How did I end up suffering in 40c heat on a dilapidated charabanc in Kos while still wearing the same clothes I had on when I went to the pub in Manchester the night before? The answer is quite simple really: My housemate Baz accidentally bought 200 tabs of acid. Yep. That’ll do it. He’d recently broken up with his long term girlfriend and he hadn’t taken it well. If he were older you’d say he was going through some sort of mid-life crisis, but given his age it was just a normal, everyday, run of the mill crisis. The sort of crisis that made him want to get drunk every night, experiment with drugs, that sort of thing. Some people might’ve staged an intervention, but we didn’t play those games in the north of England back in the 90s. I just let him get on with it and went along for the ride. One day he tells me that he’s decided to try acid. There’s a guy he works with who knows a guy who can hook him up. ‘Go for it’ I said ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ The Friday of...
All I can feel is a pain in my neck, and there's a sense that somewhere, outside my welded-shut eyelids, it's very bright. There are noises, distorted and distant, but becoming clearer, as if I'm underwater but rising to the surface. Then a voice, loud, clear, familiar: 'Woz, wake up, we're here!' Here? Where the fuck is here? I peel open my eyes and look around. I'm on a plane, the sun is beaming through the window, and a couple of hundred holidaymakers are excitedly preparing to disembark. One of these excited passengers is my mate Mark. Mark. I haven't seen him since ...? When? Was it last night? Or maybe this morning? Images and scenes are fading in and out of my mind's eye, incoherent and in no particular order. Trying to piece everything together is challenging. I have a pain in my neck from several hours spent sleeping wedged against a plane window, and a pain in my head from an unknown number of hours of what could loosely be describe...