Tribewanted: 'Achievements and Dreams' by Jonathan Wilkins

Achievements and Dreams

By Jonny Wilkins, Surrey, UK Posted 26 Jan 2007

Current mood: rejuvenated

Been reading the TW forum the last few days and people have been posting links to www.my50.co.uk or similar sites where you can list all your top achievements to date and dreams for the future. My dream would be to make a billion dollars dreaming up websites for people to chuck their dreams on then sit back with a cool beer, but looks like I missed the boat on the that one. Anyway, my Mum sent me a Paul McKenna CD today so maybe I’ll get some inspiration from that whilst I’m laying on the sofa in a hypnotic trance. "Change Your Life In 5 Days !!!". Christ, you could have a different life every bloody week and still have time for the weekend off !! I’ll more likely end up remembering some false memory and turn into a schizoid jellyhead due to the trauma of being abused by custard filled blow-up sheep when I was 37.

Anyway, in the spirit of participation but being too lazy to sign up to yet another poxy site that will no doubt generate a few hundred gigabytes of spam in my inbox, here are the first five of many top achievements to date………

Run My Own Fan Club

Along with my best buddy at school we set up The Haggis And Jonny Fan Club. I was Jonny and my mate was Haggis. Surprisingly we actually had some fans – it peaked at about 60. This was all during the 6^th form at school, a time when we really should have been studying a bit harder for A-levels, and probably been a bit more mature to find this type of thing amusing. I still find it amusing now though, and maturity is a bit over-rated unless you happen to be a cheese, so maybe we should have just studied a bit harder. We wrote (and sold !!) regular newsletters, did tours at the weekend to meet our fans, ran competitions, appeared on the local radio station (see later), got accused by the Headmaster of being subversive and scurrilous, got banned, went underground, then threatened with expulsion when he found out, managed to talk our way out of trouble, and then carried on. Then I went to University and got a degree, and he went to work and earnt some money. And we’re still best buddies, even if he is a lot fatter.

Drink 140 Units Of Alcohol During The UK Sensible Drinking Week

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This was quite amusing. Walking into work one Monday morning last century (think it was 1994) I got handed a card by someone with "UK Sensible Drinking Week" written on it, with a report card on the back to track how much you drank over the next seven days. I think the intention was to keep under the recommended weekly limit of 28 units. After five days things were looking a bit bleak when I hadn’t managed to keep within 28 units on any given day, totalling somewhere over 140 units. I took the weekend off just to show willing.

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Saw The Door Up To Gain Access To My Own House

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Having returned home one night after a beverage or two I was laying on the driveway trying to find my keys. It turned out they’d been spirited away by an alien so I was going to have to find alternative means of access. The front door had lattice glass and the obvious thing to do was to smash one of the panes and crawl through. I put my boot through the pane and started to crawl in. Unfortunately the alien encounter had warped my sense of dimension and I was too fat by an order of magnitude. I backed myself out and pondered the situation a bit more on the driveway. I decided the next course of action was to stock up on cigarettes so I walked a mile and a half down to the Esso petrol station to get some. In the glaring lights of the shop I noticed my shirt was shredded, as were my shoulders, arms, parts of my waist, hips and back by the remnants of glass that I’d neglected to remove from the frame. The attendant asked me if I’d had a car accident. "Lost my keys". He nodded as if he understood and quickly gave me my change. Back at the driveway basecamp I decided to wake the next door neighbour up (was <st1:time minute="0" hour="3">3am</st1:time> by this point) and climb over her back garden fence into my garden and try the patio doors. These were locked. My neighbour didn’t have a ladder to try the bedroom windows so I asked for the next best thing. A big saw. Back out front I smashed another pane, sawed the frame away and finally gained entry with a slightly less tight squeeze, my neighbour in her dressing gown saying encouraging things like "Jonathan, you’re bleeding !!". I woke up the next day and wrote a letter to the residents association telling them the Neighbourhood Watch scheme was fucking rubbish.

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Have A Close Encounter Of The 3^rd Kind

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Having returned home one night after four pints of cider down the local I was laying on the sofa watching some late night rubbish when I saw red pulsating lights floating around in the back garden. After ten seconds or so, having come up with no rational explanation – such as reflections on the glass from something inside the house – I got up and opened the patio doors. The lights were still there, floating upwards. I ran to get a torch, but when I returned the lights were gone. All very strange. A few days later, again after four pints of cider in the local, the lights were back. This time I was ready – the torch was still by the patio doors. I tentatively approached the doors whilst simultaneously searching the memory banks for news stories on hallucinogenic cider, then opened them. The lights remained, but stopped moving. I peered into the darkness, torch in hand, building up the courage to turn it on. Click…… I turned it on. Ooooooooh ooooooooh what the hell is that !!! Luminous green eyes stared at me from the undergrowth, motionless, lights still pulsating. I panned the torch around. It moved, quickly, up and over the fence. As flashed over the fence I got a decent view of it – it was the black cat from down the road wearing a collar of red flashing lights. I assume the collar was to stop it getting run over – black cats are pretty hard to see when it’s black outside. My feeling is it’s probably caused numerous accidents as people swerve all over the road fearing for their lives at the hands of alien abductors. At least the cider was off the hook anyway.

<o:p></o:p>Be A Published Author

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At a previous place of employment the department I worked in started a regular newsletter. Oh, deep joy !! This was taking me back. I decided to pen some stuff for it, highly hopeful of it being deemed unsuitable and never getting printed. The first article was entitled "The Jonny Wilkins Guide To Being Bloody Great". God only knows what was in it, I can’t remember, but it was printed in the next issue and caused much hilarity. Egged on by the similarly childish members of the department I agreed to write another one. This happened to be shortly after Sensible Drinking Week, so "The Jonny Wilkins Guide To Sensible Drinking" appeared in the next issue. A month later I decided to really push the edge of the envelope. After tens of minutes spent carefully considering every word, "The Jonny Wilkins Guide To Safe Sex" with accompanying side article "How To Make Your Own Blow-up Dolly" was completed, submitted, and published. Senior management asked the department to stop the newsletter two days later.

Tune in next time for more top achievements and dreams. Be Inspired.