WozzaBee

​ There's a guy I know called Doely (that's not his real name but we'll call him that to protect his identity), who went to the pub after college for a birthday drink one Friday back in the early nineties. When he woke up the next morning he looked around and was pleased to discover that he'd managed to make it home to his own bed, because he had absolutely no memory of getting home (or even leaving the pub). He channeled his inner Captain Picard and conducted the regular Saturday morning damage report, starting with his jeans; they weren't ripped or covered in shite so that was a good start. Then he went through his pockets; wallet (which still had some money in), keys and enough loose change to fill a piggy bank - excellent, it was looking good.  Next, shoes. He had been wearing the brand new Nike Air Max trainers that his Mam had bought him, so it was important that they were still in good nick (he still lived at home and she would've battered him if he’d rui...

I've always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a kid, and I was actually quite good at it back then. I used to take concepts and scenarios from things I'd read and seen on TV, jumble it all around, add in some ideas of my own and come up with something new. I was upcycling before the word upcycling had even been invented (or reinvented?). Somewhere in my teenage years I lost interest, I guess sitting at home filling a blank page with words couldn't compete with what my mates were up to outside in the real world, so the real world won. The victory wasn't total, however, because the desire to write, to create stories and express ideas, never went away completely, I just ignored it for a few decades. Eventually I found my way back, after I had become aware of a thing called blogging. People weren't submitting drafts to publishers anymore, forlornly hoping that one of those gatekeepers might just see something worth taking a chance on. No, if they had something to ...

​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 described as...