Who Is Andrew Beattie?

Hello You,

I hope you are flying pretty fucking high.

So, I promised I’d be back and I suppose I owe you a bit of an update now, like a 3 week update, whoops. I’ll not make an excuse although I did prepare several on a small list that included one cracker, even by my very high excuse making standards, just in case you demanded one. I’ll not make it though, I am just rubbish and the weeks have flown by on me, but I will say that this particular excuse included Japan, Lady GaGa, a fast car, a dragon and the biggest firework in the world. It was also a lie.

But I am back and so here is a list, with notes, of the major events that have happened over the past 3 weeks. I must warn you. I must always warn you.

1. Liverpool Twestival

What do you get when you put a load of social media type people, twitter users, a group of Doctor Who fans, Liverpool Echo and Daily Post workers, one aspiring politician, a very loud band and me in a very expensive bar in Liverpool’s Albert Dock? Well I’ve already given you the answer; it’s in the fucking title, Christ, if you got that wrong? It was a great evening spent in the company of like minded people of all ages and whilst I usually hate any gatherings of people of any sort they stocked a great bar and after an hour or so I was pissed enough to hold conversations with people that I didn’t know with relative ease. That’s the beauty of alcohol. If the truth be known I’d not have needed it anyway as the attendees where a great bunch. I just wish someone would have told me that before I spent 12.32 weeks wages on a round of rums.

2. My Birthday, the big 26

I’m 26 and that is all I really have to say about that. In reality I have my little plan to stick to with my writing et cetera and the last few months of my 25^th year were all bloody marvellous. If I stick to it, and write a screenplay, in my 26^th as well as the other stuff that’ll happen along the way, I’ll be as happy as a pig in shit.

3.  The Cheltenham-London Weekend Express trip and festival of aceness

Ah ha! Travelling! It was on the list of stuff I needed to do and I’ve done it so fuck you world, take that. It all started on a Friday morning on the 8:30am train to Cheltenham and finished at 11:30pm the following Monday, 4 days, 2 towns, and one fat guy, me, with a bag, a pen and a pad, and a sense of adventure, the likes of which the world may never see again. The pen and pad remained largely unused and the book unread and as a result, this is all mainly from memory. Good job it was only a week ago hey.

Cheltenham is most lovely and I arrived to be greeted by my cousin, Julia, just as the heavens opened. Despite the rain and heavy grey skies Cheltenham looked beautiful, a little too beautiful for me I seem to remember thinking, as we drove through on a mini tour of the town before heading to my cousin’s lovely new house. Another thing worth mentioning is the French architecture, it’s all over the fucking place on account of some bloke called Montpellier who built a load of buildings there shortly after they realised they had a shit load of fresh water. The next thing to note is that I got really pissed on my first evening there and effectively cut a 3 day stay down by half. I’d have much more to tell but I don’t. An evening of Rum drinking took this away from me. It was days before I forgave it. So to sum up, Cheltenham is beautiful, very leafy and if I hadn’t have been so fucking catastrophically drunk, as in going for a walk at 5:30 in the morning drunk, I’d have much more to tell you, like a day out in the Cotswolds, which I missed.

London has always had kind of a pull on me in that I’ve only been there a handful of times but every time I go it seems strangely familiar, homely and wonderful, like a good pair of boxer shorts or Fern Britton’s face. 24 hours is also not enough time to see London, even if like me, you decide to get the best view in town from the London Eye.

For those who are massively ignorant, the London Eye is a big fuck-off wheel, right next to the Thames in London. I’d say that it was a Ferris wheel but that really wouldn’t be doing this thing justice, it is fucking colossal. I am terrified of heights, suffering permanently from extreme vertigo, and so to say that my arse was twitching slightly on the slow walk up to the mega spinning death wheel right next to a huge body of water, is a bit of an understatement. That being said, once I was up there, and glued to the seat in the middle of the shared stranger pod the views across London just blew me away. Whilst in London I also did an immense amount of walking and visited the Southbank book market, visit old Liz in her palace, chilled in Trafalgar square with my Cousin, walked by the corridors of power and refused to pay £25 to go around on a bus, I hate the bus, and just about got the hang of the tube system and all in time to be on the last train home to Liverpool wishing.

Wishing that I’d have taken a camera to snap some pictures for you. Wishing that I’d have made some notes about the sights and smells of Cheltenham and London, the little things that I noticed along the way, the conversations that I overheard on the tube, the people, and the moments my family made me laugh. Wishing that I could do it for a living but mostly wishing that you could have been there man, it was bloody super.

But now I’m back in business, the post holiday blues have subsided, and I am finally refreshed and ready to resume life, my life to be precise, and crack on with that bloody list of mine, a screenplay and all the other shit I have to do in between. Thanks for coming back once again and until next time peeps,

Be happy,

With peace and love,

Andrew Beattie

p.s. You will have noticed that I mentioned that I am drinking again. That is all I have to say about that for now.