So hot it burns your fingers

Winchester Cathedral Grounds, 2001

I jarred my coccyx pretty badly coming off the starting blocks in athletics way back in Year 7 – proof, in my opinion, that fat kids should never be forced into sports – and it still plays up to this day. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, I wake up unable to bend properly, and I have to walk like I have a stick up my ass for a couple of days. It’s hella sexy.

This was one of those times. I was lying, sprawled out in the Cat Grounds, contemplating the last of the vodka and trying to will myself back upright with the vague notion of catching a bus home. College had finished a couple of hours ago, but in those days I was never in much of a hurry to go home and negotiate my step-father, and my mother had taken a relaxed approach to my time-keeping given the circumstances.

I pulled myself up gingerly, feeling significantly closer to 60 than 16, and squinted through my vodka-haze at the car that had just pulled up at the gates. Cunt Girl was behind the wheel.

I hobbled over.

“Do you want a lift home?”

“More than I want to go wait in the bus station for a fucking hour.”

Everyone shifted over and I folded myself into the back. The car was full of smoke.

“Thanks for this, seriously. I didn’t even realise you got your licence.”

Cunt Girl looked at me mischievously in the rear view mirror.

“I didn’t.”

I fastened my seatbelt.

“So whose car is this?”

His reflection grinned at me.

“Don’t worry, we’ll give it back.”

Hell, it still beat the bus.

“Fine. Who’s rolling?”

As we set off through the back streets of Winchester, it was clear that Cunt Girl’s grasp of the Highway Code was somewhat rudimentary. He seemed to favour a bullet-dodging zig-zag trajectory, and was largely ignoring that pesky white dotted line down the centre of the roads. Still, I knew that we were home free once we hit Hursley, which was basically rural Hampshire with an IBM building stuck in the middle of it.

“Do you want a go?” Cunt Girl asked.

“Nah, I’m never learning to drive. Come September, suburbia can go fuck itself.”

Christ, drunk 16-year-old me was a cock.

“Fair enough,” Cunt Girl shrugged. “It’s Fuck-Up’s turn next then.”

Ten minutes later, they dropped me off on the crossroads near my parents’ house. I couldn’t quite face going home, so I propped myself up on my own personalised fence – the one that read “FUCK THE SYSTEM” in 6-foot-high letters – and chain-smoked until it was dark.

Later, I learnt that Fuck-Up hit a pheasant on the way into Basingstoke. Beyond that, I never thought to ask what became of the car.

The young and prodigious #wifebanter Film Festival

When we’re rich and famous Nic and I are going to have our own film festival, because fuck Cannes in the face.

The guest list comprises of five categories of directors, with seven names in each category. It changes constantly, but this is how it stands today. Later, Nic will probably crack open the vodka and shout at me about missing out Von Trier (I’m more Dogma than Dogme 95), while I’ll chain-smoke and fight in John Landis’ corner, because I’m a sucker for a man in a gorilla suit.

1. Allowed the good whiskey

Quentin Tarantino

John Waters

Guillermo del Toro

Darren Aronofsky

The Coen Brothers (we see them as a single, squishily conjoined entity)

Dario Argento

Martin McDonagh

2. General admission

Kevin Smith

David Lynch

George A. Romero

Edgar Wright

Álex de la Iglesia

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Wes Anderson

3. Made to sit in the corner and think about what they’ve done

Pedro Almodóvar

Ridley Scott

Sam Raimi

Wes Craven

David Cronenberg

Luc Besson

Tim Burton

4. Personae non gratae

George Lucas

Steven Spielberg

James Cameron

Michael Bay

Paul W.S. Anderson

Uwe Boll

Steve McQueen

5. Worthy of re-animation

Lucio Fulci

Stanley Kubrick

Alfred Hitchcock

John Hughes

Tony Scott

Jim Henson

Sidney Lumet

Finally, just to bug Nic, here’s a list of people we haven’t argued about yet:

Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorcese, David Fincher, Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee, Roman Polanski, Oliver Stone, ANY FUCKING COPPOLAS, Hayao Miyazaki, William Friedkin, Zack Snyder.

