"On your own head..."

Despite the fact that my law exams are looming, I am still accepting invitations for partying, thrill seeking, bungee-jumping, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, and lunch from inconsiderate friends who (being aware that my powers to exercise my will and refuse such invites are always zero) should try and live their whacky extreme lives without me during these tense months.

I accepted two such invitations last weekend and though I knew my time could be more productively spent in study, and as such though the phrase ‘on your own head be it,’ may have passed through my increasingly over-burdened mind, I had no inkling of how shudderingly apt such a phrase would prove to be to the consequences of these fraught attempts to cling on to something resembling a social life.

Friday was a birthday party in the most agreeable surroundings of the Morrison (lah-di-dah ) Hotel and was an occasion which was so much fun, that even the disaster of wearing a similar shirt to the man who will one day be known as Jones CJ (for the non-legal among you, that stands for ‘Court Jester’ by the way), did not detract in any significant way from the delightfulness of my evening.

In fact I wasn’t even that put out to find that on returning to my patient bike with its gazelle-like grace, that some drunkard had decided to use it as a urinal, directing the subject matter of his (one presumes it was a male of the species) self-relief to the centre of my helmet. I merely got on with things as one does, wiped down my bike a little and decided to cycle home sans helmet, leaving it dangling from my handlebars in the wind like the publicly-displayed soiled sheets more common to the generation of Huckleberry Finn and his ilk.

Saturday’s main event was a stag party that started early in the afternoon (/hangover) with some drinks and some music because the honored stag is the lead singer-songwriter/guitarist in a rock band. It was an event which was to make me feel with more pointed sadness than ever before that I spent my youth in a military marching band for delinquents and orphans playing the clarinet and not rocking out in a rotating foursome tortured by personality clashes and artistic differences, singing Nirvana covers with squeaky high-pitched unbroken voices. But well, I've made my bed (with military precision) and now I'll just have to try and deny that it's a clarinet under the covers and maintain I'm just happy to see you.

Compounding the shame of my wasted childhood and resulting lack of a socially acceptable party-piece, was a feint, but no doubt ever-present, odour which may have been as much in my head as emanating from it; but nonetheless had every reason to be there. For you see Laurel and Hardy were not comedians. No, no, they told it like it was. People really do forget that their helmet has been drunkenly pee-ed on when they are late for a stag party, and the beery pee really does have a tendency to gather in a pool between the main helmet-bit and the plastic cover around it, and the laws of physics do allow for the beery pee to remain where it is until the helmet is on one’s head only then to trickle down the left side of one’s face in a graphic reminder that while you may from time to time think you’re number one, you are mistaken. The number one is in fact laughing its way through your girly long hair and all the way down to your chin.

Now, I can make it a double-truth when, if my exam results are less-than-impressive and my parents ask why I didn’t perform like they expected I would, I can look them straight in the eyes and say, “Mum, Dad, I thought you would have figured it out by now given the hours I keep, but you haven't and I can’t hide it from you any longer: I'M JUST A PISS-HEAD.”