cigarette

I sat looking at him feeling sick. The smoke curled around his face and drifted past his greasy, unkept hair. With the wheeze of an exhale, he gently placed his treasured cigarette in the ashtray and reached for his beer.

Worn out, pale blue jogging pants clung desperately to his bulging stomach. A stomach that was so large, yet so versatile. By night, he could use it as a book stand when sat up in bed. By day, it became a place to rest those tired arms or a tray for catching food.

His belly poked through his shirt and joggers, like an angry escaping elephant, thrusting aside his grungy t-shirt. The fluff filled belly button rounded off a physique that hadn't seen a plate of real food in years.

The excessive sails of fat that draped from his arms flapped in an imaginary wind as he shuffled on the chair to rearrange his weight and relieve the numbness of his well cushioned bottom.

The chair groaned.

This mans face resembled a volcano. Recently active, acne spilled like hot lava across his face, scarring every morsel of tissue leaving an itchy, flaky mess in it's wake. This man had breasts and an unidentifiable chin. This man was queuing at the gates of hell.

And all the while, he continued to so delicately lift that cigarette up to his mouth, draw in the smoke with a wheezey-whistle, and rest it down gently like a precious, priceless, delicate piece of gold.

And all the while, the cloud of lingering death circled overhead, hanging in wait, ready to kill.

The waitress leaned in to clear one his empty beer glasses.

There was a slap! The table shook!

Deep, raucous laughter exploded from his mouth. His stomach clattered the table sending cutlery everywhere. Knives and forks flew. Spoons went astray. And glasses tumbled like poorly constructed buildings during an earthquake.

'Daddy, why was that funny?' his daughter asked. 'Why did you hit that waitress on the bottom?'

As he glared at her, she ran her fingers through her beautiful hair and tilted her head to one side. Her eyes confused at why he could draw pleasure from pain.

'NEVER YOU MIND,' he snapped banging the table.

He smirked and turned back to his beer.

'One day love, when you're a big girl, you'll understand…'

The cloud of smoke smirked back and whispered, 'Shame you won't be around.'

Oasis

Artist: Oasis
Album: Familiar to Millions
Track: Supersonic

Initially, when I first heard Oasis, I really wasn't keen oo the two arrogant brothers from the darkside of the British music scene.

My brother was the Oasis fan. He liked his music loud and to the point. With a couple solid punches and a drinking scandal thrown in for good measure.

Being a eleven year old of sophistication, I preferred the much softer sound of Blur. Their weirdly-mixed melodies, odd chord progressions and simply bizarre lyrics seemed to ring a bell with me and my ears were filled with the sounds of 'Mr Robinson and his Quango'.

I might add that I had no idea what 'Quango' meant or who Mister Robinson was, but it didn't matter, it sounded cool and it was much easier to listen too than the aggressive monkey-browed siblings from Manchester.

At seventeen, I (my mother) decided that it was time for me get a job to fund my excessive consumption of white cider and other highly sweetened alcopops.

Eventually, I found suitable employment at a world famous, high street pizza establishment able to offer me a solid £40 a week.

Thankfully, mathematics was of my chosen subjects at college. I was able to quickly calculate that this massive amount of money equated to bucket loads of cheap booze - so I took the job without hesitation.

Little did I know that it would involve slaving away behind a stinking hot pizza oven until midnight most Saturday nights and then arriving at 6am the next day to set up.

Little did I know that it would involve dealing with some of the most revolting people I have ever meet who would do anything not to pay for a meal including forcing their kids to put hair in the food.

Little did I know that I would meet one of my closest friends there and we'd go on to become two of biggest Oasis fans of all time.

I don't know where the CD came from - it was probably left by an ex-employee. Anything that spent more than five minutes in the kitchen ended up covered in slimy grease, so it was difficult to tell what most things were or who they belonged to.

My real feelings for Oasis developed one Saturday afternoon whilst listening to a track on that CD called the 'Masterplan'. It was Christmas time, which meant the restaurant was heaving with hungry customers polluting there bodies after a hard day of present buying.

We were tired, hot and fed up of cheese and pepperoni.

But that CD pulled us through the shift. Lively, upbeat, energetic with some beautiful melodies thrown in for balance. The power chords of 'Acquiesce' hummed through the kitchen and set our pizza making on fire, we wanted to change the world through 'Listen up' and nearly cried through 'Talk Tonight'.

Pizzas whizzed out of the kitchen at brake neck speed. Garlic breads suddenly went out on time and best of all each portion of chicken wings had the correct number of wings in!

