It was 1999, and I was starting university.  I had terrible dress sense; a velour luminous orange v-neck Cotton Traders shirt was the worst offender, usually accompanied with black shiny plastic-effect trousers.  Inexplicably I was single.  I had no mobile phone, and no computer.  I had a scrap of paper in my wallet with the mobile phone numbers of a couple of my more fortunate friends, which I’d have to take to a nearby phone booth to call them.  Alternatively I would go and knock on their door.  I met a pencil-necked geek called Gareth Evans.  I thought he was a nerd.  I used to pass him offensive and sometimes threatening doodles in lectures.

In November ‘99 I got a red Ericsson T10 mobile phone.  It had a flip-down cover which I though was cool, and I could type in my own ringtones.  At the time this was just out of this world fucking amazing.  I’m not sure how people ever coped at university before mobile phones.  I mean, how the fuck did you know where everyone was all the time?

Ericsson T10

In my second year my sister loaned me the money to buy a computer.  I had no internet, but I didn’t need it.  I could type up my essays in my room, save them to a floppy disk and go to the uni’s IT Suite to print them off.  I was given a warning by the university’s Head of IT for printing out naked pictures of Shannon Elizabeth.  Big Steve and I would sit in my room playing Championship Manager 2 and Settlers III: Gold Edition, or we’d sit in his room and watch the wrestling videos his mum used to tape off SKY and mail to him.  Inexplicably, I was single.

Christmas 2000 Gareth Evans organised a social; a sit-down meal in as close as Loughborough got to a nice restaurant.  The dress code was shirt and tie.  My mate Andy and I turned up in Elvis costumes to try and piss Evans off.  By now Evans and I had a love:hate thing going on.  I loved trying to wind him up.

"Alvin Stardust" and "Fat Elvis," December 2000

In my final year I finally got the internet, which opened up a world of endless pornography and the opportunity to download thousands upon thousands of songs from Kazaa for free.  Communication was now primarily through a little thing called MSN Messenger.  I met whatshername (not via the internet, I must add).

Evans wouldn’t share a house with me in the final year, and whenever we did group coursework he stoutly refused to let me into his group.  He was still a nerd, which is why I always wanted to be in his group.  He however, knew I was lazy and disruptive.  To wind him up, during a Management Accounting group coursework presentation we made references to him being a sex offender and a homosexual.  He took it well in fairness (no gay pun intended).  As part of the same group coursework we also left our friend, dressed only in vest, pants and afro, in a field to the mercy of a farmer and his dog. 

Click on the picture to see this man, standing in a field in vest and pants

One day on MSN Messenger, Evans and I started discussing music.  And we bonded.  I recommended Gold by Ryan Adams (for which I must give credit to Big Steve for originally recommending to me).  Evans loved it.  We both, to a certain extent, became obsessed.  Me probably more so.  I bought everything Ryan Adams I could find and downloaded everything I couldn’t.  For our first Valentine’s Day, whatshername bought me the sheet music for Gold, and I learnt to play the whole album, especially loving ‘Firecracker,’ ‘New York, New York’ and ‘Wildflowers.’

A few years later Evans and I were still in touch on e-mail, still chatting about music, usually in work time.  However did people talk aimless rubbish with people hundreds of miles away during work hours before the advent of e-mail?  He bunked a day off work (the first time ever, he told me, although he did sort of get his boss’s permission first) and flew from Jersey to Nottingham to come with me, Andy and Big Steve to see Ryan Adams at Rock City.  It was fucking ace.  Afterwards we drank ridiculously large G&Ts and trashed my flat.  Whatshername hit the roof when she came home to find the place stinking of brandy and cigars and her computer fucked due to the large amount of porn we’d downloaded onto it.

A couple of months later Evans sent me a short e-mail saying: “Buy the album ‘I Sincerely Apologise for All the Trouble I’ve Caused’ by David Ford.”  Bizarrely I remember the first time I ever played it; in the car on the way to ASDA with whatshername.  “Is this a man or a woman?” she asked during the opening track.  “It’s a man, I think,” I replied, unsure.  It was the second track — ‘State Of The Union’ — that grabbed me by the balls.  And another obsession began.

