St. Pats And Barry The Leprechaun

I arrived in England on St. Patrick's Day and immediately set about trying to turn my friends into Americans. This was not at all on purpose. Before setting out on my journey, I had solicited from all my friends their requests for things they'd like me to bring over from the colonies. Apart from the hairdresser who had responded "Your country has nothing to offer me, woman", I had gifts for nearly everyone: Doritos for MrBalls (I gave these to him as something of an apology - I'd had a t-shirt I'd ordered shipped to his house which was posted in packaging more translucent than I had anticipated, causing his postman to say "I wanted to hand this to you personally" whilst giving him my new shirt, the words "I am someones fucktoy" clearly visible through the plastic. My bad, dude), Peeps for the Evil Lesbian (she'd asked me to bring her "something fun" and I luckily saw the Peeps on the shelf at CVS before going off in search of "something fun" for her at the adult toy store), and graham crackers for Sulu (which she adorably calls "Graeme's crackers"). Sulu had discovered S'mores last summer when she was in Boston. Neither Peeps nor S'mores are a thing in England, so I set about explaining the origin of Peeps and the fact that while everyone gets them in their Easter basket, almost no one actually eats them. The Evil Lesbian had already eaten half of them before I'd finished my explanation. We managed to wrestle a couple of Peeps away from her long enough for me to introduce the sport of Peep jousting, which everyone was quite taken with, apparently having never put marshmallows in the microwave before. The Peeps fought valiantly, but in the end, their melted carcasses were inhaled by the Evil Lesbian as soon as they'd cooled enough to touch. Sulu and I cut the heads off a few more of them and made everyone what I'm calling Peep Murdering S'mores TM.

Later that evening, we headed down The Vic for some St. Pats debauchery. Having been advised by the mutineer that wearing a "Fuck you, you're Irish" t-shirt may be more trouble than it's worth, I chose a different green t-shirt which read "I'd fuck me" which everyone seemed to agree with, especially Booth who expressed this by tongue raping my nose shortly after our introduction. I unfestively spent the night drinking Strongbow, mostly because I haven't got nearly enough patience to wait for a properly poured Guinness. This would prove to be the drunkest night of my entire trip, a trip I miraculously managed to get through without a single hangover, despite the best efforts of my alleged friends. I remember accidentally inventing a game called Tits or Knees? by zipping my hoodie up with my legs inside because I was cold and then waiting for people to do a double take, a drunk mutineer repeatedly taking his jacket off that everyone might admire his "swans", a photo of the Evil Lesbian and me taken under the sign for the ladies looking skeptical about being labeled as such, and I will never be able to forget the nose rape because, seriously, what the fuck, Booth?

The following evening, Sulu and I got the all clear signal from our darling Steve and drove out to visit him in his pub. Steve's pub is a mostly laid back comfortable joint in Luton filled with an assortment of characters and as such I did not wear vinyl trousers. I managed to draw attention to myself anyway, though, as no matter how hard I try to blend in over there, my accent makes me stand out, particularly in Luton which is not known as an international tourist mecca. Several grumbly men at the bar asked me where I was from and when I told them I was from Chicago and on holiday, I was met with disbelieving stares and incredulous questions: "You're on holiday from Chicago, and you came to Luton?" I didn't of course, I was only there to see Steve, but they didn't seem to think a holiday in Hitchin was a whole lot more sensible either.

Steve had been warned in no uncertain terms that he was NOT to get me drunk because I had unspeakably filthy plans for the next day and absolutely could not be hungover. He decided it was best to get the serious drinking out of the way at the beginning of the evening. "You have to try this, it's awful," he said, pouring me a shot of something I could smell from across the room that tasted for all the world like battery acid that had been fermented and distilled in a bathtub, an accusation he neither confirmed nor denied. Sulu was driving, so he wrapped her shot in a bunch of plastic wrap so she could dissolve her tongue with it later when we'd gone home. I switched to my standard amaretto after I'd regained my ability to speak and breathe.

