Note: Today was made more legendary than it already is because it followed on directly from yesterday, which had been epic enough itself (yesterday was better, but less legendary). Also, I named it after World War I because I expected that there would be a Paint Sex War II in the future (or more).

The planned evening with Valerie got cancelled.

I prepared for the day – put the big green waterproof coat, waterproof trousers, and the blue trainers on, so it wouldn't matter if they got paint on them.

I went to the Parkinson Steps for 08:20, ready for the LUUPS paintball event.

There were five boys and five girls who turned up overall to the paintball outing. We went in cars.

We went to the paintball “barracks” along a very bumpy road so we had to go slowly.

We were given some tatty camouflage trousers and coats to put on top of our own ones.

The teams were split up into the blue team (the five boys) and the red team (the five girls).

The Paintball Guy said rule 1 was to NEVER TOUCH THE MASK. He would check that everyone's masks were put on correctly before the battle.

He gave us the option of using bangers (“grenades”) too and said they are safe but to not pick them up once they are active because they could blow a hand up. I thought one of them could fall into the big hole in my tatty camouflage trousers and explode next to my leg, so I didn't want them to be used. We ended up not buying them because they would be extra money.

The Paintball Guy also said that with the type of coat I was wearing, it would be more painful when the paintballs hit, because it wasn't cushy.

For the first mission, it was a ‘capture the flag’. We were the defenders (starting in our base) and the girls were the attackers (starting in the middle). At first the girls were attacking our base, then we went on the offensive and I hid behind a bin and shot out from it now and then. I survived that one.

The boys won the first two battles, but then we lost one of our players because he tried to adjust his mask.

The dinner at the “barracks” was a hot dog. We also put together £10 each (total £100) for a big lot of paintballs to use.

Later, we permanently lost another player because he took his mask clean off! So it was three boys against five girls. The girls ended up winning the war.

The girls had the best player on their side, who kept “killing” me from a distance, like a sniper. At one point, a paintball hit my mouth and yellow paint splattered in my mask and onto my mouth / face.

In the last battle, we tried our best, but the girls still won. Because of my coat, the paintballs kept bouncing off me instead of splatting, so I kept “alive”. I ran out of ammo. Then all the girls kept shooting me and one of the paintballs finally splatted on my coat, which signified that I was “killed”.

At the end, there was a free-for-all, where we were to shoot each other until we ran out of ammo. I got lots of revenge on the others for shooting me (although it later transpired that the sniper girl was bruised by my paintballs, so I was sorry). One of the boys ended up “winning” this one because he had conserved the most ammo.

We drove back to the Parkinson steps again.

Note: There are many versions and remixes of the ‘For an Angel’ song. DailyMotion at the time had the 1996 version. The original is probably the 1994 version. There is the 1995 version (which I considered to be the same as the Angel in Heaven version, which is yesterday's theme) and what I call the “1993” version (even though it actually first came out in 1994) is locatable on Google. Both the “1993” and 1994 versions are labelled ‘Original version’ for some reason. There is also the 1998 version which is used in the Love Parade and is basically a copy of the 1995 version.