Mother Russia

When people find out that I met my girlfriend in Siberia, they automatically assume I have a tall blond mail order bride in tow, who keeps my house clean in return for large handouts to buy Louis Vuitton products. Likewise when Alice tells people she met me in Siberia they automatically assume that I am a bad mannered, heavy drinking, uncultured, ill educated, malodorous mysogynist. She always jumps to my defence and points out that I’m doing a masters, so fuck them.

To be fair to the stereotypes of the Great British public, when I was in Krasnoyarsk (the only city I truly love in Siberia) most Russians I met were a little strange and often were heavy drinking (although not necessarily yellow).

The family I lived in consisted of the father (67), who it turned out shared his birthday with me. The fact he was Russian, male and amazingly still alive at 67 was a source of immense pride for the family. He attributed his (relative) longevity to allowing himself to smoke five or ten or, following my arrival and subsequent rent money, forty cheap filterless cigarettes a day. He never drank, confiding in me one day that “alcohol is a plague sent by Jews”. At the time I confused the word for Jew (yood) with the word for south (yoog) and happily went about informing anyone who would listen that “the alcohol was sent from the south”. Worryingly most people just nodded in agreement with my accidental anti-Semitism.

The mother who was the head of the house told me on the first day that I would accompany her to the supermarket to buy some food and drink. She asked me if I wanted any coffee. I said yes. She said that all English people like tea. I said I didn’t. She accused me of not being a proper English person. I showed her my passport to prove otherwise. She told me that she couldn’t afford coffee as she had to spend the money on buying her husband a bottle of vodka. Lying bitch.

Son #1, Mikail (41) was an obese, stinking policeman, divorced and child living with mother, heavy drinking, owner of many fine guns. He would sometimes come in drunk after a night shift and make me late for school by telling me that his ex-wife was a whore and not letting me leave the house until I high-fived him in agreement. I never argued as he was always armed.

Son #2, Dimitri (35) was a successful lawyer and the opposite of his older brother. He would often take me on fun outings such as a visit to a leisure centre car park and to look at the disused ski-lift 45minutes’ drive from the flat. He told me that he took his business contacts to these choice spots in Krasnoyarsk and he always got business off them. I’m not sure what he meant by that but I gave his broken English the benefit of the doubt as I hoped he would have done when I first chatted to him about southern alcohol.

Siberia is fun. But I can say that with hindsight. I spent most days just making sure I didn’t hurt myself or accidentally get into a fight with a gun-toting band of Rabbis wanting to know where the local vodka came from.

Ralph

Amongst my friends there are some interesting people.

Take Berry for example; he used to go out with a girl who apparently broke up with him to become a man. Nice work there Berry.

Or Project, who accidentally helped rob a house when he was drunk with a Geordie he met in the street who persuaded him that they were going to a party at a friend of the Geordie's. That evening was topped off by walking into a bedroom in said house and finding the Geordie's girlfriend having sex with someone.

Ibbo once had to cancel a holiday to Berlin to come and visit me and Project because his testicles had both swollen to the size of tennis balls and he wasn't allowed to fly.

However, without a shadow of a doubt, the most interesting of us all is a certain Ralph Watson. In no particular order he has:

• Got off with a 45yr old at a barn dance in Ripon when he was about 18.
• Amassed the largest collection of Genesis and Phil Collins cassette tapes I've ever seen.
• Got a job as a janitor in Oxford which is ace as "there's Internet access".
• Got off with an overweight lesbian (possibly also at a barn dance).
• Officiated in a 90minute unofficial amateur backyard wrestling match.
• Told an old female stranger at a tube station one night that if she gets off at the wrong station she'll be "literally fucked". In his defence he claims he was giving directions.
• Sent off an application form to join the WWF as an apprentice wrestler (lightweight division) but then had to withdraw it after his mum found out.
• Said live on radio that he would like to "club a prostitute to death with her high heels" and when challenged claimed his comments were taken out of context.

If you should ever get the chance to meet Ralph (if you haven't already) you're in for a treat. He's the one on the left in the photo above by the way, performing in the critically acclaimed Oxford-based theatre romp, Memories of Water. The look of confusion on his face stems from the fact that the girl with him is neither a lesbian, overweight or indeed over 45.

Where even the king comes on foot

Dunny. Khazi. John. Loo. Shithouse. Call it what you will, the modern flush-toilet is here to stay. Apparently, or at least according to wikipedia, the toilet is considered the great equaliser (for those of you familiar with WWF wrestling in ca. 2000-2002, you will be forgiven for thinking that Triple-H’s sledgehammer was the great equaliser). The Poles have a term for the toilet I learnt last week in class: gdzie nawet król chodzi piechotą, literally, where even the king comes on foot. However, the idea that everybody treats going to the loo in the same way is not necessarily true.

Take this conversation from yesterday.

