The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today I flew to Birmingham for my brother's stag party. The first step was to take the bus to the airport. The bus was supposed to come at 3:30 pm. But at 3:40 pm the bus still wasn't there. I was using my phone, trying to find a different way to get there, when the bus finally appeared. I was so relieved that I closed my eyes, imagined the bus was gone, and opened my eyes again so I could experience the relief of seeing the bus again.

I paid the driver and sat down on the bus. The bus took off. About ten minutes into the journey my bladder already started giving faint complaints: "Nothing urgent, but I might like to empty myself soon if that's convenient." Fuck sake. And not only this, but my first, knee-jerk reaction to this was to reach for my water flask and have a sip of water.

This is how my brain works:

Need a drink? Drink some water.

Need a wee? Drink some water.

Bored? Drink some water.

Anxious? Drink some water.

It occurred to me the perhaps reason I needed a wee so early into the journey was because of all the water I'd drunk.

Two hours later we reached Barcelona Airport. My bladder by this point had moved up a notch in its urgency. "If you see a toilet, do run in Paul, because I'm in danger of wetting your trousers."

Barcelona Airport is massive. It's so big that it has two terminals, Terminals 1 and 2. The driver stopped at Terminal 1. Everyone got off. Everyone except me.

"Um, excuse me, I need to go to Terminal 2," I said.

"Right then," he said.

He drove the bus through through an industrial estate. Ten minutes later, we were finally at Terminal 2. The massive white building was divided into three parts: A, B, and C.

The bus driver drove right to the end of the building and let me off.

I realised I only had an hour before my gate closed, so I started running. People watched me run past. I had to run; maybe every second counted. I ran into the airport building. But then I saw a toilet and so I ran in there instead. I went to a urinal and began a long piss. It went on for about two minutes. When the piss finally stopped, I nudged under my testicles and some more piss came out. Then I nudged under my testicles again and some more piss came out. This went on for a while. Then I squeezed my dick to get the last remaining drops out. I had this same problem as a teenager, except back then, I didn't know the trick of nudging under my testicles to get the last remaining piss out, so I would just put my dick back in my pants with residual urine still inside. Then the urine would come out later and wet my pants. Often the urine would soak through to my jeans, leading to a small dark urine stain on them. I would try to stop this by filling my pants with toilet paper to soak up the urine but sometimes this didn't work. One time my family and I went to a climbing activity and the woman there had to help me into my safety harness. I had taken a piss a few minutes before and now had a small piss stain on my jeans where the urine was soaking through. The woman had to bend down to my crotch level to put on the safety harness. I don't know if she saw the stain. If she did, she ignored it.

I went through airport security. A sign said you're not allowed to bring handguns or axes in your hand luggage. Is this something people need to be told? The guy in front of me smelled strongly of aftershave. A woamn in an airport uniform directed me to a queue for one of the security stations. There were eight security stations and I happened to be in the one with a suitcase stuck inside the X-ray machine. I started to panic. My queue wasn't moving. Finally, the security staff got the suitcase unstuck. I emptied my pockets into a tray, took my electronics and toiletries out of my bag and put those into the tray as well. Went through the metal detector. A woman working there waved me through. Got my bag. They didn't care about the testosterone gels.

I checked the departures board. I had to go to gate W42, which was in some far-flung corner of the airport no one ever visited. The way was blocked with a security rope and there was a little sign with an arrow telling me which way to go. I had to go through passport control. I tried the automatic passport readers but it didn't work, perhaps because the UK is no longer part of the EU, (thanks, Brexit). I joined a queue instead. The queue was held up because there was a problem with a girl's passport. I had 15 minutes to reach the gate before it closed.

Finally I got through passport control. I started looking for the gate. But my mind had swapped the numbers 4 and 2 so I was looking for a gate W24. Luckily I noticed my error quickly because there was no gate W24. I got to the correct boarding gate ten minutes before the final boarding time. At first, I wasn't sure it was the right gate because no one was boarding, and there were just a handful of passengers sitting around. Probably no more than twenty people.

I went to the toilet and filled my flask with water. Girlfriend called to make sure I'd got to the gate okay. This was nice but it was difficult to keep the phone to my ear while filling the flask with water.

I went back to the waiting area outside the boarding gate. A frumpy blonde girl walked past, wearing a big fluffy jumper and a floral pattern skirt. I imagined her name was Germintrude. She was talking on her phone in a slightly posh British accent like a generic Doctor Who companion from the 1980s: "Well the plane should be boarding soon because it's supposed to leave at twenty past seven. Well alright, goodbye Dad."

I sat down on a bench. A queue began forming outside the gate. Now there were a couple of hundred people. Where were all these people before? I guess they were sitting somewhere else. The sky outside the window was getting dark. Passengers from the arriving flight were still getting off the plane.

At 7 pm the plane started boarding, half an hour late. The people with priority tickets started boarding first. I never understood the appeal of priority boarding. You want to pay extra to sit on the plane for longer?

Eventually I got up and joined the queue. I was behind Germintrude. She had a Quechua backpack. Her legs were thick, like a Russian bodybuilder. She was stocky. This is what hospital matrons look like when they're young. She was talking to someone on her wireless headphones, which made her look like she was crazy and talking to herself, like a young Kathy Bates.

The sky was dark when we boarded. Boarding was uneventful. I was sat between a blonde woman in her fifties who looked like her name was Deborah (like the woman from Dragon's Den) and a fat teenage girl probably called Vicky, who had a phone in one hand and a Kindle in the other.

