Bright Light, Ip Shitty

Monday morning rolled around this week with my usual affront at the sound of my alarm waking me at six. I'd been feeling a bit dodgy over the weekend (Fiona's birthday, shennanigans with Clare's mate, falling asleep on Jacob's couch again, playing tennis - well, ballboy - in less than optimal state Sunday morning). Unusually for me, I rolled over and ignored the alarm for another hour and a half. I really didn't want to move. ANyhow, I eventually made it to work. I'm a contractor, so as long as I do the hours required, it's not a big deal if I'm not there, provided I'm not missing anything.

My buddy Olaf, the belly dancing Master's student from the town in Holland where the fireworks factory blew up, is leaving Ipswich soon, so I decided we should go to Kartouche for old time's sake. For those of you who don't remember, that's the nasty place where they play metal and dnb (if you call it that) on *the same night*. Anyhow, we went there, after I impaired my performance somewhat, and had the customary six one pound drinks before moving anywhere. These are always drunk at speed, and with our usual lack of respect for social niceties, we were pretty much rolling by the end of those. That and a bit of light social moshing later (really, this is a teenage mess, I should know better) we left as the place closed.

Standing outside keeping the Dutch Boy Wonder* company outside while he waited for the bus, we noticed the friendly Irish guy we'd been giving shit inside. It was, after all, Sant Patrick's Day. We chatted to him briefly before he started demanding whether I was English or not. Assuming he was joking, I laughed it off and told him I wasn't. When he started getting bolshy with Olaf and demanding the same, he decided he wouldn't be told to fuck off. He looked like he was going to have a go at O, so I held his arms behind his back. Oddly, this didn't seem to bother him, and he continued to wander around after Olaf. Attempting to walk away, or at least have him not follow us, he clearly wasn't going to be told. Finally, he pushed me as I walked away from him, and I thought "fuck this" and threw him to the ground**. Holding him down and telling him it was time he fucked off, I was surprised by his Gandhi-esque choice of the Passive Resistance fighting stance. Namely, he grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. Apparently Fight Club was pretty big in Ireland, because he re-enacted Brad's "go on, beat me up" scene in the bar's basement quite accurately. To the point where he obviously thought he really was just that cool***, culminating with shouting "Kill me!" - no, really. Anyhow, he wouldn't let go, and when a few kicks wouldn't convince him, he managed to grab Olaf's leg and pull him down. So anyway, we kicked him for awhile, gradually inflicting more damage to convince him to let go. Anyway, this wasn't going too great, cause as I said, I hadn't been feeling all that great. When I say "not that great" I mean that I'd felt the irresistable, charming urge to defecate myself building up for some time. Bending down on the ground and applying weight to this retard as he kicked me in the guts meant that this fight could quite possibly take an ugly, and very brown turn for the worse. I was quite literally usting to get out of there.

By the time Olaf had finished standing on his throat and I'd finished banging his head on the concrete as he blatantly refused to accept that Jennifer Anniston was not clamouring for his cell phone number, the rozzers had now been watching the farce from the other side of the street. This finally convinced him to let go of me. The police weren't stupid - no, really - and figured it out. I ran off home to spend half an hour in the embrace of the porcelain throne.

The next day, fearing I had the killer pneumonia flu, I took off home from work. So if this is my last entry, and I die of anal dehydration, please tell my mum I want to be buried under a tree facing Mecca.

* Not Dutch Curry, that's slang for diarrhoea. More about that later.

** Apparently there really is a first time for everything.

*** This is, perhaps, only slightly less pathetic than my attempts to lure Ulrika Jonsson to my boudoir by purchasing a pair of genuine 100% imitation replica Sven Goran Eriksson frameless spectacles. Ulrika, if you're out there, stop playing hard to get. You're not getting any younger, and surely you can do better than Johnny Vegas.