The first time I saw David Ford was at the Sugarmill in Stoke.  Evans was supposed to come but had to pull out due to a strenuous-sounding work jolly in Barcelona.  I had liked Ford up to this point, but was captivated by his live performance.  I don’t care if that sounds gay; he was brilliant.

I went to see him a couple more times, once at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham, and at Birmingham for his annual ‘Milk & Cookies’ charity gig, where he played a host of stuff including covers and requests.  He sat at the piano and played the full version of Bat Out Of Hell.  This elevated him to the status of God in my eyes.

When the following year’s Milk & Cookies gigs were announced, an auction started online for the opportunity to perform live on stage with Ford.  Long story short I ended up winning the auction to perform at the Eastbourne Hippodrome on my 28^th Birthday.  My song: ‘Firecracker’ by Ryan Adams.

December 13^th 2008 was the best day ever.  Whatshername and I went down with Andy and his wife Rachelle.  We went First Class on the train, had a Mexican and some beers.  Andy filmed a documentary in the style of X-Factor, which to this day I still can’t convert into a format Youtube likes.  Eastbourne was cold and as windy as any place I’ve ever been.  At five o’clock I went to meet Ford and rehearse the song.  I was shitting it.  The auction had been caveated with “Mr Ford reserves the right to change your song choice and your part in the performance if it’s likely to comprise the quality of the show” so I knew I had to be not terrible.  The guy who had won the auction the year before had played ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ on piano with Ford singing, and it sounded brilliant.  I was feeling the pressure of expectation.

In the Hippodrome I met Ford and watched him rehearse and soundcheck with his band.  When they called me up on stage Ford just handed me a guitar and said, “I’ll count you in and we’ll just see how it goes, OK?”  That was it; no pissing around.  We ran through the song about five times to iron out any creases.  The band were fantastic, and really put me at ease.

“OK,” Ford said, “the plan is that we’ll play the first half, have a break and then I’ll call you up at some point in the second half.  So you can enjoy the first half and the break but then shit yourself through the second half.”

Click on the picture for my M&C duet

Now, I know it isn’t perfect.  I started flat because I couldn’t hear my own voice over the instruments (I suspect they’d turned my microphone right down, perhaps rightly), but it was probably the best experience of my life, singing one of my favourite ever songs in front of about 700 people. 

And if you’re wondering about the hat: in the first half of the show Ford had worn a cowboy hat while playing Beck’s ‘Devil’s Haircut.’  I decided I wanted to wear it, so I picked it up on my way onto the stage.  It seemed appropriate for a Ryan Adams song.

After the show we wandered aimlessly around Eastbourne for a while, eventually ending up in Wetherspoons.  We ordered posh ladyboys: Leffe, Baileys and G&Ts.  Andy did his impression of Clyde from Any Which Way But Loose.  At one o’clock the pub called last orders and we got up to leave.  As we stepped outside Rachelle noticed someone knocking and waving through the window; it was Gary ‘G-Man’ Page — Ford’s drummer.  In quite the most surreal ending to the evening we stood outside chatting with Ford and his band for about half an hour about all kinds of nonsense. 

Evans — unable to make it due to a tricky commute from Dubai, and who’d still not seen Ford live at this point — had asked me to ask Ford where we should go for his upcoming stag do.  He suggested “something different… like a football tournament in Barcelona or coal mining in Wales.  And do it the night before the wedding.  Not enough people do that these days.”  We said our goodbyes and went back to our £35-a-night hotel on the seafront to drink Baileys, warm lager and red wine until the small hours.  It was — and without meaning to sound like an 8-year-old’s report on what I did for my holidays — the best birthday EVER.

