Hello. It’s me. From the outside or something. That’s what she says isn’t it? In the song.
In January 2016 (now) I decided I was going to give up social media for the month. This is a big deal. I chuffing love social media. It has all those bits you can drag down and release to update and it jingles and woops for you. What is not to love? I’m just worried it’s a bit dangerous. I spend so long on there that it gets fucking depressing. I’m supposed to be a writer. I’m supposed to produce things. How can I do that if I am locked into this infernal battle of baby photos and engagement announcements. That’s why I’m giving it up.
Those of you with me last year will remember the struggle of Dry January 2015. I didn’t drink. Apparently I don’t drink a lot now, and last night I downed three cans of San P Limota in a move that left me slightly nauseous for the rest of the evening but I assure you, I still drink. I wanted to give up something this year that had the same level of overlap with my life. It was either going to be social media or caffeine and I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to my grandes.
I’ll do a nice big wrap-up of what has gone on this month at the end but I just wanted to drop you all a message to say I am ok. I’m focusing on the things I actually enjoy. I’m writing a lot. I’m making plans that I hope to see through. Everything is awesome. I’ll see you when I’ll see you. Alternatively, there are other ways of getting in contact with me and you can use any of them. Don’t be a stranger or at least, don’t be any stranger than you usually are.
There we go, like narcissistic thieves returning to the scene of the crime we find ourselves back at another January. The chance to give everything a lovely little wipe clean and an opportunity to take stock of our life choices, or the chance to mock anyone who would consider changing anything they’ve ever done just because of the date. Either is good. It’s been a funny old year. I often wonder which it’ll be that the entire world gets destroyed because of bad decisions but here we are in another new one, blinking slowly through our hangovers and willing our genitals to return to normal size after knocking back half an E with a glass of bubbly because “fuck it”. Many things happened in 2015, politics and stuff, but what you are really wondering is what I made of the weird stuff that happened to me. Well, I’m going to tell you, breaking it down month by bloody emboldened month.
January: The year began much like others before it, by following on from the year that had been. I spent most of the month accidentally writing 2014 on documents and having to correct myself and dreaming of the day I would have to make a 5 look like a 6 rather than making a 4 look like a 5. I was also swiping right with a fiendish speed I first established playing Track And Field as a kid. It was an experimental time for me as a man although one which, as good fortune would have it, stopped me from being on the Channel 4 show, First Dates. I will forever be in debt to the replacement bus service I refused to get all the way to London on the promise of a background TV date and a dinner (which I have in my head would have definitely been a battered sausage and chips). Elsewhere, my glasses got trodden on in a sex kerfuffle and were never the same again.
February: As with every year before it, February was celebrated nationwide as being my birthday month. While the House of Lords still veto the suggestion we all get the whole month off and call it a Pauliday I did get a lovely four Saturdays and Sundays off in a month as well as a mixed grill to celebrate the day itself. In a move that shocked many (me), a number of my friends forgot the date and spent weeks afterwards trying to make amends. I pigheadedly refused to lower myself to their level and instead floated around my flat in a pair of mop slippers. I went to my first ever Drive-in movie where I saw ab-flashing gay romp Top Gun for the first time. I went to a very nice hotel in London and upset the establishment by drinking a lot of vodka martinis while dressed like I was in Mad Men.
March: Two incredible things happened in March 2015. The first was that The Strokes announced they would be playing Hyde Park in the summer. I booked tickets. The second was that Secret Cinema announced they would be showing The Empire Strikes Back in the summer. I booked tickets. The third was that I started talking to an incredible woman via my blog who utterly compelled me. The only problem was that she was in Manchester and I was in Essex. With the near-Vulcan levels of logic I possess I got on the National Express website and booked tickets. I was also asked to perform at Old Trunk’s Tales & Ales events. My best bit from the show was getting to say cunnilingus onstage, I’m like Shakespeare.
I also forgive my friends for forgetting my birthday when they surprised me five weeks late with a meal out. I almost cried hard salty man tears.
April: I spent most of April darting back and forth to Manchester and falling in love like an idiotic little schoolboy. I also got to visit Salford Lads Club and having been there and done that, got the t-shirt to prove it. Everything I had ever said in the throes of my relationship-hating mentality were served up to me on toast points. I was literally (not literally) eating my words (metaphor). After spending three days together Charlotte and I decided the best thing we could do about the two-hundred miles between us was reduce it to about fifteen feet at all times and she started packing up her life to come and be with me. As I am constantly reminded, the north remembers, I know nothing, winter is coming… except it wasn’t. Spring was. And I was full of the joys of it. I was reasonably youngish, I had a foxy lady and somehow I managed to get an interview for a job I had lovingly gazed across the room after for about six months.
