Holiday Snap-shorts

"Travelling – see it's not really my thing. I reckon the more places you see the less you appreciate the places you already know, and the more people you meet the less you appreciate your existing acquaintances. Therefore I only leave my house on average seven times a year, that way I get to appreciate myself, which is important... Most memorable recent outings were to post a complaint to Ofcom about Jonathon Ross (I hadn't heard the show myself heard it was very offensive), and to visit the National Railway Museum in York. They really don't make them like they used to. Stephenson's Rocket: now that's a beautiful way to travel..." [John Dillon]

"I'm Jazz, man - this is my bar," said the slightly drunk Englishman as we entered a tiny dive in semi-suburban Prague. So we got talking. Or, arguing fiercely more like, because for all that this Jazz fellow was pretty funny, he was also an obstreperous bastard, and we just couldn't take his claims seriously. "We're descended from aliens, who built the pyramids" was a key theme. "I moved to Iceland to escape the apocalypse." All this, put forth aggressively, followed by "I co-wrote the New Zealand national anthem, with Mauris." "Bollocks" we said. Bit of googling the next day and it turned out he wasn't lying. But also our man 'Jazz' had failed to tell us his most outstanding claim to fame, that he was in fact Jaz Coleman, frontman of the occasionally mind-blowing post-punk outfit Killing Joke. [RJ Thomson]

In Los Angeles, by a stroke of luck my friend and I had been invited to a USC sorority party. Anyone who has ever seen Girls Gone Wild knows how these occasions always end up. Before, we went for dinner at this restaurant famous for fish tacos. You probably know where this is going... It was like fizzy gravy! Every time I thought about leaving the house, I was drawn back to the toilet as if by powerful magnets in the seat. My mate went, and what I missed that night can only be found on the internet, pay-per-view! [Euan Ferguson]

I run Boxwars UK, so i got invited to put on an event in Haapsalu, Estonia at the Horror Film Festival there. There were only three international guests, two of which were well-known film directors in Europe: Marek Piestrak (a guy who did the first sci-fi shown in the Eastern Bloc) and Brian Yuzna (Re-Animator 2, Society), and me. So because I was grouped with them everyone in the festival assumed I was a film director too and I got free food / drinks / VIP area, lunch with the Mayor of Haapsalu etc. for two whole days until people realised I actually hadn't directed any films, and was just there to put on an event where people beat the crap out of each other with cardboard tubes. Good times... [Demian Hobby]

"Ireland, 2001, economic boom but I was seeing none of it. I wanted to get away, away from the drink and aimlessness, so I booked a trip as far away as possible: Australia. On arrival in Melbourne however I checked in to a hostel mostly populated by my bloody neighbours from home and proceeded to join them in a 6 week session. Since then I've been convinced that the rest of the world doesn't exist and the airplane flew round and round for hours, dropping me in a previously undiscovered part of deep southern Ireland, different only because of it's climate and deep sense of sporting arrogance. Cork maybe." [Mary Fitzmaurice]

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