Work?!

The nice man at White Horses know as Gra Murdoch published this story in the current issue of the mag. It galls me a little to refer to it as a mag as it's unlike any other surfing publication on the newstands. It has minimal advertising (9 pages, 4 front 5 back, out of roughly 180. I say roughly because it has no page numbers and I just did a flick through which is a lazy mans count) and it comes out quarterly. But journal doesn't seem right either... What else is there? Oh well, the man in charge calls it a mag so who am I to argue.

Seeing that G&T has made me thirsty.

Where was I? Oh yeah 'Julian', I sent him a copy of the Mag without him having read the story previous to it's publication. We are going on a boat trip to the Mentawais in 53 days time and it'll be the first time we've hooked up for a year. He's told me he's bringing cement and that it's probably be a good idea if I didn't sleep. Wanker :)

Anyway here it is

We’ve always pissed each other off. He’s a fuckwit. He likes squaretails, I like round. He drinks lager, I drink beer. Even our skateys were opposite, he’d have the trucks done up so tight you couldn’t turn the bloody thing, mine was a carver. But we still hung out together. But we knew the symbiotic rewards of tolerance. He had a car, I had a house. He’d pick me up to head down the coast, I would chuck him petrol money. We’d raid his Mums kitchen then eat at my place after pulling a few cones sat in front of surf vids. He liked Sunny I liked Curren. It was a fine line between laughing our heads off and tearing eachother’s heads off. We crossed that line in Scotland.

A week off in the middle of summer, flights were too expensive so a road trip to Thurso it was. We packed up his ‘82 Ford escort wagon with essentials: enough mull to get the Caribbean stoned, enough cider to drown a festival, then popped round his Mum’s for the obligatory larder raid and we were off. It’s a friggin long way from the SW to Thurso, but with a bag of cassette tapes, a bong and the occasional apple juice, the miles disappeared in a hypnotic fug.

It’s been called the ‘cold water Nias’ and ‘Europe’s best right’, we just called it a hoax. Flat as. No surprise. Fortunately the locals were more upbeat than the swell, and back then visiting surfers were still a novelty especially visiting surfers that arrived driving a party on wheels. They took us under their wing and led us to a small industrial estate on the edge of town where the Pixies were blasting out of the rusty doors of an old barn. Inside was the ultimate flat day fun, a full sized halfpipe. After an afternoon of skating ourselves into a sweaty mess we invite everyone to our campsite for a party.

They started rocking up around six and were still rocking up at midnight. Every one with a least a carrier bag in each hand and every one with a bottle of whiskey in their pocket. Were there really this many young people in Thurso? Evidently so. Julian and I held court, propping our arses on the bonnet of the Ford, taking it in turns to tell tall stories in between trying to work out what the fuck the locals were saying. We were having a ball.

But the fucker kept leaning on me.

“Oi pack it in will ya?”

 “What?”

“Leaning on me.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

He stopped… for a minute, then carried on. Normally it wouldn’t have been a big deal but I was having enough trouble keeping myself upright.

“For fucks sake! .”

“What? .”

“Stop fucking leaning on me.”

“Fuck off, I’m not.”

It wasn’t long. He was back on me. I was over it. I stepped forward and the fucker went rapidly sideways and straight to the floor. He came up swinging like the drunken amateur pugilist he was. I dodged a couple, wore a couple, then tried to bear hug the mad twat.

I’m glad this was back before mobile phones and their requisite cameras. I’ve no doubt it would have been an internet sensation, tagged with words like ‘massive’ and ‘fail’. We grappled. He’ll tell you he landed one after another. I’ll tell you we flayed madly at each other and ended up in a classic wrestle trying to get one another on the floor. Then we fell off the cliff.

Early next morning we decamped without a word to eachother. We spent the next three days in frosty silence. We surfed tiny Brims’ Ness; we were attacked by arctic terns and mossies. We met a Kiwi and a Seppo, which meant we could at least talk to someone. On the fifth day we said goodbye to Thurso, thank you to the locals, and left the Yank and the Kiwi with enough hash to see them through till they went back to the rigs. And we still didn’t talk to each other. 

Eight hours later we were still in Scotland, behind a massive queue of slow moving traffic on a single carriageway. We were functioning normally in all other departments, rolling, drinking, smoking, just in silence. But the mutually imposed ostracism was definitely wearing us down.  As we crested the brow of the next hill we could see the extent of the traffic jam. As the road wend its way down the hill and through the valley we had full view of the almost mile-long snake of crawling vehicles, and there was absolutely nothing coming the other way.

Julian looked at me, I looked at him, and for the first time in almost a week, there was the merest hint of solidarity. He swung the car into the opposite lane and we cruised for a clear mile down the wrong side of the road, as dumbstruck faces watched incredulously from stationary driver’s windows.

We pulled back on to our side of the road in front of the culprit – a septuagenarian driving a car he got for his sixteenth birthday.

The road ahead was empty. We turned and grinned at each other. Without saying a word the silence was broken.

When we both got married twelve years later, he was my best man and I was his. Wanker.

And here he is!