These are the adventures I all too frequently find myself slap-bang in the centre of.  They are recorded here for enjoyment, posterity, or simply to serve as a profound and heartfelt warning to others.  Everything in this section is one hundred percent true, unless you are a law-enforcement officer or a future employer, in which case
it’s clearly a complete and utter fabrication.

The stories are listed in chronological order, so together they can serve of something of an autobiography, albeit one with all the boring "legal" bits taken out.  However,
if you’re new, I suggest you start with one of these...

• The First Time Acid Freakout Extravaganza
• The Great Prescott Debacle
• The Diary of Gand Frank
• Tents, Drugs & Rock n’ Roll

Enjoy!

1. Anarchy at Adfest

The field is pocked with tents.  They are clustered everywhere – by the gate, down the slope, in the corners.  A blue and red and green fabric village.

And I know every single person here.

This is Adfest, conceived by the only kid in school rich and narcissistic enough to throw a music festival for our year and name it after himself…

2. The X Men

It is the very beginning of the Summer of Drugs and the little white pill feels good in my hand.  I hold it between my fingers; look at it this way and that.  It is beautiful – fragile and innocent, yet full of chemicals that are very illegal, and by all accounts, very fun... 

3. Seeds of the Sickness

Coming off the back of the Summer of Drugs, we were hungry for more heinous chemicals.  One that intruiged us was LSA, a compound closely related to LSD, found lurking naturally inside several different types of seeds...

4. The First Time Acid Freakout Extravaganza

In 2004 I was a music festival virgin.  I was also an acid virgin.  This is the story of how, on one sunny August day, both of those cherries got popped like balloons.

5. The Ballad of Bloodstock

The first genre I got into was punk.  From the baby-steps of Blink to the shit-kicking strides of Anti-Flag, I loved it.  But my punk romance was not to be.  Less than a
year after swearing to my safety-pinned lady that I would never leave her, I fell in love with a new and elegant mistress.  Metal.

The screaming solos, the razor-sharp riffs, the thundering drumbeats...  I was hooked.  Now, I sleep around with any genre I feel like, but at that time in my life metal was my mistress and a band called Children of Bodom was her ensign.

So, when I heard that Bodom were playing a metal festival, I had to go. Hywel and Boris were just as into it as me, and so plans were laid for this most epic of quests. 

Three metal warriors – and Karl, who came along for the hell of it.

This is their story.

6. The Great Prescott Debacle

The rumours spread like wildfire.  Are they true?  Will John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, really come to visit our school?

I regard the whispers with scant interest.  To be perfectly honest I couldn’t care less whether a fat prick with an unrivalled talent for mangling our beautiful language will visit the school.  Couldn’t care less, that is, until I discover one vital piece of information…

7. Tents, Drugs & Rock n' Roll

The name Donington has long been synonymous with rock.  Donington Park, a motorsport course in everyday life, posseses the power to dart into a nearby phonebox and become, for a couple of sun-drenched days, a huge and amazing festival site.  Its height was in the late 80s, when bands like AC/DC, Guns n’ Roses and Def Leppard all headlined.  Sadly, in the 90s, it tumbled into dust-ridden inactivity.  But just after the turn of the century, some unknown genius revived the ancient art of rock n’ roll in Donington.  And they called it Download…

8. Dances with Dominique

Some girls are crazy. Some girls are hot. Some girls are crazy AND hot, and those are the ones you have to watch out for.

9. The Diary of Gand Frank

Amsterdam has long been a Mecca.  Groups of stoners would sit around in school, passing a joint and talking in reverent whispers of a holy land where coffee shops
lay on every corner, where beautiful whores stalked the streets, where magic
mushrooms were as readily available as a bag of popcorn.  Back then, it was just a dream; a wild, crazy dream.  But now...

10. Enter the Darkness

Ketamine.  In the right doses it can rip your mind right out of your skull, thrusting you headlong into a dark, chaotic world.  The first time I ran into this drug was relatively harmless... there was a lot of staggering, some crashing, a bit of melding into the walls...  The second time, however, was more dangerous. We were supposed to club ourselves crazy in Oceana, but I never made it.  I was found three hours later on the side of a distant road, head wrapped in a towel, babbling strange gibberish about being in a dark, dark place.  But dark doesn’t even begin to describe one weekend…

11. The Law and the Lady

The local law enforcement round our way has trouble catching a cold.  Once an
officer pulled up smack bang next to where my friend and I were parked on a deserted road, smoking bongs.  He glanced into the smoke-filled interior of our car and promptly reversed into an adjacent field while my friend was trying to hide three ounces of grass in his sock.  Way to go, old Bill.

Nevertheless, I've had a few run-ins with the long arm during my time…

12. Books, Booze & B-Listers

Hay-on-Wye is Britain’s premier booktown.  There are more than thirty bookshops within its boundaries, and everything else is a pub.  Each year, the town holds an
Arts & Literature festival which attracts people from around the world. All the hotels fill up within days, but once I heard there were fields around the village in which people could camp, I had to go...

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