A death in the family

When your missus shouts "I think you've just done something stupid!" from the kitchen, it's odds-on favourite that a 'slight mis-truth' has just been delivered by said spouse. I generally find that this kind of statement falls into much the same category as "Now look what you've gone and made me do," or perhaps that age-old classic, "Well it was your behaviour in the first place that led to me sucking that other man's balls while fingering his anus."

Now I'm fortunate enough to have never heard that last phrase (well, not since my history teacher died, anyway), but the first statement was recently thrown at me, accompanied by the delivery of what can only be described as a small, damp wad of 'something blue'. [See below].

Now I'm not an expert in damp artifacts or anything, but it didn't take me more than a nano-second to realise that this was (or at least had once been) nothing more than the total fucking record of everything that had happened to me for an entire fucking year of my life.

So... nothing major then.

Yes, the infamous "gay book" that I took with me everywhere had been murdered.

It was - obviously - my fault. Well of course it was. I mean, how silly of me to have not realised that the task my other half performs every single Monday of every single week of every single year (i.e. checking my pockets before putting things in the wash) was actually MY responsibility on this particular random Monday.

How foolish of me not to have checked that the single-most important item I owned - filled with a million concepts, inventions, ideas, observation and potential fortune-making thoughts - wasn't about to be eaten by an Indesit 1300.

If people thought I was shit at updating my blog before this happened, just imagine how bad I'd be now the 'source' had been destroyed!

However, I didn't spend my extended youth watching Indiana Jones over and over for nothing, so I set about recovering this lost treasure with nothing more than a steely determination and a set of tiny tiny tweezers...

Each sodden "page" (if indeed the word "page" can be used to refer to something that looked more like a piece of sponge cake than stationary) was gently peeled away from the the main wad, hung from a miniature washing line, and then gently caressed with a hairdryer on the minimum setting. This basically produced some kind of bastard child of a note pad and a bag of crisps, but some of the text was vaguely visible. Now all I had to do was piece it all together in some kind of order so that the contents made sense. However, considering most of it was utter bollocks before it went into the washing machine, this would be no mean feat.

Anyway, I have to abandon this entry now because I'm still trying to put together a story that currently appears to involve an old man moon-walking, a woman who puts all her chips in the pot with a pair of cats, and someone called 'Donald' who is either an ex-Cheltenham jockey, or possibly a dachshund. I'll keep you posted.

Poker: The doorway to hell

Poker has opened many doors in my life. It’s put me in situations I wouldn’t have been in otherwise; introduced me to characters I would never have met otherwise (have you noticed in poker you never meet ‘people’, only ‘characters’); and exposed me to tales and stories that often took the hair off my arms.

One such story was about a seasoned poker pro who enjoyed himself while on tour by hiring a prostitute to travel round with him. She would keep him company, be his portable rail bird, and – of course – make sure he had something to smile about at the end of each day.

As the story went on, this particular player had a pretty bad run and ended up out of money. He managed, however, to find a hooker who was prepared to render her services for a percentage of his potential winnings. All it would take was 20% and she was onboard. And so it was that “John” took to the tables with a new kind of pressure weighing on his shoulders: if he didn’t get any action at the tables, he wouldn’t get any action off the tables.

Poor old John... He bust out of the main event, crashed out of a side tourney, and finally died horribly in a sit ‘n’ go he entered in one last desperate attempt to secure some poker-fueled jiggy-jiggy. And throughout each and every dreadful performance, his lady of the night glared at him from the rails, adusting her ample busom, applying gloss to her pouting lips, and eyeing up the guys on the final table...

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Not really big enough for a seperate entry, but another story was with a well-known figure in poker who declined a drink, explaining that the last time he had a drink (many years ago) he went out for "a few" down the Kings Road and woke up two days later in Dusseldorf. Lightweight...