Urinating at Notting Hill Carnival

Here’s a story of one of the most eventful urinations of my whole life, which happened at Notting Hill carnival, a couple of months ago. I'd drunk a fair bit and was needing to find somewhere to relieve myself. Being a male, anywhere would have done; an alleyway, a bush in the park, an assortment of plastic cups. But none could be found.

The side streets had been boarded off by the police to keep the party all down the one main street, so I had to use the designated toilet areas. This meant a very long queue.

Now when my brain tells me "hey, you're gonna have to urinate soon." I've basically got about a 30 minute period until it's all over. So I queue up to this toilet that is down some stairs and into a building; there's just the one toilet and the queue is moving ever so slowly.

There are some speakers in the window playing some raggadub and the vibrating bass isn't helping my bladder one bit. I reach the bottom if the stairs and am now just 5 people away from my destination, when out of nowhere comes a group of 5 girls, who push in the queue and stop behind me.

The girl who had previously been behind me quite rightly and politely said "Excuse me are you in the queue?" by which she meant “what the devil are you doing?”
The leader of the girls said "yeah we are in da queue, we're gonna use the toilet, you thick or sumfin?"
"No, I'm not thick, but you should go to the back of the queue instead of pushing in."

At this point, out of the blue, the 5 girls just attack the girl behind me, grabbing her hair and slapping her. So me and this other chap try and break it up. But I'm not gonna lie, I was clearly the weakest person in this situation. During the scrapping a window got broken and the group of girls ran up the stairs and away. They left this poor girl behind with her bag upside down on the floor, some hair ripped out her head, and she had a broken nail. And not just any old nail it was a proper nice one that she'd clearly spent ages painting.

As I helped her with her stuff and gave her my one and only bacon shaped plaster for her bleeding finger, she seemed surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Until the woman who owned the building came storming out and told the girl that she had to leave because she had broken the window. The girl and I tried to explain that it was this group of girls who had since left but the woman wasn't having any of it and she demanded that the girl gave her some money to pay for the damaged window and then leave.

At this point other people began to back us up and the woman begrudgingly went back inside and let her stay in the queue.

This experience made me a sad man. Like, it's meant to be a carnival celebrating everything good about the Caribbean culture, and you can't even go for a wee without a group of kids attacking you. Disgrace to their race.

Poor girl didn't even seem angry or anything, she just seemed embarrassed.
How angry must those girls have been to just attack someone for no other reason than that she didn't want them to push in front of her?
I blame the parents.

Happy ending though - I got to use the toilet for free. They were charging a pound each but the whole commotion had left the people in charge distracted.

Death of a Traveller. Birth of a Blue Steel Hitler.

My mum bought me a “Welcome Home” balloon. It was one of those overly fancy ones made of tin foil. It floated around my bedroom proudly displaying to everyone that I was not only home, but I was welcome. Feeling truly welcome is one of the most pleasant feelings one can experience, and when I returned home after 17 months in Asia, the welcome I received was mammoth. When you live somewhere as an ethnic minority, in a culture that is so wildly different to your own, you grow to miss the feeling of being at home. I didn’t have a problem with feeling welcome in Korea; 99.9% of people I met (yes I met over a 1000 people so that percentage is accurate) were very kind at made me feel at ease. At ease, but not at home.

Home is a place that brings back childhood memories, like the first time you watched the Wizard of Oz. And now I have come to realise that the crazy cow Dorothy was right. There really is no place like home.

So anyway, this awe-inspiring balloon that was making my life worth living has decided to piss its helium all over my room and start sinking... slowly. We are talking weeks - seven and a half to be exact - for that balloon to descend to my floor and its sinking is having an unexpected effect on me.

I take this falling balloon to be a symbol, a metaphor for a dying set of personal beliefs. I have returned from travelling feeling like a bit of hippy with a luscious ginger beard. My attitudes are very different from when I left and seem alien to some of my friends. But my hippy ideology is slowly being corrupted by our culture and is crashing down to consumerist earth. Just like this damn balloon.

