Taking Stock

It would appear that I've been in Liverpool for a month. The fact that I can say that - and with a roof over my head, which will be paid for tomorrow, honest - comes as a nice surprise. I still have yet to hear a decent band, although happening upon this fella in a dingy basement full of Englanders glistening with sweat slightly less alcoholic than things I've paid good money for at the bar was a welcome diversion. Bartenders in this country don't seem to know the difference between vodka and water. And with the spirit measures being quite a bit smaller on this side of the Channel, drinks have a nasty habit of sneaking up on a body.
Now to teach my self how to drink vodka and coke, a skill that for one reason and another I never learned in Ireland. There's a time for everything I suppose, and the time when the offy's run out of everything else is better than most. I'll keep you posted.

The Town Where Rock is Dead

And as if by magic...

Liverpool! Made it easily enough, although I now owe every bank in Belfast money. Fuckit, clearly a problem for Future Jim. The mug.

I've been here for three weeks, during which time I've drank pretty much nothing but under-priced, watered down vodka and listened to nothing but remixes of dance and r&b numbers no-one particularly liked to begin with. Turns out the English can only dance to music they recognise. May have been the same in Belfast too, but Buckfast and incisive social commentary aren't easy bedfellows.
Speaking of, while meandering around looking for a pizza that doesn't taste like an inferior Pizza Hut (exactly as good as it sounds), I happened upon an off licence. In itself, quite unusual, because anyone who doesn't but their vodka at one of the sixty million Tescos, Tesco Expresses, Tesco Metros, Tesco Alfrescos or Tesco Putanescos, or else Sainsbury's, Asda slash Walmarts or Aldis or any of their bastard offshoots, is a fool. But being slightly twisted, I found myself drawn through the door into a massive perspex box with an off-licence scrunched in round the outside. Kind of felt like a guinea pig in a Scottish guy's flat.
And lo and behold, jemmied in on the right-hand side- Buckfast, several bottles of, price six round pounds apiece. So two bottles I lift. I've been forcing it down me; tastes wrong here for some reason, even wronger than it tasted in Belfast. I always maintained that a bottle drunk anywhere but the walls in Derry in anything other than darkness with dirty orange light pollution bouncing off clouds that mean business, is an inferior bottle. But as with them all, you stop caring after two mouthfuls.
So I regained a familiar state of mind at least. You know where you are with a Buckfast hangover. A bottle also forms a perfect base for a load of vodka when you intend to have a boogie. Disjoints the mind nicely, and gives a nicely twisted perspective, perfect for the appreciation of dubstep, which is something that never made a lick of sense to me in Belfast, but now strangely does. Anyways, my brain's starting to fall apart round the flu-ridden edges and my head's about to pop, so I think some more Generic Lemsip Substitute, a rum-based digestif, and an attempt at sleep. As you were...

-Jim