Eight months later it was Evans’ wedding day.  I had made the transition from annoying cock at uni to best man.  I had got hideously drunk on Evans’ stag do and lost my glasses.  The wedding was great and my speech went down pretty well, but the best part was the surprise the bride — Erica — had organised for the groom.  After the speeches I told the guests that the bride and groom were going to make their way to the dance floor for their first dance, and they should follow.  I ran ahead to give the surprise his cue.

The bride and groom walked to the dance floor to the sound of David Ford at the piano playing their song, ‘Song For The Road’.  Evans looked over at the piano, back at Erica then back to the piano, proper double-take style.  “He looks like David Ford,” he whispered.  “It is David Ford,” she said back.  “Did you know about this?”  “Yes Dear, I organised it.”

At the end of the set Evans asked for an encore.  Later he would confide in me that he wished he’d thought of an obscure album track that he really wanted to hear, but all he could think of was to ask Ford to play Firecracker.  With me.  Feigning reluctance I got up there and played the song.  Again, I bloody loved it. 

Click on the picture

Afterwards Andy and I plucked up the courage to ask Ford if he wouldn’t mind just saying a few words into Andy’s video camera.  We’d made a kind of documentary in the style of X-Factor, we said, and we wondered if he’d like to do a Simon Cowell-y type critique of my performance.  He smiled, “I think I’d be good at that…”

Click the link to see 

I’ll never be a rock star but I’ll be able to tell my grandkids that I sang and played my guitar on stage a couple of times.  I’ll ask if they want to see the DVD.  They’ll scoff and ask me to explain what a DVD is.  I’ll explain it’s something we used to watch films on in the olden days before telepathic holograms and I’ll say, “You think that sounds shit, let me tell you about my red Ericsson T10…”

You know when you’re queuing up in a supermarket and you put your shopping on the conveyor belt?  You know the little plastic divider things that keep your shopping separated from the person in front’s shopping and the person behind’s shopping?  Can anyone remember how we survived the supermarket experience before these little inventions?

I’ll tell you how.  We used common sense.  Fucking common fucking sense.  You put an obvious gap between your shopping and the person in front, and you made sure that the cashier stopped scanning when they got to your shopping.  Easy.

Why then do people refuse to put their shopping on the conveyor belt without the aid of a foot-long plastic prism to prevent their shopping becoming irreconcilably confused with the shopping in front?  Specifically, why do they shoot you accusing looks and huff and tut and sigh when you don’t put the little divider thing after your shopping?  Use your fucking common sense; like people used to.  I hate those little plastic shopping dividers, because people are so stupid they rely on them and can’t function without them.

And next time you arrive at a pedestrian crossing, perhaps you might like to do something we used to call LOOKING LEFT AND RIGHT before pressing the button, crossing the road anyway, and causing a car a quarter of a mile away to have to stop in thirty second’s time at an empty crossing.

A friend of mine once went to Birmingham.  On her way back to Nottingham she decided to put her Sat Nav in charge.  She followed the Sat Nav’s directions for a while before stopping, thinking something wasn’t quite right.  She’d blindly followed the directions and ended up in North Fucking Wales.  She driven 110 miles in the wrong direction and ended up in another country before she decided to engage her brain. 

You see, this is what really shits me about progress and technology; they cause people to stop using their tiny stupid fucking brains.  The blame is probably equally apportionable between the people and the technology, but seeing as the technology itself is far from stupid I can only come to the conclusion that people are inherently moronic beings.

So it was with a sense of sad inevitability that last week I finally caved in and became an iPhone owner.  I’ve wanted one for a long time; I just never wanted to be one of those people, and I certainly don’t want to end up relying on technology to guide me through my every waking moment.

The tragic news is that after seven days of owning an iPhone I have no idea how I managed to survive twenty-nine and a quarter years without one.  What did I do last time I was lying in bed with a hangover and needed to find out the time of the next train to London?  How did I ever manage to buy a coffee without opening the Starbucks iPhone app and finding directions to the nearest store?  What did I ever do on the loo at work before I had Freecell to play?  Actually, try and forget that last one.

