RichardsonRants

Social media was bought to a standstill this morning by the alarming discovery that it is raining.

Karen Matthews, who has lived in the UK for 32 years and has experienced this kind of weather for every single one of those, was apparently mystified as to how it was sunny one day and then raining the next - a very typical weather pattern for southern England in August. Fortunately, she thought to share this shocking revelation with her friends who were oblivious to this as they do not have windows. "I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S RAINING!" she wrote, showing an apparent lack of awareness of seasonal weather fluctuations and precipitation in an insightful and constructive Facebook post. This was then followed by 11 different emojis that a team of professors in hieroglyphics from Cambridge University are still trying to translate.

A man she knows, Christopher Wilkins, who has been friend zoned for many years and actually has a degree in weather systems tried to add his support.

BEFORE YOU GO: Ask yourself: Do I really want to do this? Am I honestly prepared to spend the same amount of money I could spend on a decent holiday in a hot country on losing my mind in a field full of mud and lunatics whilst risking foot and mouth disease? If you answered ‘Yes’ then read on!

ESSENTIAL THINGS TO TAKE: Drugs. Cash. Something to hold all your drugs and cash. Boots (these can also carry your drugs and cash).

THINGS NOT TO TAKE: Things you like. Dignity. Children.

THINGS YOU MAY WANT TO TAKE: Booze, if you can be bothered to cart it around. Maybe a tent.

WHEN YOU GET THERE: Firstly, you realise that all the nice emails you got from the so-called ‘Head Gardener’ about how wonderful and liberating the festival is were complete lies, as it is surrounded by military grade fencing and appears to have hired a private militia for security. The prices of anything; be it a drink, a snack or a t shirt are priced in a manner that makes Harrods look like Lidl. Still, there are more important things to deal with; like where you’re gong to live for the next few days.

So, if you have taken a tent, go and set it up first. Do not - and this is very, very important - decide to ‘go for a few beers and set up the tent later’. It will never happen. If you have been on site for more than one hour and haven’t set the tent up, sell it (for drugs and cash), because it is now totally pointless.

Once you have either set up or sold the tent, it is time to start drinking. Your friends may insist on marching you around to different stages to see bands they think they once might have heard on Jools Holland. It’s pretty pointless trying to argue here so just follow them around till they get tired. If they ask you what band you want to see, pick one from the closest stage to where you are because you, naturally, don’t want to do anything as lame as watching a band at a music festival when you are still sober enough to understand the words.

FOOD: You might start feeling hungry and you can take your pick from any number of stalls selling unrecognisable charred lumps of roadkill for a tenner or - if you’re feeling in a baller mood - there is even a place called Soul Fire which labels itself as an actual ‘fine dining restaurant’. Soul Fire calling itself a fine dining restaurant is an exaggeration in the same league as Colditz in 1940’s Germany calling itself a Holiday Camp. Technically correct but you’d rather be shot by Nazi’s before you ended up in there.

Obviously, if you’re hungry at Secret Garden Party by far the healthiest and safest thing to do is to start taking loads of drugs to suppress your appetite. Whilst you may think that advocating the consumption of banned substances which have quite possibly been cut with all manner of household cleaning products irresponsible, I can assure you it will still be safer than consuming anything sold as ‘food’ at Secret Garden Party, a festival which takes the same view on food preparation and sanitation as Zimbabwe does to the democratic voting process. So just get all your calories from alcohol. Speaking of which…

DRINK: Generously, the ‘Head Gardener’ of Secret Garden Party (who is actually a hedge fund manager from Hampstead who has never set foot inside the festival), allows a limited amount of alcohol to be taken in with you on arrival. This is, per person, either 8 cans of beer (or cider if you are a scarecrow) or 4 cans plus one bottle of wine.

In other words, enough for your first couple of hours. Then you have to buy drinks from the various bars around site. Or you could just drink your own tears once you read the price list.

Interestingly enough, you are not allowed to take any spirits in with you. This is somewhat surprising because the Head Gardener himself must be very familiar with spirits, what with 3 of them visiting him every Christmas Eve, the tight bastard.

THE WEATHER: The weather at Secret Garden Party has two modes: The Day After Tomorrow or Mad Max. Torrential rain or nuclear scorched desert. There is no in between. In the former, your tent (provided you haven’t sold it for drugs or cash), is a sinking life raft, in the latter it’s a radioactive greenhouse for cultivating rare saharan cacti. Either way you’re fucked.

THE MUD: A special mention for the mud here. Secret Garden Party is in a field and fields are generally put in places where it rains frequently. This is quite useful if you’re growing carrots or peas or something but not quite as handy if you’re hosting 30,000 deranged loons stomping around who have all gone temporarily blind from substance abuse. Be warned: You can lose many things in the mud, things like your wallet, your boots or your dignity and your mind.

SECURITY: There are quite a lot of security guys on site because, for some reason, the organisers and Cambridge council don’t seem to understand that the only reason people can stomach going to sit in a muddy field for 3 days, listening to a line up that was cobbled together by the work experience kid at The Deaf Institute, is so that they can do so whilst getting out of their minds.

So, whilst taking your drugs, try and be subtle or at the very least be prepared to run away fast. The exception to this is if you’re a very attractive woman, in which case you could start chopping up lines of cocaine on the back of a disabled pensioner and still get away with it because the security guards at Secret Garden Party are almost entirely comprised of the bad guys from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and don’t normally get close to females that aren’t on four legs and in a stable.

(Do not go swimming in the lake. Look at that water. Just LOOK at it)

CELEBRITIES: Apparently we saw Prince Harry at Secret Garden Party in 2014 but as it was 4am it could quite easily have been a badger with a ginger wig stapled on to it. Despite claims from the organisers that lots of celebrities like to pop down to enjoy the experience (and oxymoron in itself), the only famous person you’re like to see - other than the bands playing - will be Kim Jong-Un who’ll be there picking up tips for his next labour camp. Speaking of bands…

HEADLINERS: Headliners are, invariably, bands who used to be big but can now no longer command a slot later than 11am at a respectable festival and have to come here instead. It’s where bands go to die. Still, they are usually quite good because they come on stage at a point when you are so wasted, so battered, so catatonically annihilated, that you will have left the realms of reality far, far behind.

Plus it will also be dark and you’ll feel less self conscious about being dressed like a 6 year old at a Frozen theme party, covered in mud. You will enjoy the set and tell all your friends they’re the best band you’ve ever seen when, in all likelihood, you got lost on the way to the stage and are watching two squirrels wrestling over an acorn.

If you’re not this wasted at this point then you must work security at Secret Garden Party, in which case congratulations on learning to read and I was only joking about the farm thing.

POST HEADLINERS: Once the headline act/squirrels finish fucking about, it’s time to explore. Head into the woods for some fun! You might meet some people.

OTHER FESTIVAL GOERS: A very varied bunch from all over the UK (West London and East London). Generally speaking, you should avoid talking to anyone you don’t know - as they will - until you’re completely off your chonks.

Once you are, you’ll meet loads of suddenly very interesting people who will tell you about how they come every year and how amazing Secret Garden Party is because there’s nowhere else quite like it. This is partly true because I don’t know too many organisations with both the vision and cheek to charge you £200 to sit in a field doing MDMA for three days offering only a musical line up and living conditions on par with a Siberian Gulag in return.

Still, despite this, your new friends will tell you how Secret Garden Party is their “home”.  Remember to smile whilst you consider how bad their actual home must be if they consider a giant maniac filled swamp a better residence than the place they get their post delivered to.

Graciously though, because you’re so high and they might be giving you drugs, you’ll indulge their nonsense and become temporary best mates. Before you and your new friends part, you’ll swap numbers and say that you’ll meet up again some day. You put their number in your phone using the best description that you can think of at the time.

LATE AT NIGHT: In the same way that scientists can’t tell you what would happen to you if you fell into a blackhole, no one - including yourself - will be able to tell you what happens during this part of Secret Garden Party because no one remembers. Like the black hole, all you can be reasonably sure is that you will, in one way or another, see reality get torn apart.

APPROXIMATELY 7 HOURS LATER: Disorientated, sickly and unable to rationalise why you ever thought coming to this festival was a good idea, you will stumble or crawl from out of some tent, stage or the woods across a sea of used balloon gas canisters to be greeted by something terrible and truly awful: Sunrise.

The last 7 hours have been a vicious, incomprehensible blur of self-destruction and the only thing you can work out with any good degree of certainty is how much money you have spent on making yourself feel so unwell. Your jeans may be ripped from end to end and you will not really care. All that matters is that you find shelter before the harsh, unforgiving sun exposes your sins and bad decisions to the world.

THREE HOURS AFTER THAT: Dehydrated and with a head that feels like an angry pneumatic drill, you crawl from wherever you found to sleep (under a bin, in a tree, in some strange Australian girls tent who talked in a really weird whisper), and are - in this brief moment of rational and objective thought - greeted with the true reality of Secret Garden Party; an open air lunatic asylum full of maniacs in animal costumes. You gladly pay £14 for a bottle of warm mineral water and then go and find your friends that are still alive.

As you walk around to find your friends, you will see your fellow festival goers - who last night were your best mates in the entire world but now mostly look like they have got lost on the way to an open air audition for TOWIE via the local Steroid clinic - give you violent, aggressive stares. Stares that are either the first stage of a south-eastern mating ritual or merely a prelude to having your head kicked in.

