You can't spell Manslaughter without Laughter
Trip Start
Jun 23, 2005
1
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Melbourne, Australia
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Back at the party my mate, Mike, suggests playing the broom game. As soon as I hear the word game I'm jumping up and down saying "let me play, let me play, I wanna play." Of course I don't know how to play the broom game but Mike, being the obliging chap he is, teaches me. The rules to the 'broom game' are pretty simple. You take a broom and hold it above your head. Whilst looking up at the broom you then spin around 10 times with everyone else counting for you. Upon reaching 10, you simply place the broom on the ground and jump over it. Piece of piss, right? Well, no, not really. In fact it's not easy at all, you've got it completely fucking wrong. It's extremely difficult and, some may say, more than a little dangerous.
Anyway, there's me, spinning like a 'tard, trying not to lose my footing in my flip-flops, awaiting the magical number that is 10 so that I can throw my stick on the ground and jump over it.
Which is what I very nearly did. Very nearly indeed. What I actually did instead was go flying off in the wrong direction, stumble, and then crash head first into the garden. As I lay on the ground with the world spinning much faster than it usually does I began to realise that the side of my head was hurting. Not a little bit hurting, mind, but a lot hurting. In fact it felt like I'd just been kicked in the ear with steel cap boots. As I rolled over and began to stand I noticed that I had managed to land on a brick in amongst the flowerbed. It turns out to be the only brick in the garden. Why anyone had decided to place one solitary brick in the garden is beyond me, unless it was designed to teach you not to fuck with the broom game.
As I staggered back over to the rest of the people in the garden a few of the girls let out a bit of a scream and a few of the guys screwed their faces up and looked away with a bit of "Ewwwwwwwww."
It would seem that I was bleeding a little bit. One of the girls rushed me upstairs to the bathroom with a view to cleaning me up. When I got there I was a little taken aback by the sight that greeted me in the mirror. You know the bit of your ear that is used for keeping your headphones in place? Yeah? Well it looked very much like I'd ripped that bit off. It certainly felt like I had ripped it off. After getting cleaned up I returned to the party where everyone took it in turns to come and stare at it a bit, shake their head, tut a bit and walk off. Within half an hour I had a scab the size of my thumb on the side of my head. Not long after that I decided to make a move home as I was in quite a considerable amount of pain.
As I said before, I'd damaged the bit of my ear which holds your headphones in place. Well, I guess the only good thing to come from this incident was that a week earlier I'd managed to wash my ipod which meant I didn't have to worry about not being able to use the headphones. It being completely fucked and all. That now brings my tally of washed things to: 2 mobile phones, 2 ipods (if you include the brand new one I bought three weeks ago to replace the one I washed 2 months ago), my passport, an ounce of weed (still smoked it, so who's the idiot now, eh?) and a snail.
What I'm getting sick of now is people telling me I should check my pockets before I was my clothes. No Fucking Shit. Of course I should check my fucking pockets - if I did that I wouldn't have spent close to $2000 on electronic equipment. Then once I've calmed down and start to think about it objectively I realise that I'm an idiot and don't deserve any nice electronic equipment. I don't even deserve pockets.
Get ready with the high-fives people. I finally passed my driving test. I was determined to pass it before my 30th birthday and I did it with 14 days to spare. I had lessons for a couple of months and then booked my test. We'd only been driving for 12 minutes before she asked me to pull back into the test centre. I assumed I must have done something wrong, but she congratulated me and said I'd passed. How the fuck can they tell how good you are at driving when you've only been on the road 12 minutes and 6 of them were spent sitting still at red lights. I made clear my disgust with the whole system when I karate chopped her in the throat and gave her a flying dead leg as she tried to make good her escape.
So now I'm licensed to drive. I rock. I've decided against buying a car, however, lest I wash it.
Took a trip to Brisbane recently. Two guys I used to work with down here in Melbourne, who both became good friends of mine, were relocated to start up a new office in Brisvegas (as it is affectionately known). One of them you may remember from a few posts back, the one who hunted and killed a sheep. I don't think I told you the story of when this guy had a drunken incident with a knife so I'll quickly tell you now before continuing with the tale of my trip to Brissie.
This guy, we'll call him Ben, is a great guy but a bit of a liability when it comes to drinking. He has only one mission when he drinks, which is to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. I've seen him have 50+ units of alcohol in less than four hours which is just plain dangerous (that particular night actually came just a week after the incident I'm about to tell you). Anyways, he's out with his mate and they've finished off a couple of bottles of whisky. His mate pulls out a knife, rolls up his sleeve and says "look how sharp this knife is" before running it across his forearm and drawing a bit of blood. Ben snatches the knife of him, exclaims "that's not sharp" put his hand behind his head and ran the knife across his tricep, cutting through all the skin, muscles and tendons right down to the bone. His mate calmly pulls out his phone.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm calling an ambulance."
