Hiccups are shit

A mate of mine had congenital hiccups. Seriously. He was born with them, lived with them, and couldn’t get rid of them no matter how many specialists he saw, how many remedies he tried, and how hard we hit him in the chest. Nothing could shake them.

In the end it got too much for him. They caused him to drop out of uni, he couldn’t sleep properly, and he couldn’t hold down a job. He’d often say to me, “Chris *hic* these fuc*hic*king hiccups are ruining my *hic* fucking life *hic*.”

It was a shame. He was a bright, funny lad, and if it hadn’t been for his hyper-sensitive diaphragm, I’m sure he could have gone on and had a miserable, meaningless life of mediocrity like the rest of us.

But he didn’t. One day I came home and found him dead on the floor of my lounge, beside him an empty bottle of vodka, and an empty bottle of pills.

“NO!” I screamed. “NO HICCUPING DAVE. WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS?” I ran up to him and shook his limp, lifeless body. “HICCUPING DAVE. YOU STUPID BASTARD. YOU STUPID, STUPID BASTARD. WHY? WHY HICCUPING DAVE? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? I’D BEEN SAVING THAT BOTTLE OF VODKA FOR GEMMA’S HOUSE PARTY NEXT WEEK.”

OK, so I made all that up. But so fucking what? It’s what I do. But I don’t want the fact I’m an attention seeking liar to detract from the awfulness of hiccups. They are not a subject for jokes. They are serious. And a real fucking pain.

A few weeks ago I had a terrible dose of them after a night on the ale. I was walking from central London down to Charing Cross to get my train home, but these fucking hiccups wouldn’t leave me be. They were relentless. And having suffered the shock of losing a made-up friend to hiccups in the past, I knew I couldn’t risk letting these little fuckers settle in for any period of time.

Whilst walking, I’d been holding my breath for longer than David Blaine, and my lips were turning a shade of liver that was worrying me. Just as I was about to pass out, I passed the Everwell Chinese Medicine Centre on Charing Cross Road. They could, they claimed, cure any ailment. Which was superb, just so long as they could cure the ailment I had, not one I didn’t have.

I walked in and explained the situation to the man. It took a long time to convey the problem. Partially because I had hiccups, but also because I was drunk, and I’m a fat tongued, inarticulate idiot. Finally the fella got the gist of it, told me to sit down, and wandered off to the back of the shop. He reappeared moments later holding a small white tablet, and a plastic cup of water.

“Here. Take.” he said with a directness and a clarity that made it impossible for me to fuck up. I took the tablet, and popped it in my mouth, washing it down with the water. “Here is your bill.”

I took the piece of paper and unfolded it. I read it. It said £200. I turned the bill over, turned it back, again, and re-read it. It still said £200.

“TWO HUNDRED POUNDS?!” I shrieked in a voice so high pitch we both winced. “TWOHUNDREDFUCKINGPOUNDS?! For what? A little tablet? A shitty little white tablet? And some water? What was it: A real pearl and a chalice of unicorn tears? One of God’s teeth washed down by the authentic piss of Christ? A tiny little universe in the shape of an aspirin, and a cup of, of, of….” I was running out of steam, and was hoping for the man to butt in and tell me to shut the fuck up. But he kept schtum. I felt the need to fill the silence.

“You pirate. You thief. You miserable bandit. You robbing, conniving, little, shit. How fucking dare you? How dare you charge me £200 for that shitty little tablet and shitty little cup of water?”

The man started laughing. “HAHAHAHAHA!” he boomed as he snatched the bill out of my hand, crumpled it in to a little ball and threw it on the floor. “HAHAHAHAHA. Stupid boy. STUPID BOY! HAHAHAHAHA. Where are your hiccups? They’ve gone! HAHAHAHAHA. Now get out of my shop.”

“You mean…?” I asked meekly. The pill had been a placebo. Probably just an aspirin, or a vitamin tablet or something. It certainly didn’t cure hiccups, and it definitely didn’t cost £200.

“YES! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Best thing for hiccups, a big shock. Now, get out of my shop, stupid boy.”

Welcome home! Here’s your present.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently, which has seen my average daily visitors slump from a mind-bendingly high 16, to a gut-wrenchingly shit 4. To the twelve who left me, I offer you nothing but the two fingered salute. For those who stayed, you get the same, but blame the others for putting me in a bad mood.

