Full Mental Jacket

Tescosuicide often sparks a lot of memories with his blog posts, the last one that got me was the denim jacket story...

Now my old denim I bought sometime in '88 and soon set about covering it in patches... Metallica, S.O.D. (as in Stormtroopers Of Death), Helloween, Anthrax, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, plenty of other stuff I can't remember and a great big Kreator "Terrible Certainty" patch - it was piss poor quality and faded so quick I had to totally re-paint it in all it's vivid detail.

And what else? Ah yeah... it first got covered in beer (& flying OJ) at Donnington '88, had snot, vomit, chilli sauce and melted cheese on it, grafitti, pin badges, a beer fight I once had landed a pint of snakebite & black on it, staining it purple over the shoulders, and it got signed by Iron Maiden too...

And then one day, about 5 years later, I took all the patches off... WTF was I thinking?

It was at this time I was in a pub in a little town in Surrey, one summer night, with a group of workmates... whatever happened, at the end of the evening there was 4 of us and Mike's NS125 motorbike... Mike's idea was to save us a taxi fare and get us all back to the hotel, about 5 miles away, one by one...

Andrea got the first lift, whilst me and Ryan just chatted...

Mike came back for Ryan next, and he was the only one of us who didn't have a jacket. So I told him to take my denim.

"Nah" he said "I'm alright, it's a nice evening, anyways, you'll get cold"
"Better to wear something on the bike, mate, Mike can just bring the jacket back. And I'll only be without it for 20 minutes or so..." I responded
He thought about it. You could see the gears in his head whirring LOL
"Yeah, go on then" he agreed

And off they went...

Tick followed tock followed tick followed tock...

I got a bit annoyed after 30 minutes, was positively cold and pissed off at 45, and after an hour I decided to head home... It was gone midnight by now and Mike hadn't come back.

Not being native to this part of darkest Surrey I just headed a direction I thought was home... Yeah, right :S Some guy in a Ford Capri pulled up and asked WTF I was doing out in this dead old town at this time o' night and offered me a lift.

So I get back to the hotel and there, in the reception, are Ryan & Andrea... she's crying her eyes out... When Mike took Ryan back it appears he took a bend on one of the country lanes a bit too fast... it was supposedly safe to do it at 40 mph, that was the speed limit for the whole road, but when he did the bend at 70 the bike crossed the white lines and the lads both ended up toast...

Mike got carted off to hospital with a broken leg. Turns out he was off work for weeks and I ended up covering a load of his shifts (inconsiderate b*st*rd LOL)

And Ryan? Well he was OK - bruised, cut-up and bloody, limping and a bit shaken but intact. He apolgised for the damage to my denim... oil, mud, grass, blood, some rips & scuffs where it had hit the tarmac... but I didn't care... it was a good move he'd borrowed it otherwise he may have had no skin left on his arms...

I always called that denim "my armour", seems like it came true :)