Crazy, Crazy Nights

"Errm...how you feeling now?"
d looked at me, her face grey.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted.
The day had started so promisingly. I'd woken with the same feeling of self-assured fortyness as yesterday, no drop-off, no 'happiness hangover' - which I think we'd both secretly suspected I would have - and d and my mother had gone off, shopping: it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be taken shopping. Actually, now I think of it, it's a fundamental law of the universe that d, on any visit to my mother, will be Taken Shopping - it's a phenomenon that deserves its inital capitals.

I, in the meantime, had a date with my mate Karen (Pulley), which was great. She drove us to a coffee house, we had coffee, I kind of tempted her into getting a Millionaire's Shortbread, and she offered me some.
"Can't," I said. "Haven't had a dessert in about...20 months now."
She blinked.
"Ohhh, I feel crap now, eating this," she said, and I laughed. I've watched Cake Boss, while d had tiramisu, and while I was sweating my ass off on a goddamned sonofabitch exercise bike, cursing every motion of my legs, every pixel on the screen, and the world as a whole. I figured I could endure the sight of one of my pals eating shortcake.

Karen's dead cool, one of what I feel it would be instinctively wrong to call my older friends, so let's call her one of my longest surviving friendships, and she (as I'm hoping she won't mind me disclosing), turned 40 herself recently. Girl's doing good, with two kids who, though I've never met them myself, knowing Karen, I'm fairly sure are pretty cool themselves, and are probably her whole world. We shot the shit out of the world for an hour or so, and it was kinda like it was when we were teenagers together, except now she drives a BMW.

A very, very cool note was struck as we drove away from the coffee house. If there's one song in the world that I can't hear without thinking of Karen, it's Crazy, Crazy Nights, by Kiss - It's an instinctive sense memory - Crazy, Crazy Nights=Pulley. This is because we spent many a Saturday night driving around in other people's cars (our slightly older friends' cars, I should explain, not strangers cars!), and it was always The Song, The Soundtrack of our cruising - think Wayne's World/Bohemian Rhapsody, only with Kiss. And more specifically still, there were nights at a local dive bar called The Brandy Bridge, and while all the popsters and modernistas would do their weird 80s dances, we - the Rockers - would sit around tables, drinking, talking, laughing, plotting (or maybe that was just me!), and bathing in the heady mixture of teenage hormones, potential, anticipation and - and I can't stress how important this was - cleverness. We were generally a fairly smart bunch - sorry, we just were - and the wit oiled the wheels of our conversations, along with phenomenal quantities of double entendre.

Then The Song would come on. You couldn't avoid knowing The Song had come on - the intro gives you no choice about it - and we'd all pile onto the dancefloor, grab each others' waists in a circle, and not exactly dance. We'd sing, we'd shout, we'd bang our heads or shake our incredible hair, but mainly, we'd be singing along, releasing all the stress of a teenaged week by shouting in tune and time with the incredibly uplifting, rebellious lyrics:
"They try to tell us that we don't belong,
But that's alright, we're millions strong.
You are my people, you are my crowd,
This is our music - WE LIKE IT LOUD!"

Ah...those were crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy nights, and we loved 'em.

If you happened to be a teenaged male in our Rocker crowd, you wanted to find yourself opposite one of the girls in our Kiss-huddle, because somehow, it was vaguely like you were singing it directly to each other then. You weren't of course, but it was often enough to get you through the night. And if there was one girl you especially wanted to be opposite in the huddle, it was Pulley. There were two reasons for that - firstly, Pulley, bless her, had developed early and in a manner that was guaranteed to make red-blooded but clueless Rocker dudes fall on their knees and praise whatever creative force they believed in for a job phenomenally well done. But secondly, more elevatedly, if you forgot about yourself for the tiniest fragment of a moment in that huddle, and looked at Pulley's face during that song, it was quite enough to take you to some higher level of consciousness. Most of us had what could best be described as "shit to deal with" in our teenage years. Pulley, I guarantee you, had more. Seeing her so fabulously carefree, swinging her mad 80s Rock Chick hair and shouting to all the gods and devils that SHE LIKED IT LOUD!!!...it made you feel that things would be OK for her after all. As indeed, it turns out, they are.