You, in turn, look to the ground, both to avoid aggravation and a possible unprovoked beating but mainly to avoid the blinding glare from their signet rings.

Having not eaten for nearly 24 hours, you chance upon an amazing restaurant on site called Soul Fire and pay fifty pounds for some burnt offal and a Bloody Mary which has less vodka in it than a Robinson’s fruit shoot. Then your phone rings. It’s your bank manager. Quite reasonably, he demands to know why and how you’ve just spent £1000 in a field. Ashamed and unable to explain this even to yourself, let alone him, you hang up and crack open a beer. Then another. And then another until you stop shaking.

Then, like some deranged Bill Murray in an MDMA-themed Groundhog Day, you do the whole thing all over again. Twice.

THE TRIP HOME: It’s now Sunday or Monday (you can’t really tell), and as the greenery of Cambridgeshire rushes past the train window on the way home you, for some reason, can’t stop thinking about how you let your parents down by going to Secret Garden Party.

Your phone bleeps. It’s a text message saying “hi mate, great to meet you” and is from someone listed in your phone as ‘Cunt dressed like a Pokemon’. You vaguely remember meeting them in the woods and block the number straight away.

You check Facebook and see that one of your friends has posted pictures of themselves in Mykonos. You realise that they probably spent roughly the same amount of money soaking up the beautiful sun and the hypnotic crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean (near the Head Gardener’s sun lounger), that you did by absorbing £10 cans of tepid lager and enough narcotics to put an Elephant into orbit in the middle of a giant medieval latrine.

Your friends will come back tanned, relaxed and rested. In turn you get home, pale and blistered like a sunburned Dracula, scared and in fear of a week of night terrors.

THE END: Alas, for the Head Gardener (and Masochists with a mud fetish), this years Secret Garden Party is the last. For whatever reason - most likely involving the police and a hefty offer from a property developer who wants to turn SGP Ground Zero into a huge housing estate - there will be no more after 2017.

But do not worry if you have missed out or can’t bare the thought of not going again, you can repeat the Secret Garden Party experience next year with minimal hassle.

Simply go to your bank, withdraw your entire life’s savings and then send a text to ‘your guy’ asking him to pop round. When he asks what you want, just reply with “Everything”.

Then all you have to do is wait for it to start raining and go sit in a park and consume all that you have bought in one go. Then - when you wake up from your coma - go for a stroll through Colchester town centre.

Goodbye Secret Garden Party, I will miss you. Sort of.

Take our fun quiz to find out if you’re qualified!

What's your dream job?

a) Reporting on injustice in the world. b) Making up weather scare stories. c) Writing 'so unhappy' underneath pictures of minor female celebrities taken as they leave the gym.

What's the biggest waste of public money?

a) Trident nuclear program. b) Foreigners. c) I'd like to say the NHS or the BBC but if I get the job it's really the twenty or so thousand pounds my parents spent putting me through my ‘journalism’ degree.

What do you think of Nigel Farage?

a) Awful. b) Not a foreigner.  c) Far too left leaning for my tastes.

What do you think of the NHS?

a) Our greatest achievement. 
b) The NHS should stand for No Helping Socialists & foreigners. c) I hate it but I don't know why.

What's the biggest issue facing the UK?

a) The growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor. b) Foreigners. c) People won’t get cancer from all the things I keep saying cause cancer

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

a) Still saving up for a studio flat. b) Burning down a Mosque. c) Crying into the mirror.

In a terrible tragic accident, a young lady cyclist has been knocked down and killed. What do you need to establish before running the story?

a) The facts. b) Which one of them was foreign? c) How much is her parents house worth?

Pictures need to go with the story, where do you get them?

a) Respectfully ask the parents for a photo. b) No pictures, need the space for weather scare stories. c) Facebook, specifically 'beach' photos.

What are your attitudes to work?

a) Truthful reporting. b) Excellent because I am not foreign. c) Arbeit Mach Frei.

What are editorial standards?

a) Adhering to press guidelines. b) Slating foreigners.  c) What?

How could you improve the BBC?

a) Gosh, I don't know, an independent commission? b) Sell it to Richard Desmond. c) Burn it down.

Truthfully now, which demographic are most dangerous to public democracy in the UK today?

a) ISIS? b) Foreigners. c) Our Readers.

What scares you?

a) Nuclear war. b) A slightly European looking neighbour. c) The formation of a proper independent press complaints commission. What is your dream story to report on? a) Anything with dogs. b) Something bad involving foreigners. c) You know that film ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’? Yeah, well that happens for real except you can erase memories of your professional career, instead.

Answers we didn’t need.

In the original Alien, the crew of the Nostromo lands on planet LV-426 thinking they are responding to a distress beacon. In fact, the distress beacon is actually a warning to stay away.

There are parallels here to how I went into the cinema after watching the trailer for Alien Covenant thinking that I was going to watch a good film. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, the trailer was obviously telling me to go and watch something else.

There are about twenty cast members in Alien Covenant. Or are there ten? Who knows? Who cares? Not the various Aliens who tear them to pieces or even the characters themselves seem to care, even though most of them are married to each other and receive the news of their spouses death with the same level of grief you might get when being told that the Milkshake machine at McDonalds isn’t working.

Also, it’s only a cameo but somehow, James Franco makes it into this film. I believe that there is a contractual obligation that he and Danny McBride have to be in the same films as each other.

If you like Michael Fassbender then you’re in for a treat as he is in this film quite a lot. An awful lot.

He has some cracking lines such as “I’ll do the fingering” when he is teaching someone to play his flute. No, that’s not a euphemism. The rest of his dialogue seems to have come from a GCSE students greek history book. Given his lengthy screen time, I couldn’t help but think that there are cheaper ways (It cost $111 million to make) for the director, Ridley Scott to tell Fassbender that he wants to fuck him.

It is now 38 (fucking hell), years after John Hurt descended into the depths of the derelict spacecraft in the original film and for all that time, people have wanted to know the origins of the Alien. Who or what created the beast? People have wanted - no, needed - the answer to this.

But we were wrong. We were so wrong.

To say that the reveal is a let down would be an understatement in the same league as saying that Donald Trump might be slightly unsuitable for public office. You’ll go into the cinema thinking the Alien is the most terrifying creature in all of existence but you’ll just leave feeling a little embarrassed for it.

You might think that you want to know where the Alien came from but you also might think that you want to read the contents of your ex and their friend’s group WhatsApp chat in the weeks following your break up. Trust me. You do not want to know.

Possibly the most aptly titled album ever, both because you want Kasabian to stop and also because the album in itself is really one big cry for help, ‘For Crying Our Loud is the sound of three thousand drunk car thieves coming up on their second pill.

It is the sonic representation of Liam and Noel (or whatever their names are) saying “fuck it, that’ll do” and sending the studio recording tapes off to be mastered by some poor mixing engineer - some hapless victim who didn’t deserve this - who would then tear out his remaining strands of hair trying to make the record halfway listenable.

Or maybe they did really make a proper, decent record but somehow, said tapes got swapped around with a recording of their primal scream therapy sessions and this is what happened.

For this album contains a collection of lyrics so nonsense and self indulgent - so off their fucking rocker and pointless - that they would test at least 80% purity for cocaine.

Here is a sample Kasabian lyric;

“That word rhymes, I like limes, people going mental, my car’s a fucking rental”

Actually, I made that up but I expect you believed it was real because Kasabian lyrics are actually like that.

The record is the sound of two men that you would normally expect to see stumbling around drunk in Basingstoke town centre at 11am, screaming nonsense into the void, with the expectation of receiving nothing but a shower of money in return.

The record is the sound of Oxford Street at rush hour, busy and annoying and likely to incite violence. The aural equivalent of someone’s elbow in your face on a crammed tube on a boiling hot day. The soundtrack to tripping over your shoelaces at school and hearing the dreaded scream of 'bundle’ before twenty of your peers pile themselves on top of you, shattering your spleen and self respect.

There are 12 tracks, or so the album sleeve would tell you. It’s hard to tell where one track ends and another one starts.

Are the brief moments of blissful silence merely the starting point of a new song, or actually punctuated moments of quiet reflection as whatever radioactive blend of ketamine and LSD that Kasabian are mainlining causes a brief pause of consideration, like the apes stopping to stare at the monolith at the beginning of 2001, before they return to slinging their own excrement around and beating each other’s heads in?

Perhaps this album, this elaborate cry for help, is designed for the live experience? Kasabian aren’t bad live, provided you’re ok with being elbowed in the face by a crowd surfing Peter Crouch and also like having your beer served to you out of a glass and at 30 miles an hour towards your face from someone 5 rows in front of you who likes spending 6 pounds on watered down piss bravely purporting to be Carlsberg, only to throw it in the air like a deranged caged baboon.

I have seen Kasabian live 5 times, though this is mostly accident, rather than design.

Peter Crouch once called me a bellend backstage at one of their gigs because I thought he was a goalkeeper. Peter Crouch really likes Kasabian.

I digress. It is hard to give this album a score because how can you score madness? What score can you give insanity? As we pour over the news and look to our leaders for guidance as to where the world might be going, maybe we will miss the more subtle signs of the apocalypse, maybe we will ignore the discrete warnings of the impending collapse of it all?

Is it possible, just possible, that Kasabian aren’t a pair of drugged-up reprobates who have done so many narcotics that they hear colours but are, in fact, bugled-up soothsayers who have seen into the future and are singing the last songs of our time?

