I first met Jason when he moved down to Kent. We mainly became close when we went started at the same university a couple of years later. Even though we were studying different subjects (I was on a philosophy course and he was on an English course), I had taken an English module called The Tale to fill up my schedule, and we would often be getting the bus at the same time.
My earliest memories of us spending quality time together involve us skipping the lecture for The Tale, to instead go and play pool and video games (mostly the amazing Racing Jam which has the funkiest theme music known to mankind, and Time Crisis). We were pretty poor at pool and spent a lot of money attempting to complete Time Crisis until I ran out of coins and died, abandoning Jason to continue the quest alone and overwhelmed.
Jason decided that uni wasn’t for him, and we didn’t see each other quite as much over the next couple of years. However, when I finished my third year, I was looking to move out and there was a room available in the flat he shared with our friend Luke, which I snapped up as quickly as I could. This was the point when I started to think that I might be a grown-up; living away from home; my first full-time job earning what couldn't have been much more than minimum wage. Surely this is as grown-up as anyone ever gets? Oh, silly naive past Stew.
My job involved me working shift patterns and would often be in the flat on my own during the daytime. Jason had a large range of replica weaponry. This helped to keep me sane. We lived on the fourth floor close to town and one of my favourite games was pointing a toy gun out of the window and pretending to be a world class sniper.
Me and Jason have recently shot real guns together. I am far from a world class sniper. He is a natural, possibly because he owned a million toy guns. He is able to hit James Bond in the eye from 20 paces.
I have many memories from the short time I was living in the flat (our landlord decided to sell around 6 months after I moved in); towers of pizza boxes; endless sessions playing Crazy Taxi; watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back around 1,000 times; the time that me and Luke were playing Championship Manager and he decided that as manager of Liverpool he was going to blow his entire transfer budget on the worst player in the game just to see what would happen.
One that for some reason sticks in my mind was spotting Bass walking along the road during one of my sniper sessions, pretending to shoot him and the calling his mobile to tell him he was dead. You have to take fun where you can when you’re stuck indoors on your own earning peanuts.
Whilst living together, we formed a band. Perhaps band is a loose term. We played music together. We did so with my brother and a couple of friends who used to crash over at our flat frequently. Not many of our friends had moved out of home yet, so we were effectively living in a bit of a party flat. It was natural for us to just start playing music together. The band was known as Werewolves Ate My Platoon, after a newspaper headline at the end of the film Dog Soldiers, although was generally shortened to W*A*M*P. I left the band before they played any gig to join another band in the hopes of gaining fame and fortune (Spoiler alert: I didn't work). I am fully aware that I am a complete sellout.
Both of our bands played regularly around local venues and Jason and I would hang out and watch each other’s bands but over time we’d drifted apart due to various circumstances. In the last few years we’ve reconnected and started hanging out again regularly. We’ve even started doing music things together again, along with one of the other founding members of W*A*M*P. Jason has learnt how to play drums for this project in a ridiculously short length of time. Look out for The Cool Kids, coming to an open mic near you.
It’s been an incredibly enjoyable time for me. I haven’t played regularly in a band for many years and it has been fun and reminded me why I enjoyed playing music in the first place, and is possibly the most fun I've ever had playing in a band because it is with a couple of really great friends and we're only doing it to have fun so there's no real pressure.
A while ago, I told Jason he was going on a random holiday with me. There was a thing on a discount holiday website where you could pick some dates and the company would give you a random holiday. This is how we ended up going to Riga in Latvia. This was an excellent holiday. To tell him where we were going, I prepared a most excellent Powerpoint presentation. I even bought one of those clicker things to change the slides. I enjoyed doing this very much.
On this holiday, not only did we discover a mutual love for Lego minifigures (which has blossomed into visits to Lego exhibitions, talk of future visits to Legolands, and our long awaited and at present completely unwritten and unplanned Lego sitcom) but this is when Jason got to fire real life guns for the first time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier.
Jason was asking me after this when our next adventure would be, so I made him climb a mountain. It may sounds like I’m bullying him, but I know what he likes. He likes climbing mountains. Even though he moans about it the whole time, it’s a very character building experience. I was amazed at how good he was at mountaineering. He puts it down to stubbornness and the fact that he’s decided to do it and isn’t going to back down from doing so.
I'm very much looking forward to our next adventure which I have promised him will involve no mountains and all of the Lego. I should be a bit kinder to him from now on. We're hopefully going to be visiting Legoland Denmark next year, although like most of our great schemes, it is currently unplanned. However, once I've got this big party thing out of the way, I'll have some more time to sit down with him and bash out the details. LEGOLAND 2018, BABY! WOOOO!
Please note: Jason is not as small as he appears in the picture above. It is a cunning use of perspective. He is actually person sized.
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