» Buses

The Psychedelic Bendy Bus
It had been a shit night. Not least for the fact that it had ended with me stood at a bus stop in the middle of the night, freezing cold. And I'd been waiting for about an hour.

I'd been out, spent a load of money that shouldn't have been spent, felt thoroughly depressed about being newly single for the first time in years, and was just generally in the wrong frame of mind to have been drinking. I'd been to busy bars and it seemed like the world was against me: every fucker in the place was out to spill my drink, get in my way or barge me away from the bar. I was pissed off, and just wanted to get home, The night bus which was supposed to be running every 15 minutes hadn't made an appearance in 60.

It had gotten to the point where it was so late it was now early. Walking home seemed to be the only option, and I had a four-mile stomp to compound my misery.

And just as I turned to trudge away, a bus pulled alongside me. Finally.

It was fairly empty, and I took the unusual decision of sitting near a group at the back of the bus. I normally like to keep myself to myself, but if I fell asleep, I wanted to have half a chance of someone noticing and waking me up before the bus reached the end of the Earth. It was one of Ken Livingstone's mobile traffic jams, a bendy bus, and so the seat I had sat in was a good 15 metres from the attention of the driver.

Watching the cess-pit of Shoreditch slip by, I barely noticed that someone had sat next to me, as I was consumed with bitter thoughts about how much I fucking hated this anonymous city, the girl that had left me and the best friend that had taken her. Until I noticed a burning smell.

And quite a familiar burning smell at that. Turning away from the window, I saw that the guy sat next to me was puffing on a huge joint. He winked at me, and passed it over. The gesture of kindness, combined with absurdness of getting stoned with a stranger on a night bus really struck a chord with me. I instantly felt a little happier.

Not wanting to be too greedy, I took a few tokes and tried to hand it back. He gave me a bemused smile, and nodded backwards. "He said it's got to go that way..." my new friend grinned.

"Who said?" I asked, a bit confused.

"The geezer that handed it to me."

As it turned out, I was sat in the middle of about 10 complete strangers, who had all decided to have a chat and pass spliffs round for their journey home. It was a total mix of ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, from the Chinese girls that had barely been in the country for 5 minutes to the middle-aged nightworker on his way home from a shift, all smoking weed on the bus like it was the most normal thing in the world to be doing.

We talked and laughed for a good half hour - I still can't work out why the driver either didn't notice or didn't care that the back of his bus resembled a Kate Bush video, as by the end of the journey it was so smokey I could barely find the way to get off.

As the doors opened at my stop with a whoosh, I walked out feeling like a contestant on Stars In Their Eyes, emerging from a green fog with a stupid grin on my face.

The bus disappeared from sight, and I never saw those people again. I sometimes think back about how completely surreal the whole experience was - did I imagine it? Was it some sort of supernatural funk bus, forever cruising the late night streets, on a mission from God to lift the spirits of unfortunate souls in their hour of need?

Probably not. But it was the best bus journey I've ever had, and it came just when I needed it, in more ways than one.


Length? 60ft, with a kink in the middle.
(Thu 25th Jun 2009, 15:48, More)

» Sexual fetishes

My Dad used to make my Mum dress up as a nurse.
Then, he'd get her in the car. They'd go for a little bit of a drive, and end up at the local hospital.

He'd drop her off, and she'd go inside. And work a full shift.

Then, when she got paid at the end of the month, he'd spend the money on whores.
(Mon 26th Oct 2009, 17:09, More)

» Bullshit and Bullshitters

The Prince Of France
I have a friend who regularly comes out with the most astonishing level of bullshit in the most casual manner. We'll call him Des, for that is his name. These gems are from a while ago, when Des was in his early twenties, but he continues to bullshit to this day.

A few years ago, the French presidential elections were coming up and so featured on the news. Des watches this, and then states very matter-of-factly, "Of course, if the French revolution hadn't happened, I'd be in line to be the Prince of France now. Bet you didn't know that about me!" No, I didn't Des, because your surname is Smith, no-one in your family is French, and you look like the 5th member of East 17. "Yeah, my ancestors fled France when they started chopping people's heads off. It's a shame, cos it would be cool to be a prince, but then again, I don't like France much."

Des usually got quite aggressive if he was called out, so by this point we'd learnt to nod, feign belief, and then tell everyone about it later. He is still privately referred to as the Prince of France.

The Prince of France's finest moment came about when someone at work was talking about getting a spanking new telly. Again, this was a while ago, so to get a new TV meant getting a great hulking CRT affair. However, there was nothing wrong with the old telly, and so they were debating whether they could justify a new one.

The Prince of France overhears this, and chips in with the most mind-bendingly astonishing stinking steaming pile of shite that I still haven't quite got my head around what was happening in his brain at that precise moment.

"Well, I suppose you could do the old 'milk & liver trick'", he mused, in a vacant, 'Oh, you must have heard of it' tone.

"What the fuck are you talking about Des?" came the withering reply, as Mr Telly prepared himself for a full-on barrage of billy bullshit.

"You put a plate with a bit of liver on it at one end of the telly, and a glass of milk on the other," he stated. He had finished, as if this was a perfectly self-explanatory statement to drop in to a conversation of the merits of television purchasing.

"What?!!"

Des sighed. "Liver, right, loves milk. So the liver will crawl across the top of your telly at night, and climb up the glass to drink the milk. But cos it's heavy, it'll topple over, and spill milk in to the back of your telly. And then you can claim for it on insurance."

The liver will crawl across the top of your telly at night.

Astonished, I offered him a chance to backtrack from the monumental advice he had just offered up.

"Des, is that actually true?"

"Yeah, my uncle works in insurance. There's nothing they can do about it. Happens all the time."



