And, inevitably, the morning after would come. This was subtly altered by the exact events of the night before – whether glasses of water were drunk, if he had been sick, what take-away had been ordered – but since these, as mentioned, might as well have happened when he was passed out, Graham didn’t have much of a say in what happened, and was usually ruined by the morning after anyway. He woke up, and immediately regretted it. For a start, he’d been having a rather interesting dream he couldn’t remember the specifics of. It wasn’t exactly fun, or sexy, but it was a very interesting dream, one of those that could easily fill out a thousand words of nonsense if you could remember it. Following this by waking up meant you forgot it doubly quick, once for waking up, twice for waking up thinking your head had been hit by a sledgehammer, and forgetting anything else.

He felt horrible. People who had stopped drinking heavily at twenty three, and tried to kick-start it with a massive bender ten years later, come out of it like an old school Mini Cooper picking a fight with a lorry. His head was the worst part, sledgehammer metaphor already mentioned, but as ever, there were many little things making it so much worse. The dry mouth and parched throat. The starving hunger, paradoxically mixed with the stomach growling “you just try it, mate, you won’t enjoy it”. The horrible aftertaste, in this case chilli, tobacco, and something else quite foul, but thankfully not vomit. That, and he’d left the curtain open, a wall of light hitting him in the face. And like fuck could he do anything about it.

He lay there for what was only an hour, but felt like three, before lurching out of bed, throwing the curtains shut before the light made his head any worse, and collapsed back on the bed. It was still too bright, since he must have overslept, but at least he could actually get his eyes open without them falling out.
All in all, his room wasn’t in too bad a shape. When he was a student, a night like that could have anything spilt or dropped on the floor. And walls. And ceiling. In this case, it mostly just seemed to be clothes, a pizza box, seemingly empty, more clothes, and…

Wait, clothes?

A flash of something came to his mind, he’d walked past a charity shop, he was with… some students, perhaps. He had the vague idea that one of them had suggesting stealing a black sack left outside, full of donations. Something to do with not having any clothes. Evidently, the drunken Graham had told everyone what he was doing, and one of the people he’d told had done something about it. A simple solution, perhaps. But what was here?
Wonderful. Someone’s grandma had had a clearout, by the looks of it, and three flower-print dresses festooned the floor. Also, an ancient looking, and gigantic, bra. That would have to be binned when he could move. A pair of jeans that looked like they might just fit, but on closer inspection seemed to be a woman’s pair. Well, needs must and all that. And finally, what was either a bandanna, or a headscarf. So no T-shirts then. Graham risked a look at a clock. Eight thirty. He’d always had a bad habit of waking up too early when he’d been drinking.

He stumbled downstairs, and through sheer force of will, managed to force down the fry-up he was served. He needed food in him, despite the feeling that his insides were out to kill him. He then returned to his room, and studied the pile of hideous clothes in the middle of the floor. Evidently, even though he had been utterly smashed off of his face, he had been thinking along the right lines. He needed supplies. He had kept the important things and what he needed to keep up the illusion he was only away for the weekend. The other bag had contained more clothes, some tourist guides, a map of Europe, and a Dutch language book, without which he’d be struggling a little.

Promptly, two thoughts crossed his mind.
Where was his phone?
And how much had he spent last night?
The second question was the easiest to answer, a quick check of the wallet showed that “only” fifty pounds had vanished from his wallet. Ten pounds of the remainder had turned into loose change somehow, and there was a scrap of paper with an illegible phone number on it. Graham left it. The first question remained unanswered. It hadn’t come back with him. This was slightly more worrying. One, it had been a rather nice phone, a birthday present from Miranda, and had had email, internet, and all sorts of new and shiny things installed on it. Secondly, if Miranda tried calling it, there was every chance that whatever happened, she’d start panicking about it. He went downstairs, asked if he could use the phone, and dialed his own number. Unlike seemingly everyone he knew, he thought it was quite useful to know your own number, and he felt rather smug as it started to ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello, who is this?”
“I dunno, who’s this?”
“Well, you know the phone you’re holding?”
“Yes?”
“Its my phone.”
A pause. Then a gasp of surprise.
“Oh yes! Its… you’re that bloke from last night! Man, that was a maaaaaaaaaaaaad night! Do you know how much you drank?”
“By the feel of it, far, far too much.”
“Yeeah, that was mad. Listen, you want this back, I guess?”
As obvious as it might seem, Graham paused for a second before answering. Was it that useful to have a phone that had no SIM card in it?
Still, if all else failed, he could sell it somewhere.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Right, right, well come back up the road, we’re back here, come get it.”
“Erm.. back where?”
“Here!”
“I don’t know where here is! I don’t even know who you are!”
“Right, right, I hear you, fucking hammered last night and all that. Right, we’re in Lambert Street, go up Bev Road and find the petrol station, we’re at number 32. Catch you in a bit!” And then the phone went dead.
Packing up his bags, Graham checked his ferry tickets. His ferry left at half five in the afternoon. Plenty of time. He packed his bags, paid his bill, and set off to find a petrol station.