Apparently, St. Pats weekend wasn't over yet. After Sulu and I tried out our snake handling skills on the snake Steve keeps in the bar these days we were ready to go, but Steve insisted that we had to stay for a while as "something" was going to happen that we wouldn't want to miss. This something was Barry the Leprechaun. Nearest I can tell, Barry the Leprechaun is just a drunk Irishman named Barry who had happened upon some green velvet trousers and a matching jacket in a thrift store which he bought for £10 and decided to pair said outfit with an outrageous wig and head to the pub. Barry had just returned from a rather long stint in Germany, so, already in his cups, he spent the evening talking shit and counting in German or occasionally slipping into a German accent and arguing with Steve over the value of foreign currency. Steve watched in wonder and amusement whilst Sulu and I spent the better part of two hours alternately taking the piss out of him. "I can't even see you tagging each other," he told us. "I don't know how you two know when it's time to switch." When we'd had our fill of that, we finally got up to say our goodbyes. Barry hugged me entirely too long and I eventually had to say "Barry, please sit down before you fall down." I hugged Steve goodbye without breaking his neck (he thinks I hug too hard, I think he should shut up and take it like a man) and demanded that he go to the Double Down Saloon in Vegas and drink the ass juice as if there were some chance of him giving that adventure a miss. He went, of course, and even tried the bacon martini because he does that sort of thing.

Or Too Early To Help With The Next One?

The mutineer (on his Facebook status): .... FUCK. I dont remember how I got home last night.

Me: Well done, sir.

One hour later

The mutineer: I just woke up... again. I have a boner and I think im still drunk
did i just say that out loud?

Me: No, you typed it. With one hand, I assume.

Four hours later

Friend of the mutineer:  I appear to have come across this conversation four hours too late

The mutineer:  It's not too late for your input, [friend] ;-)

Me: probably too late to help with the boner situation though.

England Trip Do Over - Part 4

After a few false starts on Sunday, I finally managed to get out of the hotel and meet the mutineer at the Red Hart for a delicious lunch of various things that had been fried (ordering a meal all on my own the night before had depleted my social bravery reserves, so I got him to order for me in exchange for buying him some chips*). We ate over an intense discussion about playing in bands and the relative superiority of +44 over Angels and Airwaves, which we both agreed was steaming pile of emo horseshit. I also had two Strongbows. I should have realized ahead of time that this would turn out to be a mistake later on, but I was distracted by my delightful company and the onion rings. After lunch we headed back to the hotel where the mutineer kept me company for a few hours until the day's main event.

Steve had been telling me for weeks that he was going to have me tend bar in his pub while I was over. I had been telling him he had no idea what he was saying for just as long. "I think you'd be a natural at it," he told me, despite my repeated explanation of how I already knew that wasn't true: a) I have crippling social phobias and b) I break and/or spill EVERYTHING I touch. When I told the bartender of Steve's plans over dinner one night he dropped his fork in shock and asked if Steve had ever actually met me. Luckily, events transpired that prevented him from implementing this ludicrous idea. Instead, he came to the hotel to pick me up, where I showed off the coils of rope that had been left behind on Saturday before heading down to the car park where we stood in awe for 10 minutes watching a black squirrel frolic by a tree (hey, it's not every day you see a black squirrel).

We headed out to a place called The Rusty Gun, obviously the most appropriate place to take an American visitor to dinner. It's also one of the most appropriate places to take Steve for dinner. As he will be the first to tell you (the comic will be the second), Steve only eats weirdo food. Take him anywhere in the world, and his instinct is to find the most outrageous thing on the entire menu and then order it. He's the exact opposite of me, really. No matter where I go, I pretty much only eat four things - pasta, hamburgers, prawns and dessert. It's because I know I like these things, and I want to make sure I do not starve to death because I ordered something I might potentially hate. Steve, on the other hand, is on a perpetual culinary adventure.

I will now go back on what I just said about myself in the previous paragraph. I order the same things over and over again everywhere, mostly, except that when I'm in England something weird happens to me where I suddenly decide it's time to try some new vegetables. I don't know why this happens - maybe it's because certain things are more common there than here or maybe it's because I'm drunk a lot - but my first trip over to see the comic I ate some parsnips in an attempt to appease his mother (the poor woman nearly short circuited when he told her I didn't eat potatoes and almost gave up on making me a roast dinner altogether. Instead she went overboard and made about twelve sides in the hope that I might like at least one of them) and I have been addicted to them ever since. For starters I had prawns (see?) and Steve ordered the soup of the day, which was celeriac. I'd never heard of it. "It's a root vegetable," he told me. "Try it." I was dubious, owing to the word "vegetable" which typically connotes "horrible things are about to happen in the vicinity of your taste buds" to me. But he wouldn't drop it, so I borrowed his spoon and (after a rambling description of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short Rejected when he gave me the crazy eye for holding it up and shouting "My SPOON is too big!") tentatively tasted the soup. Immediately, Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" began to play. Diamonds rained down from the sky, a pile of kittens appeared out of nowhere and a bevy of angels hovered nearby smiling benevolent smiles at us. Celeriac is DELICIOUS, and I made him write it down for me so I could look it up later and see if we even had it here (we do, but it's called celery root), which he did while I inhaled pretty much all of his soup.