May: In May everything went proper mental. I had to clear enough space in the wardrobe for another person to get their stuff in there and I found out I got the job I had been pining for. I could practically smell the impressive job title on subtle off-white business cards, It would even have its own watermark. I bought a number of suits because I was still watching too much Mad Men and tried to negotiate a start date. After a heavy 24 hours in which I drove back and forth to Manchester with a carload of stuff we got Charlotte moved in and began our domestic bliss of cold cups of tea, love and dolly grips fucking everywhere.
June: In a matter of days I got to see two of the most important things in my shared love of life with my hetero-life partner Antony. We watched The Strokes and then we watched Star Wars and it was a-maz-ing. I finally felt like I was at a point in my life where I could be the adult version of child me, allowing these incredible opportunities I had always hoped for to play out. More than anything I always wondered when I would get to a point where I was happy with my lot. I seemed to have found it. Charlotte and I also welcomed our ridiculous bundle of joy Rigamortis into our lives. The rescued halfling of a cat with bowed back legs became our fur baby and we started creeping other people out with the way we talked about her as if we had birthed her ourselves. I started my new job and was immediately overwhelmed.
July: For Charlotte’s birthday we went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour and geeked out for a number of hours. I discovered that regardless of what I may have thought I was never in Gryffindor House and have been flying the Ravenclaw flag ever since. We visited her family for a few days and traveled to Hay-on-Wire for all the bookshop feels.
August: I was reminded of just how cool all of my friends were as they simultaneously jumped ship for the Edinburgh festival. I submitted a new novel about a version of me with a different name to agents and publishers across the land and was told I had made the main character purposefully unlikable. It was a low point. I spent weeks trying to make myself purposefully likable again. Reading Festival allowed Antony and I another chance to geek off as we spent four hours circling the M25 before finding our turn off, drinking too much, thinking that some of the children at the festival should really locate their mums and dads because they’d had far too many disco biscuits for their faces to deal with unattended and then watched The Libertines locked arm-in-arm.
September: I started trying to fit six months worth of training ahead of my annual charity trek into just one month as it dawned on me I was going to actually be flying to the Grand Canyon. I spent my weekend walking across the very flat and un-Canyon-y Essex countryside, taking refuge in the sitting rooms of anyone who would have me and making Vines that I assumed were hilarious. My fourth book, The Stamp Brotherhood, was released upon the masses (my parents and possibly some people who got the free e-book) and once again I waited for Lady Fame to come knocking at my door. The book did incredibly well, getting into the Kindle Top 20 for its category and earning me even more of a smug demeanor. I got three new tattoos, finally reaching a point where I realised I don’t have to explain the relevance of them to everyone each time I get one done and it can simply be because I like something. It’s not like it is permanent anyway.
October: I flew to Las Vegas and was jettisoned out into the desert to trek the Grand Canyon. I met some lovely and incredible people who I will remain in touch with, as I did after the Sahara and Peru treks. I raised over a thousand pounds for the Guide Dogs charity and I added another country to my roster of blagging rights when I looked off wistfully and recalled the time I hurt my knee in a cave. I got drunk in a casino, was denied entry to a club, lost my underwear on a building site and was shown to an executive business suite in the course of one night out. I downplayed this element compared to all the great charity work.
Charlotte and I visited Bath, enjoying a relaxing day in the thermae spa, a trip around the Roman baths and a lot of good food. We both got tattooed on Halloween.
November: I decided I was going to write two novels instead of one in the National Novel Writing Month event held each year in November. I completed the first one, at sixty-one thousand words, in just twelve days, promptly had a breakdown and was offered counseling. The second book is still in development. I also took too many truffles and got weird on a houseboat on the canals of Amsterdam.
December: Then we got here. Lovely little month December is. The warmest since records began. I ran about everywhere in a t-shirt, sweating and trying to work out if I had bought enough stuff for everyone. We commandeered a Christmas tree and set it up with the fancy baubles and bangles we had collected on our recent travels. I got to perform with some of my friends in a weird quiz show held at The Alex where I was the sexy scorecard boy. It developed my desire to bring back crop tops for men. Star Wars brought absolute joy to my face. I watched it twice and wept quietly each time. I went to so many Christmas parties that I forgot what working without a hangover felt like. Then it was Christmas and we were packing up and off to the midlands again. It was the first Christmas I had spent away from home and Charlotte’s family made me feel very welcome.