Many years from now, future historians - in the charred ruins of our collapsed world - will pick at the clues of the past to try and ascertain what took humanity to the brink of destruction and there, buried under the scorched earth and ash, the twisted metal and blackened glass, they will find 'For Crying Out Loud’ by Kasabian.

Having recently u-turned on an election-pledge-breaking plan to increase national insurance contributions for the self-employed, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond has held a press conference to unveil his alternative plan for generating addition tax revenue income: Taxing Big Issue sellers.

"It's only fair" snorted Hammond stroking the erection he always gets when he's about to start fucking over poor people "for years these individuals have taken advantage of the system and earned money - sometimes in the region of tens of pounds - on a daily basis. And they get to take as much holiday as they like. At YOUR expense."

Hammond, winner of world’s most boring haircut for the last 3 years running, then went on to reveal other plans, such as a higher income tax rate for donations received from begging and charging stamp duty on cardboard boxes and shop doorways.

"After all" Hammond concluded "these people are a drain on the NHS and seeing as how we haven't quite destroyed that yet, we need to crack down on these rogue earners until we do."

Asked for a final comment, Hammond said "The whole idea of the Big Issue is ridiculous anyway. Why don't they just switch to digital distribution? Why, I can download the Sunday Times on this gold iPad that you paid for and read it on there. Why don't they just do that?"

Additional reports that Hammond was heard singing "Osbourne was a pussy" over the popping of champagne corks in the back his tax payer funded ministerial Bentley upon leaving the press conference are currently unconfirmed.

Aforementioned Bumperdink Crumblepotch plays a brilliant, yet total tosser of a neurosurgeon called Stephen Strange, an incredibly unlikely name that is still not as unlikely as the titular character playing actors real name.

Unfortunately, Baffledoffle Cankerbangle fucks up his hands in rather unrealistic car crash and he can no longer be a surgeon. Ironically, despite now having shaky fingers of equal value to the world of surgery as Katie Hopkins is to a patient on the heart transplant list, he carries on being a tosser perfectly adequately.

Unable to find answers to fix his trembling wanking paddles with contemporary science, Bapperbongle Cobbledongle travels to stereotypical Asia where non stereotypical Asian Tilda Swinton gives him some magic mushrooms (possibly) and he has wild hallucinations and becomes a scorceror…sorsera..saw…wizard. Or something. Then he shaves his beard into one that a man who is legally banned from going near schools might have.

Predictably, Basiltwiddle Crobbaldizzle becomes an expert wizard with a magic cloak and has to fight Mads Mikkelsen (real name) with the help of Chiwetel Ejiofor (real name).

I couldn’t tell you why they fight as I really lost interest about halfway through. This is because Bonkerdazzle Cackleswizzle has an American accent so bad, so shit, that you could literally replace him any character from a Ken Loach film and they would sound more convincing.

Some other things happen and there is more talk of alternate dimensions than there is at day three of Glastonbury in the stone circle but in the absence of any cohesive plot or indeed, charisma from Binkledapper Cocklebaster, I fell asleep so not really sure about the rest (Though it is probably $30 million dollars of CGI getting spunked on 20 minutes of nonsense.)

If you are a fan of bad American accents and Bopperdizzle Cumpotbread then you will like it. If not then you will probably hate it.

It’s amazing what you can charge for Avocado on Toast, isn’t it? Daily, you look at the news and see the tumbling pound, continuing it’s almost-inevitable nose dive into kindling and wonder what the answer is. The answer, my friends, is Avocado on Toast. The amount people charge for it is unbelievable, especially considering how easy it is to make.

All those bankers in the city, wishing the windows weren’t reinforced so they could jump through them and join the pound on it’s downward plummet to oblivion, should start trading avocado on toast. It is immune to depreciation, currency fluctuations and common sense.

Here’s what you do: You grab an avocado, scoop it into a bowl and then hit it with a fork a few times.. Even I, a man who usually brings culinary skills to the kitchen on par with the diplomacy that Tony Blair took to the middle east, am an expert in making this simple dish. Heston Blumenthal with a hard skinned pear thing. That is not a euphemism. 



Once you have battered said fruit into a mess closely resemble a Shrek themed bukkake* movie, you just chuck it on some toast. That’s it. If you're feeling in a baller mood you can then put some chilli on it. This is easy because you can buy it in a pot and sprinkle it on and it makes you look like you know what you’re doing. Piece of piss.

I have met people who claim to be huge “fans” of this dish. How can you be a fan of a dish? Do you go and see it in fucking concert? When’s the new EP out, mate?

I have, sadly, experienced conversations with other humans who make the bold claim to be always hunting down “the perfect avocado on toast.”

At this point in the conversation I start to look around for a pint glass and a bottle of bleach but I always manage to steady myself by thinking about how my Mother rings me up every day telling me I’ll never get married.**

‘In your face, Mother’ I think to myself***. I can make avocado on toast, the key to a woman’s heart. So I just smile to the person saying this nonsense and say “Wow. What’s the best place you’ve found” whilst I pinch myself really hard to stop myself saying something rude.**** I’m nice like that.*****

Anyway. I had avocado on toast at Jusu Brothers. Jusu Brothers is a japanese styled restaurant. I say japanese styled because, whilst the decor and menu looks a bit japanesy, the menu is not. They give normal dishes japanese names. I am not making this up, this actually happens. The only thing that is truly japanese in Jusu Brothers are the prices, which are all in Yen. JOKE! They're not, they're in pounds but you could be forgiven for thinking that they are because it is quite expensive.



The prices and non-sensical styling, combined with the new-age health food aspirations of the menu, obviously attract a well heeled crowd. By well heeled, I clearly mean ‘total cunts’. In they flow like Gucci clad Lemmings, cooing over the organic menu, insisting that ‘natural’ is the best way, totally oblivious to how ironic it is to insist on something natural when they are also trailing a lead attached to a small hamster dog deliberately inbred over centuries to have 2 inch legs and a massively truncated life span.

Of course, it is the sort of place where everyone is continually twitching their head, looking to see who is looking at them but also making sure they don’t catch the eye of anyone in the process. What results could best be described as a cafe that is doing it’s best impression of a crowd at a tennis match during a cocaine convention.

The staff are on a whole new level, too, simultaneously ridiculously good looking and yet also somehow slightly detached from this world. I think it is a health food thing. Or being really good looking. Their wide shiny crystal-like eyes are the eyes of aliens who have only recently hatched from their cocoons and are still getting used to their new human skin whilst you, you primitive ape, have dared bother them for some food in return for money.

Jusu Brothers extol the virtues of something called ‘Zen Eating’. Those of you who can tie your own shoelaces and are allowed to walk around supermarkets on your own will quickly realise that this means fuck all other than to make you sound like an aforementioned total cunt if you dare to bring it up in serious conversation without laughing.

‘Zen Eating’. Jesus fucking christ. If you are ever up on a murder charge and facing a very long stretch inside, save a fortune on a defence lawyer and just say “Yes but he did say that he was into ‘Zen Eating’ your honour”. The case will be instantly dismissed and you will be carried out of that court on the shoulders and raised arms of a cheering jury whilst your victim's teary eyed relatives hug and thank you for doing them a massive favour. Then you’ll probably get your own cooking show.

Anyway. Avocado on toast, or as some places insist on calling it smashed avocado. Get over yourself mate, it’s avocado on toast. The only smashed up green thing was a rather ill me the night before I came in to your cafe, which goes someway to explaining why I agreed to the 700% mark up on a plate served to me by a Vulcan.

At Jusu Brothers they call Avocado on toast 'Avo Don'. Of course they fucking do. The name of a dish you whisper softly whilst ordering in case anyone hears you say it and you have to move to China to save face.

But it was decent, in fairness. Great coffee too (bizarrely, this is relatively cheap. Go figure.) and smoothies that, even if you have the same one three weeks in a row, is a different price each time (Anywhere between £3 to £9. Something to do with the economy or the staff not used to having hands instead of tentacles whilst using the till or catching sight of their reflection in the mirror and being distracted (which would be perfectly understandable, to be fair).

I would go again if they let me.
 RICHARDSON RATING 
If you are into the idea of queuing up in the cold for an hour to get something you could make at home for literally one fifteenth of the price whilst being surrounded by the sort of crowd that would be part of Hitler’s new world order if he had been into Yoga - and I know an awful lot of you are - then I cannot recommend Jusu Brothers enough. If you go, get the Avocado on Toa...sorry, Avo Don. I'm a big fan.

If you are not then you will recognise Jusu Brothers for what it really is. A member of a vast restaurant conspiracy that is in concert with Farmacy and Franco Manca. A cabal with one aim and one aim only: Create new overpriced food venues in order to raise property amounts on Westbourne Grove and price me out of the area. Well fuck you, Jusu Brothers. Fuck you and your avocado on toast, I’m not going anywhere.

Special rating for Staff/Service 😍/10

Disclaimers:

Millions of undecided US voters are still keenly anticipating who their friends in another country think they should vote for, an astonishing new report has revealed. Bill Huckson, 36, from Alabama said “I still don’t know who to vote for, it’s right down to the wire. I think the only way I’m going to be able to choose is to go with the one all my friends in England tell me to.”

Mary Williams, 26, from upstate New York added “After all, everyone in Britain was so keen to hear my views on Brexit, it’s only fair that I listen to them on their views on foreign politics too.”

