Good idea at the time...

*it took me all day for blogger to let me post this so excuse the errors I will fix them after I bath and send my monsters to bed*The first place I ever moved into I was the ripe old age of 23 and in Leicester. It was in a nice leafy stretch of road with some fabulous houses , some with sweeping gravel driveways but nearly all of them had a real estate value of about £1-2 million . The house where I lived was a lovely Victorian four story house, it was I believe a hotel at one stage as all the rooms had ensuites. It was a bed sit really but I suppose you couldn't get a more grander one in that neck of the woods. With an industrial sized kitchen, a basement laundry and a hangar sized living room it was quite the find for a would be flat hunter such as myself. My room had its own floor so to speak, nine steps up and had an Olympic sized swimming pool of a bath. It was cosy when I put all my things in it and the landlady on occasion ,would show people my room as an example how nice/cool one could get their room if they chose to live there. This was their first foray into letting out rooms so I was the first to move in. After that it was a matter of about 4 weeks before every room was taken. Out of the nine of us living there I think there was only one or two people that was from the uk, there was a guy from the Seychelles , one from Australia , New Zealand, another from Ireland, another from France. All in all not many people apart from myself knew many people from the area , so most evenings we would congregate downstairs with a few beers and chat. This in tow became a regular occurrence , everyone would get a bit hammered and with each evening of drinking that went by the drinking became heavier and heavier. I was fond of my Landlord , Rash, he and his wife lived in a 'granny flat' at the back of the house and they often came up for a chat and a drink. Rash was a Bacardi man and I would goad him in my slightly inebriated state that Bacardi was in fact a girls drink, backed up by my fellow Irishman at the time, who indeed verified that in Ireland it was only the pink pound or the girlies choice of drink, Rash threw down the gauntlet for 'the ultimate drinking challenge ' and see who out of the entire house could survive the night. Every drunk in the room ran with that gauntlet and it was agreed , Saturday night coming was to be the liver Olympics.

The rules where simple , bring your own choice of drink but make it enough to get drunk on 3 times over , not liking beer and not one for spirits too much I brought to the table 6 litres of Taurus Cider and a small bottle of Captain Morgan rum to pace myself. Everyone had taken the precautionary pint of milk and food to line the stomach to stop themselves from getting too drunk to quick, a lot of sturdy meals where prepared and eaten a couple of hours before the evenings activities and I being in no humour to make myself a meal, opted for a bowl of shreddies (malted wheat's).. There was a great buzz that night, hilarious stories shared, drunken games played and gentle but hilarious teasing were thrown back and forth but one by one my flatmates threw in the towel and there were four of us left. Rash my landlord, John from Ireland, Alan who was from Nottingham, and of course myself. The worst part about drinking in the living room was that if you needed to use the bathroom, you would have to climb the stairs to your respective rooms and if you had a room on the top floor there was every chance you would not make it back down again by either having a conversation with your liver that it was pure suicide to go back down or one could miss their footing and have a nasty tumble up or down the stairs. Being so paranoid and drunk I let the guys use my bathroom each one of us brought our glass with us for fear of it being spiked by our rascal of a landlord who was very much as jober as a sudge at that stage. But as we took our turns our bottles where being slowly filled with vodka by Rash and what he didn't know that John from Ireland was putting Poteen (moonshine) in his when he went to the bathroom. How we did not go blind from that night remains a mystery. Alan was in a pretty bad way and he left with the help of rash and john, they were gone for about 15 minutes , and 15 minutes is a long time for a raging drunkard like myself. It turned out that the had to sit Alan on the toilet and manoeuvre his head into the sink to make sure he was alright. And then they just spent the rest of the time doing knock door run on all the others doors etc

When they came back down , we where all feeling the toil of the night and feeling very much worse for wear and we called it a night. Agreeing that there where no winners in this game, that we where all equals and we crawled to our respective rooms and man do I mean crawled. I went up those 9 stairs on my hands and knees and lay on my bed. The bed felt like it was on the crown of a whirling dervish and I knew it was a matter of time I was going to honk like articulated lorry. I staggered to the bathroom and let ejection run its cycle. Convinced I wasn't finished, but in desperate need of comfort and sleep I decided to bring with me the small bin as a receptacle should I need to avoid a Mama Cass Situation. I awoke to see the strange image of an empty shampoo bottle, squeezed out tube of toothpaste and several tubes that once held toilet paper strewn about the bed. In my drunken state I had emptied the contents of the bin onto the bed and left the bin back into the bathroom instead of its rightful place by my bedside. Aside from the second heartbeat turned up full volume in my head , my body told me I needed to use the toilet bad, the aftermath of malted wheat's and cider evident on the cistern and tiled wall such was the force. I looked in the mirror eyes so red it gave my features a lizardish cast and my hair looked like it was starting up a new wave band. I needed some liquid to rid the dehydration. I walked very slowly to the kitchen where I met John who seemed to be doing the same thing as I, both of us afraid to talk too quickly scared we would punctuate our sentences with vomit. We both agreed we had lost the ability to generate saliva, to us death seemed pretty awesome right there and then. Just as we where about to leave for our respective rooms Rash's 14 year old daughter Naomi arrived with a note for me which went something to the tone of

Dear Bastard

I will be sending for a doctor soon, I hope you are feeling as foul as me if not worse. I can just about breathe but only very gently

Rash

Ps I think I'm in trouble with the wife over the carpet.

Turns out Rose, Rash's wife woke up about 6am to find Rash, Bollock naked, ass smiling up at her as she entered the bathroom , on the floor his arms death-locked around his porcelain lover , snoring and hastily cleaned up puddle of vomit beside him.. The newly fitted £900 bathroom carpet would have to be torn up as Rash's steak and kidney Guinness pie he had that evening seemed to stain glue itself to the ivory pile. I sent him a reply back via the daughter

Dear Fucker

It looks like I have jaundice and a junkie has styled my hair. If its of small compensation to you, my stomach is heaving like that's its full time job and all I have to remember the night by is my shreddie encrusted tiled wall of my bathroom and a black vacuum populated with shifting, vaguely-menacing shapes. Congratulations sir now fuck off and allow me to regain the will to live again, I neither feel human nor mammal.

Jude

PS Don't fancy the grief your going to get for the carpet.

I calmed down drinking after that, most of us dared not imbibe for a good week and it was a month before I went near the gut rot again. As for Alan, he said that he had no recollection of being brought upstairs and sat on the toilet and his head in the sink, he was grateful because he got a nasty bout of the squits as a result of all the mixing of alcohol and eating a hot masala beforehand, also he did have some carpet burn on his face from falling off the toilet but I think his major concern was who had the bright idea of whipping down his jeans and sitting him down like a toilet training 3 year old. He didnt quite make use of his facilities in the end and had to rid himself of his jeans as a result... Had I continued the pace at which I was drinking back then Im pretty sure I would have ended up a bum and Im 100% sure a night like that now would most likely kill me as a bottle of good red seems to have me in cheery enough form but its best times like that remain where youth is king and you can stare death square in the eye..