I got to see in the new year with my shoe brother before heading round to see other friends and get weird into the wee hours.
Every year has its ups and downs, it has triumphs and it has disappointments. I’m trying my best to navigate through it all, to celebrate the things I have done and recognise the fact that I’m in a very good place and space. As a very wise man recently told me, you need to find success in the life you are living and enjoy those victories. Here’s to 2016. Cheers.
My brother surprised us all by popping the big question today. It had nothing to do with the Hadron Collidor. In fact, he asked his girlfriend to marry him. I have a strange relationship with my brother. We have completely different tastes in a lot of things but I love him more than anyone else in the world including Benedict Cumberbatch.
As his older brother I felt it was important I put together some advice for him. I am not married. It’s a punishment for shoplifting in some countries. I have been to weddings and lived for two years, three months and seven days longer than him so I know what I’m about son. Here is my advice:
1. She is always right.
2. Weddings are apparently quite expensive and quite hard to organise. I am therefore willing to offer my services not just as a superstar DJ but I will also spellcheck your speech absolutely free of charge.
3. Don’t skimp on food because I will judge you.
4. If I’m not your best man I accept your decision but insist on assisting in writing the speech in an advisory capacity. Again, this speech can be spellchecked by me free of charge.
5. Don’t wear brown.
6. If you want to keep the headcount down, have the wedding somewhere exotic. I recommend Tibet, Kiev or Bangalore.
7. Let Harry be the ring bearer. He can drive up the aisle in his new BMW. It’ll be brilliant.
8. Don’t let people throw rice because if a bird eats it then it expands in their stomach and they blow up. This sounds quite cool in theory but you don’t want seagull guts on your nice tweed drainpipes.
9. Chocolate fountains, photo booths, karaoke, public hangings and pick n mix stalls are great at weddings.
10. The best weddings have free bars. Cut costs elsewhere by picking up a dress from Oxfam.
Each day they come to me and stand and stare. Why am I the one on display? What do they think I’m able to offer that they can’t get from inside. The thing is, when you get down to it, I’m not able to really show them what they’re like. Instead it is just a version of them, the opposite in fact. All the bits are there but everything is back-to-front, the wrong way round. Sometimes I wonder if they even think about me at all. Me with my mahogany frame. Me with my oval shape of good intentions. Me and the layer of dust that sits on my head and everybody seems to miss when they dust everything else in the room. They stand before me and pay little attention to anyone but themselves. Sometimes I wish I could fall down and swallow them up. One of my ancestors did that. He was the reflection on the water until a man fell in and drowned. We are all reflections and we never receive any thanks.
I have spots popped before me. I have grubby fingerprints along the bottom of me, which again never seem to be picked up as they go about their weekly cleaning routine. I sit and wait for someone to pay me any kind of attention and when they do, it isn’t for me at all. I’m just a prop to them. I’m a vessel through which they can see a version of themselves. When they don’t like what they see then they find even more delusional ways to present themselves. They’ll take a multitude of pictures using their phones until they find one that hides that extra chin. They’ll add filters and text and emojis until the image they have is nothing like the truth I first offered them. And that’s what they choose to share. Not who they are or what they do but some pimped out, made up, circus of an affair. You want the truth, you can’t handle the truth.
I get jealous you know, of the others that get to go out with them. Tiny versions of me which fold in half and fit in suitcases and clutch bags. They get to leave. They get to see the world. They get the adventures. I’m static. I stay here during the days when nobody is around. I’m stuck and I reflect the same wall, the same edge of the sofa. I’m above a beautiful fireplace but do you think I can see it? I only get to see their comings and goings. I might as well be watching paint dry. Ironically when it comes time for them to paint the room I’m taken down so I don’t even get to watch paint dry. The last time they did it I was just propped up against the sofa which had been dragged into the centre of the room. The only company we had was the dust sheet which was left over us. That’s no life for anyone. I’m worse than a prisoner here. At least prisoners get an hour of exercise in the yard. What I would give to be taken down and tossed around the garden like a Frisbee or even just a bit of excitement. To be used to split up lines of cocaine. Lou Reed once said “I’ll be your mirror”. I wish I could tell him there is nothing romantic in the sentiment but I’ve been reliably informed by a candleholder that he popped his clogs last year. Poor misguided Lou. Imagine going to your grave thinking you want to be someone’s mirror. I’d rather be a toilet brush.
