The ramblings of a madman . . .


So, we left Cambridge at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am on our way to fair Londinium. As I type this, more than 24 hours after, I have just fragmentary memories of yesterdays shenanigans. Anyway, things looked momentous from the moment we left, with certain individuals not having slept the night before and being determined to carry on under the condition that sundry substances were shovelled down their respective gullets. I spoke to lots of complete strangers on the bus, which was nice. I also ate my last morsel of the day at around 11 am, a toasted chicken balti ciabatta with a mango, passion fruit and orange juice. The healthiest thing to pass my lips all day.

Once on the boat technical matters threatened to hold us up, but thankfully these were ironed out quite quickly and the tomfoolery commenced in earnest. I was determined to keep control, so I swore an oath to pace myself in order to feel fresh for Derrick May at the Soul Tree later on. And that’s it really. It was nice on the boat, good atmosphere, good tunes generally and a party atmosphere, which is how it should be. You’re not going to these events to chin stroke are you? I bumped into a lad I see most days getting on my bus to work, never spoken to him before, but we had a chat and of course I’ll be sure to ignore him when he gets on as usual tomorrow morning.

As the afternoon drew to a close, it clouded over on the river and started to get a bit breezy. We went all the way to the estuary, so everyone was keeping an eye out for a whale coming back upriver. By this time I was so wasted I was seriously calling into question the idea of going out later on, but I’d luckily made arrangements that I couldn’t back out of. Battered and bruised on the bus, I was an easy target for drug jabberers. I had my ears chewed off by two blokes in quick succession. One was a company director and epitomised reserved middle England. When he found out I was older than him he couldn’t believe it. I have that effect on people occasionally. The next guy was very friendly, a nice bloke, but I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. He also started smoking on the bus, an unforgivable offence that, when reprimanded, turned him all childlike and contrite. It never occurred to me to stop him rolling up and I was nearly as surprised as him when he was told off for it. It wass around this time though, that I got my second wind.

Arriving in Cambridge at around 8:15, I was corralled into the Cow were Karl and the 209 Radio massive were all in attendance for his birthday bash, which would be finished off in fine style by Mr May about 7 hours later. Robert met me in the bar and I started hitting the Jack Daniels and cokes, as well as something else. Suddenly I started to feel extremely animated and was buzzing around chatting to everybody. We stayed in the bar foe a couple of hours, going into the Soul Tree around 10:30. It filled up steadily. Largo played a completely different, and better, set from what he’d played earlier on on the boat. Jim Masters took things up a notch, so by the time Derrick May appeared, we were at boiling point. Derrick then went on to slay us with a set of sonic mastery, exclusively vinyl-based, I didn’t see him use any cds. I tried to say hello, and he was more tolerant of my sorry state than I thought. He liked my t-shirt, with the portrait of Giorgio Moroder on it, but he thought it was Frank Zappa.

This was easily the best night out I’ve had in Cambridge. Admittedly, the standard hasn’t been particularly high, but activity over the past few months has been more intense than usual. I hope this is the beginning of some intense clubbing activity.