A few weeks ago, whilst enjoying an extremely exhilarant converse at a gathering hosted in a dear friend’s dwelling, I found myself holding court with a group of freshly-made acquaintances. The chat bustled back and forth as we all excitedly traded tales from our pasts. Where we were schooled, relationships that we may have formed, both romantically or otherwise, our preferred past-times etc etc. Oh how we enjoyed probing each other, digging deep with the aim of unearthing yarns detailing embarrassing endeavours of days gone by, giggling at the preposterous parallels that our life paths had inevitably taken. With the second chalice of red Wine starting to infiltrate my already merry mindset, making me even more at ease with my new friends (not to mention susceptible to mockery), I started to really open up and explain my love of Artistic expression. Once i’d exhausted my somewhat tedious spiel on Music journalism and reinforced my desire to one day craft a piece for Rolling Stone Magazine (a topic that i’ve been throwing out at parties for over five years, usually to the very same stifled laughter, traditionally followed by the feigned encouragement that could only be expected from a gaggle of drunken minds you’ve just been introduced to/encouraged to engage with), I commenced the obligatory speech on what I was doing to achieve this lifelong ambition of mine. Naturally it wasn’t long before I regaled the masses with the details of this very site you have stumbled across/been forced to view by Chris, Mick or myself. I chatted animatedly about the wonders of ‘blogging’ and the courageous pursuit of flinging the thoughts and feelings I would so desperately like to have the stones to convey in the real world into cyber space.
As I reached for the cheesesticks, feeling somewhat superior that my drunken desciples were hanging off my every word, my reality was inexplicably ravaged down from upon the charismatic cloud my bragging had elevated it to.
‘Well, I just don’t see what you could possibly write about all the time Marty. How do you keep readers coming back every week’?
That was a sudden slice of sobriety I could have done without.
As we grabbed our coats and headed into the bitter evening air I started to do what no aspiring writer should ever do, I started to THINK!
When it all comes undone, i’m rather like any other single, caucasian male hurtling towards that most maudlin of milestones ‘Thirty’! I’m still as foolhardy and frustratingly forlorn as I was a decade ago. I can be found frequenting the very same dankhole bars I probably should have outgrown midway through the ‘noughties’ and, perhaps most depressingly of all, I am still an underappreciated, nah, underachieving office Monkey who makes his own lunch everyday as a cost-cutting exercise and wears Captain America briefs to convince himself he is still, y’know, a ‘zany’ type of guy. Shirley was right, what on earth did I have to say that anybody would ever have the slightest shred of interest in? Worse still, how was I even going to convince my friends to tune into my latest entry? My confidence was shot, the unthinkable had happened: I’d lost the power to boast!
The next couple of nights consisted of tossing and turning and panic-stricken scribbling that resulted only in nonsensical noodlings so awkward it could have been torn straight from an adolescent Adrian Mole diary. This was quite a slump. What the hell was I going to do?
Then, it hit me. OF COURSE! I had a wealth of wisdom that was just waiting to be tapped into. A set of stories so scintillating, so spectacularly scandalous that I could dine out on it for months. All I had to do was lift the lid on one of the most embarrasing episodes of my young life thus far. I guess enough time had passed to share with the World (Wide Web) MY TRAVEL DIARY!
For you see dear reader, I spent ten monumental months entertaining guests from all over Europe as part of an Animacion team in the enviable location of Spain. My time there was unquestionably the most adventurous journey, not to mention an unprecedented period of self discovery, that I have ever had the pleasure to undertake. Needless to say it was also inhabited by a cast of characters, unsavoury serpents and weird and wonderful wimseys. A troupe of theatrical treasures you very seldom have the chance to cross during the rather dull nine to five existence.
I hereby officially announce the commencement of a five-part mini series, my account of those heady hedonistics right here at ‘OnlyBees’.
So if you’d like to learn about how I was almost killed by Spanish gangsters, my days spent in Canarian crack dens, my brief romances with German goddesses and Slovakian princesses, how I was touched inappropriately by a five foot homosexual choreographer or the night I finally got to see my idols Boney M perform ‘Daddy Cool’ stay tuned to ‘ONLYBEES’.
Episode one to follow…
Ciao bella
Marty!
