Life is one big crippling hangover…
It all begins with an idea.
Waking up in your pee stained jeans that clearly didn’t have enough absorption properties to save flooding the mattress, and thus creating a solid map of Africa now floating beneath you is a humiliating experience. Unless you need to bang out a quick geography lesson of where Ghana is on the continent to a random walking through your flat, then it’s time to flip it over. This wasn’t the advice I’d been given in 1997 when I found my Corporal floating on his own piece of continental artwork. His next question was rhetorical, but I didn’t know what that word meant, or how to recognise a person delivering that form of question where the answer wasn’t needed or certainly any suggestions required.
“Do you know the best way to dry this out Carole?”
Sort of sounded like my Dad asking my Mum, whose name is obviously Carole for advice given the same predicament after a session at the Wilton Conservative Club. Fighting with that image in my mind and stench of urine combined with stale alcohol and his farts from his slow-puncture all night, I responded. “No Corporal”
His nostrils flared and eyes sent out a subliminal message that told me he was about to glean great satisfaction from the now highly anticipated answer. Like any well versed storyteller he used the element of silence, to build the element of suspense, that created the element of knowing I was on the cusp of receiving life changing knowledge.
“You lie in it” He didn’t even have enough time to clock my deflated reaction, as this guy still remains a legendary hero of mine to this day and that three word answer at that moment didn’t seem life changing, but in years gone by it’s been relationship saving temperarily. Like the symptoms of stress where you may show the signs, it’s the cause or source we need to deal with. The source for creating maps of Africa wasn’t a fetish or me expressing my global creativity. It was popping to the pub, but only for a couple…