And so, today, as we drove out of the coffee house car park, it was entirely, unendurably inevitable that Crazy, Crazy Nights would "Whooh!" itself into production on her stero.
I'd love to be able to tell you that the two middle aged Rockers turned the dial up to ten and sang it out again, driving off into the short-term future...but we didn't, we were too busy talking about the entirely different shit that we both these days have to deal with. Although we did pause to appreciate and remember.
"Ahh, my feelgood song," she said. "Some things never change."

She's right. And I'm grateful they don't.

She dropped me off and we went about our respective business - I met back up with d at the house, and we had a traditional roast beef dinner. Then, essentially, time caught up with us, and before we knew where we were, we were on a train out of Merthyr to Cardiff.

Which, with a certain prophetic righteousness, was where the trouble started.
d grew less and less chatty as the Valley Line stations passed, and it turned out her insides were doing most of the talking for her. She was having the kind of reaction I have on Xenical...without, in fact, the benefit of Xenical. We looked around pointlessly for a bathroom - there isn't one on Valley Line Trains; it seems to be a tenet of their operation that 'you should have gone before you left'. So by the time we pulled into Cardiff Central, d was in serious need. She disappeared for the best part of twenty minutes. Then the best part of half an hour. We only had about thirty-six minutes between trains, and I'm a neurotic-in-training, so when the London train turned up and d hadn't, I was panicking.
She finally made her way down the platform, moving slowly, and we got into the train.
"That," she understated, "was not pretty."

We'd been sitting on the train for about five minutes, and it had just about pulled out, when d bolted again. She was gone until a couple of minutes before Newport. And gone again before we reached Bristol. And so it continued, off and on, all the way back to London. She tried to rehydrate, but it was like a signal for her body to go into spasm again. Before we pulled in to Paddington, she came back, looking grey.
"Errm...how you feeling now?"
d looked at me.
"OK, stupid question," I admitted. "Home with all speed then?" She nodded.
Home with all speed means we get a cab from Paddington to the nearest Central Line station, take the Central to Stratford, and get a cab from Stratford to our flat. We waited in line at the Paddington cab rank.
"Nearest Central Line station," I said when one arrived. "Lancaster Gate, I think."
"S'just up there mate!" said the Cabbie.
"Yyyeah, I don't know the way," I lied.
"You go up there, take the first left, it's about five minutes' walk!"
"Are you saying you won't take us?" I asked.
"Well, I've been queueing for about half an hour, for what's only gonna be a small fare - it's not worth it mate!" he said, and buggered off, leaving us gobsmacked at the side of the road.
Welcome fucking back, I thought.
By now, other cabs had filled up and the line of people had pushed us forward, essentially out of contention. Normally, d's not the kind of person to take this bullshit, but she didn't feel good and I wanted to get her to place of digestive safety.
"Number 27," I said, thinking of a familiar bus. "S'just up there, we'll nip back to Notting Hill and Central Line it from there..." Contingency travel planning, by the way, is a learned London instinct - anyone who was here for the IRA's occasional sprees, or for 7/7, just knows this shit. We went and stood at the 27 stop, d getting increasingly antsy with every minute that passed.
"Here's one," I said, trying to nurse her.
The packed-to-the-rafters 27 bus sped up as it approached us, and fucked right off into the night.
This was starting to feel personal.
We legged it across the road, trying to get a 23 to Liverpool Street - or at least to Marble Arch - only to see another, empty 27 coming the other way. So we ran (as best we could), back across the road, across its oncoming path, and finally got on it. A quickish stop at the Starbucks at Notting Hill Gate (they were keen to close up, but couldn't till my girl was done), and we were on the Central Line, then a much nicer Stratford Cabbie, and home.

d's back in the bathroom as I write this. In fact, she's been in there the whole time I've been writing this...Personally, given the timing, I think she's becoming allergic to London, and frankly, after the way it welcomed us back tonight, I'm not sure I'd be remotely surprised.

Erm...

I'm just going to go check my wife hasn't done an Elvis. You lot talk amongst your selves...

Or alternatively, click THIS and remember having hair...