Why can’t it just float forever? How hard is it to make a completely air tight tin-foil container that can hold my dreams aloft, above my TV, touching the ceiling for a lifetime!? It’s a strange thought but that’s me in a nutshell. I add meaning to the meaningless. This balloon means nothing. It isn't trying to convince me to progress with my life. It doesn't represent my travelling free spirit and its decline as the “real world” sinks in. The balloon isn't forcing me to drop with it, deeper into the depths of the soft carpeted floor of a middle class England life. It's just a balloon.

I know all this but when that balloon finally hit the ground, a bit of the explorer inside me died. I looked in the mirror and I saw a very hairy, ginger faced man staring back at me. The balloon had fallen and I felt I only had one option left... Shave the beard off.

I no longer felt like a man of the forest

One hairy ape....

First I neatened it up slightly

No more neck beard!

Check out those chops!

I'll call this the cheek patch...

Zebra cheek is the new clean shaven

I've never looked so stylish...

...until now

The zebra chin is the new zebra cheek

I'm sure I'm making some hearts melt out there...

If I was a porn star, this is how I'd look

Zebra tash didn't work so well

The Blue Steel Hitler

Don't worry, I did clean up.
And yes, I also removed the Blue Steel Hitler...

Hello World

Welcome to Sobweb – the latest website that will be falling into the world of obscurity over the next year... or not, depending on which manic depressive tendency I'm exhibiting at any given moment.

This project, let’s call it a project, is all about creativity and the journey it can take you on. We all have our creative moments. That flash of genius as it comes thundering through our consciousness – be it about a personal decision, a book you’ve been thinking of writing, or just a witty facebook status. It happens to everyone, all the time.

What you choose to do during this “divine” inspirational moment varies from idea to idea, and person to person; some things get written down, others painted, some ideas are tweeted, or sometimes a thought process it just marvelled at before disappearing into the clutter of our mind.

After this flash of creativity, when the thunder is now just a mere whisper, doubt creeps in. This doubt and fear can be paralysing at times and can stifle the most imaginative ideas. Sometimes this a good thing; I don’t think the horror movie idea about bed bugs that eat people, which was conceived on a long car journey in Scotland, was ever going to be the blockbuster we believed it could be in the moment. But then again who knows? Maybe it could have been with the right direction and a dash of good fortune.

A lot of good ideas are lost every day as a result of this fear and this doubt. We are afraid of failing. And for good reason. Evolutionarily speaking, failing at something would normally lead to death. If you don’t time that rock throw correctly, that lion will be eating your face. You can understand why we as a species are afraid of failure and of creativity in particular. You might think “Actually, I won’t throw a rock, I’ll think outside the box and try talking to the hairy fella.” A few days later that lion is crapping out bits of you, and that creative thinking has cost you your life. Fear is there for a reason. Unfortunately the instincts controlling our response to fear have not evolved nearly as rapidly as our society has.

Death is no longer a realistic consequence of creativity. We can throw off the shackles of our genetic carefulness and put on our “I don’t give a shit what you think” hat. We can develop ideas, stories, pictures, and we can share them globally, with our fear being potentially realised merely by trolls and dislikes.

This is what Sobweb is about – sharing ideas and sharing our own flashes of genius, be it a recent one or something that you may have stored away on your C: drive somewhere. I have two main passions in my life: writing and listening. I love to hear other people’s stories and I love to tell my own. So please, tell us about some of your own inspired moments by clicking "contact us" and sending us something. It will most likely get reposted, with full credit to you of course.

This fear can be overwhelming and unsettling, and this is what we at Sobweb struggle with every day as we try to pursue our dreams. We want to create an independent production about a different culture to our own, exploring the far eastern country of Korea, in a comedic setting. Sobweb will be growing in numbers over the coming months and we hope to welcome people with passion for this project.

This site is about our journey of creativity; the joy we get from achieving the next step or the overwhelming sense of failure that can paralyse the most imaginative of ideas. We want to share our journey and we want you to share yours.

I'll leave you with a TED talk I recently watched that has inspired me somewhat. I'm not really a TED watcher but I got linked on Facebook and ended up spending an hour or so watching a few talks. Enjoy.