Onward!!

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They’d forecast thundery rain for the Saturday afternoon. Undaunted, I met up with some friends at a new pub for me, the King William IV in Leyton. The brewery tap of Brodie’s Brewery, it was a pretty exciting prospect as they have all their house ales on at £1.99.

We sat out back of the pub, amid empty casks from various breweries, in the shadow of the brewery building itself, with the gleaming steel equipment visible through the windows. Hours passed quickly in the muggy humidity of the afternoon, with no rain in sight. Somehow a leisurely pint or two on a Saturday afternoon turned into us agreeing to one friend’s suggestion of “maybe we should go back to my place, get some more beers and pizza”.

Turns out I didn’t even finish the can of beer I cracked open on arrival there. Full of pizza, I fell asleep on the couch and awoke to the end credits of the Steven Seagal film we’d put on for laughs.

We’d all slept through the whole film. I remember it involving a meat locker, a “lowly cook” and Gary Busey. Oh well, some other time.

We sit down on the outside seats of a Starbucks with a friend. I’ve come to Holland Park to see her quickly after work. It’s miles away, both literally and figuratively, from where I live and hang out usually. The cars are BMWs, Maseratis and assorted large sports utility vehicles of absolutely no use in a city as crowded as London. The people around me are well-to-do and bright-faced, all trimmed up by yoga and expensive manicures and divorce settlement money. The buildings are clean, freshly-painted, their windowsills bursting with flowers and other decoration. The shops along Holland Park Avenue are high-end and distinguished, down to the butcher and the bookseller.

Mid-sentence, I become aware of the sound of dripping from the next table over, to my left. A woman had been drinking a bottle of water and I’d seen the screw-top cap drop and roll away earlier. I thought that it had spilled and I was hearing it drip through the table slats.

No, I was wrong. This middle-aged woman is pissing straight through her trousers, nonchalant as anything, still necking the water from the bottle. The dripping trickle increases into a pretty good flow and goes all over her shoes and flows down toward the street. I am utterly dumbfounded, knowing what must be happening for the phenomena to be occurring, but disbelieving that it is. Both I and my friend have trouble concentrating on putting words together to string sentences.

The woman gets up and wanders into the Starbucks, her tight white jeans yellowed and wet at the ass. She comes back out soon after and leans over to my friend and asks, “do you smoke?”

“No, I don’t,” my friend replies.

“Well, FUCK OFF!” she hisses, all eye makeup and tight lips and no doubt completely sodden legs and feet. We look at each other, again unable to actually say anything. The woman turns to a passerby and yells obscenities at him too.

I count my lucky stars that I’d asked for my drink to go.

In the dreary boarding lounge past passport control, a group of British girls is waiting on the seats to my left. They’re talking about an afterparty, quite clearly having attended it the previous night. Something clues me into knowing that they’re roller derby girls, which I find pretty cool as far as sports go. I sit quietly, getting through a chapter of my book.

We end up sitting together on the same row, me and two girls from Royal Windsor Rollergirls. In between nodding off and one of them nerving out about the flight, I get invited to see them in action as well receive a primer on the after-effects of a weekend’s derby: bruises, welts, whiplash. I ask whether people break bones ever.
“Oh yeah, one girl broke her ankle this weekend in Helsinki, though she had a previous injury in it and it wasn’t helped by the fat girl who fell on top of her.”
I wince sympathetically, the closest thing in my experience being cracking a rib under the knee of an enormous Polish guy in a concert mosh pit I got swept up in.

“And someone hurt their arm in Saturday’s practice. They broke it in so many places they had to pin it,” they continue. Serious sport, that, with participant names to go with it: Trucking Hostile, Golden Malicious, Crucivix.

I’d seen the posters for the event in town, but only on the night, and when I was most definitely not in a state to attend one much less the all-important afterparty. My seatmates promise it is good every time, though not necessarily in the most conventional sense – what with “hot, sweaty girls, fishnets and hairspray, glitter” and of course rapidly developing bruises.

All too soon I was out past baggage reclaim, having promised to check them and local events out. Now, in the acrid-smelling heat of the Heathrow tube station stairwell, onto a train, slapping my rucksack down and sliding into a seat, reader in hand.

A mad Vappu weekend had crowned a break in Finland that felt cruelly too short. I could have stayed (not least because of the provided food) a good while longer: it felt cruel for both them and me to not be able to see my Helsinki friends more.

(This post marks 5 years and 1 day since my first entry in this guise. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone.)

There’s something very English about a pub quiz – from the ubiquitous drawing round meant to be completed during the quiz itself to the “appropriately” funny team names based on a shared theme – I’ve been on teams called Never Mind the Quizcocks as well as Throbbing Quizzle, for example.

But it really is something else when it’s a bunch of twentysomethings gathering to be quizzed by a friend whose primary modus operandi seems to be analyzing the theoretical conflicts of various animals. I always knew it was going to be something special, but he knew exactly how to tap into the collective consciousness of kids who were raised on far too many video games, monstrously bad literature and deservedly-iconic cartoons. The evening included rapid-fire recitals of Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners and the teams orating a poem, either about Bernard Manning fighting a seal or about “Dogs at the Circus”. You would not believe the beat poetry that can come out of the latter.

You’d think that was enough for a night but I ended up in bed a hair after 4am, having rocked pubs up and down the road until each of them closed. And just as the English came up with the pub and quiz to be held in it ^{[citation needed]} they invented the best ways to get over the night before. In this case it was a decadent bacon and egg roll from the local cafe. Set me right up.

I got a double dose of inimitable humor as the day called for a barbecue, for which I travelled deep into South London – promptly realizing I kind of missed living there. There is a different vibe to the neighborhoods to the North and South of central London. In the lovely glow of a temperate spring evening we burned our way through a sackful of charcoal, destroying ribs, mackerel, asparagus, eggplant, and some rainbow trout to die for. Oh, and thoroughly pickled our livers with Jameson’s and bourbon.

It was a completely silly thing to do on a Sunday, especially after a fairly heavy weekend to precede it, but you only live once. And you better live well. Everyone should throw up from laughter at least once in their lives. It burns but is a sign of good times. Beat watching the Finnish general election results.

Dad-summary since he keeps voicing his disappointment at my use of language: I had a brilliant weekend with friends which involved drinking and shouting in and outside a pub, grilling meat and fish and having a bit too much whiskey, especially for a Sunday night. Hope you’re proud.