WARNING: Do try anything you see here at home or at work. If you ever get into a situation where you’re thinking about duplicating events you’ve read about on Bloke Called Dave, you should IMMEDIATELY contact a health professional and attempt to get past those rude cretins who work on reception at such places in order to keep you out. You know, the ones who speak to you as if you’ve only phoned up for an appointment in order to psychologically p*ss on their cornflakes.
It started with a simple statement:
“Hey, Dave: I’ve heard that if you do a Flat White and then get straight on an inversion table, the buzz is just EPIC.”
Now these are dangerous words, especially coming from a friend who knows better…and a friend who knows full well that I happen to own a rather bitching inversion table that I affectionately refer to as ‘Tiptoe’.
I own lots of exercise equipment. I swim two or three times a week, do at least five sessions on a crosstrainer and regularly hang from chin-up bars in the attic. After several years of doing this, I’ve developed a body where two rather nice arms and legs are framed around a skeletal torso with visible ribs and ill-fitting skin: the experts call this skinny fat. I once got a lot of attention leaving the ocean in Brindisi because many of the locals had never seen anything so pale with spiky ginger hair that wasn’t being hauled in via a fishing net.
Anyway, I own an inversion table.
I bought one because a friend who suffers with his back showed us all on gaming night (we’re like the Bing Bang Theory crew, but older) that inversion tables were a great way to variously fix your back and trap your friends upside down in order to poke them viciously in the stomach. At least one guy got stuck on the thing that first night, but we all had a laugh.
So….here I am, following that incredible advice: one Flat White and I’m looking at the world like Bruce Wayne on his night off. I don’t actually feel that great, and I’m certainly not experiencing the detonating legal high I was promised. In fact, after about thirty seconds I start to feel a bit sick. I’ve put on a bit of Enya in the background because she reminds me of an elf maiden and she sings in a way I’d imagine dolphins might sing if we stopped killing them all with plastic waste.
Ultimately, when there’s no positive feelings after a further minute, I get bored and remove myself from the inversion table….and that’s when it happens.
I see a goblin.
Green skin, warty face, nose like a dripping candle….standing on the first-floor landing of my house.
A proper goblin, like those ones who ran around David Bowie’s crotch in Labyrinth.
It doesn’t move: it just looks at me.
I stand still for at least ten seconds.
Then I blink, shake my head and open my eyes again.
The disappointment hits me like a brick in a sock.
It’s a pile of dirty washing. The nose is a green bikini, the eyes are my daughter’s Cinderella mask and the body is, well…..basically just an awful lot of pants.
I’m really upset, but at least I gave Flat White Inversion a try.
All that said and done, if you do ever decide to conduct the same experiment and YOU see a goblin too, can you send me an email and just let me know? Thanks.