Cracked Back.

Generally, I've had a shit January. I caught the worst cold I'd had for ages. Having a bright red nose and streaming eyes isn't really much fun, and the look doesn't really suit me, either. When I recovered from that, our boiler decides to commit suicide, and I spent most of last week shivering my nuts off. It's fixed now, and my house is now warm again.
But now, worst of all, I've managed to royally injure my back. It's my shoulder, mostly, but I've trappped a nerve and it's killing me. After spending possibly the most gruelling Monday at work I can remember for a long time (they're all pretty gruelling, actually, but this one had the element of serious physical pain thrown into the mix. Fun!), my lovely girlfriend booked me an appointment at a back clinic, which, luckily, is just around the corner from where we live.
This was the first time I've ever been to a chiropractor, and I was kinda nervous about what torture he was about to put me through, but as I was in so much pain I couldn't even sit down to have a poo (sorry to be brusque, but my bowels are a big deal to me!) I thought it can only help.
Also making me nervous was the fact that there was a running machine in the waiting room. I don't like running at the best of times, and the thought of doing it in the waiting room in my debilitated state didn't fill me with joy. I was imagining the receptionist laughing at this limping Quasimodo figure trying to jog along on this treadmill like a disabled gerbil. Then the lady who'd been in before me came out. She was walking very gingerly. My girlfriend, who had accompanied me, saw my worried mug and started laughing. This amused me too, but we had to keep straight faces in case the poor woman thought we were laughing at her. Trying not to laugh only makes me want to laugh even more, though, but I managed to keep it together, mostly because I knew that laughing would probably hurt. Everything else I did hurts, so it stands to reason that giggling would probably kill me, too.
So, it was my turn, finally. The chiropractor asked me a few questions, ascertained how much mobility I actually had and then he told me to take off my shirt and lie on the massage bed he had, on which you lie face down, and your face goes into a specially built-in hole. (I've seen a similar bed in the terrible Jackie Chan film The Protector, but Jackie's bed had a naked chinese girl lying under it for him to look at. No such luck in my case, I'm afraid. Just the floor. Luckily, though, unlike Jackie, no-one tried to stab me while I was lying there either, so it's swings and roundabouts.) The chiropractor pours some kind of lube on my back and gets to work. This hurts. I thought massages were supposed to be relaxing!
Then the really fun bit happened. He asks me to turn over and then he cracks my back. Ow. He does it again, higher up. Ow again. Then he puts his arm around my neck, grabs my head and twists it so my neck cracks. Fucking mega ow.

(Those James Bond movies lied to me! 007 always gets a blonde buxom masseuse to give him a rub down when he's injured, and he gets to shag them afterwards in the steam room. I get my neck cracked by a bloke called Steve. Not fair!)

Now, I'm a fairly big guy. I'm over six feet tall, and I weigh about sixteen stone (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a fat bastard.) but he was throwing me around like I was nothing. He said I had a high pain tolerance. Nice chat-up line. Normally, if I was in a situation where I've got my shirt off, covered in lube and a man is wrestling me, him saying 'You've got a high pain tolerance' might've worried me, but it made me feel cool. Yeah, I have a high tolerance of pain! I'm a rough, tough real man! This all evaporated when I winced and gasped as I struggled to put my shirt back on.
It turns out I have no spinal damage, but the stresses I put my muscles under at work are affecting my joints. So I have to do exercises. The main one involves putting my left hand on my right shoulder, my right hand on my left shoulder, like I'm hugging myself (I was doing that all last week anyway when I was fucking freezing!) and then I have to move my upper body in a figure-of-eight motion. Now this exercise is the first one you learn in junior school when you pretend to be mentally handicapped. If I stick my tongue between my lower lip and my teeth when I'm doing this, I'd look exactly like I did when I was ten and one of my classmates had just done something stupid. So, anyway, I have to keep doing this before I go again, next week.
I'm still in pain, though. I haven't been back to work since Monday, but it is improving. The fact I'm sitting here typing this is a sign of how improved I am. And I've managed to have several poos since. Hurrah!
I'm so bored, though. As I haven't been able to move out of my seat, I've just been sitting there watching DVDs and daytime telly. It may sound fun but it does get tiresome, especially when I'm watching shite like Tarantino's Death Proof or Cash In The Attic. I don't know which is the most gruesome!
Also, because I know she reads this blog (someone has to, I suppose) I'd like to thank my wonderful other half for looking after me. She wasn't really expecting this level of care until we were both in our seventies, but she's doing a wonderful job, and it's good practice for when I'm a septuagenarian with dodgy joints.
Right, gotta go. It's Homes Under The Hammer in a minute, and I need to see how that guy who bought that town house in Weymouth is getting on.

Poorly Shoulder, Episode VII

Guess what I've been playing with all afternoon! It's true though, my shoulder does hurt. I think I might've mentioned it to all and sundry at least eleventeen times...

