The Spontaneous Three Ride Again

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A long time ago, in a cul-de-sac far far away.....

In my teenage years, I generally hung around with two of my neighbours- for the sake of anonymity I'll call them Oisin and Ross. We were known as the Spontaneous Three, if only by ourselves. I suppose it's easy to be spontaneous when you've got nothing planned and feck all to do. We just did the usual stuff: hang around on street corners and watch girls pass obliviously by...play football on the street... hang around on street corners and watch girls pass obliviously by... The usual, basically.

The sad thing was, we didn't even discover knacker-drinking till about the age of sixteen. For non-Irish readers, knacker drinking is the term given to the practice whereby you: a) hang around outside an off-licence, waiting for an of-age adult to purchase multiple cans of the cheapest lager they can find; b) take said cans to a secluded field, or wooded area; and c) drink said cans until you vomit, fall over, or both.

The adventures of the Spontaneous Three were comitragic at times... or at least they were to the Spontaneous Three.

There was the time we went to the local swimming pool (mainly because it as close as we could get to seeing girls naked without going to a strip bar, which at the tender age of fourteen is admittedly difficult). Lack of talent in the pool drove the three of us sauna-ward. The only problem was, there appeared to be two separate saunas: one, we reasoned, for males; the other for females. But which was which? So we stood there, the three of us, still dripping from the pool, playing papers scissors stone, trying to establish who would be the first of us to venture into one of the saunas. We were in our fourth game (out of best of five), when suddenly the door opened slightly: it was being pushed open by the arse of a large woman, who was so big she might as well have had a reversing siren. We panicked, thinking it was all a bit much for three horny teenage blokes to be hanging around outside a females-only sauna. So we attempted to run out of there, back towards the pool. The only problem with running on a slippery floor like that, is that it is tantamount to running in a cartoon: your legs spin round and round but you don't actually move. When we finally gained traction, myself and Ross crashed into each other, banging our heads with a clunking sound like two coconuts knocked together. Through the pain we made it out the door and into the pool area: Ross tried to pull his rubber swimming cap on as he ran, with it twanging back into his eyes and him running into a poolside potplant; I, on the other hand, launched myself into the nearest part of the swimming pool I could see- the shallow end. So, picture about a dozen armband-equipped toddlers floating placidly around the shallow end of the pool, feebly paddling away. Then imagine a giant shadow befalling them all...they only have time to look up briefly, before I crash down and flatten about seven of them all at once. Then I'm frantically doing the front crawl down to the deep end, basically mowing down any toddler in my way. I eventually surface near the end of the pool, to see Ross still stumbling around, blinded by his backwards-facing swimming cap. I look back over to the doorway to the sauna, to see Oisin calmly chatting away to the monstrous woman who had startled us. He eventually turns around and shouts down the pool, drawing all other swimmers' attention to us, and says 'HEY LADS, IT'S OK: IT'S UNISEX!' And so, it turned out there weren't two saunas after all; one was a steam room, the other was a sauna (which to me sounds about as different as Pepsi and Coca Cola). In the immortal words of Socrates: D'oh.

There was also the time that Ross and I broke into Oisin's gaf to hurry him up for our trip into town (he had spent about sixty minutes in the shower at this stage). As we entered the house via the garage, we realised that as he had been taking a shower, there was a possibility that Oisin could've been wandering around in the raw (and in fairness, that was something we just didn't want to see). Hence we progressed from the garage to the utility room- and then onward to the kitchen- with our eyes firmly shut. Cue us stumbling blindly around the kitchen, when we hear an irate shriek: WHA DA FOOOOK??! We then open our eyes to see Oisin thundering towards us, a mere bath towel preserving his modesty, and a golf club being waved around in fury above his head. Ross managed to get the kitchen door shut just in time for Oisin to crash into it, while we escaped with our lives, back out through the garage.

And of course, there was the shit radio station we concocted and cunningly christened Sh1t FM (no trades descriptions act breached there I tells ya). Sh1t FM featured such glorious parodies as Killiney Hills Cop (featuring a northside Garda investigating a murder on the other side of the Liffey) and The Y-Files (a rural version of The X-Files, featuring Agents Sculder and Mully, who investigated paranormal activity in the Irish midlands). We also took to taping our own prank phone calls, before we had even heard of the Jerky Boys (of whom one is, incidentally, called Johnny Brennan). The most memorable call went like this (Ross doing an No'rn Irish accent, with Oisin and I facilitating the overly complicated recording process:

Ross: Howya, is Sarah Jane there?
Posh woman: Sa..Wh...Sorry, who is this?
Ross: Ah naw bother; I'm just ringing about the bike.
Posh woman: Bike? What bike?
Ross: I'm just ringing Sarah Jane about the wee bike. Is she there?
Posh woman: Now listen here, what's all this about a bike?
Ross: The bike! Is Sarah Jane there?
Posh woman: Well, no.
Ross: Ah- is there a Sarah Jane living in that house?
Posh woman: Well....Yes! Yes there is.
Ross: Ah naw b....huh? There is?
Posh woman: Yes. Now what's all this about a bike?
Ross: Ummmm....er...maybe it's....maybe it's the wrong Sarah Jane?
Posh woman: Well I want to know about this bike.
Ross: Naw, naw- I think I've got the wrong number...thanks anyway.
Posh woman: You're not going until you tell me about this bike!
Ross: Ah, I've got to go...you're breaking up.
Posh woman: No, now you listen here....
Ross (slams phone down in a cold sweat)

Jaysis, she sure turned the tables on us. Must be the first time in history that a prank caller was begging to hang up. Still though: good times.

The Spontaneous Three in drunker days...

But the important thing is that this blog was inspired by the news that one of the Spontaneous Three is now expecting his first child. An entirely new, and slightly less spontaneous, adventure...but an adventure nonetheless.

Best of luck Oisin,

Mistaar B

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