Cigarettes and Alcohol: Confessions of a Stag Weekend (20 page)

Chapter Thirty: The Last Smoke of the Condemned Man

With the last pint sunk it’s time to say goodbye. The weekender is over, finished, kaput, terminated, clipped, done and dusted.

The
parting isn’t too sad though because I’ll see all the lads again tomorrow night for The Monday Night Mellow Madness beer session where I’m sure we will re-live every moment of action from the last three days of excess.

I
grab my bag, slap some palms and wander out the back of the pub to the car park where I am meeting the soon to be wife. I rang her earlier to plead for a lift home at lobbing out time and incredibly she agreed to come and pick me up. I did push my luck a bit and asked for a bit of NORWICH as well but got nowhere. Got two hopes there I reckon, Bob and no.

(
For all you innocents out there NORWICH stands for Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home.)

As
I walk out the smoky bar I pause and spark up the very last cigarette with a lighter. It tastes vile. I am well smoked out but at least I beat the carton. I am a winner. The carton of ciggies has been defeated and I have the totally knackered breathing apparatus to prove it!

I
stroll across the car park to my breadknife’s car sucking down the last hit of nicotine. I toss the final dog end into the nearest drain and open the car door. ‘You don’t smoke,’ she states giving me a filthy look.

‘Not
any more I don’t, that’s a fact,’ I splutter back.

‘So,
how was your weekend then?’ she asks, dying for some juicy gossip to share with the girls.

‘Oh
you know that lot they’re a boring bunch of teetotal bastards. We were all tucked up in bed by ten o’clock enjoying mugs of cocoa,’ I reply.

‘Yeah
right, cocaine more like and a load of fanny on your mugs. Come on fess up who pulled and who got arrested? Who went whoring and who got hospitalised?’ she wants to know the full SP.

‘Come
on love you know the rules. What goes on tour stays on tour. You never rat on your friends. Always keep your gob shut. I’m not some stool pigeon, grass, FBI informer type. All I can tell you is that I behaved myself and The Village Idiot was his usual fuckwitted self. I’m going to blame him for all the bad shit!’ I blag sitting there with my fingers crossed feeling like I’m in court in the witness box getting the third degree. ‘Besides you’ve got that hen do next weekend and you will be right mashed up if you last to this point in the proceedings.’

‘You
are not wrong,’ she replies. ‘Newcastle here we come. Lock up your sons the saucey southern slags are on their way. It’s going to be a mad one!’

‘Yep
I bet. Knowing your crazy mates it’ll be a miracle if any of you make it back alive,’ I say.

Silence
fills the car. I am exhausted. The over indulgence of the last three days have caught up with me. I can hear my bed calling and my normal boring weekly work routine just waiting to wrap its cloying arms around me again.

I
sit there with a huge grin on my grill remembering all the great stories from the weekend. I am truly thankful that I have some amazing friends and family around me. I am a blessed man for sure.

I
get all emotional as we pull up in front of our house, knowing how lucky I really am. Life’s a fucking fantastic ride so get out there and enjoy it!

‘I
love you,’ I blurt out.

‘I
love you too,’ she replies ‘but you really are a tit.’

GAME
OVER…..YOU ARE SPACE CADET….TRY AGAIN…….THE END

Appendix Number One: The Glossary of Tossary

Arris
: This is cockney rhyming slang for ‘arse’ which originally came from ‘bottle & glass.’ Then in a slang within a slang style, Aristole means bottle so this got shortened to Arris in the end. What a fucking palaver, why not just write the word arse in the first place, it’s only four letters.

Balloon
Knot
: Your ring piece because it looks like the knot in a child’s balloon. Simple as that!

Battle
Cruiser
: Translates to ‘Boozer’. Other pub related rhyming slang include: Nuclear Sub-Pub, Rub-a-dub-dub….again Pub. Near & Far…Bar.

Breadknife
: Wife AKA ‘She who must be obeyed’ AKA Her Indoors AKA The Other Half AKA She who will be soon residing under the patio AKA Love of my life AKA ‘The Enemy.’

Disco
Biscuit
: For all you young eggs out there with your trendy MP3 Players a disco biscuit is an old vinyl record played at 33rpm for an album or 45 rpm for a 12 inch or 7 inch single. To my ears vinyl sounds far superior and more ‘lived in’ than the clinical over produced digital quality of modern recordings. Mind you as I am as deaf as a post so please pay no heed to my opinion.

