The Weird Weekend, the largest predominantly cryptozoological conference in the English Speaking world is only five months away. You can read all about the 2009 event, and buy tickets, at http://www.weirdweekend.org/ or by clicking on the logo at the top of the page. Corinna will be covering the preparations for the event, and profiling the speakers over on Her Blog and there will be lots of other fun stuff in the months to come. However, completely unprovoked, Mike Hallowell, who was one of the speakers at the first event, relives his memories over five mornings this week...Don't believe a bloody word..
The train was late. Tannoy Tracey then made an announcement to this effect, which went something like, “Bing bong. Woh wayn weing woh nyazzenyers nyong ylantnyorn vyore nyll knee nyelayd nyore nmroxnylnely nyongteen nynuts. Gnynee r zzorry nore nye neelay. Nyangyoo. Bing bong.”
It was getting a bit nippy, so I opted for a quick willy check. All intact. Fingers still operating at 50% efficiency. They breed us tough in Geordieland.
Once ensconced in seat A 12 F, I settled down for the ride. In front of me on the table was a copy of the Daily Mail, the latest issue of Nexus magazine, a bottle of Diet Coke, a copy of Night Whispers by Charles Veley and my mobile phone. Tannoy Tracey’s sister, Intercom Eileen, introduced herself. Unlike her colleague, she was able to make herself understood at least half of the time. Refreshments would be available, she told us, either from the trolley service or the buffet car. We could enjoy hot drinks, she enthused, such as tea and coffee. Eileen was very, very sorry for the delay, and hoped that we wouldn’t physically abuse the guy who came round to check our tickets. He only worked for the train company, you see, and not those greedy bastards who didn’t invest enough capital into the network. So as it had bugger all to do with the ticket guy, we should leave him alone, geddit? I wondered whether Eileen was seeing the ticket guy on the side.
And yes indeedy we did geddit, and we weren’t particularly bothered. It was only nineteen minutes, so what the hell. The train was beginning to rumble forth, and both Exeter and the enigmatic Mr. Downes beckoned.
It all went well until we reached York. By this time I had imbibed three miniature whiskies and a can of lager, and was pleasantly immersed in my book. The alcohol was insulating me from the rest of the world and the carriage was blissfully quiet. I felt incredibly serene. Then, out of the blue, five slappers staggered through the door like harpies from hell. The journey from York to Bristol Temple Meads was a bloody nightmare which I will never forget.
Sitting opposite me was a woman. She looked eminently respectable, and I suspected she was a schoolteacher. Until the advent of the aforementioned slappers she was studiously annotating what looked like a pile of examination papers. Her concentration was punctuated by the occasional forlorn sigh, which she would then follow with a dash from her red pen through a paragraph of teenage incompetence. Yup, definitely a teacher.
The look of horror on her face when the girlies entered the carriage precipitated feelings of both sympathy and amusement within my bosom. We were going to be stuck with this shower for some time. She knew it, I knew it, and I could see she didn’t like the idea one little bit. Four of them deposited themselves around the table on the opposite side of the aisle. The fifth actually sat on the table with her back against the window.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why the woman opposite me looked fed up to her back teeth. These lasses had no volume control, no deodorant, no manners, no femininity and no bloody life. They had, we learned from their conversation, been released that very same morning from one of Her Majesty’s hostelries. They had all been done for soliciting and/or possession of illegal substances, and were now on their way home to Wayne, Dwayne, Shane, Nozzer and Biffer. Mind you, exactly why Wayne, Dwayne, Shane, Nozzer and Biffer would want anything to do with this shower of degenerates was beyond me. I’ve seen ageing rhinoceri with better skin tone than this bunch, who looked as if they hadn’t seen a bar of soap in years. Had I been a research scientist I would have paid dearly for a blood sample from one of these ladies of the night. I could then have made a name for myself by discovering several of the exotic strains of hitherto undiscovered bacteria and viruses which must surely have been coursing through their oft-punctured veins. They looked like girls who had everything.
