rawson:
Hey, it's me. For the one hundredth article on TON I decided to both bring fun, excitement, laughter, the past, the present AND the future. Its for this reason that iv lost a lot of sleep recently, but it doesn’t matter - for I have the answer.

The fun and excitement will ooze from the other parts... I hope

Anyway, most of the readers should remember the first adventure. This (for those of you who are either new to TON, and so haven't read the article - or are just too damned lazy) was the trip into the forest North of Kesgrave, that Christof, Jameson, and myself all went on. Through thick and thin we stuck together and from reading the original article, you should realise that in the end it was me who stuck together, but not with my shoes which I almost lost into a bog...

Anyway, the frolicking was incredible, but "the lads" (random quote from Faye Steward during year 2000) wanted more. We decided that during the 2002 Easter holidays, we would organise another trip. A large trip. A better trip. This time, we would have even more fun, and would spend the entire day out in the fields frolicking.

We planned for minutes... And I arranged that Jameson should ring me and Chris around 7:30am the next day (a Sunday) so that we could make an early start. That didn’t happen though. He decided that 10am would be a better time, and so everyone was at mine by around 11am.

Jameson arrived at mine first. He'd managed to sneak his Video camera out of the house for this momentous trip which on its own was quite a momentous feat. This is due to James having broken the camera on a previous expedition, and whilst his mother thought it was his sister - she still wouldn’t let him use it.

Anyway, he was at mine admiring the... Respectable posters... On my wall, when we saw Chris arriving - Jameson managed to video tape the momentous occasion as Chris swore at the camera (and to my family downstairs who just happened to be watching)

This time I made sure to grab all the best technology that I could find, and we left my house. The itinerary of equipment included:

1 Video Camera
1 Garmin GPS Unit (with only 4 hours of available battery life due to cheap batteries)
4 bottles of water
6 packets of crisps (3 packets of skips, 3 packets of hula hoops)
3 'mobile cellular telephones'
Half a dozen knives :)
A ‘monocular’
3 School Bags
My wallet (including Visa Electron Debit Card - that FHM wouldn't accept, damn fools)
Some strange Hooks I made out of some laundry devise that I ripped apart.. could come in useful

Anyway, we went on our trails, the GPS said that we were on our way somewhere, not sure where but it looked like it was trying to guide us home from Surrey which was not that useful but its not important. After a quick pit stop at Chris's to pick up 2 of the 4 bottles, we proceeded to ‘the entrance’.

The entrance was, and still is a tunnel to the hell mouth of earth. However – as we are all pure at heart (yeah right!) we managed to get straight through it, and walked into the forest. The camera was brought out once again, as I began to play with my hooks and put al the rubbish from my pockets into my bag. Once Jameson had filmed me and Chris from the top of a nearby log, and Chris had chucked in amusement we began to wander into the forest aimlessly. Now I call it a forest, because we have only ever seen 3 sides of it, ant thus it could technically be infinitely long. And also because it sounds better if I call it a forest.

I managed to get control of the camera at this point, which just happened to be the point at which both Chris and Jameson needed to go for a piss – I managed to keep the tape running without any shots of James’ naked arse – which is quite a skill I tell you, and then once again, we continued on with our adventure.

Anyway, we reached the rope swings that we had seen on the last trip, and we all filmed each other swinging backwards and forwards. I managed to get a stick shoved up my ass, Chris made a big deal of getting of a swing, Jameson almost dropped the camera a dozen times, and then we continued onwards..

Then we reached it. The bog from the last expedition. However – due to having already enjoyed the spoils of the ditch from the last time, and seeing as though the sun had dried out most of the bog – limiting it to only a small area – we continued past without too much hassle. Although this too required a nice filming.

As soon as we reached the quarry, we realised that there would be problems. There was a van, from whence strange men were escaping. These men carried sinkers and twine, and seemed to be in need of a hunt. These ‘fishermen’ scared us greatly, and so we pretended to walk away from the quarry, and hid in a clearing, until the van turned around, almost ran us over – and left.

We were safe. Or so we thought. The fishermen had been left by the red van. We quickly ate Mars confectionary and skips, before I was handed the camera, and we walked past the fishermen. As I filmed one, another gave Jameson a fierce look. We jumped past the little dyke (a small muddy puddle we found) and travelled on. We reached the back of the school.

This time, the journey was very easy. This was sue to 90% of the ferns having been cut back, enabling us to easily fritter across until we reached a long area of marsh land that we had had problems with last time. This marsh land was known to have cleansing properties – as lat time it had cleaned my shoes. But after watching Jameson cross and get horribly wet, Chris and I decided to find an easier route. We walked away, amid comments such as “come on its an adventure” and “you fucking pussy’s, come on”. We didn’t hear any more until later on - when we watched the video. Jameson received a beating for that one.

We passed the marshland and decided to stop again halfway up this hill. This wasn’t really a hill, more a gentle slope up towards a hill. Whist Jameson and Chris schemed, I monitored our progress on the GPS. Wow – a whole 0.6 miles. We were not too pleased with this, and as soon as I had put the GPS away – I was promptly ‘bundled’ by both of them, on top of piles and piles of what can only be described as ‘Rabbit Shit’.