The Copenhagen interpretation of deep-fried tofu

The Haus of Goth, 2010

I let myself into the Haus at about four in the afternoon. My own place, semi-affectionately dubbed The House that Cider Built, had run out of electricity again, and I needed to get some work done.

Thankfully I’d been given my own key to the Haus months ago. It was partly a gesture of trust, but mostly because Niall, Nic and Richey had gotten sick of throwing their keys down to me from their lounge window every time I turned up on their doorstep.

I turned up most days.

No one was due home for a couple of hours, so I went through to the aforementioned lounge to settle in, armed with my netbook and a fresh two-litre bottle of Pepsi. Cut me and I bleed caffeine.

The large cardboard box from the Chinese takeaway we’d ordered a couple of nights earlier was sat, rather incongruously, in the centre of the coffee table. There was a note taped to its side, a hastily-written scrawl in red permanent marker:

“There’s a bird inside. It may or may not be dead.”

Great, I thought. Schrödinger’s bird.

I dumped my stuff down on the sofa and dug my phone out to text Niall.

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?”

The reply came back almost instantly. Either that or time had ground to a halt in my mind as I stood, transfixed, in the aura of the bird-box.

“Cat brought in bird. No time to deal with it. Alive when I left.”

I stabbed out a reply.

“NOT CHECKING. ALSO, DON’T FANCY CHINESE TONIGHT.”

I poked the box with my phone reproachfully. Alive bird? Dead bird? Zombie bird? Hitchocockian bird? Birdzilla?

My phone went off in my hand. I jumped a sodding mile.

“Pub?”

Fuck yes.

“DEAL. POOL, CHIPS, GRAVY. NO THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS.”

1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you

A conversation with my 4-year-old godson

“Auntie Emma, what’s that on your necklace?”

“That one? That’s tiger’s eye. It used to be my grandma’s, so it’s very special to me.”

“Used to be? Why isn’t it any more?”

Bollocks. Sometimes he can be surprisingly perceptive.

“Well honey, she died. I wear it to remind me of her.”

“Why did she die?”

“She was old, sweetheart. I’m afraid one night she just fell asleep and didn’t wake up.”

“So when you’re old, if you fall asleep you die?!”

A little bit more Nightmare on Elm Street than I was aiming for, but I ran with it.

“Sometimes. But don’t worry, you have to be really old.”

“Louis is really old. If he falls asleep, will he die?

“Dude, Louis is 21. He’s not going to die for a very long time.”

Thanks for making me feel ancient kid. Also, can someone else handle the sex talk? I feel like this one didn’t go too well.

I love the sound of breaking glass

Mouslecoomb, early 2006

It was the first proper house party we’d thrown since I’d moved in, and a brick had just been thrown through our front window.

Dan and I stood over it, pondering our next move. It wasn’t even a whole brick; it was a broken-off chunk of one, and it was filthy. I think I took offence to that more than anything.

“On the bright side,” I said diplomatically. “At least it doesn’t have a threatening note wrapped round it.”

I bent down and picked it up. Dan started rooting around behind the sofa. By this time we were aware that the party had gone silent, and a crowd was gathering around us. Several of our friends were putting on coats with a grim sense of purpose.

“Who the fuck threw that?”

“We’re going after them!”

“We’ll fucking get ’em!”

I was watching a mob form in my lounge. It was sobering me up, and I didn’t like it.

“Guys, GUYS!” I shouted over them. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Yeah, but what are we gonna DO?!”

Dan jumped back up from behind the sofa, clutching a square of cardboard that he’d torn off one of the flattened boxes left over from my move. He waved it at me hopefully.

“Well you see that square of cardboard?”

Dan showed it to the proto-mob solemnly, like an air hostess demonstrating a flotation device.