You forgot, didn’t you? You forgot to book Babington House, you forgot to check out lastminute.com, you forgot to plan your escape. And now you’re stuck here, like the residents of Kings Landing in Game of Thrones, fearfully awaiting the arrival of Robert Baratheon’s army or the Dothrakis and you will just have to get through it. GETTING STARTED:

Meet everyone somewhere away from carnival or at the very least, inside a bar.

Arranging to meet someone in the street or by a sound stage is the modern equivalent of when Tom Hanks went looking for Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan but without the upbeat mood and beautiful French countryside.

If anyone is stupid enough to try and arrange meeting you by a sound stage, just say yes and leave them to it. You are better off without them. Don’t forget to mute your phone so you don’t accidentally answer a call to someone saying “HI CAN YOU SEE ME…I AM BY THE SPEAKER…MY HAND IS IN THE AIR”. You’ll never see them again. Good.

FOOD:

In the week before Carnival, local cats go missing, foxes seemingly go into hiding and the rodent traps at the local eateries stay mysteriously empty. Even West London’s Pigeon population takes a steep dive in numbers.

You think about this as you cautiously peruse the local street food stalls. Whilst ‘Street Food’ may make you think of Hackney and ironic moustaches, at Carnival it just means that they don’t have a catering license. The only people interested in food at carnival are either clinically insane or arms dealers looking for a new type of bio weapon. Seriously, don’t touch it. You (and your lower intestines 2 days later), will thank me for it.

A few years ago when I lived on Westbourne Park road, my neighbour in the basement downstairs kindly rented out his front terrace to a group of transients who claimed to be running a barbecue. Their cell was made up of the weird bloke you see in every town centre shouting to himself and more than one guest star from BBC’s Crimewatch.

I saw some of the ‘ingredients’ being wheeled in and I still have nightmares. For days after I could still smell the reek of chicken and burnt plantain in my lounge. The thugs running it said I could have as much free food as I liked as a thank you, which is an offer on the same level as the CIA offering you free Evian whilst you’re being waterboarded.

DRINK:

For some reason, no one really knows why, everyone drinks Red Stripe.

Like most beer, it tastes pretty awful but Red Stripe is especially bad. They only sell it once a year because it takes 12 months to make it taste that unpleasant. Fortunately by the 6th or 7th can of this misery (or circa 1am), it starts to taste slightly better so just bare with it and, you know, carnival.

Drinking is an important tradition of carnival because it will help you blot out the less fun parts (ritualised police beatings, people urinating in the street and the smell of street food), and instead, only remember the good parts - the happy faces and the general feeling that a large part of one of London’s allegedly upmarket boroughs has been turned into a demilitarised zone.

Remember; Most locals fuck off out of it hoping that, when they get back 3 days later clutching very long receipts from Soho Farm House, their home is still standing and hasn’t been gutted from fire. A few brave, responsible and upstanding locals (hi), will stay behind to keep an eye on things, like budget Marvels ‘The Avengers’ infused with Red Stripe and Malibu.

THINGS TO AVOID:

The actual carnival procession. I’ve been going to carnival for nearly a decade now and have only witnessed the actual parade once. And this was by accident when I was trying to find someone and walked the wrong way. Fortunately, I quickly recognised my mistake and ran off back to the madness of the crowds.

Seeing the parade is a clear indication that something has gone very wrong and that you are lost. It runs parallel to every fun part of carnival and the only people who deliberately go and watch it are either your parents or people forced to take part in the procession itself.

Also, be careful to avoid pushchairs. Usually used to transport kids not old enough to walk, they’re instead repurposed as battering rams to secure a good spot in the crowd. Only a few years ago I was stood in one of the more packed areas, pleasantly trying to sway along to the music without being elbowed in the face when, suddenly, my ankles were mangled by a psychopathic teenager trying to push me out of the way with her wheeled progeny.

“Please don’t do that, madam” I requested, politely.

“Fuck orf mate, you gunna tell ‘im ‘e can’t see Norman facking Jay” came the reply, as she gestured with her thumb to the child below, fast asleep and oblivious to the ruckus through the temporarily induced coma from his rum infused fruit shoot.

I just stepped out the way. I’m nice like that.

SOUND STAGES:

Fortunately, Norman Jays amazingly inappropriately named ‘Good Times’ bus isn’t there anymore.  Which is good because it was literally a magnet for twats whose idea of a good time is to stand jammed in like a cattle cart shoving each other in time to the same set that has been played 10 years straight. JUST so they can say they saw Norman Jay MBE. It is clearly a complete coincidence that the same year that Norman Jay stopped doing Carnival for free he created his own Good Times festival and tried to charge for it.

Sadly, Sancho Panza isn’t there anymore either. I can’t think of any other stages to visit but it doesn’t really matter, they all sound exactly the same; Loud and shouty.

The ONLY exception to the above is Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues stage which is the stage that David Cameron would go to, if it weren’t for the fact that he would only manage to hear the opening 3 chords of that guy who used to be in Razorlight’s guitar strumming before the crowds strung him up from the nearest lamppost and starting launching anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor at his head. I hope he got my invite.

On the subject of violence, it’s probably best to avoid the Rampage stage. I’ve never been assaulted at the Rampage stage but then I’ve also never been to the Rampage stage. It’s possible that it isn’t as bad as all the urban myths make it out to be but it’s also possible that some people had a nice time in Beirut in the 80s as well.

Rampage Stage is at the All Saints road junction, which, apparently will only have 2 sound stages this year as opposed to 4. For the non-mathematicians reading, this means 2 normal sized riots as opposed to 4 small ones.

THE COPS:

(above: A traditional Carnival dance)

Most of the police are just there (seriously), to oversee things and pray that it doesn’t all kick off. However there will always be a few that are a bit annoyed about having to work over the bank holiday in order to babysit a huge mob of drunken loons and therefore will take great pleasure in arresting you for the mildest of misdemeanours. Please remember, whilst you might think you’re a cool and edgy person by puffing a bit of ‘the herb’ in a public place surrounded by coppers, everyone else will think that you’re a cunt. Because you are. And you’ll have zip ties round your wrists and a nosefull of pavement quicker than you can say ‘Christian Grey’.

 From then on in, you have a long and drawn out trip to the holding area where you will either get a caution or a trip down to the station to be introduced to a rolled up copy of the Yellow Pages and twenty years of stored up resentment.

Yes, you may well witness some middle aged, overweight white copper trying to dance with some black people as part of a misguided PR effort to prove that the Met isn’t institutionally racist but deep down, you know he drew the short straw and would, instead, much rather be back at the station, carefully rolling up his beloved copy of said Yellow Pages, with misty tears of nostalgia blurring his eyes as he thinks back to the days before CCTV and competent legal aid.

ANIMALS:

Some people, other than the caterers, like to bring dogs to carnival.

Bringing a dog to carnival is only ever acceptable under two circumstances. 1) you’re a copper or 2) you’re in a gang. Like people who take young children, anyone else who takes their Dog to carnival needs to be reported.

The other animals you’ll see at carnival - other than the people attending it - will be police horses. The mounted police division is one of those old, honoured and outmoded constabulary traditions that refuse to die, like racism and corruption. Don’t pat the horses, they won’t thank you and neither will the baton wielding sociopath riding it.

AFTER PARTIES:

Held at various establishments around West London, the after parties are all very much in the carnival spirit (overcrowded and over priced).

But who cares? You have to go to them because you won’t be able to remember where you live at this point. You’ll make friends and exchange numbers with people you will never speak to again whilst downing warm cans of red stripe and ‘Carnival Punch’ (Tesco value rum and coke with a grape floating in it), until you get chucked out.

Have fun finding your house and try not to think about how everyone with more sense than you went to Burning Man instead.

I love Carnival.

In a startling post-brexit move. Lucifer has decided that he now no longer wants Boris Johnson’s soul, casting serious doubts on Johnson's prime ministerial ambitions.

Speaking to various assembled press outside his home in Hell earlier today, Satan - legally known as Lucifer Morningstar - said:

“It’s true. Boris approached me back in March offering up his soul in return for a Brexit result that would help him achieve his dream of becoming British Prime minister. I went with it because, hey - I’m the Devil and that’s what I do - but I realise that even I, the dark lord of all pain, suffering and misery, have my limits on the type of person that I’m prepared to accept.”

It is understood that the eternity based deal is now being cancelled using clause 5.1c where upon Satan can return a soul under ‘exceptional circumstances’.

Satan continued “Basically, the ‘exceptional circumstances’ here are that Boris Johnson is a total and utter fucking tosser. I can’t bear the thought of having him down here with me and I already look after the worst evil dictators and serial killers in history. Boris is just a step too far. Plus, with all the flames everywhere, Azazel, my health and safety demon tells me that his stupid fucking haircut poses serious fire risks.”

A former friend of Satan’s, the archangel Gabriel, seemed to offer an alternative view, suggesting that Satan was worried that, once he arrived in hell, Boris Johnson would quickly launch a leadership coup to become the new ruler of the underworld.

Said Gabriel: “Satan is no longer the worst being in existence and he’s worried about the competition. Frankly, he should be, because Boris clearly has experience in these sorts of things.”

Let’s get this out of the way first. Make no mistake, Warcraft is an absolute shit fest. It’s fucking awful. One of the worst films ever made in recent times.

That said, I would probably watch it again because it has Paula Patton in it. I think I love Paula Patton. In the film she is green and has upside down fangs that would make oral sex a white knuckle ride into the unknown but I don’t care. Paula Patton used to be married to pop singer/rape advocate Robin Thicke, who did the awful Blurred Lines song with pop goblin, Pharrell.