Fifteen minutes passed, and still no opportunity presented to retrieve the suitcase. While Graham would have found it an interesting conversation with Miranda about career prospects under normal circumstances, the fact was that Graham didn’t have his career in mind. What he did have in mind was trying to travel the world with two shirts, four pairs of socks, and not a lot else. He couldn’t say he needed the bathroom, partly because the train would inevitably show up while he was waiting, but mostly because the bathroom was in the complete opposite direction to the cloakroom. And tempting though it was to just take the train back, he wasn’t quite sure how to get to the coach station, and he was running short of time as it was. He decided to try a gamble. He patted down his pockets, and turned to Miranda.
“Ah crap, I didn’t pack my spare glasses.”
“Oh, you idiot. Where did you last see them?”
“I think… actually, I might have left them in the car.”
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“Cleaning them, I think. I’m sorry hun, I can’t leave the bags, they should be in the glove compartment, I can’t leave the bags, can you fetch them please?”
“Oooh… well, alright then. Catch you in a minute!” She then gave him a quick kiss, and hopped off in the direction of the gates. As soon as she was facing the other way, Graham lurched towards the cloakroom. He had no time at all.

“What do you mean you can’t find it?”
“We can’t find the bag with that number on it, sir.”
“How the fuck did you manage to lose it in one day? I only checked it in yesterday!”
“And now it’s missing. We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve found it.”
“Like fuck you will, I’m supposed to be running away, and now… oh sod it. Useless fuckers.”
With that, Graham turned round, and sloped back onto the platform, followed by plain-sounding requests not to abuse staff… sod the staff. What was he going to do? He needed that money to actually get anywhere.
The train pulled up as Miranda reappeared, oddly enough with his spare glasses case.
“You big silly, they’d fallen out in the boot.”
“Oh, really? Oh dear. Well, thanks for finding them.”
“Is something wrong, hun?”
Apart from not having any fucking thing to take with me, no, all hunky dory, would be the correct answer.
“Well, I’m not going to see you all weekend, am I?”
“Oh, hon, you’ll be back soon, and it’s all for a good cause.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Well, you’d better get on. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
“Love you.”
“And I love you.” She left him with a kiss, and he stepped onto the train. As the doors shut, he looked into her eyes, and realised that if he actually went ahead with this plan, he’d probably never see her again.
Did he really want to do this?
Of course. Cold feet, that’s all. He sat down, and gazed gormlessly out the window.

Milton Keynes is a very… erm… something town, where… actually, you know what? I can’t pretend I’ve ever actually been to Milton Keynes. For all I know, the entire town is made of purple tentacles, and screaming demonic faces leer out of every pavement. So I can’t tell you what its like. So we’ll just move on to Graham catching the bus, and I’ll put the fourth wall back where it was.

Milton Keynes coach station isn’t actually in Milton Keynes. If you imagine the junction where an A-road meets a motorway, and basically stick a train station platform on an off-ramp next to it, that’s what the coach station is. It’s an incredibly boring place to spend any amount of time. There isn’t even a snack bar to speak of.

Graham had an hour layover there, for no discernibly good reason.
“I was in the Great War, you know.”
And stuck next to the obligatory loony. He didn’t look a day over forty, it was just that it was a particularly loony forty.
“Really,” replied Graham, with a monotony and blandness that screamed, leave me alone, you’re talking out of your arse.
“Damn really! Head of the RAF, I was. Flew over Berlin and shot Hitler single-handed! That suicide nonsense was a cover-up!”
“Was it now?”
“Yes! And I was going to fly a top secret prototype jet fighter with a laser cannon mounted on it, but I broke my arm on a walrus the day I was supposed to go on and fly it!”
“Sounds like horrible luck.”
“And do you know what happened then?”
“No idea.”
“They teleported me into the future!”
Graham sighed. It was times like this, he thought, when being back at home wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Focus, he thought, you’ve only been away two hours.
“Did you know, the Queen’s actually an evil Chinese warlord?”
And another hour here to go.