We walked across the farmers empty field and began to walk along the road that ran parallel to the main road where we began. A car almost sideswiped us, and blew its horn at us, as if we were to blame. We resisted the urge to yell and swear aimlessly at the car, and we quickly proceeded onwards towards a junction in the road. To the left was home - and the same route that we had gone on the previous trip, straight onwards was Ipswich/Rushmere, and to the left was a farm with haystacks. “wow – haystacks, look lads haystacks, we HAVE to climb them!!!” screamed Jameson. “No”, we replied, but we went right anyway – all the other routes seemed to be boring.

This road went on for what seemed like miles. We stopped for another break at a turning and it seemed that we had now travelled 1.6 miles from our original entry point. Bugger.. Well, we were shocked by the noisy arrival of 3 motorcycles and we hastily continued on our journey. For some strange reason, it was necessary for Chris and James to run away from me at this point. However, I was pondering my existence, and the location of a abandoned car we had seen earlier, so I didn’t really care. If they didn’t want to walk with me – it would be their decision, I figured that I would be able to find new friends soon enough anyway.

At the end of the road, we met Playford (or was it Playdon). Anyway, we were informed that Chris's grandparents lived nearby, and so once we had taken the number of a nearby phone box, had checked to see if that the only nearby shop was closed (so that we couldn’t spend our only 60 pence), and had seen a strange man (who must have had the name ‘Terry’), we turned left to follow a small stream that Chris told us he knew. Chris’s intellect was highlighted here, and here alone. No other time have I ever seen him have knowledge of an area, and so Ill give it to him that he must have a brain larger than the nearest mirror that he can find. We walked for another hour, passed female jogger and dog (who Chris thought about chatting up – poor dog), and found ourselves in the middle of a beautiful field. This field was perfect. We all joined our ‘pinkies’ and frolicked. We jumped and ran. We ran and jumped. We got tired and walked again. And then, after one last hurdle – a large patch of mud that I managed to cover myself in – we found a small bridge. This was it, we thought - Bliss... and not just a song by ‘Muse. It was also the point at which we decided to begin to turn, and to start to head home.

We followed the relief of the land upwards again, through a tunnel under a railway, and past a very large motorcycle track that had been carved into the side of a hill. We walked onwards for a while, slowly meeting more and more people as we got closer and closer to reality once again. One minute, we were nowhere, the next we were in the 1950s, and then we realised that we were just in the poor end of Rushmere, where no-one could afford to but a new car or even a decent house with two floors. (Talk to Lawrence about Bungalows – I despise them) We walked onwards past a house from which a girl (who looked like Miss Dunderdale herself) was waving, to a duck pond. Once again I checked the GPS to find that we were nearly home and that the batteries were still 90% charged. I left the GPS constantly on from this point on, whilst we walked the remaining 0.2 miles to the Main Road – exiting fro an alleyway near to a Petrol Station.

We began the trek home – which the GPS predicted would take less than a minute at our constant speed, and we arrived home (or so it believed) just outside the petrol station. Hmm – I thought. Unless we were gone for several years, or the whole country had moved several kilometres due to tectonic movement – we were not at home. However – we were not lost, as we were near the centre of our home town, and so we simply continued on home to relax and think about what we had done. I showed my dad the distance we had travelled – his comment was “is that it!” - but that was to be expected, I am not his favourite child (well, really he was one of these dodgy ramblers and so the odd ten miles to him was a stroll in the park.)

Anyway – onto the future. THE ADVENTURE. This adventure is totally different from all those that had come before. Apart from being written in BLOCK CAPITOLS, it is also on a much larger scale, a much longer timeframe, a much more expensive trip that must be well planned, well executed, and above all else CrAzY.

This trip – is to Scotland itself. We are predicting that we shall spend most of the time in youth hostels, and also that we shall need to purchase kilts in order to look like crazy people. We are not open to any applications for additional members of the trip (except in exceptional circumstances which must be decided among all those concerned.) The trip will cost a lot more money, will require a lot more time (maybe fourteen days), and will cover vast distances of ground. All I can say is... “I'm worryingly eager”.

Anyway – iv written enough on this subject, so I suppose id better think about something else. Perhaps the state of the Center Parcs Holiday village that went up in smoke today, or the middle east peace crisis.

No, I shall think about Wide Asleep.

Wide asleep is the supporting web ring that is trying to collate all the information from all of the local sites, into one, easy to browse Chunk. It is simple – yet sufficient, and I'm actually quite pleased with the progress so far. If you want to take a look – try www.wideasleep.co.uk. Alternatively, take a scalpel, cut out your upper colon, and try to use it as strange wind instrument – possibly rubbing it using a short 3B pencil.

Out of all the articles so far – I believe that mine our the worst. Rog has written few, and so cant easily be considered. Jameson has written the most entertaining– and yet the majority of his are pointless and irrelevantly useless. Jesus has a knack – whilst his articles are not as entertaining as Jameson's – they are often much more informative. Jay seems to write some of the best articles I have seen – better than al off the rest (he shall probably end up earning packets as a journalist). As for Rib – the ones I have seen are good, however he doesn’t seem to have much to do with the site anymore. Emotion Hendrix looks incredible though, and will soon be a rival to www.emotioneric.com

Anyway, I'm off, enjoy the rest of the article
$esso Dio
@wideasleep.co.uk