Brakes, Pamela Anderson and Gorillas

I picked my up bike from work today. I had to go into Soho for the meeting (which went extremely well) and because I was hungover I thought it might be a spiffing idea to cycle home on a lovely crisp winter's afternoon. It was lovely but my cycle needs a bit of work and the brakes aren't a strong as they should be.

This means slowing down requires a bit of forward planning. Quite a lot of forward planning. So if you are on the King's Road and the tiny star of Baywatch steps out in front of you while putting expensive shoes in the back of her limo then you have to swerve quite violently to avoid her because there is no way the brakes will stop you in time.

Luckly I didn't hit her, or the bus and she probably will never know how close she came to a fop-related accident. All she saw was a chap on a bike wobble a bit while saying 'blimey' before disappearing into the distance. Her trousers were extremely low slung and she really should wear a belt if she is going to bend over like that in the street. Still I suppose not every chap has seen most of Pamela's bum while commuting home.

Fashion week makes London go very silly, and it's amazing who you bump into, or almost run over. The only thing I thought as I wobbled off into the distance after my near miss is a gorilla is never going to believe me.

Wanted: A killer first page

I'm trying to write a first page for a book I'm working on. It's got to be so gripping that anyone who reads it can't help but read on, desperate to know more. In what could be described as a 'ground breaking web experiment' I'm going to post the first page and see what the people of the Internet think, all 4 and a half of you who read this blog.

If you like it, it stays. If not I will start again.

So here it is.

**************************

I looked down the cliff, and realised I was going to die.

“So how fucked are the brakes Henry?” I asked.

“Gone,” replied Henry “we’ve got nothing.”

“Just to confirm, we are both knackered, it’s starting to get dark and we have to drive down one of the most dangerous mountain passes in the Alps in a Volvo that’s older than I am and we don’t have any brakes?”

“It’s foggy too, oh and I think the offside wheel bearing is going.”

I was going to die, and what made it worse, I kept thinking of that woman.

To clear my head I looked behind us; the ancient Volvo was burbling away happily and occasionally plinking to itself. Over the last few days the car’s strange mechanical failings had been a constant source of amusement and now it was going to kill us. The skull and crossbones we had painted on it seemed a bit ironic now.

I caught myself wondering what she would be doing right now and that made me angry. I wanted my last thoughts to be at least of someone I liked, not of her.

“Well I’m going to change my shirt,” I said to Henry and the mountain side. We hadn’t seen another car for hours so it felt like we were the only people on the planet.

“Why?”

“If I’m going to die, there doesn’t seem like much point in saving my best shirt for later.”

As I put on the shirt I thought about how I had ended up here. I tried to think back through the events to find the one that led to me facing a really stupid death. Where did it all start? Was it the fake Nazis, the Transvestite builder or the porn star? No, it was further back then that. Before I became any sort of womaniser, and way before I met her.

No it all started a long while ago, on another hillside, in Scotland.