Oh hang on.
(That pun was intentional)
Someone is home.
It’s not.
It’s not them.
It’s someone else.
Someone else is in my house.
Oh god, they’ve even got tights on their head. What is this cliché nonsense?
Take me.
Take me you fuckers.
Take me back to your lair, pile me up with the doubloons and the pearls. I want to be part of a haul. I can’t hang in there like that abysmal poster with the cat on it.
Not the flat screen.
Actually, take the flat screen. Maybe I’ll get a little more family time if that arsehole isn’t around. They’ll sit staring at that frame for hours sure, but what do I get in comparison, a momentary glance.
Wait.
Don’t go.
You still have room in the van.
Surely.
Are you kidding me?
The jewellery!
What are you going to do with that? You’re both clearly men.
The Grand Canyon is probably the most famous gap in America after the one between Donald Trump’s ears. It’s the stuff of Wild West legend. It’s so big that in the day I spent on the rim, gazing out at that shotgun blast wound of Earth I only saw ten percent of it. Everything from my toes to the horizon for the duration of the day was just a tenth of what it was even possible to see. Probably less than ten percent considering I have quite bad eyesight at distance.
The Grand Canyon was the third trek in three years I signed up to do through work. The previous two were across the Sahara desert and over the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. In comparison the Grand Canyon trek did not sound like it was going to be as hard. The reason being that you can fly out of Vegas on a helicopter, loop around the Canyon and be back at the Bellagio in time for a Bellini. What we were doing was trekking through the depths of the canyon and camping out. It still didn’t sound quite as hardcore as Morocco or Peru but there was something about the idea that stirred me in the place I like to get stirred if I’m considering a trek. What really sealed the deal was a BBC documentary by Dan Snow called Operation Grand Canyon where a team rode traditional wooden rowboats down the mighty Colorado river. Seeing the scale of the canyon walls, the power of nature and the plight of ordinary man took me over the edge. The next morning I signed up for the trek.
My favourite thing about trekking, about getting away from it all and setting my Out Of Office email notification, is the change from my life. There’s nothing quite like going without washing for a few days, only working with what you and the team can carry, eating as much as you can and never being full, watching the sun go down and realising you miss this incredible feat every other day. That’s a number of things all under the umbrella of change from life.
When I was in the Sahara I couldn’t believe how excited our guide Saaid got as the sun headed for the horizon each day. He made sure we were out of our tents and with him. We would crouch down on the nearest dune and watch the colour of the sky change from blue to orange to red to blue to black. It was incredible. It was life affirming. It made me realise that it didn’t matter what pacifiers I had in my life, I could strip them away and there were all these amazing things I could spend my time with instead, these awesome people who had been strangers just days before. There was an incredible bond we shared as we watched the sun go down. With nothing manmade in our way the sky was an opera and it happened every day no matter where you were.
Knowing I was heading out on another trek I decided to include watching the sunset on my list. I had got so much from it in the Sahara and the idea of being in an incredible setting like the Grand Canyon and watching something like that filled me with a renewed joy for what I was embarking on.
Of course the reality is never the same as the expectation and the Grand Canyon was no change. It was great. It was grand in fact. It had the most varied wildlife and flowers and fauna. It could go from bizarre Wile E Coyote rock formations to lush greenery in just a couple of miles. I got to climb down dynamite-blown passages in the rock and I got to swim in waterfalls. I captured the kind of moments that would make my social network jealous. I wanted them to know how much fun I was having. Then came the sunset. Now the issue with the sunset in the Grand Canyon is that it comes at about four in the afternoon. It isn’t the same as the sunset on the horizon because you’re several hundred feet below the horizon so the sun just sort of goes and then it’s black. I’m sure from the right position in the Canyon it would be possible to watch the sun descend all the way down between those huge walls but we didn’t get that. We got the sun and then the darkness and there wasn’t a whole lot in between.
What was fantastic was heading back from camp to Havasu Falls to see if we could make out the stars. When we looked up from where we were you could just make out the closer and brighter ones. We knew we needed to be away from the few lights in the camp itself in order to get a clear view. We would have suggested it as a group exercise but when we turned around the others were playing a game where they tried to pick a cardboard box up off the ground with their mouths. They stood around, egging each other on and jeering. It seemed there were two kinds of people in the camp and we were the kind who wanted to watch the stars.