(I popped up to Lancaster for a week of rest and relaxation, and feel moved to point out that my arrival back in town, and the story in the Lancaster Guardian about the recent spike in STDs, is complete coincidence)

My cat, Roxie, has been delighted to see me. She has been following me around the house, and looking for a cuddle pretty much non stop. She’s been a proper pain in the dot. At around five o’clock this morning, my bladder full from about six litres of cheap squash (I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I figured I may as well get off my tits on Kia Ora) I went to the toilet for a bit. I took my Nintendo DS with me so I could sit in peace and play ‘Lego Indiana Jones’ without disturbing the missus.

I was sat on the throne completing the Well Of Souls level when the cat tried to force herself under the door. She couldn’t fit, of course, but it was a good effort and prompted me to open the door and let her in. Which is a strange move, as I’m fairly private about my morning ablutions, and would usually scoff at letting even a cat see me shit. In fact, I even go so far as to close and lock the bathroom door even when I know I’m the only person in the house. I need to feel safe when I crap, I guess.

Roxie buzzed around the bathroom for a bit, purring, and rubbing herself up against my legs. She did what sounded like a little hiccup, which made me laugh, then vomited an enormous quantity of puke in to the pants around my ankles, which didn’t.

It’s the sort of start to the day that makes you wonder if it’s worth ever getting out of bed, isn’t it? So much so that I’m back off to bed. I can’t risk more of this sort of shit happening to me today.

Factory Record

My girlfriend, and my Mum, who I’m pretty certain are colluding over this, keep asking me when I’m going to get a ‘proper’ job.

“I’m a writer!” I explain in an exasperated tone, whilst adjusting my beret and twirling my bum-fluff moustache. “This is a proper job.”

This is despite the fact that I only started (hilariously) describing myself as a writer when I was a waiting tables in an horrific Italian chain restaurant, and felt insignificant next to all the actors, artists and musicians.

It’s no surprise I don’t want to enter the rat race (and on a slight tangent, there was an ace Channel 5 documentary on the other night about a charity in Mozambique that has trained rats to sniff out landmines, it was great, there are clips on YouTube, have a look) when all my mates do is whinge about office politicking and the interminable dullness of their life. OK, I may be permanently broke and miserable, but so are they, and they can’t sleep in until Loose Women has finished.

I’ve worked pretty much every shit job you’d like to name (binman, waiter, barman, Manager of Manchester city) but easily the worst was when I worked on a production line in a pre-packed sandwich factory in the Fens. I needed a job desperately as I’d run out of rum and fresh limes, and was in danger of sobering up for the first time in about four years. So I signed on at an agency, got an advance on my pay from my Dad, and bought two bottles of Havana Club from Bargain Booze and went back to pretending to be Ernest Hemmingway in Havana rather than Chris Taylor in Lincolnshire.

I lasted three days in the factory. On the fourth day, when the mini-bus was due to pick me up, I shut all the curtains at home, turned all the lights off, and hid under the bed with my phone off. There was no way I was going back to that place. People had been there for thirty years, they told me. And I couldn’t last three days. It wasn’t that the work was hard, it wasn’t. It was more that it seemed like some form of horrendous, mental torture. Everything about the place seemed to be geared to driving me insane. From the freezing temperatures, to the mindless idiots (this is not an attack on all factory workers, by the way, not by any means. Just the fucking imbeciles I was forced to work with) in my team, to the way the management played Mel C’s ‘Northern Star’ album on repeat for twelve, long, consecutive hours as a motivational tool. That proved to be the final straw for me. It was at that point I vowed never to come back.

I just didn’t seem to fit in there. I was different to everyone else. Not better. Just different. We had to continually wash our hands in anti-bacterial hand wash. “I hope this has some sort of moisturising agent in.” I quipped. “Nothing worse than dry hands, is there?” No one laughed. Not even a smirk. Hell, a look of disgust or disquiet would have done. I vowed never to speak to anyone there again.

