Armageddon

So, I moved to Edinburgh. I've been introduced to parsnips. I've experienced my first ever visit to KFC. My first viewing of The Little Mermaid was much vaunted, yet inspired little more than a mild craving for seafood. I have moved from feelings of profound irritation at the bizarre sounds that our kitchen tap makes to being impressed at how it operates as a dubstep DJ on the side. I even witnessed the slow death of what became affectionately known as Jack's Raging Mint Plant. And I've played a fuckload of card games ("fuckload" is an oft overlooked imperial unit of measurement, roughly equal to the size of two football pitches).

Phil and Dave cook and clean. I get the beers in. It's like Withnail & I, without the squalor....and with a less robust vocabulary.

I do often tend to equate life to plot lines or happenings in film. Which brings me to that time I experienced Armageddon.

I was sitting in a nearby Irish pub watching the auld country thrash the mighty footballing juggernaut that is Estonia in the first leg of the Euro 2012 play-offs. And I knew this bar was going to pass its own qualification test as proper Irish when they stocked Barry's Tea and Tayto Crisps. Home soil under foreign skies. It's entirely probable that Scotland's full Irish contingent had packed the place to the rafters and so real-estate was at a premium. Just after the midway point of the midway point in the contest it came to my attention that a foreign body had entered the patch of space which I had called home. This was Texas-sized, an extinction level event, and the music swelled to encompass the epic scenario in which I was now engaged. Quite extraordinarily, this asteroid was not alone.

She had a date.

I was soon caught in her gravity. My Texan asteroid was on a first date. In an astoundingly brief period I listened (against my will and sense of propriety) as she rained down a catastrophic meteor shower on the conversation. She segued, almost elegantly, from her (clearly desperate) companion's immediately awkward "small" talk of snake bites and grizzly bears to her teenage daughter, love of Doctor Who and finally, fittingly, to her not having had sex for "well....quite a while". I feared the impact. I was going to be invited to partake in a threesome. It was inevitable.

In cases of great uncertainty and necessity, a square peg may be called upon to fill a round hole. Bruce Willis and his team of deep-sea oil drillers did not, on the face of it, fit the bill of planetary saviours, but they got the job done. So happens that on this occasion, to save the world from the awkward asteroid, I was the square peg that would surely be called upon to....er....fill that hole. And by golly (not a phrase I use lightly) there would be some substantial drilling necessary here!

I know, I know. I was getting ahead of myself. The invite was inevitable. Nobody was going to dispute that. Yet before I got to the excavation, I would have had to make the journey and land on this behemoth. It was going to be arduous and fraught with peril. I would lose some of the crew along the way. Obviously one of the expedition's number would lose their mind and threaten the whole mission. Nonetheless, someone had to get in there to bring about that explosion. It wasn't going to be pretty. It was going to take great personal sacrifice. Flicking through my head were all the eventualities. Someone would draw the short straw and have to do the deed. This is where I'd shine brightly. This was my "little death" to die. I'd take one for the team, nay for humanity itself. Billy Bob Thornton would request permission to shake the hand of the never conceived daughter of the bravest man he'd never met. Mine was a sacrifice that would be selfless, noble and remembered for generations. I think it's clear to see that Ireland would have been renamed in my honour to New Deebsland.

I swallowed hard and turned to face my quarry. It took close to a minute to adjust and take in her full scope. Pretty sure she inhabited a fourth dimension. I downed my beer.

Fuck you Aerosmith! I want to miss all of these things. I want to close my eyes. You're on your own, world!

I walked away and didn't even look back as the world was presumably destroyed behind me. Cue the explosions, Michael Bay.