“We’re gonna tape that over the window, and carry on with the party.”

The proto-mob did a bit of a double take. Behind me, someone turned the stereo back on.

“Fuck yeah!” I shouted, and strode out of the centre of the crowd, back towards the kitchen. Broken glass from the lounge window crunched underneath my feet, but fuck it. That was Sunday’s problem.

The whole party was running under International Drinking Rules, which had been doing their job rather too well. We’d written them up on our lounge door in permanent marker so everyone could play along.

International Drinking Rules

1. Don’t say “drink”.

2. If you’re right-handed only drink with your left hand, and vice versa.

3. No pointing.

4. If you violate Rule 1, 2 or 3, DRINK.

Simple, right? Yeah, well just try it some time. I’ll meet you under the table.

Back in the kitchen, I poured myself another beverage, and lit a cigarette to stop myself changing hands easily. Someone was hammering on the front door. Really, really insistently.

I ran to get it.

“Maybe they want their brick back!” I quipped, to no-one in particular.

I pulled open the door. A girl I’d never met before fell through it, her face smeared with a not altogether unterrifying amount of blood.

The proto-mob seemed to magically re-form around me.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

“Show us who did this!”

“We’ll fucking get them!”

For fuck’s sake. This lot should have been armed with pitchforks.

“EVERYONE CALM THE FUCK DOWN!” I bellowed. “Look, she’s just been hit round the head, and she doesn’t know what the shit is going on. Stop shouting at her!”

I grabbed the mystery girl by the arm and started leading her upstairs to our bathroom. She was bleary-eyed and a touch unsteady on her feet, but was still determinedly clutching a skateboard, and gave me a blood-laced beam as I sat her down on the edge of the bath.

I locked the door behind us. Everyone had been pissing in the garden anyway.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Emma, and this is my house. I’m starting to think I haven’t moved into the best neighbourhood.”

She set the skateboard down and stood up so she could survey the damage in the mirror above our sink.

“I’m Odette. I went outside to try out your mate’s skateboard and some cunt punched me in the face. Someone stole my whiskey.”

I wet some toilet roll and started cleaning her up. Most of the blood seemed to have come from her bottom lip, and she had a nasty lump coming up on her forehead, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had looked when she first fell across the threshold.

“And you didn’t see who did it?”

“Nope. It was dark.”

“Well we’re not going to be able to find them now then, and you’ve cleaned up pretty well. Wanna get back to the party?”

She nodded. “Yeah, but someone stole my whiskey.”

“What, outside?”

“No, in here. S’why I went outside to skate.”

“Yeah, let’s not do that again. Have some of mine instead.”

I handed her my glass and unlocked the door.

“She’s fine!” I announced to queue outside. “She’s going to have that drink, and we’re gonna carry on with the party!”

Dan lumbered up the stairs to join us.

“Hi Det,” he said cheerily. “Em, you said the d-word.”

FUCK.

Odette half-threw herself at Dan and gave him a massive, skateboard-laden hug.

“Someone stole my whiskey!”

“Well that sucks. Here, have this.” Dan said, producing a fresh can from one of the many pockets in his combats.

Odette had found the magic words, so she repeated them to anyone who would listen. Within an hour she’d passed out drunk on Chris’ bed, so Dan fireman’s-lifted her to his room to sleep it off.

The following evening, while we were clearing up the party detritus and broken glass, we found a full, unopened bottle of whiskey stashed underneath the sofa in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag.

Six years later, Little Miss Someone Stole My Whiskey is still one of my closest friends.

New Year’s resolutions

Although I’m now fully recovered on both counts, when I was little I used to be fat and Catholic. As a consequence of these twin afflictions, whenever Lent rolled around it was gently but firmly suggested to me that I should give up chocolate for 40 miserable, fruit-laden days.

I cheated every single year. I never confessed to it either, because I didn’t want to disappoint Father Michael. He was a lovely man, and I felt bad enough already not believing a word he said.