“I’ll be ready to go out in a minute, just nipping to the loo. Err…” I ponder, glancing up and down my designated bookshelf in the living room. “This one will do.”

“What?” says Alice.

“I need a good loo book. Loads of facts in it. Look – it’s got the top thirty fastest ODI innings listed, both by balls taken and time taken. This is good shit.”

“For fuck’s sake, stop reading books on the toilet.”

“But I need to.”

“We’ll be late to get to my parents though.”

“They’ll understand.”

Or at least one half of them will. Since living with girl(s) I learned that the greatest difference in toilet habits isn’t between nationalities or classes but between sexes. The idea of reading on the toilet is alien to every girl I’ve spoken to about this - about 8 in total, including a couple of girls at uni who thought I was some kind of strange shit-obsessed pervert for asking. In my view, a house is not a home until there’s a well thumbed copy of a) a Wisden cricket year book, b) The Economist / Private Eye / Runners World, or at the very least c) a film guide of some variety balancing precariously above each toilet in the house. And it must be a fact book. The only use for a fictional book in a bathroom is as emergency toilet paper.

How do girls think boys gain their superior knowledge of all things factual? We’re not born with it, it has to be absorbed. And reading fact books has to be done on the toilet – we are simply too busy to cram it in anywhere else in the day. If boys had to have an evening out where they were banned from using any information they had learnt whilst sat on a toilet, it would be hell. And not to mention pointless.

No wonder the Poles just talk about the king coming on foot - most likely the queen would turn up and get confused by the copy of “Top 100 Tallest Building in Warsaw” lying on top of the cistern.

The power of hate

Huey Lewis may have waxed lyrical about the power of love in what was, for me at least, an excellently constructed song; verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle 8, guitar solo, briefoutro . However, in my opinion he didn't think enough about the flip side of his 1985 Oscar-nominated Back to the Future based smash-hit coin. Namely hate.

In attempting to find people to come to a cocktail party that myself, Levermore, Mark Williams and Dave were trying to organise, we hit a stumbling block:


-----Original Message-----
From: Williams, Mark
Sent: 14 March 2007 11:23
To: Mark Pearce; Lucas, David; Levermore
Subject: RE: Koktayle par-tay?

Given that the proposed party is on Saturday and it is now Wednesday I am slightly concerned that as yet nobody has been invited. I have visions of four sorry men sitting in a living room drinking copious amounts of spirits and talking about why, and by how much, they hate various people.

--------------------------

This could be considered a bit harmless email banter, but when we thought about it, it turns out it's true. Most of our time is spent discussing how much we hate not just people, but things also.

For example I can't stand people who go to gyms and just WALK on treadmills.

Dave practically starts shaking with rage when he hears the main tune from American Beauty being used in anything but American Beauty.

Levermore can't stand people who watch football in pubs and air their opinions on the referee's decisions in his earshot and will bottle up his rage for the full 90 minutes before making a quiet comment behind thebloke's back he can't hear anyway. Very British.

Tony Weeny's temporary hatred of the person in a round who happens to be the last in the round to buy drinks (even when there is only two people in the round) is matched only by his love of a nice bong in the morning to calm his nerves.

You could try to explain hating things by saying that in order to truly like something, you have to hate some things in return. It's no good saying you like everything as then there's no way of differentiating between those things you just like (e.g.Levermore and porno) and those things that you really like (e.g. Levermore and girl-on-girl porno).

I'd imagine that the truth is that hating things is fun. Where's the fun in sitting down and talking to a friend about how much you liked the person on the bus in front of you having a conversation in a hushed voice on their mobile phone about a subject close to your heart which you found interesting? It's surely far better to begin an anecdote with "there was this twat on the bus today..."

Sunday afternoons

Whilst it is said that it is children that have creative imaginations, I challenge anybody who was present in my friend Dave’s front room yesterday afternoon to say that it’s the kids who have the monopoly on “thinking outside the box”.

“Do we have to watch this shit?” asked an acquaintance of ours, Levermore, referring to Plymouth vs Watford on the TV.

The general consensus was such that Dave turned it off. We needed something to do. After a bit of questioning it turned out that he didn't possess one solitary board game. The matter was then taken into our own hands – we agreed to play an imaginary one.

“I roll a six,” I began, referring to an imaginary die.

Our nemesis Mark Williams thought he had the measure of us; “I roll double six,” he laughed. Little did he know the imaginary game only used one die. Instant disqualification from that round followed much to his annoyance.

Levermore followed with a seven (we were using an imaginary seven sided die apparently). "Seven means the person to my left misses a go," insisted Pete.

“Oh,” said Dave on his left, a little disappointed.

Play passed to Keiko. Not being a nob-end, she decided not to get involved and play returned to me. All of us were pretty satisfied with the first round of play so we moved onto the second round, this time involving cards.

