Hello. I haven’t been here for a while. It is a pattern that is likely to be on repeat for the immediate future at least, although at least this time I’ve got a different excuse for my non-posting. I’ve been away, see? On a much needed (but scarcely deserved) weekend away with ‘the lads’ to the Lake District.

‘The lads’ in question are a fairly mixed bunch. We have a copper (not bent), a satellite engineer (or whatever it is he calls himself, fiddles about in the back of trucks at sporting events), a ‘teacher’, an idiot with a bewilderingly good job in telecoms, a man whose work for Rolls-Royce consists mainly of eating cornflakes at a desk, a very hairy doctor who apparently hates all people, a small useless man that fixes beepy machines in hospitals, a man that does advertising for those fancy see-through vacuum cleaners, an illegal immigrant, and a still technically jobless cretin (me).

The plan was simple: find a remote house, then drink enough beer to ensure that we were barely to remember any of the ensuing nightmare.

It was a largely successful plan.

For some reason, I had agreed to drive myself and beepy-hospital machine man up there. Now generally I laugh in the face of your average long-distance drive, and this was no different. Leaving literally all stones unturned, I neglected to look at a map at all, instead choosing to rely on the sat-nav. And all was well. We even managed to catch up the satellite engineer and copper on the M6, whereupon a frantic exchange of abusive hand signals naturally followed.

We are all 35.

However, not long after this, things went a bit wrong. And when I say ‘a bit wrong’ I mean “FUCK, LOOK AT THAT MOUNTAIN, LOOK AT THE FUCKING ROAD GOING OVER THAT MOUNTAIN, WE’VE GOT TO FUCKING DRIVE OVER THAT. FUCK!”

The Hardknott Pass, it says here, is made up of some of the steepest roads in England, with gradients of up to 1 in 3. I had intended to avoid it, although quite how I thought this was going to happen I have no idea, since I knew the sat-nav would take me in that direction and had neglected to look at the alternative route.

I am a dick.

Anyway, to be honest I’ve talked it up a bit. That is to say, massively exaggerated. It was pretty steep, and there was one fairly hairy moment caused by an elderly man descending in his four-wheel-drive Nissan Shitbox at approximately the pace of a glacier. But actually it was pretty good fun, and I enjoyed trying (but largely failing) to scare the shit out of my passenger via the medium of a bit of mad driving. But then he had consumed half a bottle of vodka by this point.

We arrived at the house, cracked open a couple of beers and waited for the other boys to arrive. As is my wont when I enter old houses, I immediately found the lowest beam in the place and cracked my head on it. I am reliably informed that the sound was not unlike that of a brick being smashed on the road.

The other guys arrived in dribs and drabs (mostly dribs), I got the curry on, the beer was flowing and the house was already a right fucking mess. I’m not sure quite how such a comparatively small group of humans are able to transform a nice clean house into something resembling the Young Ones’ gaff in less than five hours, but by Christ we did it.

There’s probably little more that I can say about the first night that the following picture does not amply illustrate:

The next day had been earmarked as a day of walking, so naturally we all turned in good and early in preparation. I think I hit the sack at about 5am, and I was by no means the last to retire. Up again at 10, bacon and egg butties (thanks, telecoms idiot) and straight out. Off we went, 10 young (fuck off) men, our lungs breathing in the wonderful fresh air and exhaling rank alcohol fumes.

Before long, we had started to ascend what might charitably be called a mountain, but wasn’t. It was a hill. A bloody big hill, but a hill nonetheless. Quickly, the group settled into a natural rhythm, which is to say that the illegal immigrant and I were most often to be found at the back, collapsed against a rock and gasping for breath like a pair of shit fish in the bottom of a boat.

After a couple of hours of this, we’d had enough. (That’s me and the immigrant, everyone else was still going strong.) After a brief rest, the group once again headed up; we headed down. Straight down. It wasn’t the most graceful way to get off a massive hill, but it was effective. We spotted a pub and headed for it. After about 45 minutes of expletives and minor injuries, we made it. Beers and a nice sit down.

We are 35.

Presently the other group arrived. We moved inside, and staked our claim to a small corner. There was rugby (absolutely rubbish), there was beer (good), there was chips (very good, thanks copper), there was drunken darts (entertaining for us, less so for the other patrons), there was high spirits and some pretty good banter. It was (despite the abject shitness of both the Wales and England rugby teams) a bloody good afternoon. My personal highlight was the effect several pints of Guinness has on my doctor friend when drinking in the afternoon. Basically it’s like a waking coma. He can move his arms and legs, but speech and the ability to blink have been rendered impossible.

We walked back in the dark. We didn’t get run over. When you’re comfortably into double figures with the black stuff, this represents something of an achievement.

One thing that I had been keen to do over the course of the weekend was introduce some of my more backwards, ignorant, idiotic and stupid friends to the pleasures of gaming. Some of these men, despite being in highly responsible jobs and/or earning vast sums of money, are basically as thick as a bucket of shit when it comes to telling their arse from their Xbox.

I fear I have not improved the situation.

Charlie Brooker (yes, him again) wrote something a while back concerning the perils of allowing non-gaming friends to play games in the presence of regular gamers. Throw a few crates of beer into the equation and you’ve got a verbal exchange along these lines (whilst playing Fifa 10 in co-op mode):

Me: What are you fucking doing?

Friend: What do you mean?

M: What are you fucking doing, why don’t you just pass me the ball?

F: Because he won’t do it.

M: Don’t fucking give me that bollocks you twat.

F: I’m trying, I’m pressing the fucking button, I’m telling you he won’t fucking do it!

M: Oh right, so I suppose the massed ranks of EA Sports’ development team just dropped a bit of a clanger and forgot to add a button for ‘pass’ then, yeah? You absolute fucking wanker.

F: [throws controller and stares at me in a manner that brings to mind long forgotten beatings in school]

M: Want to play something else?

It doesn’t work. But one thing I will say is that Trials HD is evidently just as addictive for non-gamers as it is for those of us well versed in wasting hour after bastard hour on it. I couldn’t get the fuckers off it. Fight Night 4 went down reasonably well, particularly as I’d created a boxer modelled on one of my friends, and naturally made him fat and useless. Uncharted 2 and AC2 are clearly solitary experiences. And having tried my hand at Street Fighter IV prior to arrival, I must say it didn’t even make it out of the box. Unless I am missing something, it was/is a truly massive turd of a game.

Anyway, the night wore on and we started to fade. Two consecutive nights of very little sleep had well and truly taken their toll by Sunday. Most of the boys bade their farewells, leaving just four of us to spend the day sitting about, nursing a beer for about five hours and refusing to go outside. (That was me, obviously.) That night, we went back to the pub for some food. I swear the chef could not have made scampi and chips look less appetising if there was a freshly laid jobby on the salad. That’s not fair, actually. There was nothing wrong with the food, and everything wrong with the inner workings of my body.

And I do mean everything.

All that remained for us on Monday was to leave as much of the cleaning as possible to idiot-telecoms-man (success!) and drive home. And I don’t know about you, but there is literally nothing I would rather do then drive for 5 hours on the M6, having barely eaten or slept for three days and with a headache that is still going strong as I write this. On Thursday.

Would I do it again? Oh yes.