Mash Blind Date: can childhood sweethearts get over spending 20 years shagging the wrong people?

27th June 2023

CHILDHOOD sweethearts Thom Booker and Jo Kramer have reconnected on social media. Can they rekindle love and accept they massively fucked up?

Jo on Thom

First impression?

A little weatherbeaten but still has the same warm eyes I fell in love with back when we were teenagers, the same eyes I knew immediately when I saw him on Facebook. They make the years tumble away.

How was conversation?

Fantastic at first. We were so thrilled to see each other and the connection was still there. Really I don’t think I ever stopped loving him.

Memorable moments?

I know people’s paths take them to different places. I understand that we’ve both lived separate lives during the time we spent apart. But he has a four-year-old son in the Philippines with his ex-wife who’s 24? What the fuck is that?

Favourite thing about Thom?

That he’s still the same guy who captured my heart when I was a girl, except it would seem to some degree he isn’t because he’s been running around the Pacific with his dick out.

A capsule description?

Kind, thoughtful, handsome, has made some life choices which are difficult to explain over a single meal so I stopped trying and focused on the now. Which is also the then.

Was there a spark?

An ember rekindled to flame.

What happened afterwards?

He invited me back to his place for coffee, which I had to turn down because the babysitter’s only there until midnight. I offered to pop over for sex before the school run tomorrow afternoon but he said that’s not how he imagined it, which was romantic.

What would you change about the evening?

Well it’s not so much the evening as the fact that, if we get together, we’re basically saying the last 20 years were a complete write-off and we wasted the prime of our lives shagging dickheads we didn’t like. Which will be hard to break to my kids.

Will you see each other again?

Yeah. I kind of love him. What other choice have I got? Carry on banging strangers?

Thom on Jo

First impression?

We’re neither of us the teenagers we were but she still carries herself with the same grace, she still has that feline smile and air of mystery.

How was conversation?

Went well when we were talking about the past of 2003. Went less well when we filled each other in on what we’d done during the intervening years. Five kids? From two marriages? And she’s on my back about my ex Chato?

Memorable moments?

Her volcanic outrage when she discovered I had a son. What, I was meant to have spent the last two decades pining away for her? Like she clearly hasn’t, based on the amount of time she’s spent in the maternity ward?

Favourite thing about Jo?

Everything I was always attracted to is still there, but a number of other things have been layered on top obscuring the picture. Specifically five children and two ex-husbands.

A capsule description?

The woman who I still about like I did when I was 18, plus enough baggage to fill a fucking minibus.

Was there a spark?

Absolutely, no doubt. That’s the terrible thing. Why couldn’t I be into someone who won’t be introducing me as ‘Dad Number Three’? Why didn’t we just do this in 2003? I blame the Iraq war.

What happened afterwards?

I thought we may as well get in there and fuck, but it has to be arranged around childcare.

What would you change about the evening?

Nothing. I’m resigned to my fate. Sometimes in life you have to accept the consequences of the mistakes you made as an 18-year-old which have blighted two lives minimum, and do your best to right them.

Will you see each other again?

Oh yeah. But I might delay moving in until the kids are all school-aged.

This week in Mash History: Michael Eavis first says 'never again', 1970

26th June 2023

EVERY year, as hordes of the filthy and exhuasted traipse away from Worthy Farm, the ghostly words ‘never fucking again’ seem to hang in the very air.

But did you realise that these very words, muttered by the sleep, water and seating-deprived zombies the Glastonbury Festival produces, are a mere echo of the cry first uttered by founder Michael Eavis in 1970?

Inspired by Woodstock, the Somerset farmer held a music festival on his land and, two days later, threw the first of what would become annual tantrums about how horrendous the whole occasion had been.

Amateur footage shows Eavis, then a young man, stating: “Never again. No way on my bloody life. Piss off every last hippie. I need a sit down and a biscuit.

“Get off my land, you parasitical bastards. I saw you shitting in hedges when Wayne Fontana was on. Christ, the stink of you. I can smell that twat with the white man’s afro from here. Was he rolling in dung? Is that his thing?

“I thought it’d be the best gig ever having all these band in one place, but it’s the worst. Non-stop queueing just to watch them dick around and not play their biggest hits. Plus some seven foot knob was stood in front of me the whole time.

“My back’s buggered, I’m knackered and Christ my head. A one-day festival and I’ve got a five-day fucking hangover. I threw up on a cow. I’ll be scrubbing that clean later.

“Nope. Absolutely never again. You will never convince me that this is not a terrible way to spend my time and an even worse way for these losers to spend their money.”

The footage surprised archivists as, mere months later, minutes from a village meeting recorded Eavis stating ‘ah it was fun though, wasn’t it?’ and ‘let’s do it again next year but with Hawkwind’.

And so the cycle of Glastonbury began and would be repeated for the next 53 years, among the Eavis family, all attendees and every band that has ever played there.

Next week: to 1701, when Jethro Tull first invented prog rock.