It was at around this point when the trouble started. We'd gotten a beer at the bar before being seated and then ordered a bottle of wine to go with our dinner (me, something that had the word beef in it and seemed safe, him I don't even know what the fuck) which I drank what I felt was more than my fair share of because he kept insisting he was driving. Then our waiter, a charming and ingratiating man who resembled a young Lurch with a shaved head, brought over the dessert menu which had something on it that contained the word "chocolate" three separate times in its description. Obviously I made Steve order it for me, thus giving him the opportunity to order us some dessert wine as well. You may recall I was two ciders into the day before Steve had even shown up. Consequently, by the time we left I was well and truly fucked.

Steve drove me back to the hotel, where clearly the only thing to do was head for the hotel bar and pour more cider down my throat. We phoned Nat the Evil Lesbian to join us, and together we hatched diabolical but hilarious plans for when I return in March. Our laughter seemed to attract the attention of the people at the next table - a nice couple from Lincolnshire who may or may not have been at the wedding the previous day (I asked them but don't remember their answer because I was piss drunk). After Steve left (early, I decided, even though it wasn't. I had gotten the Loud), Nat and I joined them at their table where we regaled them with tales of how we'd met and what we'd done all week and they told us about their grown children (or something, I was drunk). They were genuinely disappointed when we rose to leave and even more so when I explained that my level of drunkenness would most likely prevent me from meeting them for breakfast before they went home in the morning. It did.

I woke up Monday and was not any more English or 20 years old than I had been earlier in the week. I was supposed to have lunch with Felix and Charlie and their progeny. When Felix texted me to let me know something had come up and they couldn't make it, I gratefully went back to bed until the middle of the afternoon. I only got up again in order to collect the stranger from Hitchin station, who had cleared a few hours of his schedule to spend the afternoon with me tying knots in things and showing off some tools he carries around in a very nice pair of cashmere socks. I was starving by the time he left and decided to go out for a delicious roast dinner (no parsnips, sad sad). That accomplished, there was nothing left to do but pack up my things (and my new rope) and try to catch a few hours sleep before catching a bus to the airport for my flight home (I didn't. Instead I called the bartender and had him put the cat on the phone so I could tell her I was on my way home because I am insane).

Even when I've been away somewhere brilliant, and even when I leave somewhere before I really feel ready to go home, I always feel an enormous sense of relief as soon as I'm back on the ground in Chicago - it's how I know I'm in the right place. I was grinning from ear to ear the entire cab ride back to my apartment. When I got there, I discovered that my amazing roommate had bought me two bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos (I do not know what they do to the Doritos in England, but it isn't good), some Reese's peanut butter cups and a huge pumpkin (he would later tell me it's my "practice" pumpkin to help me decide what to carve on my real Halloween pumpkin). Home sweet home.

I'll see you in March, Hitchin.

*Fries.

England Trip Do Over - Part 3

I woke up Friday to brilliant sunshine and a wide open day. Both of these things are atypical of all my previous trips, so I was very excited. I wandered around by myself for a bit, simply because I could. The one thing I made it a point to do was wander up Tilehouse Street because it is my favorite street in the world. Since I grew up with an English family as a huge part of my extended one, I'd been hearing about it all my life, and had developed a picture of what England looked like in my own head which was shaped entirely around the loose oral history I'd been hearing about since I was 3. My first time visiting the comic he had taken me on a walking tour of Hitchin, which I thought was lovely, right up until we hit the bottom of Tilehouse Street, where I stopped in my tracks and stood with mouth agape. That was it. That was my England. Apart from its not being constantly shrouded in mist (and I've been told to come back at a different time of year because it will be), Tilehouse Street was exactly what I had been picturing all my life. It was like someone had mined my brain, extracted that image and had it built in real life. The comic insisted that was to be expected, as my family was from St. Albans which is just down the road and looks very similar, but I wasn't having it. Magic had just happened. I wanted to stay there forever.

