That Friday night, we lurched around and made dangerous friends with every nationality of head-case close at hand. We were exhausted from our rotten job with the toilet-Nazis and the flying beetles with teeth and I wet myself on the way to the campsite potty. It was glorious and we had made it.

After a tired-drunk Friday night, I awoke with a man’s toe in my mouth. The close quarters of our bed had made it inevitable, but still it was a rough morning all taken into consideration. Ritchie was my strange bedfellow and had a habit of tossing about, passing gas and putting his feet in my face. I was very angry with him and may have struck his leg or buttocks. Still, it was the first weekend and we had worked hard for fuck all, so the hour of testing our drugging abilities was upon us.

After a modest breakfast of nothing, we bought several crates of beer from the stony faced bastard in the campsite shop, opened the jumbo bottles of whiskey and began to get wasted at 11am. The thing we learned very quickly was that the drugs came to you and that the whole standing around looking suspicious thing was over.

Craggy faced or fresh faced Holland casualties would come knocking on the caravan door and we stocked up on everything we could get and hammered E’s indoors with Black Sabbath or dirty-ass techno providing the soundtrack. Every so often one of the jumbo bottles would spill and I would use one of those awful floppy jumpers I had taken to wearing. From that point, it was The Whiskey Jumper—although it doubled up as a beer, piss, blood and off-mayonnaise jumper. It was a fine invention and we loved it dearly.

Later in the evening we had some acid and because we had taken some weak stuff back home we thought we knew that stuff inside out. We couldn’t have been more green or less prepared for the blotchy-faced 24 hour ordeal of that bastard Hoffman’s doing. An orgy of sheer terror, laughing and paranoia began. We piled stuff around the door, so no-one could leave or come in but after four or five hours, I had to escape and go outside. There were a lot of well-honed hippies sitting on the grass with shit dreadlocks. I was upset by their health and good looks, so I went back in to discover The Scab muttering about boats and disaster.

“What are you doing with that spoon, Scab?”

“There’s a serious problem with this boat, you cunt.”

“This is no boat. Why are you making things worse for me today”

“If the boat is not repaired, it’s all over for us.”

He had made a start on chiseling out a part of the wall with the spoon. Wood chippings on the floor and that metallic taste in the mouth. I hated that Scab for a moment. Ritchie was staring out the window and Hawkeye was laughing into his hands. I was panic stricken, not because I cared about the shitty caravan but because I kept hearing a thin high-pitched voice.

“Stop that shit with the spoon Scab and listen.”

“I have things to do to keep this boat seaworthy. You listen.”

“If this is a boat, then you fucking about with that spoon will let the water in.”

Scab seemed to realise this was the right way to look at it and stopped. I explained about the high voice I had heard and after a few hours we had decided who and what it was. A strange starving creature that came around all skin and bone holding out its bony hands and saying “Pleeeeease, I ask only for the simplest of beggiiings!” He came at late evening and stayed all night crying and clawing at the windows and doors, we reckoned. The more we joked about it, the less it was funny.

Simple Beggings had arrived and everyone started screeching in his voice.

“Pleeeeeease! Beggiiiiiiiiings, pleeeeeeease!”

It was a horrible sound and although we were laughing and trying to outdo each other, each man knew that that thing would haunt us for the whole time we were there. Years later, when The Lord of the Rings came out, I nearly ran screaming from the cinema, so close was Frodo’s nemesis to Simple Beggings. Beggings was far more frightening, sadly, and only attacked the mad and drugged out.

Gollum never hung around caravan parks, clutching at men’s legs when they came out of the shit-box they called home at 4am. He was in every tree, hedge and toilet. He lay under caravans and scraped his nails through the mind. We never saw him, but somehow that was worse. Even now, in my worst hangovers, I know he is watching and the fact I gave him nothing to ease his beggings singles me out. It’s nothing any of us care to talk about much.

It was late that night when we took the mushrooms and things did not go too well. We had brought some “outsiders” into the caravan. Two guys. Colm and Gavin. Both were all messed up on E’s and at some point began to get really friendly with each other. We were all rural Irish bumpkins and had never seen at close quarters the mating of those that have matching peni. Hawkeye was angry and began to mutter insanely. Ritchie just laughed like a mental patient. Scab and I were a little upset, but more afraid of our creation Simple Beggings.

Colm and Gavin stopped short of vicious bottom-frenzy and left some time in the early morning. I missed them, but Hawkeye was in no doubt that they would never return. There was still plenty of whiskey, so Sunday rolled around and we kept the madness lit-up.

Beggings had left at first light, screaming his last plea into the sand dunes, and so we were safe to spend Sunday in the worst state imaginable. I refused to leave the caravan and when a neighbour from back home called in around three I was lying on the floor wearing The Whiskey Jumper, which was now absolutely disgusting, frothing at the mouth and raving in some strange dialect. It was no time for a chat by any means and my cabin mates were dismayed by my new persona. Back home was a boring memory and I embraced the rotten state like a long lost, murdering brother.

I can honestly say that when I got on that bike on Monday morning, it was the worst feeling of my nineteen years so far.