The shortest of these belles possessed a face which resembled the surface of Mars. Pustules of great magnitude threatened to erupt at any moment, each one lovingly crafted, I am sure, by a long-term dependency on the big H. Her teeth looked something akin to a Turner landscape, with a multitude of green shades and hues competing with each other for attention. I do not mock her appearance. I simply hold her in contempt for creating it. She could have been pretty, but had obviously decided years ago that it was too much hard work. Taking baths and brushing teeth were exercises which obviously wasted her time; time that could be spent far more profitably indulging in narcotics, shagging low-life punters and, in her case, belching loudly in between gulps of extra-strong lager. As the last drops of amber liquid trickled down her neck - and chin - she threw the can on the floor. It rolled, depositing itself at the feet of the schoolteacher. She started to push the can away with her foot, and then thought better of it. She guessed, quite rightly, I think, that this may have been interpreted as a silent protest and drawn out the vitriol of the party animals in the seats opposite. A loud fart punctured the atmosphere – generated by she of the verdant teeth, methinks – precipitating a deafening chorus of giggles and laughs from her travelling companions. Within seconds the place smelt like a cattle truck.
The least shop-worn of the bunch – a raven-haired temptress who was to beauty what asbestos is to healthy living – suddenly eyed me up. Cat like, she left her seat and crossed the aisle. Placing her hands upon the table, and leaving sweaty fingerprint marks on the schoolteacher’s papers in the process, she spoke.
“Gorra pen I can borrer, dahlin?”
Without a moment’s hesitation I withdrew a ballpoint from my shirt pocket and placed it in her hand, taking great care not to touch her fingers, which could have been God-knows-where.
“Thanks, dahlin”, she muttered, smiling as sweetly as an angel. I never actually looked to see what she did with it. I was too bloody shocked at the idea that this vision of Neanderthal loveliness could actually understand the concept of writing.
Several burps and farts later, she returned my pen. Now it was my turn to smile sweetly. “Tell you what”, I replied, “why don’t you keep it. I’ve got another one.”
“Aw, reely? Aw…thanks, dahlin!”
“My pleasure.”
“It could be if you paid her a f****’ fiver”, said Grizelda Greenteeth. For a moment I thought that the schoolteacher was going to throw up across the table.
Its funny how life has a way of suddenly banking sharply to the left when you least expect it. Further up the carriage sat two drunken Glasgwegians. They were casually but smartly dressed, and could have been a couple of stockbrokers on an away-day. Perhaps they were. Anyway, Ravenhair gets her bloodshot eye on these two, and whispers something to the creature in the seat next to her. She then turned around in her seat and bellowed, “Got the time, dahlin?”
She could, of course, have asked the schoolteacher, me or several other passengers who were in much closer proximity. But she didn’t, because, unlike the two drunken Glasgwegians, she didn’t as far as I could tell - want to engage with us in an act of sexual congress.
The younger of the two Glasgwegians – not a bad-looking lad – smiled impishly and said, “Aye, nae worries. Its thrue reet mahujinae skreekin’ richt ae nae bollis the roond, if yae ken”, which, of course, none of us did.
Meanwhile, Grizelda Greenteeth had suddenly – in between farts – started to take notice. With great deliberation she placed her bag of prawn-cocktail flavoured crisps down on the table and stood up. You could have smelt her hormones buzzing from a hundred miles away. She was obviously not going to let Ravenhair have her pick of these two studs. Without any hesitation she bowled down the aisle and told both of them exactly what £2.50 would get them in the toilet at the end of the carriage.
These two Jack-the-lads were obviously not the fussy type. One of them muttered something which was totally unintelligible but obviously obscene. Greenteeth responded by forcing her herpes simplex – decorated lips upon his, and then thrusting her tongue halfway down his oesophagus. To my horror he responded enthusiastically, and appeared to be doing everything in his power to retrieve the last vestiges of prawn cocktail crisp from between her canines, molars and incisors. Even his colleague found this too much, and tried to drag his demented pal away from this Hammer Horror reject. Too late; their tongues were inseparably intertwined and would not disentangle themselves until Bristol Temple Meads. I shudder to think what exotic life-forms transferred themselves from she to he during this episode of tonsil-tangling. I suppose our Glasgwegian reveller shuddered too, when he sobered up and realised exactly what (or who) he’d done.
The rest of the journey passed uneventfully. Well, at least after Bristol Temple Meads. The girlies alighted there, much to the relief of everyone else aboard, and staggered off down the platform in search of Wayne, Dwayne, etc.
“I’m glad they’ve gone”, I said to the prim schoolmarm sitting opposite.
“So am I. What a bunch of f***** twats”, she responded in the best Thames Estuary English.
Definitely a schoolteacher, then.
Over the past week or so we have been showing you pictures that I took during my visit to the Buckhorn museum in San Antonio, back in November 2004. Once again, this particular image sparked up a reaction in Richard Freeman's psyche, and he writes: 