I had got chatting to one woman and her husband at lunch on my first day. A member of staff had been removed from the canteen and sent home for the day for openly masturbating in the middle of the room. I filed the tactic away in my mind just in case things got really bad and I needed a quick escape. (”QUICK! Another one’s wanking! Call security!”). It was an instant ice-breaker, and the couple saw my look of horror and fell about laughing. They explained that I’d get used to seeing stuff like that, and that the fella in question was always at it, like a safari park chimp.

The woman explained how she had been working on the production line for five years now. She lived in Boston and had, she claimed, used to be a QC, but found the stress and responsibility too great and so had packed it in. I marvelled at that. From being a lawyer, to having to put up with this shit for twelve hours a day? She must have been more bored than I was. I decided then that if she could do it, I should stop moaning and just get on wit it. I’ve always had a childish kind of respect for people opting out of society and just doing what makes them happy instead. And this woman seemed more than happy.

It only occurred to me weeks after I’d left the factory that when she said she was a QC, she didn’t mean a Queen’s Counsel, but a Quality Controller – the person responsible for the output of a production line and whose responsibilities go so far as to give them a different coloured hair net. It was a hammer blow to my young and naive ideals.

I’ve had more boring jobs. And more physically arduous. But I have never had a job that was such a relentless assault on my mind. I reckon I got out just in time. Another few days and I’d have ended up a humourless, mindless, automaton, like some kind of hair net wearing, sandwich filling Dr Who baddie.

I’d like to thank my Mam, my Dad, Baby Jesus, Josh and Eric Cantona

Finally, the recognition I feel I deserve. I’ve won the prestigious and glittering ‘Post of the Week’, from the lovely folks at, erm, postoftheweek.com.

“Terrance’s adept story-telling,” they reckon, misspelling my name, “made me laugh out loud – long, and hard – and so for that he gets the prize.”

Which is great news for me. It means I’m batting three for three in writing based competitions – the other two being Channel 4’s Young Journalist of the Year and the Virgin Atlantic flight VS026 to Orlando in-flight Poetry Competition.

Fame and infamy is just around the corner people. And here’s a Virgin Atlantic based archive piece to celebrate the achievement. I’m far too important to come up with decent original material now.

“On Jan. 19, Virgin Atlantic Flight 27 was en route to Florida when a threat was found scrawled on a bathroom mirror. The message, “American must die,” was written in soap, officials said.”

So begins the report on the CBS News website, detailing the story surrounding the trial and conviction of the member of flight crew who left the message.

This story is fairly important to me as I was on Flight 27 to Orlando. We were a good five hours in to the flight when we had to turn back to Iceland. I was half way through whichever God awful inflight movie Virgin had decided to thrust upon us as we wobbled our way down the emergency vehicle lined runway at Keflavik Airport. It was, I seem to remember, a scene reminiscent of the closing ten minutes of Die Hard 2. But with less Bruce Willis.

In moments of aeroplane based emergency, I tend to look to my father (a frequent flyer through business) for reassurance. Usually he sits in a state of zen like calm, a default position for my Dad. But as we came in to land in Iceland, he was pale and visibly stirred (not shaken, my Dad is far to cool to ever get shaken). This made me feel very bad indeed.

At this point we didn’t know fully what had happened. We had only been told that a message had been found on board, and that in the current political climate these things had to be taken seriously. And so despite being almost over land in North America, and despite us all wearing our Florida Holiday clothes, we turned back to Iceland where we would eventually spend 24 hours being interrogated by the FBI.

When we landed we were told to collect our belongings and were herded off the plane, by US Military personnel, and in to buses. From the runway we were driven to massive hangers, where we had our hand luggage tagged, taken away from us, searched, and given back to us. From there were we put back on the bus and we waited. For hours.

I don’t know how long we were on that bus for, it seemed to last for fucking days. People were cracking jokes, trying to make light of the situation, but all I could think was “I’m supposed to be in Disney World”. I didn’t see the fun in sitting on a runway in a desolate part of Iceland being interrogated by the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

My Dad could see the worry and discontent on my face and he did something I will never forget. He managed to smuggle his mobile phone on to his person and called home to my Grandma and find out the football scored. “Manchester United beat Blackburn 2-1.” He told me. “Van Nistelrooy scored a penalty meaning he’s set a new Premiership record for scoring in consecutive games.”