In Warcraft, Paula Patton is an Orc which is sort of like a goblin, I think. Well, she’s half Orc, half human which means that, presumably, her character’s dad fucked an Orc. No one mentions this in the film but you just know that everyone is thinking it. I was and now you are, too.

Imagine the shit he would have got down the pub from his mates after that… “Give it a rest lads, looks aren’t everything you know” he would say as they all fell about laughing, screwed their faces up and mimed slapping arses whilst making monster noises.

I suppose that it is possible that it was the other way around (human Mum, Orc Dad) but going on their size and the basic principles of proportionality, Orc dongs must be fucking ginormous so it seems unlikely.

Let that one sink in for a moment.

Anyway, Paula Patton.

It’s amazing that I still fancy someone who was once married to Robin Thicke but sometimes the world is a weird place that makes no sense.

Warcraft is a weird film that makes no sense.

It’s directed by Duncan Jones who is David Bowie’s son. Shortly before release in something that was defiantly NOT a cynical studio demanded push against a tsunami of inevitable negative reviews trading in on the memory of a recently deceased global treasure, Jones said that his Dad had seen an early cut of Warcraft at the beginning of the year and was really happy with it.

A great, great man, Bowie. A man who - at the time was coming to terms with his own mortality - still sought to support his son by spending two precious hours sitting through utter tripe and then, somehow, summoned up the strength to pretend it was good. What a guy. It’s worth noting that he would probably have been on some quite considerable prescription drugs at the time, though, so maybe he really did enjoy it.

Toby Kebble plays the head Orc and it is truly impressive how much he bulked up for the role. I’m not suggesting he took steroids but just look at him! 

Massive! See what I mean about proportionality?

Ben Foster, an actor who really should know better than to sign up for this shit, is in it as well. I hope he got a lot of money or his soul back because he is given the worst lines since Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction.

The main human guy - I don’t know his name - looks like he should be in Sons of Anarchy but isn’t. He spends his time in the entire film pretty much the same way I did; Trying to rationalise his attraction to a green woman who uses the same dentist as a wild boar.

His son, who looks like he is literally only 5 years younger than him, dies and Paula Patton comforts him by giving him a love bite. Seriously. Worth it in my book.

Dominic Cooper plays the King who, to his credit, gets involved in actual fighting rather than press junket PR tours of the Middle East and wearing medals he gave himself. That said, he’s awful in it as well, and I feel well judged to state this because I played one of the kings in my school nativity play when I was 7 years old. I must have looked like Daniel Day-Lewis in comparison even though I forgot my lines and everyone - including my own mother - booed me off stage. Only joking! My mother didn’t boo me off stage. She stood up and walked out instead*.

Everyone in this film is awful, apart from Paula Patton who can do no wrong. If, somehow, she agreed to go on a date with me and turned up at the restaurant (a really nice one that I had booked, only the best for Paula) and was covered in soot and her hair was all charred and she explained that the reason for this was because she had just burnt my house down (and all my worldly goods along with it), I’d be all “ok, well let’s not let this ruin our evening, we can talk about it tomorrow”.

It’s sort of strange I like Paula Patton in this film because she plays a vicious creature with no morals branded in green and that is, basically, a job description for Foxtons. In fact, if she said the reason she was round at my flat in the first place was to do a valuation because she was actually employed by aforementioned scum bag estate agents, I would still let it pass. And I really hate Foxtons.

In fact, I reckon I would still probably just dreamily nod and agree if she started talking about how great she thought Boris Johnson was, too. Even though I really hate Boris Johnson.

Speaking of Boris, the main bad guy in Warcraft is called Gul’Dan. He is a bloated, deceitful and evil liar, masquerading as a saviour, who is prepared to sacrifice anything and anyone - including his own people and land - in order to fulfil his own twisted leadership ambitions.

He whips up his orcs - stupid beings who quite literally get hit over the head for a living - into a mass fury by blaming people from another land who are different to them for all their problems.

Sadly he doesn’t die at the end and his scheme - a scheme so cretinous that it makes the coyote from road runner seem like Stephen Hawking in comparison - actually works and everyone, apart from him and a couple of his repulsive self-serving mates, gets fucked over.

I think I’m still talking about Gul’Dan. Please vote Remain.

RATING:

If you are attracted to Paula Patton: 5 million out of 10

If you are not attracted to Paula Patton: Boris Johnson fucking Nigel Farage out of 10

BEFORE YOU GO:

Ask yourself: Do I really want to do this? Am I honestly prepared to spend the same amount of money I could spend on a decent holiday in a hot country on losing my mind in a field full of mud and lunatics whilst risking foot and mouth disease? If you answered ‘Yes’ then read on!

ESSENTIAL THINGS TO TAKE:

Drugs. Cash. Something to hold all your drugs and cash. Boots (these can also carry your drugs and cash).

THINGS NOT TO TAKE:

Things you like. Dignity. Children.

THINGS YOU MAY WANT TO TAKE:

Booze, if you can be bothered to cart it around. Maybe a tent.

WHEN YOU GET THERE:

Firstly, you realise that all the nice emails you got from the so-called ‘Head Gardener’ about how wonderful and liberating the festival is were complete lies, as it is surrounded by military grade fencing and appears to have hired a private militia for security. The prices of anything; be it a drink, a snack or a t shirt are priced in a manner that makes Harrods look like Lidl. Still, there are more important things to deal with; like where you’re gong to live for the next few days.

So, if you have taken a tent, go and set it up first. Do not - and this is very, very important - decide to ‘go for a few beers and set up the tent later’. It will never happen. If you have been on site for more than one hour and haven’t set the tent up, sell it (for drugs and cash), because it is now totally pointless.

Once you have either set up or sold the tent, it is time to start drinking. Your friends may insist on marching you around to different stages to see bands they think they once might have heard on Jools Holland. It’s pretty pointless trying to argue here so just follow them around till they get tired. If they ask you what band you want to see, pick one from the stage nearest to you because you, naturally, don’t want to do anything as lame as watching a band at a music festival when you are still sober enough to understand the words.

FOOD:

You might start feeling hungry and you can take your pick from any number of stalls selling unrecognisable charred lumps of roadkill for a tenner or - if you’re feeling in a baller mood - there is even a place called Soul Fire which labels itself as an actual ‘fine dining restaurant’. Soul Fire calling itself a fine dining restaurant is an exaggeration in the same league as Colditz in 1940’s Germany calling itself a Holiday Camp. Technically correct but you’d rather be shot by Nazi’s before you ended up in there.

Obviously, if you’re hungry at Secret Garden Party by far the healthiest and safest thing to do is to start taking loads of drugs to suppress your appetite.

Whilst you may think that advocating the consumption of banned substances which have quite possibly been cut with all manner of household cleaning products irresponsible, I can assure you it will still be safer than consuming anything sold as ‘food’ at Secret Garden Party, a festival which takes the same view on food preparation and sanitation as Zimbabwe does to the democratic voting process. So just get all your calories from alcohol. Speaking of which… DRINK: Generously, the ‘Head Gardener’ of Secret Garden Party (who is actually a hedge fund manager from Hampstead who has never set foot inside the festival), allows a limited amount of alcohol to be taken in with you on arrival. This is, per person, either 8 cans of beer (or cider if you are a scarecrow) or 4 cans plus one bottle of wine. 

In other words, enough for your first couple of hours. Then you have to buy drinks from the various bars around site. Or you could just drink your own tears once you read the price list.

Interestingly enough, you are not allowed to take any spirits in with you. This is somewhat surprising because the Head Gardener himself must be very familiar with spirits, what with 3 of them visiting him every Christmas Eve, the tight bastard.

The Weather:

The weather at Secret Garden Party has two modes: The Day After Tomorrow or Mad Max. Torrential rain or nuclear scorched desert. There is no in between. In the former, your tent (provided you haven’t sold it for drugs or cash) is a sinking life raft, in the latter it’s a radioactive greenhouse for cultivating rare saharan cacti. Either way you’re fucked. Interesting fact: The extreme weather patterns are actually induced by ancient ritual chantings and spells by the local forest people, angry about all the people turning up to wreck their quiet hamlet (aka the residents of Peterborough and Peterborough respectively).

SECURITY:

There are quite a lot of security guys on site because, for some reason, the organisers and Cambridge council don’t seem to understand that the only reason people can stomach going to sit in a muddy field for 3 days, listening to a line up that was cobbled together by the work experience kid at The Deaf Institute, is so that they can do so whilst getting out of their minds.

So, whilst taking your drugs, try and be subtle or at the very least be prepared to run away fast. The exception to this is if you’re a very attractive woman, in which case you could start cutting up cocaine on the back of a disabled pensioner and still get away with it because the security guards at Secret Garden Party are almost entirely comprised of the bad guys from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and don’t normally get close to females that aren’t on four legs and in a stable.

HEADLINERS:

Headliners are, invariably, bands who used to be big but can now no longer command a slot later than 11am at a respectable festival and have to come here instead. It’s where bands go to die.

Still, they are usually quite good because they come on stage at a point when you are so wasted, so battered, that you will have left the realms of reality far, far behind. Plus it will also be dark and you’ll feel less self conscious about being dressed like a 6 year old at a Frozen theme party, covered in mud. You will enjoy the set and tell all your friends they’re the best band you’ve ever seen when, in all likelihood, you got lost on the way to the stage and are watching two squirrels wrestling over an acorn.