Tilehouse Street

I was getting pretty hungry, having not eaten the night before, and had decided to call Nat the Evil Lesbian to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, but decided first to have a walk through the arcade. Which is where I simply ran into her. It was my second time bumping into someone I knew and I was probably overly excited, as walking around town bumping into people is basically her job desciption. We went and got some lunch which we ate on the lawn at St. Mary's Church, and which led to the only dark point of what was an otherwise perfect day: on finishing our lunch, we were about to throw our rubbish in the bin* when Nat exclaimed, "Oh look, there's a giant spider in there!" There was. A giant, GIANT spider. Like, huge. Like, way bigger than any spider in England has a right to be, because listen up England, one of the reasons that I go there is because there are not supposed to be any huge bugs that can get me, ESPECIALLY not spiders. THIS IS WHY I DON'T GO TO AUSTRALIA OR BRAZIL. You are supposed to be a safe haven for me, and you are RUINING my fantasy of a land of tiny harmless bugs with your ridiculously large bin spiders. CUT IT OUT. Nat, the one who is terrified of actors dressed up in scary outfits who pose no real threat to her whatsoever, for some reason decided to THROW HER THINGS IN THE BIN ANYWAY, thus disturbing the giant spider which obviously WAS a threat to our lives and making me scream like an idiot, "What the fuck do you think you are doing? THERE ARE OTHER BINS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

When I'd calmed down a bit and thrown my own rubbish away in a different, spider free bin (I made her check before I would get near it), she went about doing the tour guide portion of her town ranger job, and took me inside the church, to meet the coffee guy in the square, and to her office where I bought a bunch of souvenirs including a bottle of delicious apple juice to take home (which did not end up lasting even 24 hours). Right around this time, I got a text from MrBalls, who was on his way into town with his best friend, her husband and their offspring. I went off to meet them at Halsey's for tea where we ended up having the best waiter ever. First of all, he had no idea what cakes they had, so we sent him in to go check. When he came back he still didn't know what one of them was. "It looks like the apple ones, but the decoration on the top is different so I think maybe it's not. But the woman who brings the cakes said this morning that she had changed some of the decorations so it might be. I really don't know." I fell in love with him. After our tea and a fork duel, MrBalls and I popped over to see Felix at his salon before heading to a birthday party at the Sunrunner.

We were early, and so we got our beers and sat outside waiting for the others with one other friend, the mutineer, who had shown up when we did. People started trickling in one at a time, most of whom I didn't know but was introduced to by MrBalls, Nat or Sulu. Much of the night is fuzzy because beer! What I do remember is MrBalls saying the mutineer was the most perverted person he knew, which made my head spin around fast enough to cause whiplash so I could argue the point - they both conceded when I pulled my pink bullet vibrator out of my purse, turned it on and started poking the mutineer in the arm with it. Later, after the party started winding down, he was kind enough to walk me home and make sure I made it safely into my bed.

The next day I got up late and had time for very little other than to have some tea and a shower and get sort of dressed before heading to the train station to collect the stranger, who was spending the afternoon in Hitchin with me. I walked him through the square pointing stuff out as if I owned the place, and we stopped for some coffee and a snack at the coffee stand where I greeted Rick the coffee guy like I'd known him all my life. A light rain dissolved into an absolutely beautiful afternoon, which I missed entirely due to the fact I spent all of it indoors. However, it seemed to be thoroughly enjoyed by the wedding party going on in the hotel right outside my open window, which we spied on in between various attempts to disrupt it.

After walking the stranger back to the train station, I realized it was getting a bit late (by Hitchin standards) and I had better find something to eat before the whole place closed down. This led me to do the unthinkable: I discovered a restaurant BY MYSELF, went inside it BY MYSELF, ordered dinner AND dessert BY MYSELF and somehow got through all of those things without dying or bursting into tears. I got a text from the comic sadly informing me of our F.C.'s latest humiliation (which I had wisely chosen not to watch) and text-gossiped with Nat about our respective transgressions the previous evening.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am not English and I am not 20, and my liver can only handle so much abuse. Consequently, instead of going out on the most lively night of the week, I called it a night and went to bed. Besides, I was meeting Steve for dinner the next day, and I had not yet spent an evening with Steve that didn't end with the room spinning. Sunday would not turn out any different.

*trash in the garbage can