From then my mood lightened. Ruud and my Dad had combined to make this brief sojourn to Iceland acceptable. Not even the food we were provided with – mushroom soup followed by fish – could dampen my mood. As we were driven to the hotel we were to stay in, we saw the Northern Lights. People gasped and gawped and looked in awe. It was one of those magical moments you never forget. But I knew it wasn’t the Northern Lights. I realised straight away what it was. It was the Sun shining out of Ruud’s arse, lighting up the way home just for me.

On the cusp of death

My life, while not going swimmingly right now, isn’t quite at the stage where I want to end it. Yet earlier today, about four hours ago, I found myself in a horrible position where I didn’t know if I was going to die, or live.

I’m not sure how I want to tell this story. The narcissist in me wants to arrange some kind of clever narrative, like in ‘American Beauty’, where my death (or near death, I mustn’t forget that I’m still, technically, alive) is the start of the tale, and we work backwards from that point. Which, I suppose, is essentially what I’ve done with this aimless, irritating preamble. So forget all this guff, and we’ll start, as my Mum used to tell me to do, at the beginning.

My girlfriend has to get up early to leave for work. At about quarter to seven this morning she was swanning round in her usual panic, barking instructions at me. I was tired, and grumpy, and still mostly asleep. I payed little attention to her orders, preferring instead to try and recapture the dream I was having about a beach, a lighthouse, and a large, shaggy dog. But the moment had gone. In my dream the dog started yapping loudly and incessantly at me, trying to tell me what shopping I needed to get and telling me not to forget to do stuff I’d failed to memorise in the first place, let alone forget. The peace, and solitude, and happiness had gone, to be replaced by the drudgery of everyday life.

I woke up, eventually at about half ten, and spent the next two hours dicking about on the internet, playing Brian Lara Cricket on the PS2, and drinking tea. In the back of my head I was desperately trying to remember what it was I was told I had to buy today. I knew there was something, as not only could I recall the sound of being told what to do, I’d found a pile of money that had been left to pay for it. I flirted with the idea of taking the money and fucking off to the pub to get drunk with it instead, but I must be maturing, as I soon realised this would be a grossly stupid move.

Milk? Bread? Teabags? I was listing things we seem to buy a lot of, in the hope it would jog my memory. Washing powder? Cat food? Ah! That was it. The cat has fleas, and we need some Frontline flea stuff from the vets. I stuck my jeans on, threw on a pair of flip-flops, and began to walk the short distance to the vets.

As I got out of the back door, I realised it was raining lightly. This was nearly enough to make me go indoors and stick on some shoes and a jacket. But fuck it, I thought, it’s not far to go, and it’s not like it’s pissing down, is it? I looked

to the sky to check the clouds, and there was an absence of what my Dad calls ‘thunder boomers’ but what experts call cumulonimbus (or something). So I braved it as I was.

This, I guess, was my mistake. There’s a little cut I travel down to get near the vets. It’s an alleyway between two lots of terraces. At the top of the alley, there’s about a dozen or so concrete stairs, and at the top of these, with the concrete wet from the drizzle, and my flip-flops greasy from, well, fuck knows what, I slipped.

I felt my feet go from under me right. I slid along for what seemed like seconds, just waiting to smash face first in to each of the dozen or so steps, down in to the alleyway. “I knew I should have put some fucking shoes on!” I almost, but didn’t yell, too busy was I bracing myself against the imminent danger of neck breaking.

But as soon as the slip started, it stopped. Right at my heel. I was balancing, precariously over the edge. Teetering even. Like the bus at the end of ‘The Italian Job’. I looked down, looked around, and placed my foot in a safer position. A cold sweat was now mingling with the rain. “That.” I said to no one in particular, “Was fucking close.”

I bought the cat flea stuff, and came home the way I went, determined not to be phased or intimidated by the experience. Later on the girlfriend phoned to make sure I’d got the shopping, I told her I had, but neglected to mention my near death experience. I didn’t want to panic her at work, and I may never tell her, such is her fragile state of mind at the moment.

