Cleave and I have spent many, many drunken evenings together.  He is by far the biggest drinker I’ve ever met, and he’s especially fond of Guinness.  I’ve seen him drink two gallons of the stuff and barely be affected.  He once called me on his way home from the pub (he may have been driving but let’s pretend I didn’t say that).  I asked how much he’d had to drink.  He said he couldn’t remember, but he had six Guinness hats, and you got a free hat with every three pints.

from left to right: me, Cleave, Sages, and Ranny Ranny Ranny Don't Drift On Me Ranny, with the World's Biggest Pencil (sadly obscured), circa 2001

This brings me onto the in-no-way-exaggerated Best Thing I’ve Ever Seen.  It was Christmas Eve, probably 2001.  We were in a bar, and we were already fairly well-oiled.  Cleave and his brother ordered a Fish Bowl from the bar (literally, a fish bowl filled with alcohol).  I’m not sure exactly what was in it but I remember the bar staff pouring in — amongst other things — a bottle of white wine, four bottle of orange Reef and a few shots of vodka.  The bowl was passed around for us all to have a sip, and when it found its way to Cleave he nonchalantly discarded the straws everyone else had been drinking from, put the Fish Bowl to his lips and started drinking.  Within a few seconds the whole bar was watching as Cleave drank the first half of the contents of the bowl without fuss.  He paused for a moment, the bowl still to his lips.  He looked to be struggling.  Surely even Cleave couldn’t finish the whole thing.  Surely not.

Suddenly everyone started chanting his name.  Cleave got a second wind, and in one inhuman effort he polished off the rest of the contents of the Fish Bowl.  The place erupted.  It was awesome, it was unbelievable.  It was not — however — The Best Thing I’ve Ever Seen.  It was only part of it.  The best was to come.

Cleave put the empty Fish Bowl down on the table and just stood there.  Everything stopped.  Everyone stared at him.  He stifled a burp.  His cheeks puffed off.  Sensing danger, I took a step back.  Cleave put his hand over his mouth.  And then it came.  A great big tsunami of vomit.  The hand pressed tightly over his mouth served to spray the contents of Cleave’s stomach left and right in two jets, one of which I saw, in slow motion, coming towards me.  I was maybe three yards away and just managed to dodge the stream of watery, orange vomit that flew past my left shoulder.  The first wave of spew subsided, quickly followed by the second, as Cleave spluttered like an old engine.  This time a jet of sick flew past my right shoulder.  I turned around to see a young chap sitting at a table — fully five yards away from Cleave — being showered with vomit.  He just sat there like a stooge in a gangster film being machine-gunned to death as vomit hit him square in the chest for about ten seconds.  This was The Best Thing I’ve Ever Seen.

From Cleave downing the Fish Bowl to the Little Britain-esque projectile vomit completely ruining some poor chap’s Christmas Eve, it was a truly epic moment and I will never ever ever tire of telling that story.

And on a slightly less vomit-related note, in honour of Cleaver Las Vegas I had Elvis on random as I drove up north, and hereby present my top five favourite Elvis Presley tracks (in no order): 

• Anything That’s Part Of You
• Kentucky Rain
• Just Pretend
• Burning Love
• Are You Lonesome Tonight? [Laughing version]

In other news I went for a run, had some McDonalds, got drunk.  The usual.

.

Since the disappointment of Monday’s weight in I’ve been pretty healthy.  Home made soup for lunch all week and fairly healthy evening meals.  Well, the evening meals could have been a bit healthier (I made a lasagne last night and used a whole pot of cream in the béchamel sauce…), so there’s still room for improvement.

Tomorrow I’m at a wedding all day, but I’ll try not to get too drunk and I’ll try not to eat too much.  Chances are I won’t eat anything, I’ll drink far too much, and my girlfriend will find me asleep in my own vomit under a hedge at about eight o’clock.

A few words on Happy Ending: I’m not sure it works posting little snippets of it as blog entries.  A novel isn’t the type of thing you read in 500-word bursts, so publishing 500-word extracts of it on a blog isn’t likely to stir up much interest.  That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.  It may well just be that what I’ve written is shit. 

But regardless, I will keep on writing it, and will occasionally post bits of it.  They’ll probably be slightly bigger chunks than the last couple of instalments, and I’ll try to make sure they’re chunks of which I’m particularly proud.

Be good.

.

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.

I’ll write a little teaser of a description of the novel I’m trying to write.  I’m told that trying to condense hundreds of pages of work into a couple of paragraphs is one of the hardest things for a writer (not that I’m *a writer* yet) to do.  I don’t imagine I’ll be able to write the synopsis to any great standard, but I’ll try to get across the general idea of the novel.  I’ll give it a bash because it will be good writing practise.  No point writing two hundred thousands words if I can’t sell the idea in a punchy, catchy paragraph, is there?

Unless I can think of a reason not to, I’ll post the *humorous* letters I sent out to a few celebrities inviting them to my friend’s wedding recently.

There’s a piece of coursework I did back in 1998 for my English Language A-Level, and for the past eleven years I’ve reminisced fondly over this particular bit of writing; a CD inlay booklet charting the career of an imaginary Swedish pop band called ARSA.  From that description you can pretty much gauge the level of humour (that of a seventeen year-old boy, to be exact).  I found it last night and had a quick read through it.  It’s fair to say it wasn’t quite the literary work of genius I recalled, but it’s OK.  It’s funny in parts.  I remember this coursework made my English tutor laugh out loud – something no-one or -thing managed to do throughout our two year course.

An “Adult Fairy Story” (sadly not *that* type of “Adult story”), which was an entry into a Writing Magazine competition.  I don’t think I’m allowed to recreate it until the winning entry is announced, so I might have to hang fire on that one.  It was an attempt at being clever: written in the second person and with what might seem to be a slightly ambiguous ending.

Anyway, must go.

TTFN