Halfway through the flight Deborah had her head face down on the fold-down tray. Maybe Deborah's dead, I thought. Vicky had left her Kindle to one side. In fact, she didn't read the Kindle the entire flight.

I have a bunch of voice memos on my phone I use as a diary, so I spent the flight transcribing the diary entries from my phone into a notebook. I probably looked like a crazy man, scrawling pages and pages into a notebook. I don't know if Vicky or Deborah were reading it over my shoulder. If they were, they would have read things like "Tomorrow my son has to go to school naked. It's either naked or dressed in my clothes, I don't remember."

The flight was only 2.5 hours but it felt like it lasted for ages. When we were finally landing, I looked out the plane window and saw thousands of tiny lights, like the lights of a giant Christmas tree. White and yellow and orange. Birmingham.

The scariest part of flying is landing. Statistically, most plane accidents happen during the landing. It was easy to imagine tomorrow's headlines: FREAK RYANAIR LANDING ACCIDENT and 20 DEAD IN PLANE INFERNO. The plane touched the ground. There was a lot of shaking. Then the shaking stopped. A few people tried to start an applause for the pilot but most people couldn't be bothered and the applause petered off. They're idiots because the pilot can't hear the applause anyway since the cockpit's soundproof.

Deborah was playing Candy Crush on her phone. Vicky was checking her Instagram to see if got any notifications during the flight. She hadn't.

Dad picked me up from the airport in his car. His first words to me were, "Right Paul, I'm just warning you, but I really need a poo."

"Well do you want to go inside the airport and use the toilets?" I said.

He didn't reply. I don't think he heard me. He'd already started driving.

"I had to do a poo on the grass once," he said. "Because of that, I started keeping bog roll in my car."

"These heated seats are nice," I said. "What's it doing for your poo though?"

"It's baking it, sealing the end so it won't come out. Right, so what's the plan tomorrow?"

I told him the plan for the stag party tomorrow: VR then go-karting.

"I've been doing work on the house," he said. "I've been doing the floors in the living room, so now there's a hole in the floor."

I imagined a big pit in the floor, like Buffalo Bill's in The Silence of the Lambs.

Dad stopped at Sainsbury's to buy food and toothpaste. Sainsbury's were selling flowers for Mother's Day this Sunday. I don't have a mom; my mom's dead. They were also selling Easter eggs. They don't have Easter eggs in Spain so I liked looking at them.

We drove home. When we got to the house, I noticed Dad still had a mannequin lying on his drive. I think my dad calls the mannequin Fred.

We went inside the house.

"Oh my god," I said.

In one corner of the living room, my dad had pulled up the floor to reveal exposed floorboards underneath. There was red plaster dust and chunks of plaster on the floor. Wallpaper was ripped off the walls. One of the floorboards was missing, revealing a hole about a foot deep.

"I think there's something down there," I said. I shone my phone's torch down the hole, expecting to see a goblin chewing on a human foot. Whatever it was, it had orange bristles. "It looks like a brush."

"Yeah, I might have dropped my brush down there," said my dad.

"Do you think it's necessary to do all this DIY all the time?" I asked.

"Probably not."

The trouble with my dad is that he's always doing renovation projects around the house. Whenever he finishes one project, he starts another one, so the house is never finished, it's always in a perpetual state of repair.

He does these renovation projects to improve the house, yet ironically, the house always looks a mess because he's always in the middle of one. A few years ago it was the bathroom. Before that, it was the kitchen. The moment he finally finishes his house, he'll probably keel over and die of a heart attack.

Last year he was too busy working on my sister's garden to do any DIY projects on his house, so at least last year the house looked good for a bit then.

"So what I'm doing is, I'm moving the cupboard two inches forward and five inches to the left," he said.

"What? And that's why you made the hole? Just to move the cupboard slightly?"

"Well like that I could move the door two inches forward."

I think he might have a DIY addiction.

"Is that why you ripped the wallpaper off the walls?"

"Well I'm gonna replace all the wallpaper. Replace all the floor as well. Put down a proper oak floor. You know those old smoking rooms they had in Victorian times?"

I tried to picture a bunch of old Victorian men sitting around and smoking pipes in my dad's living room.

"Paul, what do you want for dinner?" he said. "I've got loads of food in the freezer."

He showed me the freezer. It was packed from top to bottom with trays of frozen meat.

"Where did you get all this meat?" I asked.

"Got it from my school, didn't I? I'm the one who drives the food from the food bank to the school. But most of the kids at the school are Muslim, and they can't eat meat. It's Halal" He means Haram. "So I put it in my car and take it home."

"Isn't that stealing?"

"Nah, they don't even realise. Besides, last week I fixed their bike shed and saved 'em a thousand quid. Ee'ar, look at this." He opened his fridge. "Do you like pate?" There were nine packets of Tesco smoked salmon pate. "It's bloody nice, it is."

I imagined the kids at this school starving because my dad's got all their food in his fridge and freezer.

"Is that why you have a telescope in the middle of your kitchen? Is that from your school?"

In his kitchen was inexplicably a large professional telescope with the words Celestron Astromaster 130 on the side.

"Well guess what, Paul? At the school, none of the fuckers knew how to use it, so you wouldn't believe what they did. They were throwing it away. So I went, right, I'll 'ave that."

A unlikely story. A school throwing away a telescope?

"And I've got a box of rocks 'ere for 6-year-old."

He handed me a box of geology rocks, taken from his school.

I had a pie for dinner from my dad's freezer. Not sure if it was stolen pie. Am I aiding an abetting a criminal?

I went to bed. Tomorrow's my brother's stag party.