Somehow we managed to find a spot where the canyon was wider than anywhere else I had seen it. The moon was behind us, giving just enough light for our shadows to be a mixed grey stretching out across the brush. The amphitheatre to the heavens was free and we all had front row seats. The stars were strong so far from artificial light, they wished us well and offered us peace and safety. The longer we looked upon them, the brighter they shone, in the way love works. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you have come from, there’s something incredibly enjoyable and humbling about looking up and wondering about just how big or small we are. Nothing else seems to matter. There’s everything you need in the exact moment you are in. We all felt it, that strange pull from the beyond and that’s why nobody said anything for so long.
We were only interrupted by outside interference, by the flash of others heading our way with a pair of flashlights. We considered hiding, just keeping it between us, not allowing people outside our purposeful group to join. Eventually we allowed them into our secret society with the special handshake of a flash of our own torch and gained another two members with absolute respect for the great beyond above us. The silence resumed, our muted respect for the world above. A prayer and a gift and a wish and a belief. We were together and we were apart.
‘I’d rather be here than playing with a box in the dirt’ said my friend. It remains the most profound thing I heard while in the United States.
When I was a kid I watched the Rat Pack version of Ocean’s Eleven. It was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen. I soon became obsessed with Sammy Davis Jr who is pretty much the coolest man who ever existed, and got to spend his time with the respective second and third coolest men who ever existed (Steve McQueen is a close fourth). What amazed me about the film is that nobody noticed what was clearly going on around them, that they were able to pull off a heist of that size and that they all understood all of the rules. Knowing I was heading out to Vegas, my head span with possibilities of what I could do there and what it would be like.
It was five in the morning and I was sat at a blackjack table. I was drunk, full of Subway and shouting at a dealer. It turned out that none of the four people on our side of the table knew how to play blackjack correctly. Carlos, the poor little croupier was very patient with us. It also turned out you were allowed to smoke at the tables, spilling your ash all over the baize in the process as long as you kept gambling. In addition, if you’re at a table and you’re deep in a game you can order a drink and they won’t charge you. They’re on the house. They want to keep you there. They want you to keep handing over dead presidents in exchange for plastic circles. They get something out of that apparently.
It’s part of the Vegas experience. You have to go there and gamble. Even people who don’t gamble decide to gamble when they are in Vegas. That’s the way it works. They welcome clueless idiots like the comments pages on tabloid newspaper websites.
Somehow I started winning hands. I didn’t fully understand what was happening but ordered another four whiskey and cokes. I kept putting hands down and I kept being given more chips until I realised I had doubled my money. I got up. There was no way I was going to miss this opportunity.
‘Where are you going!?’ shouted one of my accomplices, drunk and furious. He seemed to silence every other table in the hall.
‘I know when to quit’ I said, blowing a plume of smoke over my shoulder like I was swishing my tail before going to cash in. By the time I got back to the table two of the guys were screaming at Carlos again. In those precious seconds they had both got about $200 up before losing it all. They walked off in a hump with another whiskey and coke.
Some time later we were at a roulette table with an old, bald entrepreneur from Scotland called Ian. He was covered in tattoos and talked to us like we were his pet dogs. He had a camp delivery that made me wonder if he was looking for a good time. He was very good at gambling. None of us were. We were getting pretty good at drinking.
‘Hey, One Direction’ said a security guard who in the film of my life will be played by a hologram of John Candy. He was talking to us. He was making jibes about how young, handsome and talented we were. I thought about where “Being pissed and broke in a casino” would come in a game of Top Trumps. It would definitely score high on the Excitement category. ‘I’m gonna need to see some ID boys.’ he said We all threw our licenses down on the table for him to examine.
‘Hmm’ he said, obviously annoyed he couldn’t pick any of us up and boot us out the door, ‘enjoy Las Vegas.’ We played on. Losing more money and shouting tactics at each other which would never have helped.
‘Guess what I do?’ said Ian, the Gollum in his character shining.
‘Tattooist?’
‘Artist.’
‘Porn!’
‘Aye, ye ain’t even close’ he said, throwing some more of his cityscape of coloured chips down on as many numbers as he fancied.
‘I own three hairdressers and I sell bags. I’ve got tattoo parlours and I also have a bar.’ I don’t know what Ian’s intentions with us were but the One Direction comment appeared to spur him on. We promptly left.