If you’re not this wasted at this point then you must work security at Secret Garden Party, in which case congratulations on learning to read and I was only joking about the farm thing.

LATE AT NIGHT:

Once the headline act/squirrels finish fucking about, it’s time to explore. Head into the woods for some fun! You might meet some people.

OTHER FESTIVAL GOERS:

A very varied bunch from all over the UK (West London and East London).

Generally speaking, you should avoid talking to anyone you don’t know - as they will - until you’re completely off your chonks.

Once you are, you’ll meet loads of suddenly very interesting people who will tell you about how they come every year and how amazing Secret Garden Party is because there’s no where else quite like it. This is partly true because I don’t know too many organisations with both the vision and cheek to charge you £200 to sit in a field doing MDMA for three days offering only a musical line up and living conditions on par with a Siberian Gulag in return.

Still, despite this, your new friends will tell you how Secret Garden Party is their “home”.  Remember to smile whilst you consider how bad their actual home must be if they consider a giant maniac filled swamp a better residence than the place they get their post delivered to.

Graciously though, because you’re so high and they might be giving you drugs, you’ll indulge their nonsense and become temporary best mates. Before you and your new friends part, you’ll swap numbers and say that you’ll meet up again some day. You put their number in your phone using the best description that you can think of at the time.

APPROXIMATELY 7 HOURS LATER:

Disorientated, sickly and unable to rationalise why you ever thought coming to this festival was a good idea, you will stumble out of some tent, stage or the woods across a sea of used balloon gas canisters to be greeted by something terrible and truly awful: Sunrise. The last 7 hours have been a vicious, incomprehensible blur of self-destruction and the only thing you can work out with any good degree of certainty is how much money you have spent on making yourself feel so unwell. Your jeans may be ripped from end to end and you will not really care. All that matters is that you find shelter before the harsh, unforgiving sun exposes your sins and bad decisions to the world.

THREE HOURS AFTER THAT:

Dehydrated and with a head that feels like an angry pneumatic drill, you crawl from wherever you found to sleep (under a bin, in a tree, in some strange Australian girls tent who talked in a really weird whisper), and are greeted with the true reality of Secret Garden Party; a third world refugee theme camp full of lunatics in animal costumes. You gladly pay £14 for a bottle of warm mineral water and then go and find your friends.

Having not eaten for nearly 24 hours, you find an amazing restaurant on site called Soul Fire and pay fifty pounds for some burnt offal and a Bloody Mary which has less vodka in it than a Robinson’s fruit shoot.

Then your phone rings. It’s your bank manager. Quite reasonably, he demands to know why and how you’ve just spent £1000 in a field. Ashamed and unable to explain this even to yourself, let alone him, you hang up and crack open a beer. Then another. And then another until you stop shaking.

Then you do it all again. Twice.

THE TRIP HOME:

It’s now Sunday or Monday (you can’t really tell), and as the greenery of Cambridgeshire rushes past the train window on the way home you, for some reason, can’t stop thinking about how you let your parents down by going to Secret Garden Party.

Your phone bleeps. It’s a text message saying “hi mate, great to meet you” and is from someone listed in your phone as ‘Cunt dressed like a Pokemon’. You vaguely remember meeting them in the woods and block the number straight away.

You check Facebook and see that one of your friends has posted pictures of themselves in Mykonos. You realise that they probably spent roughly the same amount of money soaking up the beautiful sun and the hypnotic crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean (near the Head Gardener’s sun lounger), that you did by absorbing £10 cans of tepid lager and enough narcotics to put an Elephant into orbit in the middle of a giant medieval latrine.

Your friends will come back tanned, relaxed and rested. In turn, you return pale, scared and in fear of a week of night terrors.

Now you know the truth: Secret Garden Party is really the world’s largest open air lunatic asylum and would be better of located 15 miles outside of Pyongyang. You still go again next year anyway.

CANNES PART 2

It had been an interesting 10 days.  Alongside sneaking into the Du Cap for a star studded lingerie launch, we’d also snuck into the Sin City afterparty, Naomi Campbells birthday celebrations (and the subsequent after party), and turned up at some horrific pink themed night in ‘celebration’ of Paris Hiltons debut movie/insult-to-humanity called “Pledge This”. Then there was Star Wars and various independent and not-so independent picture house events.  We even drained the bar at a party that the guy who used to play ‘Sanjay’ in Eastenders had put on in order to (re)launch his acting career. That failed miserably, obviously (for him, not for us). It was fair to say that we’d turn up to the opening of an envelope if it meant free booze and the chance to chat shit with fellow “industry” people.

There was quite a buzz around ‘Film Noir Magazine’ at this point, which was impressive seeing as it didn’t even exist but that didn’t seem to worry the various studios who happily invited us to attend press calls and conferences for whatever 2 hour snoozeathon they were desperately pushing in order to recoup production costs.

As I mentioned before, I was heavily into the lie at this point - practically believing I was actually the news editor for a brilliant new publication that would set the film press on fire. I think this is pretty much borderline sociopathy but I really didn’t care. Because that’s the point of sociopathy. Apparently.

Most days looked a bit like this. Martini, the drinks company, had hired out this rooftop bar/club place, so we’d go down there and drink the horrible Rosso concoctions they handed out (tip: They taste a lot better when they’re free, fuck knows how bad they’d be if you had to pay for one of them), whilst reeling off advertising costs to marketing people whose names we would never remember and offer generous editorial coverage to anyone with a VIP invite.

In the afternoon and early evening, we’d head back home to get changed into our suits and then back down to one of the marquees on the beach just as whatever dreary daytime party they were holding was coming to an end. Then, brazenly, we’d just sit there watching the staff clear up and set the evenings event up. This was good because it stopped the awkwardness of having to deal with club security by going in when the party actually started.  I think we did this 4 or 5 times.

It was the final night of the festival - and the closing party was being held at VIP club down the road, hosted by Dolce & Gabbana. Annoyingly, we didn’t have tickets or even names for this but we kind of figured something would come up. Something always comes up.

So, we did the usual, sat in the bar watching everyone clear up whilst getting ready for whatever event they were holding. Sadly, and this was annoying, one of the managers had noticed that we had nothing to do with the event and really shouldn’t be there so asked us to leave.

Protesting with our made up journalism credentials didn’t do much good and before we knew it, we where standing out on the jetty wondering what to do next whilst staring out at the sea. I couldn’t help but notice that a couple of guys were hastily loading cases of Vodka and Champagne into a small boat at the end, so we edged a bit closer and started chatting to two very tall and glamorous looking girls. At this point, one of the goons loading the booze asked us if we were here for “the party”.

As a general rule, it’s always good to lie in situations like this.

“Yes”.

We got in the boat with the girls and set off out to sea. The bay of Cannes is pretty impressive if you like boats and still pretty impressive if you don’t. The further out to sea you get, the bigger the ships are. We sailed past Paul Allen’s hotel sized cruiser (was his wife on board?), away from Stelios of Easy Jets ship (huge but tackily orange with his logo plastered all over it), alongside a couple of other liners so expensive looking that they couldn’t possibly be owned by honest people.

The sun was starting to set and we were quite a way out from the shore - the Majestic hotel had shrunk to matchbox sized and even some of the smaller yachts looked like toys in the distance.

The launch pulled up at the back of a ginormous leviathan called “The Annalise”. This was the Starship Enterprise of boats, a white Death Star stuck into the ocean. I googled it when I got home and, at the time, it was the largest yacht for hire in the world and the third largest overall. I mean, it had a fucking helipad on it (where was the helicopter, I wonder?) and a rental price of around £400,000 a week. Fuck me.

We got on board and were greeted by a smartly dressed Italian guy wearing deck shoes. Quite reasonably, he asked us who we were and what we were doing at this private party. We started lying on autopilot about how we were there to cover the party for “Film Noir Magazine” and he, again politely, said that that was very strange as it was a private party and wouldn’t be covered by anyone

Whom, he enquired, had invited us? My friend was two steps ahead of him having cast an eye over the boarding ledger and reeled off the name of the PR head at Chopard who we kind of knew), as the invitee. The Italian raised an eyebrow and said he needed to check this out, before picking up a satellite phone and heading back up to deck.

At this point, after over a week of posturing bravado we started to panic. We’d possibly bitten off more than we could chew this time and here we were, half a mile out to sea with a boat full of strangers who, at any point, were about to rumble our lies and probably throw us overboard.

Just as I was mentally planning hijacking the launch boat and racing back to shore, the guy walked back down with a warm smile, apologised for keeping us waiting and asked us to take off our shoes (so we could put deck shoes on) and follow him upstairs.

I’ve never taken Heroin but I imagine that the rush I felt then, as I giddily clambered up to deck, is quite similar.  It was immense and I had to restrain myself from laughing and slapping my own back.

There was a DJ spinning records and 20 or so black tied waiters and waitresses handing out canapés and glasses of Champagne that were bottled before I was even born. All the staff were irritatingly good looking but still made to look like mutants next to the wave of impossibly beautiful, surgically enhanced guests. I couldn’t imagine it getting any better than this. But it would.

We were introduced to a few people and relaxed back into our pretend lives of international movie journalists whilst getting slowly, but steadily, smashed on the free booze.

A couple of my friends went and had a jacuzzi at the front of the ship whilst I explored inside. It had a very nice cinema, a gym, it’s own spa and several dining rooms. Every cabin (all 18 of them), was en-suite and decked out to resemble a Harrods showroom.