Tupac Lives

It seems news of Tupac’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

When I worked in the pool hall in Grantham I saw a mate of mine on X Factor or Popstars, or one of those shows. He hadn’t told anyone he was going on, or that he’d been on, he just found himself in Manchester on the day of the audition (he was a removal man) and went for it. He sang that Ronan Keating song about saying it best when you say nothing at all. Which in my mate’s case, was very fucking apt. Anyway, he didn’t get the hilarious slating I hoped, but apparently he was told he had a good look for a boy band, but not the vocal strength to be a solo singer. Which was a very diplomatic way of saying you’re shit but at least you’re not ugly.

Anyway, this guy was the person who first told me that Tupac wasn’t actually dead. He mentioned something about Tupac wearing a pair of Nikes in his video that weren’t released until after he died (and reading that link, I bet he wore a size seven). When I pressed him on this total bullshit, he assured me that Tupac had staged his death to get out of the media spotlight, and retreated to a quiet suburban life-style somewhere unremarkable to avoid detection.

I voiced my opinion that I found it all very hard to believe and he replied that until he had met Tupac himself, seen him with his very own eyes, he too was a non believer.

“Hang on.” I said. “You’ve met Tupac?”

Apparently on one of his removal jobs he went to get chips from a chippy in Mansfield and Tupac was working behind the counter. He had had severe cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance, so much so that he was now white. He still went by the name Tupac (obviously), and still wore his trademark bandanna.

“I mean,” he said, “I didn’t believe him at first, but then why would he lie?”

I stopped knocking about with this guy not long after. I couldn’t work out if he was crazy because he’d concocted this whole story, or if he was crazy because he believed the guy who’d concocted this whole story. Either way, it was time for me to move on and stop going drinking with these absolute fruit bats.

All of which came flooding back to me when I read this article in the Observer Music Monthly magazine from a while back. There’s some bad craziness in this world, I think.

The perfect bacon sandwich

On a message board I occasionally (ie 22 hours out of the 24 I have allotted to me daily) venture on to, someone posted a question ‘what is the perfect bacon sandwich?’. This is an unspeakably tough thing to ask. I thought I had the answer, and then I came up with a better one, which in turn proved to be not as good as the next one I thought up. This chain of bacon butty one-upmanship went on for some time, until I decided to ignore the question and concentrate on more pressing aspects of my life, such as getting a job, having a shave, and completing the final historical challenge on Brian Lara Cricket on the Playstation 2.

In the end, the guy from the forum plumped for the slightly modish and rakish, ‘bacon in a white roll with brown sauce’. I think simplicity could be the key here, but I don’t want to think too hard about it again, I lost two days of my life to this puzzle, and that’s two more than I can spare.

It turned out that this guy was impressing, or trying to impress his new missus with their first breakfast in bed. My, I thought, how noble. If I ever get them to the stage where they need breakfast, it’s usually a fair bet a simple bacon sandwich isn’t going to rescue the evening.

A few years ago I, when I was manager of a bar in Lancaster, I got chatting to a customer who had come in for some lunch. She’d come in with a group of her studenty friends and she was, I’m at pains to point out, fairly easy on the eye. I did my whole relaxed, funny guy schtick, and she mentioned she’d be at a club that evening and if I was out and about, I should meet up with her. Just, you know, if I fancied it. Being as cool as Paul Newman and Johan Cruyff put together, I played it down, and suggested I was busy, but if there was a window of opportunity (I didn’t actually use the term ‘window of opportunity’, that would have ruined everything) I’d pop down and see her.

Of course I was there. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, my Grandad used to tell me, without fully explaining what a gift horse is or was. I bought her a drink, we had a little dance and at the end of the night she was asking if she could walk me home, which was an amusingly forward swapping of gender roles.

When we got to my flat, and had partaken in a session of what swimming pool warning posters call ‘heavy petting’, she asked if I had any protection. I had a small can of pepper spray my mate had bought me home from France, but this, she assured me, wasn’t what she had in mind. We both went to bed slightly frustrated, but I promised her that in the morning, I would remedy the situation.

Morning came, and I got dressed and legged it down to the local super market. As well as picking up ’something for the weekend’ I decided to wow her with a sumptuous breakfast spread. I got some croissants, bonne maman jam, orange juice, and some fruit salad. I really went to town on the stereotypical, trying too hard to be romantic, breakfast. My basket was overflowing with products that could salvage this one night stand gone bad, and hopefully transform it in to a full day of filthy, gymnastic, animalistic sex.

