thanks/blame/kisses to matt_mcl for the thread title.
After I’d finished university, I moved into the countryside temporarily because rent was cheaper. When I say the countryside, I mean 5 miles over hills and fields to the nearest store, a dirt track masquerading as a road, and an electricity supply so poor the lights would flicker wildly whenever the next household (almost a mile away) decided to put the kettle on. But I had a country cottage to myself rather than a cramped studio apartment, an open fire place, a huge overgrown garden - it was bliss for long enough for friends to want to come stay.
So, my friend Leo decides to visit for a week and brings with him a sizeable baggie of homegrown. One night, the fire burning low at 3am, a thick blue haze in the air and a pile of empty beer bottles at our feet, the baggie was finished. But, Leo announces he knows like-minded people in the next village who might be able to help out, even at this late hour. We consider this in silence for thirty minutes before he leaps to his feet, decision made, and sets off across the fields in the dark.
It’s a cloudy night, the hills are pitch black, the fields full of slumbering livestock. I wait over an hour and start to expect his return. I wait another half hour and begin to worry/sober up. Over two hours later, there’s a soft knock at the door. A small voice asks me to pass out a bucket of hot, soapy water, and not to open the door wider than I have to. I ask why. The small voice cracks with sorrow and shame - “I fell in a sh*t pit on the way back.”
I think it remains the one and only time that I have actually ROTFLMAO, it takes me ten minutes to pick myself up. Yes, I’m not a very nice friend, but damn, it was funny. Still convulsing, I fetch the water. Leo strips outside, leaving his clothes in a pile, which we burn the next day. Washes himself down as well as he can with the three changes of water I hand out, but someone with dreadlocks and a beard isn’t going to do very well with a small cloth and bucket.
Naked, damp and, uh, fragrant, Leo creeps into the cottage and warms himself by the fire, filling the room with a, uh, unique odour. His hands are bleeding and swollen;
“Well, it was dark, y’see. And I’d stopped and had a smoke to be polite, but I got a little bit lost on the way back, it was dark and I climbed over a wall into what I thought was a field, and I still thought it was a field until I started sinking. It wasn’t until it was around my chest that I figured out that I was about to drown in sht, so I had to swim (!) over to the far bank to crawl out. But the bank was covered with these huge thistles and stinging nettles. And I was still sinking, so I had to decide whether to crawl out into this bank or drown in sht. Soon as I grabbed the first thistle, I nearly let myself fall back in. I hurt. I stink and I hurt. I hate the f**king countryside.”
He stank for three days straight. Impressed the hell out of my dogs who followed him around slavishly until the day he left. I moved soon after.
Is there a moral to this little tale? There’s numerous. One - never trust a wigga to try to score when he’s out of his natural habitat. Two - the human drive for life will always choose unbearable pain over a needless (and frankly humiliating) death. Three - [insert standard disclaimer about drugs being bad, mm’kay?]. Four - drowning in sh*t is just not an option; bring on the muggers and yardies, let them come in their multitudes. I’m sticking with urban life from now on.
