And here was me thinking that pork and cider went well together !

Cider + Old friends = more laughing than you can shake a baby at !

A couple of weeks ago now i organised a bit of a catch up with a few of my old friends who in all fairness i had lost touch with ( as you do ) and decided that the Camera beer and cider festival at the Worcester racecourse looked like a good bet!

Myself along with Andrew "face" Parsons,Daniel"ratman" Wilson and James "cheesy louisey" Harrison (My nickname is either Fatboy or stupid or even a mixture of the 2) met up in town and headed to the festival that promised Beer ,cider ,food and music and let's be honest, what else do you need ?!  On a seperate note! why is it that gangs of lads feel the need to give each other nicknames? It is certainly the case with me and my friends and almost to the point that if someone calls them their real name i dont straight away know who they are talking about?!

I will say now that from the moment we arrived i was not dissapointed in the slightest ! I went there literally thinking i could have a half of all the ciders they had but the actual truth of it is that if i had i would of had to have been a love child of George Best and Oliver Reed to have survived if i had . There was so much there that you literally couldn't see an end to what seemed to be the London maraton of booze !

The day started off with what i can remember was a Strawberry cider that was made in Malvern and was a modest 6.8%. The 4 of us then had a look around the festival and the variety cider and beer was like no other i had seen before in my life! They had every type of berry infused cider going , they even had traditionally made cider that had a dead rats in it for crying out loud! This place meant business, and one thing Worcestershire and its surrounding areas do well is drink and this was reflected in the magnitued of what was on offer that day! Anyway .. We all took our drinks outside grabbed a seat on the floor and considering i haven't seen these guys in years we just picked up where we left off and the banter was flying around even more than the grass bombs that we were throwing into each others drinks!

We had been there a few hours and the strawberry cider was still going as strongly as the banter when we were joined by The pork, Neathy and his son. Bit of back ground here "The Pork" Chris Park used to kick around with us at school and had more nicknames than anyone else i have known and Chris Neath thinks he is a speedway rider and his son is... his son ! As soon as they rocked up nothing changed and we were just sat around taking the piss out of each other whilst Cheesy Louisey got a bit of a kicking off Neathys son ( I must add that Cheesy had a bad head ache in the morning ,then had a few ciders, and then ends up getting punched in the face by a soon to be 5 yr old kid.. You can take the boy out of Pershore..)

I will add in here that we were having a great day and we had bumped into a lot of people that we hadn't seen for a long time

We had been there for lets say 6 hours and we had been joined by Bill, The Monk and The Thief and at this stage i was pretty drunk but still in control of most of my bodily fuctions and that is when i sat with the Pork and we got chatting..This proved to be a very pivital point in the day .. Me and The Pork used to be the once "Big drinkers" in the group and after chatting for a while i was challanged by him to "down your pint if i down mine!". Now looking back on this moment today i am wondering why every fiber in my body was not saying " dont be a twat Stuart ! you know this is going to end badly !!.. Why are you even listening to this pissed up idiot?. FOR FUCK SAKE DONT BE SUCH A TOOL STUART !!". But instead of hearing any of that all i heard was a challenge, and a challenge i was not going to back down from!!!!! Now for those of you who don't know me i am to say the least, very competetive! and if you throw down a gauntlet you better be ready yourself because i will go at whatever it is with everything i have!. So The Pork picked up his drink( This was a blend of Rats tail cider 7.2% and a grosso medium 7.5%) and he went at it like a pig at a potato and the drink was finished in seconds! At this moment all i was thinking was "you ginger bastard! now i am going to have to drink mine even quicker" . So i duly picked it up and i think i just shaded it which gave me a moment of glory , a moment of elation , a moment of pride, which was then followed by an evening of falling over, playfighting ,losing shoes and then finally losing myself. But having heard what The Pork went through i think i got off lightly. The Pork and i quote" fell over more times than i have ever seen anyone fall over , I can actually make a montage of him falling over in my head" ! and " i have never seen anyone that drunk in my life ! He was cuddling everything he could and if he wasn't cuddling he was falling over" and that along with dancing in his very own brand of blended cider (his sick) which ended up on his face and also laid claim to some poor young lady in making her go arse over tit!. The once fat but forever ginger porky really did make his mark on the festival and by that i mean more than just his arse prints in the floor of the place!