“It’s a shame it’s dark now”, explained one of the ship hands showing me around, as otherwise I could have taken one of the Jet skis out for a little ride before coming back for more food. Oh well.

Although I hadn’t quite grasped just how expensive this evening would be, I was perfectly aware that it wouldn’t be cheap. Who, I wondered, would be swallowing the cheque for all this?

Roberto was.

I was introduced, enthusiastically, to Roberto by a beautiful Italian girl from Porto Fino I’d been chatting to called ‘Alex’ but more on her later.

Possibly, because unlike us he wasn’t inhaling alcohol with all the restraint of a starving labrador in a pedigree chum factory, Roberto seemed quite sober. Alex introduced me whilst Roberto listened skeptically to my grand claims of film journalism.  I think it’s fair to say that Roberto thought I was a liar.  I think it’s also fair to say that Roberto was right.

Attempting to keep things civil, I asked Roberto what he did for a living. He leaned in close, put a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m a business man” he said darkly.

Roberto leant back and eyeballed me for a very unnerving few seconds before his contorted expression relaxed back into a smile and then walked off to talk to my friends, including one of our gang, Kate, who was Film Noir’s non-existent layout director or something.

I took another look around the deck. There I was, stood on a gigantic boat surrounded by a bunch of models and several much older Italian men who didn’t want to tell me what they did for a living but were obviously rich enough to buy small Islands. And probably whole police forces. It was dark now with the water suddenly looking very black and cold and I started to regret never continuing my childhood swimming lessons.

It’s conjecture to suggest that my generous hosts might be into sub-legal activities but the paranoia that a two week piss up affords you let my mind run wild.

The fear only lasted about 30 seconds or so before Alex took my hand and led me to the deck for a dance.  Alex and I chatted away - she was my age and was a gemologist apparently though freely admitted she hadn’t worked for the last three and a half years as she hadn’t found the right position. I agreed, reassuring her that it was perfectly normal to wait for the right opportunity whilst trying not to imagine the sheer amount of fucking cold calls I’d have to be making when I got back to my real life in Recruitment in the comparative Hades of dreary London.

She relayed their plans to head to the Dolce and Gabbana closing party and I said how funny that was because we were going too. Alex and her friends were traveling by speedboat and offered us a lift. As you do.

About an hour later, we were bumping through the water at top speed. Alex and I were getting on great by this point and although the air was a bit cold, I gave her my suit jacket and she linked her arm through mine. It was like a Jennifer Lopez video, except I was in it, Lopez wasn’t and it was dark. After 10 minutes or so, we got to the back of VIP club by the jetty.

The first thing I saw was a load of torchlights waving madly as security came to greet us. Then I heard their dogs. These dogs were even bigger than the mutts at the Du Cap, those now looking like moody Chihuahuas in comparison to the mad genetically engineered super soldier Rottweilers fed on a diet of steroids and pure rage in front of us now.  I decided that even though I was probably about to be torn to shreds by Satan’s own hell hounds, I’d had a pretty good run of if for the last week or two so I probably had it coming.

Fortunately, the security restrained the animals as we stepped onto dry land. Success! The euphoria of not being mauled to death was quickly displaced by security telling us that we had to go and queue round the front like the rest of the general public losers.

This afforded quite a few issues - I had no invite and had already told Alex I could get her in with us (even though Roberto had her name).  The front of VIP club was chaos, crowds of desperate goons clamoured to get in or get a glimpse of the A list attendees.

Reeling off various names at the door at no effect and we were turned away. Alex looked disappointed as she tried to call Roberto to arrange entry.

Around this point, and I’m not making this up, I saw a sparkly covered unsealed wrist band on the floor with the D&G logo on it. Someone had fucking dropped it. Unbelievable. This is the party equivalent of finding a wad of £50 notes on the floor or uncovering a treasure trove of jazz mags in the woods when you’re 14 in the pre-internet days. Amazing

Alex insisted I use it as she could get in herself on her own later but I said not to worry, strapped the band on and used it to blag us both in. Before we went up the red carpet, we got handed some free sunglasses (D&G, nice, I went back and got another 6 pairs later before eventually being told to fuck off) and strolled in the front past a wave of camera flashes. Hilarious.

The party inside was, predictably, sickeningly brilliant. Some performers were hanging off red drapes hanging from the very high ceiling and some DJ (Morillo?), was blasting out only vaguely offensive euro house from Heaven’s own sound system.

Penelope Cruz walked out as we strolled in. I tried, causally of course, to catch her eye but she was transfixed by Alex. My date! Well, this was turning out to be a brilliant night, wasn’t it?

As I walked into the huge arena, I passed a journalist (a real journalist, someone who actually got paid for what I was pretending I did) I’d met at a party a couple of days ago, the first person I’d met in my stay with enough sense to realise that I was lying through my teeth. She’d managed to rumble my lies when, during the course of an explanation as to why I had gotten in to all of these places I told her I was a guy called Baz Bamigboye, a film critic for The Daily Mail. She called me a liar and countered my protestations to the contrary by pointing out that Baz was in his 40s, short, bald and black.

I saw her, only briefly, as I was ushered into the VIP area by some gorilla like bouncer, pausing only to absorb her confused expression - a cocktail of irritation, admiration and jealousy - before I was handed more free booze.

Roberto eyed me suspiciously whilst I looked around. To my right was Victoria Silvstedt who, at the time, was earning around $200,000 a nipple for Playboy, being helped back into (or out of?), her ridiculously small top whilst Cuba Gooding Jnr (he won a fucking Oscar!) looked on smiling. I wonder where all these people are now? Fickle, fame is.

Everyone else was some kind of Producer, Director, music licenser or something. All you really had to say is “I’m in Cannes on business” slightly louder than normal speaking volume and seven strangers would hand you cocaine.

Just as I was starting to REALLY enjoy myself, Roberto cornered me and bombarded me with horrible questions about Film Noir Magazine - who was the publisher, when did it come out, who was the head of sales and so on - all perfectly obvious and reasonable questions to which I had never even thought of to make an imaginary answer to it. I tried to slow the pace of the conversation down by repeated sips of champagne as my brain tried to access it’s index of lies and come up with believable answers. I was on the verge on coming clean, admitting my lies and throwing myself at his feet to beg for mercy when I was rescued by Alex, who, possibly recognising my distress and not caring about my mistruths, grabbed me over the Dance Floor.

I kissed Alex there and then, in this giant hall, surrounded by the cast of the A/W ’05 Dolce and Gabbana catalogue, half of Hollywood, a sound system that was really a Giant’s defribulator disguised as a pair of speakers and, from what I could tell, glitter being blasted through the aircon. I don’t want to try and eulogise too much here but it was certainly quite a few steps up from any of the experiences I’d ever had in Infernos in Clapham.

But such is life, all good things must come to an end. And I was really, really hoping that that end would be at some point the next day. Alex, it seemed, had the same idea.

“You can stay on the boat” she said, adding “with me”. For the first time in my life, I started to seriously consider that God may exist. Admittedly a very distracted God who had taken his eye off the ball or had made an admin error in picking me for his mighty benevolence. 

As we strolled outside the front, my brain a fizzing cocktail of champagne, lust and Peruvian hospitality, I briefly considered the logistics of how we’d be getting back on the yacht. Alex was way ahead of me.

“I’m just gonna check with Roberto”. My heart sank. I’d already clocked Roberto. Him and another fat and menacing looking Italian were leaning up against a Red Ferrari and Yellow Lambourgini - as you do. I got the distinct impression that whilst Roberto and his pal didn’t own the cars, no one was going to tell them to stop leaning on them.

I can still picture it now. Alex, with her back to me, jabbering away in fast Italian to Roberto who, arms folded and relaxed on the bonnet of the Ferrari nodded away in response to whatever she was saying. He wasn’t looking at her though, he was looking straight at me, right into my eyes. He shook his head and slowly, deliberately, mouthed “No”.

Alex walked back over to me looking forelorn and told me that Roberto had said I couldn’t stay on the Yacht. She asked me what I was going to do and I said I wasn’t sure as I couldn’t remember the address of my Villa (true), and hadn’t been able to speak to my friends who had long since left to find out (kind of true, I obviously hadn’t bothered calling any of them). I mean, technically, I was stranded. Technically.

Alex said not to worry as she had a better plan anyway, we’d get a hotel room. Apparently she knew one of the guys at The Majestic and he’d probably be able to sort us out with a suite that had been kept back. I’m not sure how much a suite at the Majestic is during the Film Festival in 2005 but I’m pretty sure that if I had stuck it on card, I’d still be paying it off now.

Fucking hell...would it be worth it...should I...do I even have that kind of limit? I didn’t really have the chance to answer myself because Alex announced she would stick it on whatever nuclear powered credit card she had glowing in her Louis Vuitton purse.

Were the heavens looking down on me? Maybe... but God was obviously still very much distracted by more important things and had given some irresponsible angel - presumably the celestial equivalent of the work experience kid -  carte blanche to give me the greatest night of my life.

I was imagining Crystal on room service, 20 billion thread count sheets and the sun of the French Riveria gently creeping through the bay windows of our suite the next morning when Alex, sadly, had to ruin it.

“I just gotta check with Roberto”.

Replay the previous scene, the head shake, the firm yet silent “No” mouthed across the road to me.

I guess at this point, Alex was explaining to Roberto that I couldn’t remember the address of my Villa and couldn’t get hold of my friends because my phone had run out of battery (well, I’d turned it off), after “repeatedly calling them to find out how to get home”.

