Only too fitting

I am completely hungover at the time of writing this, which fits completely the intentions. Not that I know what they are, but in the meantime here's something that happened to me.

I have represented York in the Roses weightlifting competition. We didn’t really have a team; the president just got six people together for the sake of showing up, and I was one of them. It was the most ill-planned, ill-conceived and ill-executed enterprise I have ever been a part of. We managed to fail in just about every single thing we planned on doing. I doubt if Don Quijote would have been capable of a feat like ours; I am thus passing on to you the story of how it went, that you may pass it down to posterity.

Ok, here goes: we meet Alex the president on a terse afternoon in the parking lot in front of the sports park. None of us has ever done any weight-lifting: overall we might as well have been invading Finland, for all we were organised. We get into the two cars and leave the university. Within ten minutes we’re already completely lost. Our plan was that of going straight West, so Alex is running on a highway towards South-East while my own car somehow finds itself surrounded by crickets and cows on a road presumably leading into the wilderness and last trod on by Oswald.

We get to Lancaster four hours off schedule. Jesus Christ. How the hell do you get four hours late on a trip which in its totality is supposed to take two and a half? It’s almost night there by now, and Alex says he knows where we can sleep. It turns out that it’s on the floor of a lecture hall. The idea is overbearingly attractive. We’re also supposed to go to an event but we can’t find tickets because it’s so late, so after a quick pizza (which incidentally tastes like boots) we go to a supermarket and buy the cheapest, grisliest bottles of cider that we can find: two litres for two and a half quid! “White Hammer” or something it’s called, I can’t remember the gradation but it’s as heavy as a tractor, we get ourselves a bottle each. It also tastes like someone has vomited into a washing machine and then served you the centrifuged outcome with soap powder.

It’s not like we even have a place to go, so we sit on the floor like beggars and start downing it while Gogol Bordello blast from our adjacent cars. Someone takes out some cigars and we start smoking those, which along with the cider makes for one of those combinations of smells you’d think has been carried inside an American Buffalo for eighteen months and is now finding sudden relief coming up your throat. We’re all doing good, so we decide to go into town and at a club.

Two hours later, the effects of the cider hit us. It’s like being ran over by a truck. We are in town and at a disco (a ‘silent disco’ of all things), and our neural connections suddenly short-circuit; something like the French revolution explodes inside our stomachs, and our legs are drawing diagonals at every step. I can’t seem to act coherently for the life of me: the plan on getting to the disco was that of finding some nice girl and start chatting her up, instead I find myself sitting next to a gigantic skin-head who’s raving hysterically like a turkey about to get gutted and seriously doing his best to start a fight with me.

I can’t remember anything else from that night except that we got back to uni and half of us were vomiting, we couldn’t even stagger to the lecture halls, so we wrapped ourselves up in blankets and slept in our cars. The next day, Armageddon. Wake at 9:00 to get to the gym. We present ourselves like the last dinosaurs must have presented themselves to the planet in their final days before extinction. Our opponents are not human beings but titans. The very judges look like they’ve been lumbering around with bears on the weekend. I can hardly see the weights for how my head is aching, and my breath probably stinks like I’ve been making out with a camel (which might just as well have happened, for all I remember). We compete: we get completely caned: we go home.

No, scratch that. First we have to pass by Leeds to pick up the driver’s girlfriend. Of course we get lost again. We spend around an hour and fifteen minutes driving in circles around a supermarket because we can’t find Egdon Hill or whatever the fuck it’s called and keep ending up instead in Egdon Mount. Finally we find the girl. The grittiest thing in nature. If chavs were an art, she’d be the Sistine Chapel. I’d rather get a blowjob off a cannibal than touch her. For a trip of a weekend she’s carrying around the Titanic’s worth of luggage, and we can’t fit it all in the trunk, so each of us spends the rest of the trip as comfortable as salmons with a suitcase on our laps (five people in the car). I can’t even faint, I’m just too uncomfortable.

I get home. Tired. Like. Fuck. I get on the bed and sink.
I love all you guys. I don't know who you are, but if you're reading this I love you for that alone.