How the fuck did any of us do anything before mobile phones, let alone iPhones?  This is how technology works; it makes you wonder how you ever managed to survive without it, when you actually survived without it just fine.  The completely perverse and counter-intuitive thing is that the more technology we have, the stupider we get.  Technology will inevitably revolt and kill us all.

In the meantime as long as I’m only a click away from finding my nearest Starbucks I’m quite happy.

I’m not sure if he was joking, genuine or completely taking the piss, but today a friend asked if I fancied taking part in the world’s first kilomathon, a 26km road race from Nottingham to Derby in March.  For those without a calculator handy, 26km is 16 miles.  SIXTEEN MILES!

I’ve gone through a range of emotions since this was suggested.  Initially I completely dismissed it.  Imagine that — ME running SIXTEEN MILES.  Then, I started to genuinely consider it.  This could be it.  Training for this kilomathon could be the thing that motivates me to get out there and do some ruddy exercise.

Me running

I spoke to a colleague who runs a bit.  “I’d need to do, what, a couple of runs a week to train?”  He winced, in that way that seems to suggest he thinks I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing.  “You could start off doing a couple of runs a week.  Then maybe build up to doing more.”  Sounds tough, I thought, my interest tailing off.

But this is exactly the type of thing I should be doing.  My vague desire to lose weight and get fitter isn’t really working out for me at the moment.  (I don’t think I mentioned it but I didn’t lose any weight last week and I doubt I will this week.)  I need a specific challenge, and running a 16 mile race in less than five months’ time seems to tick the right boxes, doesn’t it?

Me stopping to catch my breath, mid-run

But I know me, unfortunately.  I start things with good intentions, but as soon as I get bored or it starts getting tough I give in.  I’ll feel a twinge in my ankle, maybe I’ll start coming down with flu.  I’ll take a few nights off.  A few nights will turn into a week.  Suddenly I’ll decide I’m out of practice and that injury/illness has put too big a dent into my training regime.  I’ll find a way to give up without feeling like too much of a complete and utter fucking failure.

So should I do it?  I guess I could do it for charity.  That would give me motivation to actually see it through.  It sounds like a lot of effort though.  *Sigh*

On a less-energetic note, driving to and from Cornwall last week I spotted loads of brilliant place names, and — tragic nerd that I am — I decided upon my top five: (in no order) 

• Indian Queens
• Cricket St Thomas
• Ballywatticock (Northern Ireland)
• Goonbell (next to the also-brilliantly-named Goonown)
• Westward Ho! (the only place name in the British Isles with an exclamation mark in it)

But back to the kilomathon.  I’m going to do it.  I’M GOING TO RUDDY DO IT*

*maybe

.

I’ve been told that losing more than 2lbs a week isn’t sustainable and perhaps more importantly isn’t healthy.  I also found out to my cost that losing a lot of weight in a short space of time gets you drunk much more easily that usual.  Saturday I got really embarrassingly drunk, really embarrassingly quickly.  At a wedding.  Take yourself back to the hotel at 9 o’clock, wake up fully-clothed, mysterious liquid all over the bathroom floor type of drunk.  And yes, I’m completely and unreservedly blaming the weight loss for my drunkenness. 

The following day someone played me an answerphone message I’d left them which consisted of three minutes of me trying to talk cricket tactics in French and announcing my undying love for a waitress I was convinced was eyeing me up.

Sunday night I had two pints of Guinness and half a pizza to celebrate getting Sandiacre Town Cricket Club’s second team promoted after a workmanlike victory in our final game.  Then last night my girlfriend treated me to a curry at Kerala in Nottingham, an absolute brilliant restaurant which I highly recommend.  As far as curries go I’d say it was a fairly healthy one, but still, I’ll make a real effort to be healthy for the rest of the week.  Then at the weekend I’m going to Oktoberfest where, I’m told, there’s nothing to do except sit and drink beer all day.  Could be an early night again…

And later today or tomorrow — you lucky, lucky people — I will post for your viewing pleasure, the next chapter or so of Happy Ending.