To me, New Year’s resolutions sound suspiciously like extended director’s cut versions of Lent, and my chubby, chocolate-smeared inner child has always been firmly against them. I usually side with the little bloater, but this year I’m kicking her to the kerb and getting my resolution on.

I’m going to quit smoking, join a gym, and teach myself to cook properly so I don’t have to rely on takeaways and microwaving everything until it burns my finger when I poke it in the middle.

Just kidding. The wife and I are going to watch 365 new films in 365 days. Here’s the Tumblr: http://wifebanter2013.tumblr.com/

Said they couldn’t teach me so I guess I’m all learned out.

I was a model pupil, right up until the day I was expelled for circulating gay pornography.

I was a senior prefect. My school reports were filled with gushing sentences about how much of a joy I was to teach. I even won the school’s Latin Prize, which was the first I’d heard of the sodding thing’s existence. Oh, and on top of all of that I was a year ahead at school, set to take most of my GCSEs before my fifteenth birthday.

In fact, the cracks only showed if you looked really, really closely. Tiny things, like my father’s signature in my homework diary, which appeared every single week, even though I hadn’t seen him in a year. Or my Design Technology coursework, which also appeared, fully formed, without me ever touching a power tool. Or even the double doors to the Science block that I was supposed to monitor at lunchtimes, which often seemed not so much monitored as locked and abandoned.

About halfway through Year 11, I’d realised that being good had gotten me precisely dick all, so I’d started to cut corners. And when no-one noticed the cut corners, I started to wonder what else I could get away with.

So, on the last day of school before GCSE study leave, I – along with two loyal accomplices – posted 50 ever-so-slightly rude A3 posters around the school.

I got caught putting up the last one.

Anyway, I blame George Michael. A year before the poster incident, he’d been arrested for “engaging in a lewd act” in a public toilet in Beverley Hills. This, combined with the subsequent release of Outside, had fascinated us, and probably filled in a few gaps in our patchy sex education to boot. Most notably of course, I remember learning the value of a self-deprecating PR stunt, and that cottaging was nothing to do with pie.

That’s a really long-winded way of explaining why, when I happened to take an unflatteringly timed photo of two of my friends playing leapfrog, I wrote “WANTED: LEWD CONDUCT” across the top of it.

It was that photo, blown up to A3, which was described as “gay pornography” in the official paperwork. Semantically, that upset me on two fronts: the second word was a lie, and the first word should have been irrelevant. Not that either of those facts mattered as my Head of Year dragged me down the corridor to her office, clutching #50 in my strictly limited edition set of poster prints, yelling about how I was a disgrace to the school and a disgrace to myself.

At that point, I was only facing suspension. It was what I did next that elevated me to expulsion.

I walked out.

In full view of the school’s extensive CCTV network, I walked out. And, because I was never one for half-measures, I kept walking all the way to the Winchester train station, and started the journey back to my old school.

I got as far as Woking before anyone even realised I’d left school grounds. My mobile rang. It was my mother.

“Where are you?”

“Woking.”

“Where are you going?”

“Chertsey.”

“The school are furious.”

“I know, sorry. I’ll be home on the last bus tonight.”

In times of crisis, my mother and I are very succinct.

I spent a pleasant afternoon in the company of my friends from my first Secondary school, making sure I took a few photos to commemorate the occasion, then I headed back into Winchester in time for the end-of-school party at the Water Meadows. I was the only one still in school uniform, but at least I had a story to tell.

My poor mother spent the next week convincing the school to let me take my exams. The two lynch-pins of her case were the school’s egregious oversight in losing track of her poor, defenceless 14-year-old daughter, and their spectacular inability to take a joke. Rather amazingly, she won. I sat my GCSEs and earned six A*s and four As, which helped my college of choice overlook my technical expulsion and appalling character reference.

They spent the next two years regretting that decision.