In Which I Am a Basket Case

Tomorrow I am joining M and C (and H) to celebrate Irish M's 30th birthday. I probably won't be able to do any blogs then, and maybe not on Sunday.

Art, for art's sake. With a capital F.

A long while ago for reasons that have been lost in time I was part of a quartet who were the Laundry Basket Society. The other three were M, Irish M and C, but when in L.B.S mode they went by the names of Bunny, Roman and I can't remember Irish M's, I shall have to ask him. Dammit, I can't even remember my society name, which is a shocking effort. M, Irish M, C and I were also part of a supersexysecret club and that might be broached on another day. Anyway, the finest hour of the L.B.S was around eight years ago. We decided to go to central London and go to as many landmarks as possible whilst drinking as much port as possible and take pictures of each other wearing laundry baskets on our heads. My personal favourite was when we went to Bucks House and managed by chance to catch the changing of the guard. I got the lads to line up sharpish and bung their baskets on with the palace in the background. Now the Coldstream Guards are meant to look straight ahead as they're marching- for some reason, not all of them did.

Squint and see a basketted C and I atop the bridge.

I swear that the next bit is true. Normally it's not good form for an (auto)biographical author to preface anything by saying it's not a lie, because it calls into question the veracity of every other thing they've ever written. "How do I know it's true if they haven't told me it is?" Well, I do so here because it sounds like I made it up, even to me. So there we were in a place called The Generator, some sort of not quite youth hostel thing in central-ish London. My memories of this place are a fairly grim nightclub, missing breakfast because we got up too late and half naked Australian (Kiwi?) girls sauntering about. So there we were in our four bunked bedroom, light on, donning our baskets and planning our movements for the next day. C might even have been eating Risk infantrymen, as he has a curious habit of doing so. Whole armies have been wiped out inside his belly. I would like to stress for the record that we don't have any pictures of the following events because the only zoom camera we had was in M's phone, and as it was 2004 there was still a ration on pixels across the country. So. Irish M was looking out of the window across to the adjacent flats, Alfred Hitchcock styley, and he slowly and calmly said "I think they're going at it across the way from us." The other guys were a bit doubtful, but this isn't the sort of thing that Irish M would make up. I went over to the window, and sure enough, a few floors down in the building opposite us, there was a couple playing slip and slide on a sofa. We had a particularly clear view of this because it was night and their lights were switched on. I informed the other two that there actually was a pair having a nice fuck, and then suddenly everyone was jostling for space at the window- perhaps this was exacerbated by the fact we were all wearing our laundry baskets. Somewhere at this point Irish M tried to use his camera phone, and was rewarded with classic unclear grainy footage which may or may not have been proof of the Loch Ness monster. I can readily empathise with those people who believe they have seen aliens but their camera has failed them so when they tell people about it andtry and corroborate their story they look mad. I don't remember which one of us spotted it (only that it wasn't me), but the sentence was uttered "Is... Is that a third guy with a camera? They're making a fucking porn film down there!" "I wondered why he was bothering with that much foreplay!" "And all those positions she's been in too, on the bottom AND on top!" Something caught the performer's eyes after that, and all of them, cameraman included looked up towards us. Somewhere, in the making-of section of a U.K porn DVD is a picture of four guys looking out of a window at the camera. Four lads silhouetted against a lightbulb. Four lads jumping up and down with excitement. Wearing laundry baskets.

There was a point to this story, but it has escaped the author's mind.

Today's Tune