The first time I met fat Adam was at a school mate’s eighth birthday party. It was the obligatory bouncy castle party. A novel concept that involved a room full of screaming, over excited children, lashings of sickly, sugary party food and an inflatable castle where they could vent their youthful exuberance and more often than not their dinner as well.
He was lay prone on the bright yellow and blue castle, making a horrendous groaning noise that I can still hear in my mind twenty two years later. He had eaten the party’s entire supply of Jaffa cakes, no mean feat considering the birthday boys, parents wealth, generosity and it being the late eighties a time long before Jamie Oliver and the food Nazis.
It was also the best part of a decade before Jackass, but due to what can only be described some kind of intrinsic force, the male faction of the party gathered around him hoping he so see him bark his chocolate orange cake based lunch onto the canary yellow vinyl.
They were ultimately left disappointed, as after a five minute or so respite he arose, phoenix like from his stupor and clambered off the castle to go and find an empty seat at the table to make a start on the plate of chocolate fingers.
Not long after the party he moved house into the same neighbourhood as me. A lower middle class collection of ex council houses, framed by fields and the main road. The solitary boundary to our then infantile world.
He soon merged into the small group of friends the neighbourhood had thrown together, none of us really fitting in anywhere else but there. Over the following years we played and fought, friendships never broken for more than a few hours and never over anything more serious than an over zealous tackle or a playful insult that dug a little too close to the bone.
Together we all found our limits and pushed through them with the help of stolen cigarettes and cigars from parents, homebrewed cider obtained from relations, some skillfully acquired hash from older brothers and the seemingly endless supply of mushrooms growing in the surrounding fields.
Adam had a hunger for the mushrooms as he did jaffa cakes as a child, there was never enough and for the short few weeks at the start of autumn he was rarely part of reality.
We always tried to have at least one group trip, the five of us together lay gazing as the stars danced across infinity for us. Never ones to try and better the experience by going on silly quests we simply let our world wash over us.
As high school ended our small group fragmented and we drifted slowly apart, people went off to college and then uni, girls were met, children were had, jobs were found and priorities changed.
I haven’t seen any of them properly for years now but I still can’t see a jaffa cake and not think of Fat Adam.
