It was 2002 ish and I’d not long met the woman I went on to ask to marry, and who gave birth to my son. We’d kind of become “official” but I’d already booked a long weekend to Amsterdam with a mate, a mate who hadn’t even smoked a cigarette in his life, or done any drugs, well he was fucked then. 
We had a tradition in my group of mates (I say had, because most of them are just plain old cunts* now (*Curiously Unexplainably Not There Socially), or just normal regular basic bog standard cunts, anyway, this tradition was to drink like you was never going to see the person again if they were going on a plane, even if it was an hours flight.
Me and my mate got ready to go “out out” in Streatham. We went to leave and noticed it was absolutely pissing down so we nicked a couple of my mum’s antique umbrellas from her antique copper thing and hoofed it up to the pub. Cut to several hours later and we were both practically unable to speak and made our way back from the pub, brollies up I stupidly suggested in my heightened agitated whiskey sozzled state that we were not a pair of pricks, but in fact Knights of honour, and would fight our way through the housing estate to get home. We basically threw all thoughts of honour and chivalry out of the window and started trying to beat the fuck out of each other with the brollies.
As we got mid way through the estate we got to one of those jobs worth spoilt sport metal things to stop people on bikes from having fun. I decided with all the imagination I could conjure that it was some sort of dragon, and tried, (in my drunken honourable knight of the realm way) to ask it to move aside. It didn’t, it was cemented in for fuck sake. I asked again, more assertively this time. Again, being bedding into a tarmac path, it didn’t budge, nor would it have. I ordered a charge, to myself, being the only fuck wit who was living out the metal dragon fantasy, my other mate was just standing open jawed, drunken heavy breathes watching me, slightly more sprightly but still heavily dumb from beers and spirits. I ran as fast as I could and brought my “Broadsword” down on the “beast” several times. 
I heard like a twanging sound, and thought nothing of it, and then realised that I was seemingly sweating profusely from my neck, which was odd. I dropped the brolly and reached up, realising that one of the spines from the brolly was sticking in my neck, I pulled it out and then realised that I was bleeding heavily from a puncture wound on my neck. Thankfully and due to my drunken state, I never panicked. I never did anything. I just stood feeling blood pumping out of my neck and my friend’s perplexed face, impotent to assist due to his drunkenness, and probably the sheer randomness of it. I took my shirt off and held it tight against my neck and made for home (which was a bout 800m away). Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t like a samurai movie where the blood is misting out like a garden sprinkler, or like a horror slash and gash movie, heaving out like someone has struck oil, but it was coming out at a fair rate.
I got home and into the kitchen and took the shirt away, the blood was still pumping out with every heart beat. It was at this point, that the stupidity of the whole thing, paved way for a whole new level of stupid, and I decided to call my girlfriend and tell her exactly what was happening.
The phone rang for some time (as it does when someone is fast asleep) she answered, confused, but asked me if I was ok. No thought for my own safety, I just told her as it was. “I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding from my neck, I love you, I just wanted you to know”- At the time, I think I must have thought that saying this would be quite romantic, and that if I died she would at least know that, what it had actually done, ringing someone who was 40 miles away, was highlight just what a complete unabridged tool she was now going out with. “What happened” She enquired. I was confused, if I told her the brolly story verbatim, I’m single, I can’t lie to her though, I settled for the bare physics of the event, the brolly exploded, which technically it did, she didn’t need to know that I was the “chemical agent” in this explosion.
I can’t remember what happened to the call at this point but it ended quite soon after this. I managed to stem the bleeding; it took a while of just sitting still, and calmly. My dopey mate had sat the whole time looking perplexed and open jawed. I hadn’t helped by giving him the frankly ludicrous instruction of only calling an ambulance if I passed out.
Once I had confirmed that bleeding had stopped by touching this flappy cap of skin I looked at him across the table with completely burgundy hands and a shirt looking like I had just got in from the tomato fight in Spain. I washed my hands and asked him if he wanted a bacon sandwich, he didn’t. I went to bed and slept in a drunken but relieved way. I woke up embarrassed and had to salvage the relationship and get myself together for Amsterdam.
Right, just to be clear, this event was a one off, I’ve not had a single other episode in my life where I have drunkenly professed to be a knight and nearly killed myself with a brolly sword, I hate knights, ok, I don’t even know why I did it that one time. Are we clear? I’m not a fuck wit ok, I’m actually quite sensible, I nearly died in a shower and by choking to death on a family sized swiss roll in a car park in Croydon while bunking college, but that’s it, I need to be clear that by publishing this, you discount me as a fuckwit, it was nearly 9 years ago and the swiss roll thing was almost 20 years, are we good? Cool. [What a fuckwit?]
