...Twas the first weekend of February 2008 and the day of the Chesterfield CAMRA beer festival. An annual event at which a rich assortment of genuine real ale enthusiasts, spectacularly bearded oddballs, scarlet cheeked drunkards with stunt-livers, and a select envoy from our football team gather in Chesterfields legendary Winding Wheel venue to drink booze until something bleeds.
Literally.
In previous years the beer festival had been entirely responsible for a broken ankle sustained whilst tumbling down three flights of stairs in The Barracuda like a dropped fridge and for me being run over non-spectacularly in the worlds slowest ever hit and run incident. Which I promptly forgot had ever happened until I looked in the mirror the next morning and saw a raggedly peeled bollock looking back at me.
So it was with no little apprehension on my part that Tim 'Superfly' Stafford, Chris 'Chewbacca' Hoskin, Steve 'Beartrap' Barker and myself attended the 2008 boozefest.
After sampling a wide selection of ales, we soon found ourselves slumped at the Cider & Perries stand drinking a locally produced cider like prohibition was but hours away.
The thing about this particular cider, as we were informed by one of its makers, is that it is stronger than it says on the handwritten label. Which is very fucking strong. This cider seems to rape you of your sobriety with the velocity of an unannounced right cross from an angry Riddick Bowe.
Anyway...after the beer festival we wandered into the daylight and staggered into a cocktail bar (Chandlers) which wasn't serving food and I went and did this...
DO NOT TRY THAT AT HOME - HERES WHY...
The daffodil was not bad tasting, a bit like celery, but within an hour the daft drunken grin was erased from my face.
I began to feel peeky as soon we got to the next alehouse (which will remain nameless as they'll never serve me again.)
In seconds I had deteriorated and quickly sealed myself in a toilet cubicle where I began violently projectile vomiting great arching swathes of sick. My stomach felt like a carrier bag full of scissors and soon, to add to my indignity I began projectile shitting a torrent of red hot diarrhoea at speeds no currently available toilet bowl could hold.
On top of this I was sweating profusely and hallucinating like I'd had the wrong type of mushrooms on the Wetherspoons Farmhouse Breakfast which was now sliding down the cubicle walls.
An hour or so after I had left the lads and ran to the toilet one of them came to find me in the booth which now appeared to have been interior designed by Bobby Sands. I was about three stone lighter and pleading for an ambulance.
I was helpfully taken right past the hospital and dropped at home where a couple of hours of restorative sleep in the bath later, I came round.
Later, I found out from my chemistry studying pal that daffodils contain a dangerous alkaloid toxin and that the vast quantity of acidic cider sloshing about in my gut probably had a neutralising effect on the poison and eased my symptoms, however it was easily the most pain I have ever known in my entire life, and I have had some accidents in my time.
Ray Mears eats any old thing with an arsehole or a stamen and remains in fine fettle...I eat a flower which grows on every street in Britain and I basically turn inside out.
So there you go...if you only take one thing from this blog let it be this....
Only eat daffodils when preceded with a daft amount of barely legal scrumpy.
Peace be with you.
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