Jose Who?

I'm still smiling (I know it's strange) from the brilliant result the mighty Aston Villa got against Chelsea on Sunday. The cheating Cockney bastards got stuffed 2-0! First time they've been beaten in seven months! Our mostly British team beat the team of expensive foreigners! Both goals scored by lifelong Villa-supporting Brummies as well!
Drogba, who is up for a BAFTA for his performance as 'man who has just been elbowed in the face' even though there was no contact at all, ironically REALLY did get injured and had to be helped off at the end. Serves the cheating bastard right. He is one of the best strikers in the world at the moment, and it saddens me that players of his calibre have to resort to play-acting. The same goes for that Ronaldo at Man Utd.
After the match, a bloke came into the pub covered in blood, telling someone on his mobile that he'd been jumped by three Chelsea supporters (it was probably only two, really) but, like he said 'at least we beat the cunts'. If he'd worn a claret shirt instead of a white one, the blood wouldn't have shown up anyway.
Being a Villa supporter is very hard work sometimes, but every now and again they do something that makes it all worthwhile, and Sunday was one of those times. When the second goal went in I was so happy it took me at least twenty minutes to get back to my natural 'slightly pissed off' state.
Also priceless was this moment, which happened straight after Gabby scored:


The way Doug Ellis is laughing at Abramovich almost made me like him again.

UP THE VILLA!!!

Stags.

I remember, a few years back, stag nights just consisted of going out with your mates, getting pissed up, maybe getting a stripper involved and then possibly rounding it off with some enforced nudity and lamp-post bondage for the unfortunate groom-to-be. These days, the stag night has evolved into the stag weekend and this involves going away to a strange town for two days just to do the things I mentioned above. Is this progress?

My brother (our Marc, the middle one) is getting married on Friday, and I've just got back from his stag weekend down in Cardiff. It seems everyone else getting married this week had the same idea. Cardiff has stag and hen parties coming out of its ears. Whoever said all brides are beautiful obviously didn't see some of the brides-to-be I witnessed. Bloody hell. In one bar, there was one extremely rough-looking obese woman wearing L-plates and a veil (so I assume she was the bride to be) carrying a giant inflatable penis, 'dancing' and singing 'Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?'. The irony was obviously lost on her. Unless she was genuinely too warm.



The plan was to get there on Friday, have a few drinks, but take it steady, as the seven of us in the party had paintballing to do on Saturday. That plan went AWOL. We got wrecked. Some members of the party got told off by the hotel's management for making too much noise when we rolled in at about 4.30 in the morning. (not me, I'm a good lad, and anyway, I was too busy being passed out on my hotel room's bathroom floor!) So our Marc diplomatically sorted the situation by taking off his belt and hitting the transgressor with it while saying "Shut the fuck up, or they'll chuck us out, you daft cunt!" Henry Kissinger has nothing on my brother.



Saturday morning, we all get up feeling as rough as a badger's ballbag, so we decide to get a fry-up in a local greasy spoon on the way to the paintball. I didn't feel like the full English, as I was still feeling the effects of spewing my ring up the night (morning?) before, so I had a bacon butty and about four cups of tea. It seemed to work, as I felt okay afterwards, and the rest of the lads seemed to enjoy their fry-ups, and we all went on to the paintball site. Now, on Saturday morning, the weather was bad. It had been raining continuously since we got to Cardiff, so the paintball site was now one big quagmire, if your feet didn't sink in all the way up to your knees, you just slipped and fell on your arse instead. I didn't have any sturdy footwear, I just had a pair of Converse Chuck Taylors which gradually got destroyed as the day went on. I've not done any paintballing for years, not since I was a teenager, and I was a lot fitter in those days! I've discovered something else I'm rubbish at. The whole day I got shot to fuck. I looked like a plasterer's radio by the end of the day. The crappy weather didn't help visibility, as the masks we had to wear were either steamed up, covered in water or splattered with mud and paint. Also not helping the day, was another stag party from Scotland, who took it all a bit seriously and tried to give us tactics. We decided to take their tactics and stick them where the sun doesn't shine (which was Cardiff, that weekend!) and just basically run like fuck and shoot everyone you saw. It seemed to work as our team won quite handsomely at the end of the day.



Like I said, my shoes were destroyed, so I decided to bin them. We all drove back to the hotel, and we decided we couldn't walk in with our muddy feet (none of us were sober enough to think of bringing a change of shoes) so all seven of us walked through the hotel lobby in our sopping wet socks, and we all got admiring glances from the other guests because of our Brummie sartorial elegance. When I got back to my room, I took of my shirt and surveyed the damage. I looked like ED-209 had had a go at me for not complying within 30 seconds. I had livid red circular welts all over my body. Arms, chest, stomach, back, arse, legs were all covered in bruises. I looked like Superted's best mate.

