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Sunday, October 03, 2004

anecdotes

listening to giles giles and fripp –
there is an art to telling a good story, some of us have and some of us don’t. think of all the times you have been out with friends and they are telling a story and something is just not right about it – perhaps they laugh too much at what they think is funny, perhaps they embellish the pointless aspects of the tale, maybe they just rush it, or may they just tell it straight. it’s the reason we love storytellers. for the rest of us we go about our days telling stories and hope that occasionally we get it right.
so on that note i have a tale to tell of a night out with old school friends, of a coffee, of a curry and then a trip to the pub. i make no bones about it i am a lousy storyteller, and i will not do this story justice but believe me it does fall into the category – you just had to be there.
over the last year an old school friend (hi joel) and myself have gotten into a routine of meeting every fortnight for a coffee and a curry. it’s a nice way to end the week and start the weekend. we swap copies of cds we have copied for each other – growing our music tastes along the way, we share tales of woe about how work is not going the way we want to, we plot future art extravaganzas we have planned (and you will all be invited to that first exhibition we give) but mostly we just chat about nothing.
this week another of our old school friends came along to join in the fun. in order to keep his identity secret i shall call him phil. i have not seen phil for 3 years, joel has not seen him for even longer maybe 10 or more years. so it would be fair to say we were all a little anxious to see what would happen. phil has been successful in his chosen career as an accountant, he has enjoyed himself when not working by being an amateur athlete and being an avid gig goer, and happily involved with the same woman for 12 or so years. i would say that phil is a very decent person, with a good heart. but phil is also one of the world’s great eccentrics – odd in a charming way that is almost beyond description, that being the case i am not even going to try to explain how eccentric other than saying he followed simple minds on much of their recent tour and then capped it off by seeing sampled minds the cover bands version of simple minds.
neither joel nor me expected phil to arrive, but he did.
for someone who has to make important decisions about the future of the company he works for i have never seen anyone so nervous about buying coffees at coffee@ anyone would have thought he was asking them for a dildo and a tube of ky. for the next 20 minutes or so we get the are you sure you want me to be here etc. there were a couple of times when i thought he would just get up and leave.
the coffee was good and then the curry we had was good as well. then we went off to the pub – now i have to admit i am not a great lover of pubs, especially as they all seem to want to play the music so loud as to make it impossible to hear each other speak. the plus side is that the pub is normally filled with interesting people – a mix of the young, hip and trendy and the rich city workers (sadly i don’t fit any of those categories).
it was here that we heard the story of the week (and perhaps the point of this rambling story).
there is no way i can replicate this as it happened it was surreal enough when it was being told to us, almost like a william burroughs cut up story, and i recall it only in a haze that seems to occur to people who have been abducted by aliens and are then trying to recount what happened. i am not even sure how we got to the subject but phil started telling us about a scandinavian girl who he had met in order to go to see simple minds in liverpool, it was all to do with the simple minds fan club. so he tells us how he thinks she was coming on to him – because when she was in his room showing him her pictures from the gig she bumped his hips with hers, they were kneeling down next to the bed and the camera was on the bed. her vagina was in an odd place… what…. how did he know… she was showing it to him….. what she stripped off….. no she came to his room in a nightie in order to show him her tattoo… a simple minds one on her arm and oh look there is one near her vagina that she wants to show him. she had told him on the way back from the gig that she would come to his room. she was going to have sex with him but he couldn’t get it up – he had given blood during the week so he was down 20% of his blood and so no way it was going to get up. but that was ok he didn’t want sex anyway as he is happily involved and besides they are simple minds fans …. except he had an 18 pack of condoms with him…. oh and she sends him pictures of her semi clothed over the internet.
both joel and me were flabbergasted to say the least.
it was a great tale, you had to be there and the moral of the story is "if you are going to meet scandinavian women do not give blood the week before."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

nope he has become a ladies man - the rogue.