Donkey
Punch
: A sexual practice not really recommended for the marital bed. As you are indulging in a bit of doggy sex you punch the back of the neck of your lover as you are about to come. Apparently this increases your orgasmic pleasure levels but is more likely to end up in your partner’s death or an assault charge. Either way it’s best to leave this nasty unpleasant business well alone. There is a movie about this called, strangely enough, DONKEY PUNCH if you want to check it out, where unsurprisingly it all ends in tears.

Felching
: To suck recently delivered still warm semen from vaginal or anal passages after sex. I’m sure that it tastes exactly like eating fresh oysters.

Fortean
Times
: The greatest magazine on the planet. It is your monthly fill of bizarre news items and features on all aspects of the unexplained. The ‘strange deaths’ column alone is worth the investment. I urge you to purchase a copy when you next go to your local news agents to buy your porno mags.

Harry
Monk
: Easy one this, it means Spunk. I wonder if there are any listings for people actually named Harry Monk in the telephone directory. What were his parents thinking?

Mallet
: Refers to a late-developing teenage lad who has yet to grow any pubic hair around his meat and two veg. My wife informs me that the female equivalent insult at her school was ‘White Triangle.’

MILF
: Mum I’d Like to Fuck. As I am hitting middle age this is gradually changing to an older age bracket of GILF……Granny I’d Like to Fuck.

Mushy
Peas
: This was the nick name/rhyming slang for Tees Nightclub in Erith. A well dodgy old place that was full of ne’er-do-wells, manual labour types and lots of loose women up for a one night stand. However you were far more likely to get a smack on the kisser than a kiss on the smacker. It was a well classy joint with mirrors everywhere, big sofas and a dance floor that lit up like the one in Saturday Night Fever. Basically you only went there so that you could get a late drink once the pubs had closed.

S
iamese Knees
: A strange condition that usually occurs after an argument where the knees of your Mrs seem to become fused together giving you no access to her ‘Holiest of Holies’ for at least a fortnight or until you apologise.

Teabagging
: The rather dubious practice of dangling your ball bags on to the forehead of a sleeping mate. It is massively immature but very amusing particularly if one of your ‘curly watch springs’ falls on to the face of your victim.

To
turn your bike around
: To go and take a shit. Why it is called this I have absolutely no idea and could not be bothered to even Google it to find out.

What’s
Benning?
This stands for ‘What’s Ben Hurring?’ (Occurring) As in what is going down? Also can be used as ‘What doth Benneth?’

Appendix Number Two: Cures for a Bastard of a Hangover

Before you dive into these notes, I want to state, for the record, that I am not a qualified Doctor and as such have no right to give you any medical advice. However I do know that drinking to excess regularly will lead to all sorts of horrible diseases that will end your life prematurely. You’ve got to face facts that none of us are here forever, so you may as well enjoy it while you can!

All
the following supposed ‘remedies’ for over indulgence in the loopy juice known as alcohol are a result of both personal trial and error plus tips I got on line through a very lazy search entitled unsurprisingly ‘hangover cures’.

Some
of them may work and others are just a load of old pony but probably worth a shot when you are desperate. Obviously the easiest way to avoid a hangover is not to drink at all the night before but really where is the fun in that?

So
when you are downing yet another shot of Black Sambuca at gone twelve on a school night, knowing your boss is waiting to break your balls first thing in the morning, you will pray hard that one of the following suggestions will at least tide you over to lunchtime when you can grab a swift top up pint.

1]
The
Hair
of
the
Dog
:

Or
to use the full saying ‘More of the Hair of the Dog that Bit Me.’ This was a belief dating back to the Medieval days when if you were bitten by a rabid dog, a cure could be made by applying the same dog’s hair to your infected wound. Talk about stupid, you’ve been bitten once you tool and now you’re going back for seconds in the vain hope that sticking dog hair in a gaping bloody gash will see you right. You are going to be one foaming at the mouth, rabies infected motherfucker very shortly, my friend.

This
quick fix is also known as ‘The Hairy Dog’ and basically involves getting up and carrying on drinking. People reckon that a small measure of drink on waking can cure a hangover or at least take the sting out of it.

I
tried this once back at school during my A Levels. I had got completely upside down the night before a Chemistry exam that I knew I was going to fail, on account of going to none of the classes during the year, so had gone out and got steaming just for the hell of it.

I
woke up feeling like my head was going to cave in and was shaking like a shitting dog, so I mooched downstairs for some water. On opening the fridge I saw a cheeky can of lager giving me the eye, so popped the lid and downed it in one. I would love to report that this gave me super powers like Spinach does to Popeye but it didn’t. I still got a U grade and just postponed my hangover until I was mid-way through the poxy exam and then felt like I was going to have a stomach turnout in front of the whole class.

