With the excitement of a family abroad
lucky dipping from a dozen restaurants
they one by one sat into their places
sliding fingers down laminated choices
ahead of the waitresses pen and pad.

‘Do you have a fish only menu?’ asked
the mother of three identical daughters
keen to express the latest life choice fad
profiled in the forests of magazines
piled on staff and waiting room tables.

In the corner a mute son and brother
sat shredding fat with his teeth from
a pile of barbecued chicken wings
whilst the girls shot energetic glances
towards each more seasoned diner.

Those others, formally clinking glasses
above plates of salads and breads
held softly murmured conversations
contrasting with the vacuum cleaner noise
of straws hitting a cocktail’s end.

Couple by couple by foursome
the suited and booted paid and filed out
back home to movie hire, chilled wine,
drawn curtains and faint buzzing
kitchen appliances of white and shine.

Three drinks and crispy cod fajitas later
the outgoing, intimate relatives danced
along a bus journey back East,
the lad’s head resting against a window
out to roads of the black cabbed elite.

In 2006 I began work as Site Editor for a large online gambling company in the UK. It was a great company to join at the age of 22 for my first serious job. The number of free parties and streams of booze from countless open bars were a great kick in the arse to make new friends and move from my parent’s house in High Barnet to Central London. I also gained a wealth of work experience.

For a year I lived with close friends I met on the job. We slept very little, instead raving around the clock in London’s clubs, parks, house parties and pubs. It was a wonderful exercise in liberation from my very quiet, rarely social life at the end of the Northern Line. Then the fish bowl set up of working, partying and living with the same small set of friends gradually became tiring and claustrophobic. My attendance at parties became infrequent and simultaneously, my closer friend of the bunch and I took to reading about meditation, attending lectures and classes rooted in spirituality. We’d later pretentiously refer to these activities as part of a path.

The superficiality and insincerity of forced smiles and laughs at managerial bar banter to win favour come bonus time felt empty. Our investigations were fulfilling and snowballed rapidly after a traumatic Halloween themed night at Farringdon’s Turnmills night club. Both worse for wear, we spent hours in the staff cloakroom whilst a medic tried pulling my friend out of a Ketamine and Ecstasy induced hole. Defibrillators were on hand incase his heart beat got any faster than the double speed it was working at and came to a stop. We were eventually able to catch a black cab home after he’d woken out of his unresponsive state of inaudible chants. We sat sobbing on my bed, still in our white boiler suit costumes, listening to All You Need Is Love by The Beatles on repeat. The face paint of a David Bowie zig zag was smudged down my face. It was like something straight out of a Hollyoaks special.

Withdrawing further from partying, I took a course in Tibetan buddhism at Kennington’s Jamyang Centre, attended talks at London’s Buddhism Society, practiced lots of yoga and did several detoxes. Meanwhile, my friend had heard on the holistic scene about a lady who used an electric drill like device to vibrate your upper spine behind the neck. This was done so fiercely that it changed the angle of a particular vertebrae, apparently sloped inwards due to alien contact with Earth… Once corrected, the lady claimed patients would have a straighter, more direct route for energy to burst past the third eye chakra to the crown chakra. These were two points said to be prominent locations for spiritual energy in ones body. It sounded farfetched and over the top to me but he got it done. He wasn’t boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before anymore, but still had claims of extremity, just at a different end of the scale.

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I

‘Can I borrow your phone for a minute mate? My battery’s dead.’ asked one eye this way and one eye that, dressed like an extra out of a 2 Tone band from the eighties; his grey, ironed trousers sitting on a bony waist, side parting hair dipping out from beneath a chequered flat cap and a warm, proper London accent you’d be both suspicious and loveable towards.

‘As long as there’s no rushing off, though you’ve been in this queue for a good ten minutes, so I doubt that’d happen, unless you’re really after a new phone or just don’t care about shitting your pants.’ replied Jack, leaning against a wall, in his own sweaty world until the question, feeling a lot more trustworthy than normal on account of the past hour and a half of dance music he’d just raved to.

‘Dad, it’s Charlie. I’m in a bit of a situation here. I got split up from Moog in the crowd and my battery’s dead. What I need you to do is look in the phone book for Moog. Give him a call and tell him I’m at the toilets where we were earlier. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll just go back to the flat. Cheers Dad.’ instructed Charlie with a tone that said everything about his relationship with his Dad come mate, old school practice of keeping paper records of electronic data and commitment to leaving with the person he arrived with.

By this point it was finally Jack’s turn to use a cubicle. He’d favoured the shelter of an inside toilet as opposed to the racks of halve pipes outside, where people had to stand face to face, an inch away from touching each other with their private parts. He did one day festivals for sounds, not splashings.

‘That’s a good effort. I hope you find your friend. Take care.’ said Jack, taking the phone from a smiley, appreciative Charlie.

‘If he rings back and I’m still here, can you give me a shout?’ asked the cockney, 25 at most and clearly nearing the end of his night that by the sight of him, included a lot of dancing in mud, twisting of his preppy clothes and consuming beer, amongst other things.

‘Sure.’ said Jack, taking to a cubicle.

After he’d taken his emergency toilet roll from his back pocket, wiped the toilet seat a good two times, undone his baggy jeans and sat, the lights went out. Sighs bounced between the walls of cubicles, the lights flickered back on before being cut again, everyone sighed some more and so repeated Jack’s call of nature.

It’d been a long wait and a demanding day on Jack’s legs. With that in mind, he took his phone out, sent a few messages and used the solitude of his surroundings to be what a stuck up spa would call relaxation quarters. When the phone buzzed in Jack’s hand and Luke’s face flashed on its screen, Jack pinged out of his daydream and rushed back to the main arena.

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