second handsome rower who had joined to peer at the corpse. The second handsome rower was not as handsome as the first, but he was still not bad, as far as the general population is concerned.
“That can’t be the same one, surely?”
“What?”
“You know, the goose we hit on Sunday? I mean, it looks the same. But that was a week ago! Surely it would’ve died by now. I mean, look, its neck is screwed.”
The handsome rower was in no mood to argue. His mind was taken back to the previous week and a series of images flashed across his cranium. The hardcore rowing piece they were doing. The flash of the oar. The crunch of bone and feather as it collided with the goose. The weird way it flopped over and then flopped back. The look of confusion and hate splayed on its face. It was a look that vowed revenge.
“Yeah… I guess,” muttered the rower, then took a step back. The broken thing on the floor unnerved him. He knew that it was the same goose. It had waited for a week, patiently biding its time until the river carried it to the boat club. So that it could have its revenge.
“They phoned the swan sanctuary to come and pick it up. But it’s not a swan! They’re gonna feel dumb. Anyway, Mark wants to talk to us about the session. Let’s go.”
“What? OK.”
Not taking his eyes off the goose, the handsome rower backed away to where Mark – the coach – was waiting with the rest of the crew to discuss the session.
“Right, boys, now we’re all here, I think that was a pretty good session really, but…”
The goose rolled over once.
“… looking very tired, though, you really need to concentrate on getting your catches in and…”
The goose’s neck flopped over. And then back over again. It looked like some horrible primeval tentacle, wafting at the bottom of the sea to catch angel fish and those weird toothy fish bastards.
“… and Robbie, you need to sort out your back, you are basically just upright all the time, really think…”
The goose violently thwacked its head against the ground with a crack. The rower flinched. It did it again. Then fell still. The post-outing talk finished with no other event and the assembled rowers and coaches scattered. The handsome rower was alone on the landing stage. Alone with the goose. It lay prostrate, staring at him from afar with splayed wings and a come-hither expression on its face. The rower came hither, tentatively, one faltering step at a time. He could not fight the urge to approach one more time.
He reached the goose. It was silent. It was still. A thin trickle of brown stuff came out of its beak. There was some seaweed on its foot.
The rower sighed with relief and turned away. It was dead. There was nothing left to fear. He got two steps when there was a sliding, crunching sound from behind him. He kept walking. There was movement. He took another few steps. There was a deathly squelching sigh, like a sponge having a apoplectic fit. The rower broke into a jog, reached the door of the boathouse, then looked round.
The goose was moving. It was on both feet. It was chasing him. Well, ‘moving’ seemed too vanilla a word to describe the motion going on in the frame of this creature. It was hardly movement as we know it. It was almost as though the limbs and neck and muscles and sinew of this creature had ceased to exist in the traditional sense, and rather every appendage of the animal were now being used as purely muscular leverage to heave it onward. Its wings, legs, neck and torso were being used to propel it forward across the landing stage at an ungodly speed, sideways, backwards, upside down and back to front. Although ungainly and inelegant, this movement was terrifyingly fast, and in a matter of seconds it had covered half of the distance and was getting faster; inside the terrified alarm bells and buzzers going off inside the handsome rower’s stricken mind, he was vaguely reminded of those old vintage movies in which all of the action seems about half a second too fast. They were funny. But this wasn’t.
It looked like a large feathery crab. And the rower was terrified of crabs. He was terrified of crying reanimated geese even more, so he turned tail and fled into the boathouse as far as he could. The duck followed, crashing into a wall as it went and leaving a bloody imprint of itself (rather like that guy with the hat in Cabin Fever).
Where to go? What to do? The rower had no time to think, as he sprinted wildly though the boat bay. Already the flopping screaming behind him was catching up. The back of his ankles started to feel very vulnerable and due to the open-plan nature of the boathouse there were no doors to simply lock or cupboards to hide in or stairs to climb and oh God it was getting closer and there was a dead end coming up and it was going to catch him and then he would be that protoceratops again and they’d find him the next day in a pool of blood with his tendons ripped out and his eyes pecked out and his body savaged to death. It was pretty bloody scary and he waved his hands about in the air madly as he sprinted through the deserted boathouse.
Suddenly, a proverbial lightbulb went on and he took a left, a right, and then launched himself into a toilet cubicle with a cry of fear. Just as the goose was about to leap at him, he slammed the door shut and bowled it over with a feathery crunch. It gave a strangled squawk of muffled pain and fell silent. The rower clambered onto the top of the toilet and pulled his legs up as far away from the floor.
For a few second there was nothing but a snuffling scraping from outside the cubicle, the hiss of the cistern and the terrified gasping of the handsome rower. Then there was nothing. For a long five minutes nothing happened. The rower’s panicky breathing faded to nothing and his heartbeat slowed. Very slowly, he climbed off the toilet bowl and nervously bent down to peer under the door.
THE GOOSE SUDDENLY FUCKING WENT FOR HIM FROM NOWHERE. It actually bit his unprotected toe, sheared through his skin and drew loads of blood. The rower squeaked, leapt onto the bowl and stared, terrified, as this fucking goose bastard attempted to squeeze its entire body under the toilet door. Its neck flapped madly back and forth, spraying brown stuff everywhere and emitting a mad croak that sounded like a whistful giggle. Blood from the rower’s toe landed on its head and made it all gross and bloodlusty and stuff. It was well scary.
