The same people are going to come up again and again in these posts this is a bit of a pen portrait of each of them, obviously I’m not using their real names to protect the guilty, though they would probably say they are the victims of my friendship.
Rooksie – my best friend in the world, mentor, tormentor and wife who insists she is burned out and broken and can’t take much more fun and holidays – luckily she is a good few years younger than me so still has some life left in her.
Ugly bloke – I met him when I first moved to Bristol in 1997 and become a wonderful friend for most of the time anyway. He has completely the opposite personality to me, he is is totally organised with a diary stretching out years, my diary is full on incorrect dates and I always forget to check it. I discovered he was taking notes with the intention of writing a book using my exploits if I don’t !
The Apprentice, he has been my friend since I took him under my wing on a football tour to Ireland (his first trip abroad) and was in a room share with me and Big Joe, he had quite an education and after that trip in 1987 he has followed me around all over the place. A member of the Council of Idiots.
Northern Bloke has been a close friend since the late nineties, we worked together and found we had a shared love for surfing (I taught him), snowboarding (he taught me), mountain biking and beer. He has another personality that is opposite to me, he is laid back and I am certainly not. He is very annoyingly good at every sport he does but after 25 years I finally found a sport I could beat him at – table tennis of all things. A member of the Council of Idiots.
The Chemist I first met him through work and we got on immediately, true kindred spirits of chaos. Another surfer, mountain biker and snowboarder (till he shattered his shoulder), has an amazing ability to convince himself the most dangerous exploit is quite safe and is amazed when he hurts himself again. As he once said “I love nights out with you, i have no idea what will happen”, that’s mutual and in fact after the nights out we rarely knew what had happened, another member of the Council of Idiots.
Cardboard Rotter we met at school when we were 11, and didn’t really get on, he was in a different class and from the other side of Plymouth but we ended up on teh same camping holiday in Newquay when we were 19 through different contacts and there came the realisation that neither of us had an off switch or limits to how far we would go in the quest of fun. That rollercoaster lasted 3 years before I fell off and ended up married, but still best friends and he founded our Alan Whicker Society, a vehicle for chaos and mayhem on every night out.
Blowey a character that entered by life via the Cardboard Rotter, he been a source of hilarity, chaos and utter carnage. Often referred to by others as a sociopath, I’m not sure how he has endured as there is a continual threat of danger and discourse when he is around not to mention being out of pocket, but some of the memories are the most enduring, or maybe it’s just PSTD,