At six I was in the lift on my own. Walking through the casino one last time had been too much for me. It was still as it had been when we checked in. The air was constant and the music played and the machines rolled. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I propped myself in the corner of the lift and hoped nobody was going to try and get in with me.
My experience of Las Vegas wasn’t the same as any I have heard. There were some high points but there were some moments where I was waiting for a screen to descend, a boom to appear in shot, a prop to fall down and knock the back wall, revealing the fact that everything is fake. There’s nothing shiny and new about Vegas anymore. It’s all a vision of how things were supposed to be in the future from a bizarre viewpoint somewhere in the middle of the last century. It’s actually quite sad to see people sat yanking on the handle of a slot machine like it’s going to answer their dreams. It’s hard to tell if anything you see or feel is real. It’s all the same, all the time. It feels like a setup. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome on Xanax.
It’s somewhere I would recommend visiting, for the spectacle more than anything else. It’s the kind of place where it’s possible to find anything to do at 3 in the morning, as long as it isn’t sleep. I was offered girls, I was offered cocaine and I was offered a cab ride home and a foot long. You can imagine which I went for.
In the first two weeks of NaNoWriMo 2015 I managed to start and finish an entire book. It got pretty dark at times but I still thoroughly recommend it.
In America, bigger is better. That goes for their portions of mac n cheese, their gun crime and their canyon. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long. To put that into perspective, especially for someone from Essex, that’s Basildon to Durham. It’s huge. We spent a day walking around the Rim (ha, rim) and everything we could see only accounted for ten percent of the total of the Canyon. It’s 1.2 million acres. That’s 1.2 million times what your dream property in Thorpe Bay has, to put that into perspective for someone from Essex. A week on, it is still hard to deal with what I got to see and enjoy in my time in America and it helped me understand why only 46 percent of Americans have a passport (and understand that Asia is a continent and China is a country).
Here are some things I observed about America;
– Everyone is really nice. Too nice. I was highly suspicious
– You can buy knives and hot dogs everywhere
– Nobody said they loved my accent even though I was purposefully being more English
– A small is a medium. A medium is a large. A large is a bucket with a straw poking out of it
– Biscuits and gravy are not a suitable breakfast
– You have to tip everything. I slipped a dollar bill into an automatic door that opened for me
– A pavement is a sidewalk and an idiot is called a Trump
– There are so many more kinds of processed cheese than you realise
– Knowing how to wrangle a horse is expected of all men
– Everyone has nice teeth
– If there is space for it then everything has a gift shop attached. America is big and there is always space
– Both time and Vegas are constructs of man and are entirely separate
Despite how problematic America can be, it doesn’t change the fact that the landscape is beautiful. We drove from Las Vegas out to Arizona and back again and the views rivaled those out of Morocco. It’s strange and beautiful and then you get to a truck stop and feel like you’re on a set. It’s the best of both worlds.
As far as the trek goes, it was the first time I have trekked with a static campsite so we were limited in how far we could go out before having to turn back. We also, to paraphrase Crowded House, took the weather with us, and were presented with more rain than Arizona had seen in the last year. The canyon is a weird place to hang out. A lot of the time you’re so busy making sure you’re not about to walk over the edge of something or tread on a spider that you can forget to look up and see these incredible geological lines cut into the sides of the thousand foot walls around you. The vibrancy and the colours seem to have been ramped up, the saturation is at 100%. I met some amazing people and had a brilliant time. I climbed and I fell and I bashed my knobbly knees, I ate and ate and ate, I gambled and walked away when I saw for myself what could happen to people. I met a tattooed entrepreneur from Scotland at a roulette table called Ian, I got referred to as One Direction by a security guard who would later show me to the Business Suite and I finally got to eat a mythical corn dog (well, four of them).
The problem now is that I want more. I want all the America there is. I want to get in a car with my lady and drive from coast to coast and never look back. I want to eat burgers and smoke Marlboro. I want to live it and love it and be. There’s just the short issues of having to work and not having the money. I’ll get there though. In the meantime, I have National Novel Writing Month starting in a couple of days and a bonny new travel story to write.
Today we have some time in the morning free to enjoy the sights and sounds of Las Vegas. After lunch we transfer to the airport for our return flight to the UK.
If everything has gone to plan I will be full of regret and vodka. I’ll also be pleading the fifth.
Paul Schiernecker
Stay informed with curated content and the latest headlines, all delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now to stay ahead and never miss a beat!
Paul Schiernecker 