The rower was like fuck this and sprang theatrically from the toilet bowl onto the top of the cubicle partition. He awkwardly hung from it for a second and then heavily fell over the other side with a crunch that winded him. The goose immediately scrabbled back from under the cubicle door and leapt at him with a war-cry, slashing open his leg. He squealed and totally sucker-punched it in the head, kicked it back, attempted to leap to his feet, got halfway up before it bit down on the tendon on the back of his ankle with a razor-sharp death rattle, screamed, fell over again, tried to protect his face from its bite, felt it shear off half of his ear, threw it bodily against the wall again, then scrabbled onto all fours and fled the toilet. The goose followed. Covered in blood and mangy water and moving like a boneless brakedancer, it looked like something rejected from Silent Hill for being ‘too patently fucking terrifying’. The rower peered, terrified, over his shoulder and realised that it suddenly had a beak full of sharp teeth and a long forked tongue. The skin revealed by its moulting feathers was scaly and slimy. It suddenly stood up on its two legs, flapped its wings, and flipped its broken neck up in the air like a yo-yo. It roared.
The rower came to some stairs and desperately crawled up them. The goose followed sedately. It knew that there was no escape now. Its prey was injured, bleeding and hobbled. It was just a matter of time.
The rower reached the top of the stairs, turned round the landing, and realised, with horror, that it was a dead end. He scrabbled at the wall for somewhere to hide, spreading gore over the beigeness, but there was no escape. There was just a blank wall, with a ceremonial rowing oar attached to it. He pressed himself against the wall as flat as he could, but there was no escape. There was nowhere else to run.
The goose turned the corner and saw its quarry. Its head – dragging on the floor behind it – twinkled blankly. It squawked. The rower stared at it, and in that instant he realised – this was it. There was no fleeing it now, no anaesthetic from the facts of the truth. His faced was pressed into the grinding cogs of the evolutionary fight for life. Questions sped through his beleaguered mind. When it came down to it, would humanity ever be able to survive? Were we ever truly deserving, ever truly equipped to come out top of the evolutionary power struggles that defined how this world was to be? Had Mother Nature had enough of us, had she simply decided to squeeze humanity out of existence once and for all? Why the fuck had the architects who designed this building constructed a staircase that led to a dead end?
The goose’s head flipped round and they gazed at each other again. There was a sense of mutual understanding. All of the questions and the fear faded. He knew what he had to do. There was no point fighting it.
The goose took a step forward. The rower came to a decision. He climbed to his feet. It was time to prove that humanity still deserved to exist on the planet. It was time to assert his right to exist. He certainly wasn’t going to led this feathery little twat decide that he wasn’t going to live any more.
He grasped the rowing oar. It was too long to get a proper swing – there was barely enough room in this corridor to swing a cat. He’d have one chance before the goose was upon him. Suddenly, a clever line occurred to him.
“Hey,” he said solemnly. The goose stared blankly at him. “Hey, goose. Duck.”
It didn’t. He brought the oar slamming down with a piercing whistle that reminded him of a rowing outing that now seemed a million years ago. The animal almost BLURRED around the blade, twisting like pasta. It popped with a dull crunch, spraying feathers and goo all over the shop. It thrashed madly about, squealing like a pig in frustration and pain. The rower let go of the blade and it remained where it was, deep inside the unholy thing that now spasmed and twitched on the floor. Its mouth opened a few times and its wings flapped weakly. It stared balefully at him.
“Oh, piss off, cunt”, sighed the rower, then stepped over the animal and staggered downstairs. As he went, the goose attempted to bite him. He tripped and stumbled to the bottom of the stairs, where he lay in a little pool of blood, exhausted and beaten by his encounter with the goose. He passed out for a few minutes, until a voice awoke him.
“Hey, what happened to YOU?”
It was the second handsome rower. The handsome rower looked up wearily.
“Goose,” he said “Attacked me. I got it with an oar. Up the stairs. Make sure its dead.”
“But I just came from up there… there’s nothing but a broken oar, a load of feathers and some blood. The goose is gone!”
The rower looked up and his face was literally, like :-o !!!!!!!
THE END???
Man that was fucking intense. I should totally write for Hollywood. If any movie producers feel like taking “The Goose” or “The Feathered Demon” or “Quack Quack You’re Dead” (whatever I end up naming it), and producing it into some kind of multi-billion dollar horror franchise (I’m thinking that I get played by either Kevin Costner or that guy from the Natwest adverts), please get in touch. And the incredible thing about the story is that every word of it was true. Well, up to the words “…nothing left to fear”. After that I kind of started taking some artistic liberties. Man that goose was fucking terrifying. I’m shivering just thinking about it. Look, I made a picture of it:
Well, I say 'Made', I mean 'Cut out a picture of a goose and stuck it onto a floor image on Photoshop'. I would have added some blood or something, but look, it's terrifying enough as it is. SERIOUSLY. Geese have TEETH. And fucking tongues! That's some bad shit, right there.
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