Back in mostly one piece

I’m back home again after our whirlwind of activities in Southampton.

The indoor carting was quite cool fun although as usual the carts felt too slow and the indoor surface meant sliding on every corner regardless of slowing down so no attempt at fine tuning those race lines to the edge of your tires. Well, maybe there was, but I wasn’t slowing down enough to find it.

Clay pigeon shooting was fantastic. It’s the first time in my life I’ve fire a real gun and this was a double-barreled Beretta shotgun. I did pretty well and came third in our group behind a friend who used to play for Guernsey and another friends father who’d done it a long time ago. I even beat the whole team on one set that involved overhead clay pigeons although the debris did manage to fall down and hit my in the small of the back.

The comedy club was quite good although there was a fair amount of heckling at the start from a small group. The compère went to great lengths to try and shut them up with a variety of put downs but in the end had to have them removed. The New Zealand guy was pretty fast ‘n humorous but then pick on some guy who’s girl went and sat next to another guy to the point where the woman ended up walking out and the guy stood up and told him to get on with his act and stop picking on them before running out after his girlfriend.

Oops.

Our table was absolutely covered in bottles of beer us having ordered ice buckets of 5 bottles of beers each — not actually that much all considered but it did look a LOT and put it in some kind of perspective.

The second guy on was much slower and less in your face being a bit of a stoner with a crazy shirt.

At this point my headache from earlier in the evening kicked into overdrive and having made my apologies to the groom-to-be I ambled back to the hotel along the streets of Southampton. My brain had helpfully made some sort of semi-conscious route and I found myself back at our Ibis by 10pm.

There the headache took full force and the fact our Window wouldn’t close properly became a problem with my headache and the noise outside. My room-mate Glyn was quite patient with my as a ran a wet towel and placed it on my head. The Ibis guy, who was possibly Dutch but definitely weird came up and failed to fix our Window with his miniature set of tools.

Thankfully I found my sponge earplugs in my pockets from that days shooting and plugged them into my ears for a reasonable nights sleep.

Sunday was paintball day and we set off on a McDonald’s breakfast (we tried to find other places serving hot food but were running out of time).

I managed quite well not getting shot until about the 4th game where I got a hand-splat to my glove. The enemy team were cheating a bit at this point and we had to start getting marshals to go over and point out to them that yes, they were covered in paint and should report to the dead zone.

I eventually got shot on my head which although hurt like crazy for a few seconds soon went down and hasn’t left a bump.

Unfortunately in the last game, a free-for-all, some European girl decided to shoot my bottom from quite close range as I ran through the undergrowth and so I took a big bruise. I always seem to get one at paintball but I thought I’d managed to avoid it until then.

All in all a very good weekend and apart from antlers and pink hair the stag got off quite lightly especially compared to my brother-in-law’s one in Prague.

Tired now, good-night!

[)amien