Things did not get much better when the coach actually arrived. The thing about coaches, is that they are usually designed to carry you great distances between cities, and are usually cheaper than trains. This means that the people using coaches don’t have the money to get a train, and can’t drive for one reason or another. This does tend to mean that they are usually full of students and mad people. Thankfully, that madness usually manifests as enough social awkwardness to give you a quiet journey, or at worst just blare out some horrible hip hop on their phone.
As another aside manifesting as a battering of the fourth wall, whoever thought you needed to have big-ass speakers on a mobile phone needs to have their balls stamped on. That is all.
“I was in the Great War, you know.”
“Oh, really?” asked Graham. This gentleman actually looked old enough to have taken part in the Second World War.
“Oh aye. Those were hard times. Couldn’t have done anything about them, but they had to be done.”
“And I’m very grateful for it, sir.”
“Did you know, the Queen’s actually an evil Chinese warlord?”
Oh gods, he thought, and it was looking so promising.

The journey up to Hull took a lot longer than anyone was expecting. Not just because the mad old man had many more stories, both of wartime sacrifice and blithering lunacy, but traffic on the M1 was made ten times worse by a lorry full of chickens overturned. A large van full of hot fat crashed into it, and a truck carrying eleven herbs and spices managed to avoid them, but upended itself all over the road. The smell of KFC wafted for miles around. It was a tired, and nauseatingly hungry, party which got off in Hull.

Many things have been written about Hull over the years. Frequent references to “shittiest town in Britain”, and “actually given an award for shittiest town in Britain” are thrown around quite frequently. This isn’t an entirely fair accusation, since you’re just as likely to get punched in the face in somewhere like Manchester, or Newark-on-Trent. The thing is, Hull is an aimless town. Its main economy was based on its ships, and these do not venture out very often, so it no longer has any affluence it may have had. These days, it is true to say that its entire economy is students and pushchairs for young mothers.

But that would miss out on a city that is still full of life and character. Nestled amongst the student-ridden slum housing are some beautiful buildings. The town centre mixes shitty bars and take-aways with gilded statues and Victorian architecture. Not that this concerned Graham much. Having spent all day travelling, he needed somewhere to collapse, and then perhaps a quiet drink somewhere to celebrate his newfound freedom. After about an hour of searching, he managed to find a small bed and breakfast that miraculously still had a spare room. There was a rather good reason for that, however, and the normal Hull-air smell of either tires, burned cocoa, or death, was replaced with a rather damp, musty smell, and a rather damp, musty texture to the air as well. Graham shrugged. As long as it wasn’t the bed…

Thankfully, half an hour with the hair dryer had rendered it suitably dry, and Graham resigned himself to what would now be a mildly damp, but even stinkier night. This was most defiantly a call for massive amounts of alcohol. He strolled out of the bed and breakfast, wandered back to the main road he had walked up, and went almost straight into a bar.

I’m trying not to turn this into a travelogue of debauchery here, so I’ll point out only the salient details. Beverley Road is the main road through Hull, and the main road for bars. A man could start drinking at one end, and be hammered by the other. The town centre end caters more to the locals, and the end nearer the university is obviously more favoured by students. Technically, this doesn’t affect too much, since both ends are likely to be pissed on any night of the week, but neither party likes each other. They each seemed to like Graham, however. Back when he had been a student himself, Graham had had a very set pattern for getting exceedingly drunk.
At the start of the evening, he normally nursed just a pint of whatever ale or bitter the bar had, having something he could enjoy and comment on intelligently, while he was still able to tell what he was drinking, or talk intelligibly. This was appreciated by a few working men in the first few bars, who he shared a few words with, before moving on.
He then progressed onto lagers, which were a bit easier to drink a lot quicker. He had never been one for simply downing pints, mainly because they were far too cold to do anything with quickly.

Midway through the night was usually the time sobriety started sliding away, and it was also the point where the bars became more… well… fun. One of the last lucid thoughts Graham found himself having was in the Cannon Junction. A rather unusual bar, it is built into the support for a railway bridge, and the main sitting room is two converted train carriages. He had somehow caught up with a 21st birthday pub crawl, and had found himself, despite the entreaties of the previous paragraph, having a downing contest against a large youth wearing an incongruous pink cowboy hat.
And it was exceedingly fun.
“Wouldn’t be able to do this with Miranda anywhere in sight.” Thought Graham, as he slammed down his pint, a second after his opponent. And naturally, he demanded a rematch.

Later on in his evenings, his memory tended to go a bit fuzzy, as did everything else. Having moved into the realms of the Scream brand bars, the cheap student drinks, and the exuberant young people about to go to some grotty club, this was made somewhat… worse.
He remembered being in a queue for something, and it was a little dark.
There was a large stretch in somewhere with lighting, and a very loud soundtrack.
He had been shouting merrily about something, and some people cheered at whatever he’d said.
Eventually, he left with some people, and as tradition dictated, the blast of cool, fresh air pushed him over the edge of what his memory could work with, and for all intents and purposes, he plunged into blackness. While still walking, talking and having fun for a good few hours.