Roberto produced something from his pocket. I couldn’t read the name on it but I knew what it was. It was a fucking Film Noir business card.

“I have your colleague Kate’s business card” he said “let me try”.

Fuck.

Predictably, he connected to Kate within 2 rings. She had been asleep (having not been woken up already by my non-existent phone calls).

Fortunately, he passed the phone straight to me and I started having a go at her for not picking up her phone (I hadn’t rung her), and leaving me on my own (I’d said goodbye to her about 3 hours before and told her not to worry about me getting back), and so on. 
It went a little like this:

Me: “why didn’t you pick up your phone, why did you leave me?”

Kate: “John, what are you going on about?”

Me: “It’s fine, I forgive you, I’m just glad I finally got hold of you”

Kate: “Twat.”

Me: “It’s cool, stop apologising, just give me the address”

She gave me the address and I hung up.

“Phew” I said, not entirely convincingly and we all said our goodbyes. Under Roberto’s watchful eye Alex just kissed me on the cheek and skipped off towards a waiting launch boat, never to be seen again. Roberto shook my hand and then he just pointed at me. I was waiting for him to say something but he didn’t, he just walked off.

I got a taxi back to the villa, on my own, and fell asleep, on my own.

I received a text from Alex the next day while we were driving down to Monaco to blag our way into the Grand Prix, saying they were already sailing to St Tropez for the day because a new D&G shop was opening.

That ship cost Four Hundred thousand a week.

In 2005, I went to the Cannes film festival. For those of you that don’t know, Cannes is a city on the French Riveria, next to Nice. It holds many festivals. Films, Music, Games, Television etc. The main theme of each of these is that as many coked up foreigners as possible can fly over for a week or two, terrify the locals and prop up the local alcohol trade whilst trying not to get arrested.

The film festival originated in the 30’s before eventually, post World War 2, evolving into a worldwide centre piece for Hollywood producers to feel less guilty about releasing blockbuster drivel year on year and celebrate independent and art house films (whilst still being finacially supported by said drivel, because no one - save your really, really cool (boring), friends ever bother watching or paying for art house films.

I think one of my proudest achievements of doing the full 2 week stretch at Cannes (and Monaco Grand Prix right after), was how I managed to avoid actually watching a single film. Actually, that’s a lie. I saw Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith at the local cinema when, after 2 weeks of being out every night on the piss, I went and hid in the cinema with a raging hangover to watch George Lucas finish shitting over my childhood memories of the Jedi. I think I (understandably), fell asleep before the end, too.

Anyway, a bunch of us got accredited for the festival as producers (hilarious), despite only one of our number actually having any film industry experience. The accreditation didn’t do too much, except grant you easy access to the Majestic hotel and into the various closed off stages, restaurants and marquees whilst ordinary losers hung around outside hoping to catch a glimpse of one of their favourite actors.

As production passes don’t really get you anywhere, seeing as how everyone has one, we decided to say we were journalists. Sensing that people might suspect we were lying, we knocked up a website, email addresses and business cards for a fake new monthly publication called, unbelievably, Film Noir Magazine. I was the News Editor.  Of course I was.

Fortunately, our fake magazine proved to work wonders as we used it to sit in on interviews, meetings and free parties whilst promising all the various studios that we would grant them generous coverage in our first print.

Hilariously, they lapped this up, and we were in turn given guest list and tickets to lots of parties. When we didn’t get tickets or guest lists we just took their names and used them ourselves.

I did consider feeling guilty about this deception but then when Sony Pictures started telling me how much they liked our latest edition, I figured they were lying just as much as we were so I just went along with it. Fuck them.

We went to some pretty cool places - The Star Wars party (much better than the film), The Sin City after party (again, better than the film and the film is actually pretty good), Naomi fucking Campbells birthday party, sort of hijacked a giant yacht and even had a quick dance with Ivana Trump when I was off my face at some black tie party and met Paris Hilton. swear I’m not making any of this up, by the way. I mean, if I was, I’d invent meeting some cool people instead.

So, the scene is set an my personal highlight was down at the Hotel Du Cap. The Du Cap is - and this isn’t a typo by the way, a €10,000 or so a night hotel just outside Cannes that only takes payment in cash. Hilarious. On the evening I went, I’d already been down there in the afternoon with my friend Evan who was, at the time, a bona fide Paparazzi journalist for Star Magazine in the US - which is kind of like Heat over here, I guess.

When we were there (I think he was following Britney Spears or something. Again; really), and I was getting patronised by Paul Allen of Microsoft’s wife over lunch, we discovered that Chopard were launching their lingerie line at a party there later. I say lunch, I wasn’t eating. It’s fucking expensive.

So we went back to our villa, got suited up and headed back out in our little rented Ford or whatever it was.

The Du Cap at night is a bit different than during the day as evidenced by the kevlar coated bodyguards walking 4 foot high Dobermans around. What could go wrong?

Quite a bit. Evan had the name of a Getty Images photographer friend of his and tried to use his name at the desk to the party. Sadly, he was already in and there was no plus 1. Foiled. Oh well.

Evan came back and said he couldn’t get in but I could.

How, I asked, was I to get in without a name? Evan had taken a look at the name cards, handily laid out in front of him when he’d been refused. There were quite a few familiar names on it but he said to use one he didn’t recognise.

He told me the name. You have to remember, for the last week I’d been out every night drinking free champagne and cocktails so when he said it, it sounded like nobody to me. You might notice my error here but I was oblivious.

“Who?” I asked again.

“Billy Zeine” He replied. ZEEN. “No one knows who the fuck he is”.

I shrugged and walked over to the very attractive lady on the desk and said I was Billy Zeine, whoever he might be, and the lady smiled, handed me the card and told me to go in.

Whilst drinking free booze and shoulder rubbing with film stars is a lot of fun, the best bit, the high, is when you blag it in.  It is quite something, I can tell you. The rush you experience when fooling your way past security and into a tightly guarded party is brilliant.

The other side of the entrance to the party was much better than being stuck in the queue. Tall leggy models swan past in twenty grand ball gowns and you find yourself competing for bar space with people you have in your film collection at home.

Remembering the huge - and by huge I mean ‘obscene - prices of the place I reckon I must have sank about a grands worth of over priced booze in under an hour whilst I tried to discuss promotional strategies with Chris Tucker over cocktails. He was politer than he should have been.

 That might not sound like much now but then, in 2005, he’d just been paid about 25 million dollars for Rush Hour 3 and was the highest paid actor in the world at the time.

I popped outside to watch Cirque Du Soleil put on a small private show by the infinity pool, said a few hello’s to my fellow industry friends (I was totally living the lie of Film Noir Magazine by this point - I mean, I believed it myself. Awesome), before going over to check out the view.

The Du Cap is on a cliff facing the sea. As I stared out onto the Mediterranean, swishing the whisky around in my crystal glass, I could make out small Rib boats and Paparazzi goons with telephoto lens snapping away at my fellow party goers. And, quite possibly, me. Losers.

I headed back in and checked the seating plan for dinner. Hysterically, I was on the same table as Sharon Stone and Elizabeth Hurley. I mean, fucking hell! How good is that? I began mentally going through the process of how I would somehow seduce Hurley (“Yes Liz, we should put you on the cover, it could be your comeback…let’s go somewhere quiet and discuss it”), when Evan came back in.

“We have to leave” he said.

I looked at him like he was insane. I mean, at the age of 25, all my teenage dreams had come true. I was standing in the best party I’ve ever been to, about to sit down for dinner with two of my adolescent fantasys (I thought a lot about Liz Hurley in my teenage years..), and I was surrounded by models and actresses. Not just models and actresses but models and actresses who actually believed I was in the position to help them progress their careers. I mean, would you leave? Of course you fucking wouldn’t.

I laughed and said no, I was staying put.

Evan put on a much more serious tone and said that we had to get the fuck out right now before going on to explain why.

In the hour that had passed, Evan had stayed milling around the entrance hoping to catch a familiar face who could get in him.

At this point, a rather uptight English guy had walked in and started getting irate with the girl guarding the entrance. Evan listened in.

“Hi” he fumed “I’m the agent for Mr. Billy Zane. I have his invite here but you spelt it wrong. You’ve spelt it ‘Zeen’” ZEEN. Zeine. Shit.

The lady was apologetic but did her best, in broken English, to explain that he didn’t need to worry as Billy was already here.

“No. He’s not” was the curt reply.

“No monsieur” she had protested, smiling bravely “I welcomed ‘im in myself, do not worry”

“There must be some mistake..” he went on.

“No mistake, I promise” was about as far as she got before the Agent erupted. “HE’S NOT IN THE FUCKING PARTY BECAUSE HE’S IN THE FUCKING CAR OUTSIDE. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON”

As the desk lady verged on the edge of tears, Evan slipped past around a side route, upstairs through the ballroom and then down into the restaurant and then into the party. Where he found me and told me we had to leave.

I hastily downed my drink and snuck off out of there, just in time to see some mad English guy going apeshit at the front desk because the guy from Titanic was waiting to come in.

I paid a bit more notice to the security guards and dobermans as the concierge bought the Ford hatchback round - which, incidentally - stood out a fucking mile amongst all the Ferraris and Lambos.

We sped off laughing and headed straight into the Sin City after party by walking through the kitchens of the adjoining club whilst pretending to talk to security on our phones. Later on that night I got into an argument with Clive Owen and his publicist whilst queuing up for the bogs but that’s another story.