Welding Party

You've gotta fucking love the English language...


With the simple, elegant substitution of a single letter in an otherwise quotidian expression, one can strike a golden chord of potential awesomeness. The idea for a 'Welding Party' came about yesterday evening, in the piercing cold beer garden of my local, a sparkling notion rising like a phoenix from a brazier full of red-hot glowing shit coals - a pure moment of 'man-genius'. But how do these precious, almost spiritual moments come about?


In some of the most beautiful and elegant ways imaginable, physical, cultural and social evolution is merely the ongoing end result of a series of arbitrary defining factors. X happens, therefore Y is the result. It is because of this very principle that, when two or three specific human beings (of which I find myself one) get together in the same place, the immediate reality around us warps into a fucked-up pastiche of eighteenth century France - where florid insults, debauchery and disdain for the masses all combine to form this grotesque collective over-mind that becomes far more than the sum of its parts. It is this gargantuan neural omnishambles - the direct outcome of our physical proximity and capacity to communicate - that somehow always finds a way into the universal comedy store cupboard. Admittedly, we've been there before. Countless times, over the last quarter of a century in fact. But every so often our bumbling trains of thought will converge into one hyper-bullet-punk-as-fuck-lightspeed-shitcannon and send us into places we couldn't have gone alone.


It was, in this manner, that the concept of the bring-your-own-scrap-drunken-welding party was born.
And this is the sentence that began it all:


"You gotta come up for a drink. Oh, by the way, I have a welder......."


"Hello. Emergency services. Which service do you require?"
"Um...all of them? Yeah, better make it all of them."
"What's the nature of the emergency?"
"Um..right. It's half two in the morning, there's a patio full of pissed-up men next door welding random pieces of metal to anything they can find. At least three of them are stumbling around blind with arc-eye and they all look like they're burnt in random places. One is holding his scrotum and sobbing quietly to himself. And I've just noticed someone's welded a massive fuck off clothes horse to the bonnet of my car. Bastard."


It will be spoken of in whispers, in darkened corners, the stuff of true legend...It WILL happen, I promise. And when it does (and I can see again) I'll let you know how it all went.


JH