Homelands Weekend: Chapter 1

Holy shit... what a FANTASTIC weekend. It's Bank Holiday Monday afternoon, a couple hours away from kick-off of West Ham v Preston, so I thought I would pop in an early entry into the Blog site from the weekend.

I guess I'll kick-off from the beginning of the weekend, since most of the good stories generally do that... you know, start from the beginning.

The plan started in Manningtree, 3:30pm to meet Pearce at the train station. He'd finished his day at work and was gonna pick me up there to save him the trip in and around Colchester. It was a bloody gorgeous day as well, a high of between 29 and 31 celcius... the perfect temperature to be stuck on the A12, M25 & the beginning of the M3 in.

Four and a quarter hours later, we finally arrive in Winchester and goodness me... the first thing you notice when you're driving through town is the women. Oh my! Blonde after blonde after blonde. All fit and all dressed for Friday night. What a warm welcome to town! It was a good thing that Pearce missed the turn into Barry's street and we had to do a quick tour through the one-way streets of Winchester.

Barry was already out from work and was at the pub before meeting us at his place. We quickly dropped off all of our stuff, got ourselves set and we headed straight out for the Friday night festivities.

We went immediately to the pub that Barry was drinking at with his co-workers, the White Swan and was ready to start our drinking fun. We met up with Barry's Dad, Giorgio, Colin, Andy, Ronan & I think a couple others. Memory loss is slightly apparent.

From the White Swan, we hit Mississippi for a fried chicken stomach lining and then back out on the razz. Oh yes, razz we did!

Greens, O'Neills... uhhhh... Baz, you might have to help me out with some more names of places that we went to, because now I'm really drawing some blanks. Anyways... we got pretty drunk. It was a good thing that I brought the camera along, or else I never would have picked up such great photos like the one you've already seen.

I think O'Neills was where we had finished off with the group. Everyone sort of filtered their way home while the Mark, Barry & I were chatting away to ourselves or other people. I had met some pretty cool people in O'Neills and was chatting away to no end. I was chatting away to one fella, Damien, about anything and everything. He seemed really cool. I have his e-mail address, I should send him the picture I have of us two. It turned out really good. I'd put it on here, but I will conserve my restricted bandwidth on here for now. I'm sure the good pictures will all make it onto Dirty Hairy Mouth sooner rather than later.

After chatting with Damien, I ended up chatting with Mim, a girl from Scotland for a little while. How much time exactly, who knows? But it was long enough to have her boyfriend complain about me in the bathroom. Fortunately, Barry was in the toilet and heard him call me an American 'something or other, probably best not to say exactly' with a goatee and Barry corrected him by telling him 'For your information, he's actually Canadian.' Ha ha ha... well done, mate! Barry said that shut him up quite quickly and well it must of helped, 'cuz nothing really happened past that. Ha ha ha.

Weather Update in Wormingford... it's a thunderstorm!! Woo hoo!!

Anyways, we finished up at who knows what time in O'Neills and made the walk back to Barry's but we needed something to eat from somewhere. We found the 24 hour garage just up the road from his flat. Funny photos of Knock-Down Ginger, rolling on cars & Barry throwing up all made the photo gallery and pretty much concluded a great night! Once we got back into Barry's we rolled out his couch into a bed and crashed. It was a necessary thing to do.

I put my camera on charge, so for Saturday, Homelands, would get a great showing on film and digital photos.

Don't worry, it won't be long before Chapter Two... I just don't feel like writing it at the moment.

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7