After we all had our afternoon shushes (shit, shower, shave) we went to the Walkabout bar around the corner and watched the Villa play Newcastle on the telly. How Welsh was that? Standing in an Australian bar watching the Villa on the telly. We could never do stuff like that back in Brum. Hang on, that's EXACTLY how I spent the previous Saturday afternoon here in Birmingham! The whole weekend was like that-we had drinks in O'Neill's, Rococo, Edwards, Walkabout and The Prince Of Wales- and they all look the same as their Brummie counterparts on the inside, why the hell did we come to Cardiff?! Still, the Villa played well and should've won, but it was nil-nil and a point at St. James's Park is always a good one. Also, Wales were playing Argentina in the rugby at the Millennium Stadium, so Cardiff was full of drunk Welsh rugby supporters. I had on a T-shirt that said Empire Strikes Back on it, and was told by a drunk Welshwoman , while I was outside having a cigarette that she'd never seen a Star Wars film. She told me this about six times. "I've never seen a Star Trek movie either", she added as a little epilogue. How interesting!

After the match, we decided to get some din-dins because we all agreed that going out with a virtually empty stomach was what done us in on Friday. The noisy fuckers who nearly got us all chucked out all had McDonald's, but me, my brothers, and my brothers' mate Liam decided we'd have some proper food, so we went to an Italian restaurant and filled up on chicken and pasta. Our stomachs properly lined, we went back to our hotel, got changed and went out on the town.

The bit of Cardiff we were in was full of hen and stag parties. They stood out because most of them were in fancy dress. We couldn't be arsed with all that shite, as it makes you a target for other arseholes, and you also look like a prick. The stag parties tended to dress up in afro wigs, for some reason, whereas the hens tended to go with a theme, I saw women dressed up as pretend policewomen, sailors, gangsters, pyjama parties, and in one case, Quasimodo (though I'm beginning to think now that wasn't a costume!) my favourite group of hens, nerd that I am, were the group dressed up as Superheroines- Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Generic Superhero Woman whose costume I didn't recognise. I was willing to try and get Batgirl to slide down my Batpole, but the party told me to hurry the fuck up as we were going to a titty bar. It's a stag night, there HAS to be naked ladies, apparently.

Typical Brummies, we haggled to get a fiver knocked off the entrance fee to the lapdancing bar, and eventually, they let us in at a fiver off. This seemed a bit stupid in hindsight as we spent shitloads of money in there. Apparently, we bought thirteen bottles of Champagne in there, at over thirty quid a go. The ladies in there seemed to like us (besides the fact we were spending lots of money) as we were just in there to have a laugh and take the piss and not take it seriously as some of the other blokes in there, who think the girls really want to dance for them, and they joined in with our piss-taking of each other. Apparently, we spent more in there than Robbie Fowler (now a striker for Cardiff City) did, when he went in the other week. At the end of the night, when they let us out, it was through another nightclub, and could we fuck find our way out. It took us about half an hour to find an exit, but we managed it. While me and my youngest brother were finding the way out, my other brother, the groom-to-be, managed to stop one of our party getting glassed because the twat said something he shouldn't have. This rounded the night off superbly, because Marc was fuming and told his mate exactly what he thought of his behaviour. This nearly led to another punch up, but it was all settled fairly amicably, and we all went to bed for about three hours.

We left at about Twelve on Sunday, and the trip home was fairly uneventful, except for when our car hit the kerb the moment we got back into the Brum. We swerved into the other side of the road, and if anything was coming the other way it would have been extremely serious, but nothing was, so we were okay. The reason for the driver's collision with the kerb? "I was looking at that field over there." That's okay then. Worth dying for, that.

So anyway, I'm back now, covered in bruises and stiff as a board and dehydrated, but at least I'm still alive!

Sore Thumb.

Today was not a good day. Today, at work, I managed to set fire to my right thumb with a blowtorch. It wasn't one of your girlie ones that chefs use to brown a meringue with. It was proper blowtorch which was attached to a five-foot tall bright orange canister full of propane. The lighting mechanism (a spark like you get on your cooker) wasn't working, and we needed fire to do the job we were told to do. I borrowed my colleague's cigarette lighter, turned the gas valve and proceeded to light it. I didn't get my hand out of the way in time, and cooked my thumb. I think I beat my record for the amount of times I can say 'fuck' in one sentence, which is a lot. (although I don't think you can call it a sentence if it mostly consists of one repeated expletive.) It was one of those accidents in which you're scared to look at the wound for a good ten minutes after it happened, but when you do, the injury is a bit rubbish. I was afraid I'd totally melted my wanking spanner, but I don't even have a good blister to show anyone! My thumb looks a little bit like a pork scratching (one of the good ones with a hair still attached!) a little bit red and puffy, but it doesn't look that bad. It hurts like fuck, but it doesn't look bad.

All in all, a good start to the week, especially after the weird weekend I've had, which I might talk about one day.