Reminiscences of an Old Punk

It was lovely to catch up last night with dear friends P. and M. before they head back to Australia. We first met in the late 1970s at The Victorian College of the Arts, in Melbourne, when we were all just babies. The venue for the evening was Drummond Street, Euston, for a great Indian meal at Taste of India (delicious food and handsome, friendly staff). Much hilarity ensued as we reminisced about the wonderful, anarchic, art-student days of the Punk era, which we all agreed were the golden years of our lives. A few of the items on the evening's agenda were as follows: driving down Hoddle Street and everyone is completely off their chops on LSD - the road was writhing like a Van Gogh painting;  the girl on speed who threatened people with a tiny metal earring shaped like a dagger which she took out of her ear for the purpose; someone sets a boat on fire in a Richmond street - it explodes; a dozen eggs smashed into the Richmond public letterbox; a friend makes a frantic dash to the parked car, carrying an enormous charity box in the shape of a dog, which he had just wrenched from its moorings; a garden fence is torn down; a young man passed out in the hallway at a party and a girl fishes out his genitals and leaves them on display for the world - the young man's friend then pitched into a heterosexual male's nightmare of gingerly noodling them back under cover - this happened half a dozen times over the course of the evening. But the story which I had completely forgotten about for all these years was disclosed by P. through gales of his laughter. Apparently, at one party or another, I'd had a sudden, violent attack of diarrhea, during the course of which my underwear was thoroughly soiled. I had apparently removed the now offensive, reeking undergarment and tossed it into someone's garden, intent on not letting the mishap spoil my evening. Unfortunately, I had forgotten, or was perhaps too inebriated to care, that my jeans were split under the crotch. The upshot of the tale is that we all went to sit on the stairs where, according to P., "Everyone going up and down had a perfect view of your dangling cock and balls."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bethnal Green Send Off

     A family shambles into the pub, all dressed in black. It comprises a set of obese twins, one of whom is the mother of a boy and a girl aged about eight and nine.       "My god", she says to the barman, "I need a fuckin' drink after the day I've 'ad." She orders for the entire entourage and they all sit around three tables, which they hastily drag together. The woman now spots me in the corner and she galumphs over on unsteady, knock-kneed legs, with a plaintive look across her pale, doughy face.     "'Scuse me luv, can I take summer dese chairs?" She gestures to the three empty seats around my table. I tell her she can. "Only, I cremated me muvver dis mornin'. " she says, apropos of nothing. I give her my condolences.       She seats her two children on tall stools at the bar. Another family member arrives with two bags of McDonald's food. He places these in front of the kids, who eagerly dig in. The adults sit ad...
Read more

Clomping Through the NPG

   Three gangly, teenage American girls spread out and clomped around the wooden floors of the National Portrait Gallery in their chunky boot heels, loudly calling out to each other about the portraits in the Elizabethan rooms.     "Lookit this guy! He's so cool! Look at his beard. So hipster. I LOVE it!"     "Oh wow! This woman is, like, ancient. Check out that bling!"     "He's, like, a king or some shit! Lookit his hat! " I sought to escape them by slipping into another room, but they followed me in. This room contained a group of young schoolchildren who were sitting on the floor quietly listening to a lady Gallery guide explain to them the beautiful portrait of Henry IV. The three girls seemed completely oblivious to this, and they edged around the room still shouting out their observations on the people in the paintings.     "Gahd! that looks like that dude in that movie, you know who I mean?" ...
Read more

The Old Marquis

     I found myself at the French House in Dean Street, Soho, where I sat at the bar and had a number of glasses of the house lager. I eavesdropped on the conversations.      A young man in his late twenties asked his friend, a woman about thirty, how she was.      "Oh, alright, I suppose," she replied, "except for having to shove suppositories up my father's arse for the last ten days."       Two old gents were seated on the stools under the window. They were red-faced, very merry, and very loud.             "And, of course, when I was sixteen," one said, "I was taken under the wing of the old Marquis, and I went out to live on his estate. He taught me a great deal about society, and food, and wine, and what to wear to table, and that sort of thing. All kinds of things, really. It was the perfect education for a young chap, in all sorts of ways ... And, of course...
Read more