"Why?"
"Look at your arm in the mirror."
"Oh."
22 internal stitches and 20 external stitches. I got his old phone after breaking my one, which has the pictures on it if anyone fancies seeing them.
So I'm in Brisbane and it turns out we've got a fishing trip planned. Now, I'm not a big fan of fishing but Ben assured me that it would be fun. We're going proper deep sea fishing off the coast of Noosa. We'll get some beers and just drink in the sun with fishing being something we do whilst getting drunk. Alright, fair enough, doesn't sound too bad. The thing is that we have to be in Noosa at 6.30am which means leaving Brisbane at 5am. Suffice to say we decided to take it fairly easy on Friday night - couple of beers and a BBQ.
Saturday morning and everyone's up for it. We sparked a spliff in the car and were all getting excited about the day ahead. We turn up at the place the boat leaves from and then it suddenly dawns on us. We ain't bought any beer. Nothing. We watch the other passengers loading up the boat with crates of beer and start to panic. How the fuck did we forget to buy beer? We even made a special trip to a store the night before to buy an Eskie (one of those things you stick beer in and it keeps it cool), we just didn't buy anything to put in it. Twats.
We decide to make a few enquiries as to where we may be able to purchase some alkeehole but it was fruitless. This wasn't looking good. 7 hours on a boat without a beer to rub between us.
We board the boat, all feeling a little stupid, and head out to sea. The first couple of hours were alright but it didn't take me long to start getting pretty bored. I sought solace in the fact that at least we'd all be going out on the town tonight, so that's something to look forward to. The really annoying thing was that I hadn't bothered to put my watch back an hour when I arrived in Queensland so here's me thinking that there's only 4 hours to go, only 3 hours to go, only... oh, bollocks, there's still 3 fucking hours to go.
A couple of the boys caught some decent fish but obviously I didn't catch fuck all. Everything I caught was too little and had to be thrown back. Because it was deep sea fishing it took ages to reel the little bastards in, only for the bastard captain to come along, take it off the hook and nonchalantly throw it back. The fifth time he did this I had to take the fish off him and beat him unconscious with it, which took fucking ages. By the time I was finished the fish was ruined so I threw it back.
Eventually the ordeal ended and we made our way back home, excitedly talking about the night ahead. As we'd got up so early we all planned to have a kip and then go into town about 8. Woke up at 11.30pm and the boy's are like, "nah, can't be arsed. Too late."
"You're joking, right?"
"Nah, we've been waiting ages for you to wake up and now we can't be bothered."
"Well, why didn't you wake me?"
"You looked so peaceful."
I ended up watching Heat which frankly I think is a bit of a shit film.
Didn't go out Friday night, didn't go out Saturday night, absolutely determined to have a large Sunday before getting on my flight at 5.30pm.
And a large one we had. We started early and proceeded to get pretty damn hammered. We decided to put the fish we'd caught on the barbie so we made our way down to the communal pool/BBQ area of their apartment complex with a couple of bottles of tequila and a few beers. It was only once we got there that both Ben's (my two mates are both called Ben, by the way) realise that neither one has remembered their key assuming the other one had brought there's. Nice one boys, all my stuff is locked inside including my wallet and house keys and I've got to be at the airport in 3 hours.
We eventually got let into the apartment by the woman who runs the complex. The only problem was that it was now 9pm and I had well and truly missed my flight. I ended up having to buy a new ticket and commute from Brisbane to Melbourne at 4.30 the next morning.
All in all a pretty special trip - and the beauty was it only cost me $1000, including 3 flights and one fuck off expensive fishing excursion.
So that pretty much brings you all up to speed. Tomorrow I jump on a plane and make my way back to Blighty. It's been 18 months since I was last there and I'd be lying if I said I was only a little bit excited about seeing my friends and family.
I hope all you lot back in London are still up for a pint on the 28th, I certainly am.
Comments
spelling and punctuation
Hello Shane,
Your spelling and punctuation is appalling. If a word is a plural there is no need to put an apstrophe in it. So when you refer to two Bens don't use it. If you are saying it belongs to Ben i.e. it's Ben's, then do use one. Also note the apostrophe in 'it's'. The apostrophe represents the missing 'i' as in 'it is'. If something belongs to someone you can say 'it's theirs' not to be mistaken for the abbreviation for 'they are' which is 'they're'. You complete nob.