(a fuckwit <<<)
Sadly, and unbeknownst to my now ex. I went to Amsterdam with the zeal and vigour of someone who had somehow “cheated death” (and not just stemmed the bleeding of a reasonably bloody neck wound), and a fucking Darwin award, and so, given this bonus of extra life, would go shit or bust in Amsterdam. If I was destined to be a Darwin award, I’d decided that it was going to be the first human to legitimately overdose from cannabis. Fuck it.
We arrived and checked in to the cheap hotel, the room predictably by the fucking 6am laundry shoot, and the outlet for the 6am chip fryer on the ground floor. We dumped our stuff and went straight out, and straight to my coffee shop of choice (after looking bemused at the small men looking at the 25 stone Nigerian hookers in windows). We arrived at Homegrown Fantasy, and went through the predictable warnings of how strong their stuff is, it really fucking is, its not just weed, it’s the whole science behind it (a flash back to the first time I went to Amsterdam and spent an evening clinging onto the side of a military camp bed in a £12 no star “hotel” believing I was going to float out of the tall Dutch window and to my death) I nodded, in an attempted learned fashion, and we brought two large slices of hash cake and some shit called desert eagle or something ridiculous and headed back to the hotel room.
Ignoring the warnings to have just half a slice each, we wolfed them down with tea and then had a few joints in the hotel room. Given my mates utter drug virginity, when the stuff kicked in he started to tremble and quaked a bit, slowly rocking back and forth as he went from a reasonably competent cognitive human being, to something with the intelligence of something from the salad cart in Harvester. My concern turned inwards when too, I started to shut down like an infected Windows XP on a slow laptop. As I felt the swirliness of the hash cake kicking in, I bid my poor mate farewell and went into emergency shut down, my final vision of him was convulsing on the bed, like John Hurt in Alien, and he was whiter than a KKK member’s uniform after a Persil boil wash. 
Several crazy dreams later I awoke to find it was the early hours of the morning and I couldn’t move much, I turned to see my poor mate exactly as I left him, rocking slowly like a mad Nan, I asked him if he was alright, but he answered with about as much info as you would get off a caeser salad. I tried to get up to piss but it took me about 20 minutes to get off the bed and to the toilet (which was at the end of the bed pretty much), then it was like trying to pee out of a hypodermic needle. In the actual morning, I told him I was sorry, and asked him how he had felt, he said it was “different” and not entirely unpleasant. We went for a walk, and then back to the Homegrown fantasy for more of the same. It was that night I attempted the pointless overdose which of course failed, you can’t overdose on week, you can only get long term mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia etc (shit). Anyway, I’ve admitted a lot on here, sorry it wasn’t full of stories of prostitution, fruit insertion, vaginal table tennis etc. Not my thing I’m afraid.
This story started with an umbrella, so it may as well end with one. I’m not a fan of them, I have to run the gauntlet of the different sized people rushing through drizzly London with them arched forward like a medieval battle, and the blokes with the massive Corporate ones which are wider than the pavement whishing around like a cunty capitalist be-suited Mary Poppins and the worst of all, the fucking older pratt with the shit perm, which is guarding her hair with her life. She is practically deflecting the rain, and she doesn’t care about your eyes, she is protecting her “do” with her life, looking like a shit Willy Wonka with a thin layer of lipstick she actually looks like a poodles rear end, but it doesn’t matter, everyone has their OCD, and hers is getting water on her shit barnet. I’ve had my eyes raked by an errant brollying before, it was like a drive by. I went nuts.
This morning was like the Chariot racing scene in Ben Hur, it was coming down hard, I had a brolly for once and smashed someone else’s out of the way, who was about 5ft 5 and didn’t seem to care for anyone else, as long as he was OK, I managed to slip a “you fucking cunt” in. My inner dialogue is getting louder, and my mannerisms more obvious as I get older. For example, me, a 36 year old dad should never walk behind a fucking faux fat Eminem rude boy prick walking along the train platform with that ridiculous bowl, as if they have recently had a hip replacement, not only imitating it, but pulling a School Yard “spaz face”. I’ll get caught out one day and probably punched up a bit, but I’m getting older disgracefully and things get on my nerves and I CANT KEEP IT IN...
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