So there you go, it was a insurance scam of epidemic proportions in the late-ninties to encourage a piece of liver to throw milk down the back of your TV set, and insurance companies would begrudgingly pay out, if that's what you told them had happened. MIND-BLOWING.

Des Smith, Prince of France, King of Bullshit.


Length? I hold the world-record for it.
(Thu 13th Jan 2011, 20:05, More)

» Housemates

This QOTW brings a smile to my face...
My housemates moved in a while ago - first a single girl, who we'll call "Claire" and then about a month later, her newly single best friend, "Kate". No, this isn't going the way you think.

I was hesitant at first to let Kate move in. "She can't move in if she's just going to mope around and get teary about splitting up with her boyfriend," I told Claire.

"She won't, I promise," was the reply.

There is too much detail that I could go into for the events that follow. I'll give you the highlights.

Kate, fortunately, wasn't too upset about splitting from her boyfriend. Especially as she now lived with her new partner-in-crime. In fact, she was quite positive about it all. And a bit too keen to flaunt her newly-found singledom with her equally single best friend.

I came home one sunny afternoon to find that they'd moved the sofa into the street, and got shitfaced on cider. Then, with me sat there, had started flashing the local scrotes who were hanging around the street smoking weed. I had to leave to meet friends, and told the girls that on no terms should the chavs be allowed in to the flat. I left. They promptly invited four of them in, "for a laugh". These scrawny fuckweasels must have been 18 at the most, and complete strangers - none of them even lived anywhere nearby. I was not happy.

The next day, there were apologies, but I had to point out to them the stupidity of letting strangers into the flat - at the least, we could have been robbed. The girls were in no state to stop them. They had assumed I was annoyed because they weren't paying me any attention. Seriously.

Life returned to normal for a short while, until one night when one of my friends, Dan, was staying over and was sleeping on the sofa. I woke up in the morning, turned to switch off my alarm, and he was lying next to me. "Erm... morning. What are you doing?" I asked.

"The girls brought back a load of blokes last night at about 3am. They told me to fuck off out of the living room. I would've just stayed any way, but two of them looked like they were going to puke on me..."

Oh. I walked into the living room. It was empty. But covered in puke. The bathroom floor had become a lake of piss. The front door was wide open. And my laptop had been stolen. I bolted the front door, and got a very large knife from the kitchen.

As luck (!) would have it, one of the guys was still asleep in bed with one of my housemates. He was friends with the wankers who had robbed me. And he was locked in an unfamiliar flat, with a very, very angry, knife-wielding Sloppy stood over him, and Dan looming in the background. Frantic phone-calls where made, and my belongings were returned by some very sheepish looking teenagers. The girls were 26 by this point, FFS.

Again, there were apologies. Tears this time. Kate admitted she wasn't coping with being single at all, and was bringing home anyone who showed any interest to make her feel better. Claire's brutally honest excuse was, "I'm a bit of slag when I'm drunk, but this will never, ever happen again."

I'm a bit of soft-touch, and being a couple of years older, felt some sort of brotherly duty to give them another chance to sort themselves out. When they were good, living with them was great, and so I decided I would try and overlook these slip-ups - they were genuinely shaken by what had happened, and it was obviously a lesson learned. For a fortnight.

I woke up, two weeks later, at 5am, Sunday morning, with music pounding from the living room. The girls were in there, with 4 blokes I had never seen before (turns out they hadn't either) all snorting ketamine off of the coffee table. It was impossible to get any sense out of them. Turning down the music had little effect, it went straight back up every time I left the room, several times. I was told to fuck off, that I was being boring. By the blokes I didn't know. I walked out at 8am and wandered London aimlessly for hours, grinding my teeth.

I returned home to find a stranger slumped against my bedroom door, who I kicked out of the way and then had to step over to get into my room. For the next three hours, I listened to idiots with Special K-induced paralysis of the limbs tumble down the stair case, and then laugh hysterically, presumably because they'd landed on a purple marshmallow made out of tits.

I did my research. The comedown would hit them, hard, on Tuesday morning. Monday night, they were told on no uncertain terms to get the fuck out of the flat, and left to dwell on it for the rest of the week.

And so the reason I'm smiling? As I type this, they are walking backwards and forwards carrying piles of crap to a van, with looks of despair on their faces as they prepare to move back to their parents' box rooms, since they've blown the little money they had on drugs and booze.

Two of my friends are moving in on the weekend. I'm tempted to say that we'll celebrate with a huge line of ketamine and an orgy, but unfortunately for the sake of ironic punchlines, the guys moving in are not druggy slaggy wankers. We will however, get shitfaced and have a laugh, without inducing the urge to rip each other's faces off, as any good houseshare should operate.

Apologies for not being particularly witty, but I am revelling in the appropriateness of this weeks question. Whoo!
(Thu 26th Feb 2009, 16:19, More)

» My most gullible moment

Conned by a bloke in the pub...
A few years ago as a student in Sheffield, a group of us were telling jokes in a pub. As Southerners in a Northern local, and students to boot, we weren't particularly popular, but we were keeping ourselves to ourselves, and as far as we were aware, weren't bothering anyone.

My friend James came out with an absolutely lame one.

"What do you do if an epileptic has a fit in a bath? Throw your washing in..."

which was met with a bit of half-arsed laughter, until the huge bloke on the next table stood up, staring James straight in the eye.

"Now you lads seem alright, so I was going to leave you be. But don't ever fcuking say something like that - my brother was an epileptic and he died in the bath."

All for of us felt incredibly ashamed, studied our feet, mumbled apologies, and all the while this burly monster's murderous stare was fixed on James.

"Yeah," he continued. "It was a fcuking tragedy. He choked to death on a sock."
(Sat 23rd Aug 2008, 23:42, More)