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When I was at University, I somehow ended up hanging around with people quite a bit older than me – the townie, druggie folk. To this day, I do not understand why I was accepted into this group.
Going to dealers' houses, and townie houses, parties and pubs in the town was one thing, but one weekend I ended up at a party way off in the country. The house was quite remote and there were about fifty people there: lots of booze, joint smoking and LSD being taken. It was a good party in my recollection, but as usual I felt a little bit out of my depth socially; to this end I rolled and smoked joints constantly which took the edge off my heavy drinking.
I remember being sat at the kitchen table which was surrounded with tripping people. I didn’t join in too much, I mainly listened to the weird conversations going on. There was a girl there with her boyfriend, and she suddenly quieted the whole room with a loud exclamation. She was tripping, and had been digging at a splinter that she had in her thumb – a splinter that had been there for several years. And lo! the splinter had literally popped out of her thumb. Her announcement was followed by lots of stoned amazement, and people gathered around the girl staring at her thumb.
Jump forward a couple of years to Lamu, an island off the coast of Kenya. I was hanging out there with two friends – doing the usual: getting drunk and stoned. You had to go around the island by boat to hang out on the beach; we ended up going about every fourth day – too busy getting wrecked and challenging Bob (the can-do boy of the place where we were staying) to venture out in search of things such as chocolate, crisps and pop for us. His tasks made all the harder by the fact it was Ramadan.
The beach, when we did get there, was deserted; a vast expanse of golden sand and perfect blue sea overlooking the channel between Lamu and its neighbouring island. We had been warned about violent robberies of tourists whilst on the beach, but the worst thing that happened to me was being stung by a jellyfish.
I told my two friends that I recognized a couple we spied sunbathing further down the beach. My friends ignored me, much as fellow travelers ignored each other – because everyone is so cool. However, this couple had set me to thinking about where I’d seen them before.
Several days later we happened to be on the same small boat as the couple as we all returned around the island from the beach. Quite rudely I stared at them for most of the journey until it finally dawned on me (to my huge mental relief) where I knew them from. I broke the silence of the journey by asking the girl, “Were you once tripping at a party when you got a splinter out of your thumb?” Both of them were visibly astonished, as were my friends who thought I was making more of a twat of myself than usual. I told her I’d been there when it happened, and although I knew they wouldn’t remember me personally, we had many friends in common, but not much else.
The boat pulled in and we went back to our new routine – baiting fat white girls who were enjoying the attentions of the local rasta-type men. We didn’t mind the girls getting lucky, it was the fact that they behaved like beauty queens and paraded their holiday shag around the town as if they were Hollywood starlets that stirred us to action. |
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