One of the best shifts I ever worked.

In the July of that year, Oasis had played Wembley Stadium as part of the 'Familiar to Millions' tour. I went straight out and grabbed a copy.

The album version of 'Supersonic' is much 'dirtier' than the live version and grinds along powerfully, sounding cool and putting out an attitude.

The live version captures a band flying high on performance. The live version raises my pulse and awakens my senses. I've trained to it, ridden my bike to it, run to it, cooked dinner to it, danced to it, and simply sat with a satisfied smile on my face and just listened to it with my friends.

Whenever I'm feeling down or need inspiration. Whenever I need that extra boost to keep going, or to keep my focus on my work.

Supersonic always put me in a good mood.


*I've since discovered that a 'Quango' is a an acronym meaning 'quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation'. I still do not know what this means.

**I have several musician friends who claim Oasis are a bunch of untalented and ugly musicians who shouldn't be allowed to perform. I will receive some serious stick if they read this. Please feel sorry for me. Thanks.

goldfish

If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?

Unfortunately, I don't have a pet at the moment. But, I have owned (and killed) an assortment of goldfish in my time.

My favourite, Regi, was ceremonially sacrificed in a raging fire in the garden of my house at university.

If you think that this is an unusual end for a goldfish, then I guess you're right. I expect that most simply slip away during the night and are found by their owners the next day.

After a little sadness and mourning, the dead fish is awkwardly tossed into the toilet, flushed away and then promptly forgotten.

But not my fish, he went with a bang. But we could have saved his life if we had only made him understand just one single thing (it too would have helped if we'd known what this simple thing was before assassinating the little guy).

Allow me to explain.

Reginald was a pretty ordinary Goldfish. He didn't do much except swim in circles and avoid the other fish in the tank. And like him, the other fish in the tank were orange and boring.

We don't know if they talked to each other. We have no idea if they spent entire afternoons theorising about their existence, questioning the meaning of life, and just what was the purpose of being cocooned in this tiny little pond.

In fact, Regi and his friends were good at nothing else other than eating and or course the bodily function that follows eating.

For about three weeks we had a great routine in place. Feed the little fellas in the morning and on a Saturday give them some fresh water to play in.

Everything was going fine until one morning we came down to discover that Regi was dead. At least he appeared to be.

He was floating on his side at the top of the tank with a glazed look in his eyes. His gills were frozen and there was not a flip from his fins.

Oh dear.

Our suspicions of death were confirmed by the behaviour of his fellow goldfish. None of them would go near him. They all cowered at the bottom of the tank and would not approach. It was like he was some form a disease, a horrible plague polluting the serenity of the tank.

Regi was dead. This was a sad morning.

Eventually everyone drifted down with hangovers and had their moment of sadness and grief over cornflakes.

Overcome with emotion, we decided that flushing the poor fellow down the toilet was not fitting for one of our fish. After much deliberation, it was decided that we should build a fire in the garden and have a few beers to mourn our fallen comrade (what else are students supposed to do on a Saturday anyway?)

A selection of beers were purchased and the afternoon turned into a rather boozy affair. I don't really remember much until the following Tuesday.

On Tuesday night we were watching a quiz show presented by the rather intelligent Stephen Fry. The program is quite quirky and as it turned out one of the questions revolved around the memory span of a goldfish.

What was interesting was the little fact that Stevo threw in before moving onto the next question. His factoid went something like this:

'Did you know goldfish will eat non-stop if there is food available? And interestingly, when you overfeed a goldfish it will lose the ability to regulate it's buoyancy. The result is that the goldfish ends up floating aimlessly on it's side!'

My face dropped. Oh no! The night before Regi's death I had given him a little extra feed because I was convinced that Andy, my housemate, wasn't doing a good job feeding them.

I gave out a yelp and owned up. Chris looked at me and said that he'd done the same too. Andy spoke up and said,'Well, I've been feeding them every morning just like it says on the packet.'

We realised what we had done. Regi had been exposed to a whopping three portions of fish flakes in the space of a few hours.

We had simply overfeed poor Regi, which meant we had caused his paralysis in the pond. So when we discovered him, he probably wasn't dead and he would most likely have recovered. That was until…

...I BURNT HIM TO DEATH ON THE FIRE.

He could still have been here! He might have been okay if we'd just left him alone! He would still be swimming freely with his friends… what have I done!

I took a cider from the fridge, took a huge mouthful and sighed, 'If only we could have made him understand that to many fish flakes could kill him.'