It was me, The Scab McCabe, Hawk-Eye (Haughey) and Richie. Our lives amounted to nothing at home so a caravan on the coast of Holland was sorted and it was decided that madness, starvation and the very worst elements of humanity would be our dear friends for a while.

We bought huge bottles of whiskey at the airport. It was very hot when we arrived and we rested in the cycle paths with angry Dutchies ringing bells and screaming. The caravan park was run by the insane Pedro who told us that he hated the Polish. We assured him we were not Polish and bought bikes from him. Mine was named Gazelle and we took off to gawk at our surroundings.

The sand dunes stretched for miles and we were quite taken with the whole fucking thing. The Scab was showing off his bike skills when a bee stung him on the lip. It was not to be the end of his suffering. Looking back after thirteen years I have never seen anyone who suffered so much for so little. He was ashamed of the way his face had turned out so we went back to the caravan. We met the other human trash we were supposed to meet and they spent the evening hurting our minds with drugs to help us settle in.

The caravan had two small beds and looked bad for a young man abroad. Four idiots were to experience the amusing, melancholy and fucking horrendous for thirty days. We had come to make our heads leak out time, space and normality and we probably should have waited a couple of years. I can’t remember how we found the jobs but on the Monday we had directions to cycle nine miles at seven in the morning to meet Yorgi. Still, we were young, fit and stupid and we took off.

Our jobs were to crawl on our hands and knees across huge fields in huge rubber trousers, each to his own row, weeding thistles and awful scratchy things. It was fine until the sun really started to shine at around nine thirty and the full horror kicked us badly.

We were introduced to Yonka, Yorgis father who was a toilet Nazi. When we had to go, we were brought over the fields to their house – where Yonka would stand outside the door ruining the whole offloading. The toilets were a badly thought out pan where you had to view your creation before sending it on its way. He couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English and thought giving us horrible biscuits and black coffee at ten am was kindness.

We disliked Yonka and made up horrible homosexual stories about him while crawling and weeding. These huge beetle things would attack Richie; who insisted on doing it shirtless. Richie would scream and run around through the rows up ahead beating at himself. It was very pleasant to watch. He was up ahead of us because he would not weed his rows properly. The man was a cheat and he got treated badly by the insects for it.

In the middle of the day, some would say lunchtime we were put in a shed to eat crisps. We hated Yorgi and Yonka for it. Nobody would speak and awful Dutch paprika crisps smashing was all the sound there was. We would go back into the killing fields, almost ready to cry and then cycle home. Hawk-Eye bought a moped that he would later use to terrorise us, the locals and the police.

Some evenings for a treat we would go to a place we called ‘Shit Bavo’. I can’t remember how it was correctly spelled or pronounced, and don’t care to remember. It was a mental hospital and we would get stoned and cycle around laughing at the mental patients until life at the caravan was worse than ‘Shit Bavo’ could ever be. Our dinner was Minute Maid and Mars bars, sometimes boiled eggs and bread. The money was all spent on dope and other bad ideas and the days just went on like that, until that first weekend when “Simple Beggings”, acid, mushrooms, ecstasy and “The Whiskey-Jumper” held sway.