As
a hangover avoidance system I will have to give this ‘Hair of the Dog’ method a D-grade.

I
mean when do you stop topping up the booze? Five years later when you are sitting in a shop doorway in a urine sodden pair of pants drinking ultra-strength cider at ten o clock in the morning? It seems a rocky road to becoming an alcoholic to me, which I am not.

Well
maybe I could be a borderline case.

2]
Physical
Exercise
:

Some
deluded hung over souls choose to voluntarily go out for a run, take their push bike out for a spin or go to the gym on the morning after. As these pursuits are all fucking dumb things to do when you are sober we will discount these straight away as a cure. Grade F

3]
Skive
off
Work
and
Sleep
:

If
you’ve been on a massive bender all weekend and just can’t face the Monday morning blues at work this is a corker. Call in sick claiming to have dodgy guts, a family crisis, real man flu, an in-growing eyelash or whatever gets you off the hook and go back to bed.

Then
indulge in a crafty HW (Hangover Wank) to get rid of all those nasty toxins. You will certainly feel better for a few minutes before you drift off back to sleep. Just don’t forget to hide your ‘wanky hanky’ or used tissues before you doze off.

Morning
sex is also a great destroyer of hangovers, although there are not many women who will let you paw them up and then have full ‘rumpy pumpy’ while your breath stinks of second hand lager, mouldy kebab with onions, half a curry and a portion of large chips smothered with burger sauce.

Even
if you don’t get a leg over I’d still give this ‘cure’ an A-grade not because it will sort your head out but it does mean an extra day off from the drudgery of employment which is obviously top! If you do jib off work and manage to wangle some ‘beard and langers’ whilst under the curse of a full monty hangover give yourself an A+ grade. I can teach you no more my young apprentice.

4]
Non
-
Alcoholic
Drinks
….
Yes
they
do
exist
!

In
this category The Bloody Mary comes out top of the chart. The tomato and lemon juices give you back all those important vitamins that your drinking has depleted. Quite what the Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces do is a mystery but the overall package seems to work. Best leave out the vodka though or you are back at Point 1 above and again end up avoiding the inevitable. I’d also leave out the celery as it tastes bloody horrible going down and repeats on you all sodding day. I don’t care what the food experts preach; any salad item found on your average restaurant ‘all you can eat Salad Cart’ is no good for you, apart from the bacon bits.

(
By the way the name Bloody Mary is meant to have come from Queen Mary I the persecutor of those of The Protestant Faith. She had a pretty novel hangover cure for believers in this religion she lopped their heads off with a whacking great axe. Bit extreme and certainly not legal today according to The High Court Judge who drinks in the local.)

We
move on to the magical hangover smashing qualities of pure orange juice. My favourite cure of all time is two paracetamol washed down with O.J. The jolt of vitamin C added to the pain reliever sorts you right out…..most of the time.

Someone
I used to work with swore by drinking ‘a pint of Thames’. This was a half pint of OJ and a half of cola mixed together. I guess it was called a Thames as it would end up looking the same grey/brown colour as the river and would probably taste just as bad, although hopefully it wouldn’t have the used jimmy hats, eels or dead bodies of East End gangsters floating in it.

I
was going to try a pint of this purely for research purposes while writing this book but to be honest I could not be arsed. Try it yourself you lazy hung over twat.

In
Poland, apparently they down shots of pickle juice in the morning to recover from the ill effects of the ‘one too many’. Personally I would rather suffer the throbbing head.

Diarrhoea
medicine also came highly recommended by the internet to put you back on the road to Wellsville. It would restock all those lost minerals and help to rehydrate your well knackered body in addition to stopping you shitting like a race horse all day after consuming that late night burger that was made up entirely of rotten animal guts with churned up eyelids and arseholes.

Overall
Grade B+

5]
The
Frankly
Bizarre
:

Somewhere
in mainland Europe that I won’t name as this idea of a cure is just so blatantly dumb I would not want to embarrass the country in question…OK it’s France. Here they would bury the ailing person up to their neck in moist riverbank sand to help them recover from their night on the tiles.

Two
words…Incoming Tide.

The
garlic quaffing snail eaters really hadn’t thought this through had they? Mind you it was a great way of losing some of the more shall we say, ‘intellectually challenged’ members of their society. Quite frankly as a cure this really bites the big one. Grade U