The message had landed in Cat. C Elite Walks (a humorously named WhatsApp group) a few days earlier:
“The red route is wot we’re doing Sunday.
Assemble at Chanctonbury Ring car park 12pm.”
Sunday morning arrived, and at 9am I dropped half a tab of acid.
The morning passed fairly smoothly. I’d ended up taking half of the tab (dissolved in water and measured precisely) a few weeks previously, as it turned out it was quite a weak batch – so I wasn’t seeing mushrooms growing out of the walls or pixies etc.
I decided I was fine to go for a walk with friends – but what I wasn’t factoring in was that there was the train to get there, and then watching for a car (whose appearance I couldn’t recall) at a busy junction. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I woke up early. A bit too early really, so rather than getting out of warm bed and dosing myself with something that doesn’t improve your feelings of physical bounciness, I lay in bed for a couple of hours while it got light…
At about 10am, I decided I could definitely cope with this walk (actually, more that it was a great idea, on a beautiful day) and confirmed and set a time – leaving myself 15 minutes to grab a coffee.
I had recently benefited from someone else’s brainwave of putting a plaster on a toe that was painful in new shoes (having mentioned grumbles about finding shoes that fit) – but should have had a trial run before a 3-hour walk. Anyway, I ended up on the train considering putting on an extra plaster… but stopped myself.
Was that socially acceptable? Getting my hiking boots and socks off, in the middle of a half-full train, and wrapping plasters around my bare pinky?
I walked a couple of carriages down to find a seat with at least an empty place or two between me and the next passenger… but on sitting down, I noticed the nearest passenger was in a rail uniform (and so maybe more likely to feel empowered/obligated to confront me than the average passenger). I decided I couldn’t guarantee that what I wanted to do wasn’t in fact even worse than a faux pas.
I decided that, whatever, this was a decent topic of conversation for a half hour’s drive (“was it socially acceptable to put plasters on your feet on the train?”) as well as that I could probably manage the day with a bit of rubbing – that even without one plaster, wasn’t that unbearable, in fact.
As I sat on the train, I saw this at Hassocks station:
I thought it looked like 3 somewhat otherworldly characters, watching. I thought about posting it in the group chat, but again stopped myself. This time, because seeing silhouettes in random places could sound a little bit paranoid – where this was, to me at least, an amusing random pattern in some condensation on a window.
I also held my tongue when a group of young kids sitting in front of me (this was before I decided to find a quieter seat to put on the plaster) were playing “we’ll be out of the tunnel in 3, 2, 1” – when I started wondering how amusing or formative (or probably just downright scary) it would be to put on my best weirdo face and to croak into the void “we’ll be in the dark forever, I tell you! Forever!!!”
But fortunately, I realised this probably wouldn’t go to plan, and just chuckled to myself about putting that on film (which is not something I have any experience of)
I arrived at Preston Park, and went and had similar thoughts about putting on plasters in the coffee shop there too.
I then spent a fairly unpleasant 10 minutes standing at the main junction there, expecting my friend to be coming down London Road… walking up and down to stay level with the traffic slowing down for the lights, so I could jump in elitely (like it said on the tin).
At 5 minutes late, I messaged, and it turned out they’d arrived on time (from a different direction) and were parked on the less major road, waiting for me.
I hurried over, and proceeded to fluster for the remainder of the journey.
In the past I suffered quite a lot with anxiety, and as a result of this, I have a tendency to try to plan conversations – particularly in cramped places, such as inside a car (one of my anxieties is due to being tall, and I’ve always disliked crowds etc) – but I was feeling it would be better to explain why I was so flustered, instead of trying the conversation about the plasters. And so I did.
Stopping off for a grounding can of coke, we got there about 15 minutes late, and found our walk mates had already got their car stuck in the mud…
I decided soon enough to take a bit of a back seat with freeing the car, as acid can make one do odd things – it’s not necessarily good for perspective, or not good for situations where being reliable is valuable (eg potentially dangerous ones) – but I was only tripping mildly by this point.
As some measure, I’d had no visuals, although I don’t usually notice random humanoid silhouettes (like I did with the first photo here) – and I did think the sky was particularly fantastic that afternoon. To some extent, you can judge for yourself – here’s some more photos:
Lol, that’s not that unusual for me. I like grey/brown low colour pictures with no subject – often pictures of leaves on the ground, but I’ve definitely got better (or more useful) photos of puddles in my collection.
But, taking a back seat was difficult – as I think I was the only one there who had done anything remotely like engineering or physics – which encompasses stuff like forces, and [classical] mechanics… potential barriers or wells (my mate was in a finite non square well!) so once I’d racked my brains for a bit – tried a different paradigm to see if I reached the same conclusion (that how they were trying to use the sticks to increase the traction the wheels were feeling was, if I was right, then the set up was making things harder)
But I’m probably digressing a bit much.
Fortunately, before I’d had time to rewire the car, a helpful bypasser brought his VW Golf over with a tow rope, and slightly hairily pulled the car out of the mud, and we were free to go for our walk.
TBC
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