When I got back to the flat, the girl was stirring from her sleep. I told her I’d popped out to get supplies and presented her with a breakfast in bed which I hoped would persuade her that her immediate future lay with me. It worked a treat. It was textbook stuff. She leaned over to me and kissed me, “Did you get those condoms then?” she asked.

“Oh bollocks.” I replied. “I fucking forgot.”

I had spent so long thinking about breakfast, the sole purpose of my mission to Sainsbury’s had slipped my mind. After I walked her home, I never saw her again.

I’m not Jack Bauer. Or Danny Wallace.

Danny Wallace, in his latest phoned-in offering in Shortlist Magazine, recounted how he twice foiled shoplifters in Boots on Regent Street. He’s nuts, man. Why place yourself in harm’s way like that? Was he getting paid for it? Did he stand to gain anything from this act of altruistic heroism? Did he bollocks. I suppose, knowing he has a weekly column in one of the less shit freeby papers to fill, he’s got to put himself in these positions, but I still think he was foolish. I’d rather Boots lost a thousand pounds worth of shower gels than risk getting my face punched in, or my indoor supers scuffed. But hey, this says a lot about me, and a lot about Danny Wallace, I suppose.

A couple of Christmases ago, I was shopping for presents in Boots, Lancaster. I had intended to get my girlfriend some perfume, the DKNY red delicious, but they only had the green. Or vice versa, I forget the details (Danny Wallace wouldn’t have, and that’s why he’s writing for Shortlist, and I’m writing for, well, no one). So instead I decided to buy myself some haribo star mix and a tracker bar. I needed sustenance if I was going to make it out of Boots at Christmas time. Sustenance and brain food.

Trying to find my way out of the throng of mentalists that made up the clientele, I bumped in to a guy I know, who used to drink in the Wetherspoons I worked at. He was a little bald Manc, as dodgy as any stereotype I wish to throw at him, and under his arms he had loads of gift boxes.

“Alright mate? He said. “Doing some last minute Christmas shopping?” He must have noticed the tracker bar in my hand I suppose.

I didn’t answer straight away. I had a mouth full of nuts and oats, and this was one person I didn’t want to shower in them. Though a muesli face pack is an excellent way to exfoliate, or so I’m told. But now, just as it wasn’t back then, isn’t the time to get in to a discussion about that. I rapidly finished my mouthful of Tracker, and replied, “Yeah.”

“Well,” said the dodgy Manc, “Meet me in Ruxtons (a rough pub in town named, appropriately enough, after a famous Lancaster murderer) in quarter of an hour, you can buy some of these off me.” And with that he slipped the gift boxes under his jacket and disappeared in to the crowds.

Blimey, I thought. How rude. Shall I tell a staff member? Shall I call a police officer? Or maybe perform a citizen’s arrest? I did none of those things. I was fairly stressed as it was, and I could do without having to take an hour or two out of my day to deal with the bureaucracy that surrounds being a hero. So I let him go his way, and I went mine, which was to Accessorize, to get the missus a hairband, or bangle, or cheap ring that turned her finger green.

I suppose a good pay off would have been if I’d gone to meet him at Ruxton’s and bought the DKNY gift set I was looking for. But I didn’t. And I’m not going to lie, because it would also have been a criminal offense. And as well as not be bothered with having to deal with the bureaucracy of heroism, the same stands for villainy. I’m content, you know, just being anonymous, and occasionally straddling that oh so thin line between good and bad. Like Ghost Rider, but with more skin and fewer flames.

Which reminds me. A few months later whilst walking home from the pub with a kebab and bottle of 7 Up, I stumbled across a bin some idiots had set on fire. The damage had been done, and just a few smouldering embers were left. But these, having been a member of my school’s Fire Prevention Youth Quiz Team, could still be dangerous. I can’t abide danger. So I emptied my 7 Up over the remnants of the fiery disaster, and stamped out the rest. No one was there to see my act of derring do, and until today I’d not told anyone about it. I didn’t let it affect my life, and I didn’t want the limelight. As I say, I’m happy with anonymity.

That’s a real hero, Danny Wallace.