I wanted to finish this with a few pictures of his dimise but can i add that there are better ones out there and i will add them in due course!

This one is just for fun !

                                           Chris " The pork" Park with Daniel "Ratman" Wilson

Also i would like to thank everyone who was out that day as it was a great day to say the least !

I predicted a riot !

The London riots! Is it all an excuse to get a new pair of Reebok classic's and a mobile phone ? Or is it the only way the young, frustrated and uneducated get to voice their opinions on the state of a nation ?

Unless you have been sunning yourself on a remote island with no connection with the outside world you will have seen that london is in chaos with youths and gangs running, well... riot! and now they are inconveniencing all the poor people in power by making them cut their holidays short!

With all the coverage i have seen over the last 72 hours i have seen a few interviews and all apart from the political and services persons there has been a running theme, and that theme is in a nut shell you can only push people so far!

We are talking about the youths who are out there committing the rioting offenses and how they have been squeezed by the government so much that they are now an extreme version of how most of us average people feel in the wake of the financial melt down that happened 4 years ago. I am not suggesting that everyone out there is about to suit up and join these thugs but what i am saying is that most of us at the moment are feeling immense pressure just to survive(and also buy lavish stuff i really dont need) and in the face of such an extreme feeling its fight or flight!

All you have to do is look at the facts ......

• -Employment is hard to come by and keep hold of!
• -If you are employed i am guessing that most of you dont get an annual increase in income( because employers know you should just be grateful you have a job)?
• -Power which we rely on is still rising!
• -The rise in VAT to 20%
• -The constant rise in duty.

Its getting tougher and tougher to live and that is a fact! I am not suggesting that all of the rioters are products of a modern government! but i am suggesting that if there were more jobs out there or if it wasn't so hard to live in today's England or even if there was more for the youth of today to get involved in then at least half of those people out there wouldn't have been rioting this weekend! Lets face it, the normal average person when happy doesn't have thoughts of petrol bombing innocent people homes, businesses and looting all un sundries ( I will admit that they mainly seem to be targeting sports cloths outlets so they can nick some Reebok classics).But in depression things fester and manifest and then express themselves in destructive ways and that is what i think has happened here to begin with and now it has just escalated into something far more ugly.   

The government aren't totally to blame, as we all know things can only grow so much and then naturally they have to either plateau (if your lucky) or crash and in our case literally burn! As when our country was booming i think we ALL assumed that we would keep growing and that everything would be alright. But you know what they say about assumption being the mother of all fuck ups?!

Just to finish this off i would like to just say that i DON'T agree with what is going on i am merely saying that all riots are a product of the country at the time! All you have to do is look at what happened in Turkey, Greece and Libya to see that( Not that i am suggesting that a lust for leisure wear is to blame in these countries). I would like to think that the rest of us, if this continues? would stand up to this mob and take the streets back along with the police and bring order and peace back where it belongs and that is with the majority not the minority! 

I thought that i should put this link on here! Its a great idea and its a twitter link which is all about helping clean up after the riots so if you want to lend a hand please follow this link , you would be doing a great thing ! 

Prologue

Having read the odd book i thought what better way to open the blog than with a prologue?

This is actually a poem that i wrote when i was 12 years old and to be honest its quite depressing BUT i think that it was a pretty good poem ( considering i was 12 and obviously having the time of my life).

The Outsider

Who's the outsider?
The one on his own?
Who's the outsider?
The one all alone?

He stands to one side and not with the rest.
He scuffs his shoe's and looks at the mess!
He stands on his own, alone by the tree.

Who's the outsider?

Me!


Not the most cheerey way to kick off the blog but i thought that it was still less depressing than talking about the double dip recession, Amy Winehouse or maybe even the Tottenham riots that Brixton seem to be trying to claim as their own ( Gotta love Brixtoners/ ites). 

Sorry for the lack of ranting and trying to make myself seem clever by talking about something hard hitting that i dont understand! But this is an idiots blog so please expect plenty of it in due course!

But until then enjoy this little beauty ................