This Is This

Or you could have had:

Superstar CJs… -Here We Go!

But yeah, it was fucking awesome. I’m talking about the Chemical Brothers gig in Brixton on Friday.

Coincidences? Extraordinary goings on?

You’d expect nothing less, would you? Hang on, I’ll get to that.

I’m always amazed at the enthusiasm and boundless creativity of musicians and it something that I hope will always amaze me, however much I see it.

And I’ve got to say that the fans were just the nicest bunch of young folks I have ever seen at any gig. At one point someone walked past me and was waiting for someone else to hand beers to their friends. The person passing by stopped in front of me briefly and wasn’t blocking my view. She was short and I’m not a big guy - about five ten and average, but she’d been in front of me for about six seconds before she said: “I’m really sorry about this.”

Sorry about not blocking my view while you wait for someone to finish giving beer to their friends? I love being English.

Drugs were there in abundance and our friends were getting really annoyed that I kept getting offered pills (six times in two hours) while they weren’t. Cocaine and speed was the most pedalled, and of course I didn’t, but they were pleased at the end of the evening when someone tried to sell them weed. Immediately after which some guy tried to score off me, which put a damper on their short-lived, somewhat concessionary celebrations.

OK, OK. A coincidence.

During the gig and a brief comfort stop I ran into a friend in the bar who used to work with me and is now at rival company, where he sits across from someone who used to work for me.

Did I really say “I’ll see you online anyway?” I think I did. Sorry, dude if you’re reading. Which he says he does, by the way, so I’m not presuming too much.

And as if 2007 hasn’t been extraordinary enough, I thought things would at least wind down by the end of the year. But no, I have to go and save some guy’s life.

In the cab on the way home at two in the morning, our driver spots another taxi on the wrong side of he road, crawling along with cars swerving all around it, and four passegers in the back going nuts.

We pull alongside and ask what he’s doing, and the driver is barely conscious and clearly in a bad way.

Our driver tells us the incapacitated driver is drunk and starts asking him what the hell he’s doing, pointing out that he’s on the wrong side of the road, but he’s hardly able to lift his head from the steering wheel, and he looks like he’s getting worse by the second. You can tell he can hear us, but he can’t even turn his head and within twenty seconds he get what we’re saying and he stops the car but he can’t even grip the steering wheel.

In the back of his cab, the passengers say they don’t know what’s happening and ask us for help so me and the driver jump out, because we have to get the people out of the car before this guy drives on again.

I stand in the road, diverting down cars around the event, and our cabbie puts on the handbreak of the other car and the apparently drunk gets out and staggers to the side of the road with my friend, who got out of our car right after me.

Our cab driver meanwhile gets the people out of the now abandoned car to safety at the side of the road and he gets their car and drives it to the curb. 

Once everyone is safe and I don’t have to hold up traffic, I start walking back over the road to the staggering driver standing there with my friend, who yells to me: “Diabetic!”

I look at the guy, who is now struggling to breathe, covered in sweat and can barely stand, and he’s wrenching at the throat to take off his tie while swaying against the railings behind him.

I say “Diabetic?” and my friend says “Diabetic - he just said. Diabetic.”

I call an ambulance immediately while my friend stays with him and someone else rummages through his car for any medication.

The emergency services kept me on the line and asked for the guy’s situation, which wasn’t improving, and you could tell he was trying hard not to not pass out. We couldn’t sit him down because we weren’t sure he could hear us, and he was soaked in sweat anyway and it was about minus two degrees out, and he would have probably laid down and been worse off.

Someone finds his needle pen and takes it to him and very carefully dials up the maximum dose and injects himself in the stomach.

It’s a very slow process, during which I don’t rouse his attention since he was so out of it. It must be a humiliating thing anyway, standing with two strange blokes while you’re trying to keep yourself from going into a coma in the street.

After a couple of minutes and while I’m still on the phone to the ambulance service, he injects himself again in the belly and checks a reading on the pen thing.

A paramedic arrived about ten minutes later. Does everyone think they are a medical expert when they talk to the emergency services? I did.

The medic jumped out of the car and I addressed her.

“I called it in. The gentlemen says he is diabetic and has injected himself with something while we were waiting. He is not conscious of his surroundings and appears to be improving, although slowly.”

I should have added “Vital signs appear to be good. I need ten mils of epoxy resin and a sentimental gurney. Talk to me, people.” 

Because everything’s a big fucking joke with me, isn’t it?

I’m glad we were there, because the passengers didn’t have a clue what was going on, and he might have kept driving if our cab hadn’t asked him what the fuck he was doing. His passengers said they had been driving on the motorway half an hour before and that could have been a disaster.

Someone called the cab company he worked for and they say they were sending someone out, so the passengers were going to be OK, so we decided to leave. An ambulance pulled up as we moved away to leave, once he was sitting in the paramedic’s car.

Or…. OR….

Last Night A CJ Saved My Life

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I love Ireland. It’s the land of my fathers. Well, technically it’s the land of my father’s mother and her fathers, which makes me a quarter Irish.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 1:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.