I took the imaginary dragon card. It was universally decided that this would slay any card Mark Williams could take. He was getting pretty annoyed by this point and claimed the rules were flawed. His was a lone voice.

Play passed to Levermore who drew a miscellaneous card. We never actually worked out what the imaginary card depicted, but it was unanimously decided that it meant the person on his left missed his turn.

“Oh,” said Dave again, still disappointed.

It being Dave’s house, he decided that the TV would go back on. We put the imaginary game to the backs of our minds.

In what was a first, none of us had ever been so glad to see Plymouth vs Watford.

World Cup Fever

The World Cup's nearly upon us once more and even though I don't have Sky to watch any of it I'm still looking forward to it. I'm sure it will be pretty good, but for me, the most memorable game played in world cup was in May 1999 at Trent Bridge. England vs Zimbabwe. Described by Cricinfo as "a dog of a match, an absolute shocker" and "possibly the least interesting one-day international staged in this country" I still remember it.

I can’t remember the score (I assume England won), but this was a day littered with disappointment.

Fans had been condemned by everybody at that World Cup for the post-game pitch invasions and subsequent pile-ons in the middle of the batting strip. Everybody was subsequently banned from going on the ground at any time, but for one glorious summer, you could enjoy the simple pleasure of sprinting into the middle of the pitch as soon as the game was over, along with up to 1,000 other like-minded fans, and trying to grab a stump and piling on.

We’d spent the lunch break sipping beer and studying the plan of the ground on the back of the ticket, trying to work out which part of the boundary was closest to the batting strip. After much heated debate we decided that fine leg at the Radcliffe Road end would be our best bet. With a couple of overs left, we made our way there, draped in an England flag on which we’d written something witty about Alan Mullally (he’d upset one of us the summer before by making the universally recognized “wanker” sign at him).

The excitement of the forthcoming pile on was growing; we were taunting a couple of like-minded Zimbabweans when the final runs were hit. Immediately we bolted. We were steaming towards the square, sure that we have the honour of being the lucky ones, the heroes at the bottom of the pile-on with the stumps stuck firmly in our hands and our ribs stuck firmly into our kidneys. Our faces and spirits dropped as soon as we got into the fielding circle – a bunch of Pakistan fans were already there. They had taken the stumps. They were at the bottom of the pile. They would be the ones manhandled like demigods by the overzealous stewards. Bastards. Their team wasn’t even playing.

As we reached the batting strip things got worse, the pile-on had already reached such a size that we would have needed oxygen masks to climb onto the top. We stood around for a while, looking in vain for a way up to the top of the pile. There was none. It was all too much and we headed out of the ground.

As it turns out, it was the Pakistan fans who needed the oxygen masks. As we disappointedly drifted out of the ground for the long walk into the centre of Nottingham for a curry, we saw them being walked into the back of an ambulance, barely able to breath.

“Just think, that could have been us,” said Ant. He looked sad.

How is that?

Jeez, I'm bad at cricket. I mean, I’ve tried some things in my life that it turns out I can’t do, but to persist at a sport for so damn long without any tangible results in my favour, what the hell was I thinking? When I stop to think of all the things I could have done whilst I was spending up 7 hours a day “playing” for East Leake Second XI in Division H of the South Notts Cricket League, I begin to weep and shit blood.

My lack of ability as a batsman makes me fucking livid. My shit-ass useless forward defence combined with a discernible lack of attacking shots in my piss-poor back foot repertoire fucks me off like nothing on Earth. I’m the sort of fucking useless bats-fuck who can’t cut, cover drive, hook, pull or sweep for shit. Fuck, I’m more likely to hit myself in the face than I am the ball past any fielders inside the circle. My footwork when a ball is pitched up is like some sort of dick-ass awkward dance on some hot fuck-coals. I’d sooner eat my own shit than even think of the fuck-off huge swipes I’d take outside off stump at some short pitch shithouse delivery from an ageing spinner who turns the ball about as successfully as I’d turn any passing hot lesbians who were turned on by any cricketing shot that wasn’t a fucking disgrace to the game.

And what fucks me off even more was the ignominy of having to fucking bowl. Fuck, I was fucking shit at that. I’d bowl to a crowded slip cordon who were there only to field the turds of deliveries I’d often throw down 6ft outside of off-stump. On the rare occasion of one going straight, the poor fucks in the next field would more likely be picking up their teeth after being hit by another fuck-off huge six as I would a single fucking solitary wicket. If I heard the death rattle of the bails, I was safe in the knowledge that it was either a fucking windy day or that I’d slipped like a fucking fuck-off fuck-face and kicked the fuck out of the stumps at the non-strikers end.

Jeez, if I could go back and talk to a 13 year old me, I’d bash the living shit out of the deluded kid and tell him to spend less time being a fuck-awful cricketer and more time addressing his Tourettes.