The Reeking mass of lums,
Easter is over, except for school teachers, bless them, they have another week off yet but who would grudge them that eh? Not only are they charged with providing the intellect that will steer our country away from the ditch of hardship and ensure that my pension gets paid so I don't freeze to death in front of some insipid solar powered two-bar heater. They also have to put up with surely the most stupid looking teenagers in the history of teenagers.
We had arranged a couple of days away with friends in Lancashire and set off at 7am on Monday morning. Its the first 7am I had seen since my, career break , I now feel justified in calling it that. What a 7am it was too. Grey, cold, windy and horizontal rain trying its best to get in the car along with the cartload of bags that travelling women seem to need, even for just two days.
I hadn't been looking forward to the three hour drive in the Vauxhall Astra just because on first impressions it came over as being pretty crap, and so it proved.
Astra, does that word not conjure up silver suited space pioneers, thrusting out of planetary orbits and hurtling between shiny modern worlds of wonder. There should be a law against products with non-representative names. The Vauxhall Astra for example should be called something like the Vauxhall Dull, or the Vauxhall Vapid something that said a little about it or the people that buy them.
The rain immediately brought into sharp focus an irritating fault. At least it was irritating after 5 minutes, after 2 hours I was ready for slicing my ears off with salt and vinegar flavored razor blades. The window wipers, when they returned to their seat gave off a noise, that most accurately could be described as a thlapp. So, it was, thlapp.....thlapp.....thlapp....thlapp for mile after monotonous mile, unless of course the rain came down even harder, or I was driving blindly because of the curtain of impenetrable spray that another thundering supertanker had thrown in my face, then it would be, thlapp..thlapp..thlapp..thlapp. That and the constant mono-drone from the little engine, it must have been like that for those airmen in the war, flying for ten hours to bomb Dortmund except they only had to live with the fear of a terrifying death in a fiery ball, I had that bloody thlapp.....thlapp to cope with.
I also have to point out another similarity with those intrepid heroes and their Lancaster bombers, I think a midnight bombing run to the Ruhr would have used less fuel than I did.
Camelot Castle theme park was the destination and hats off to them. They really had the medieval feel down to a tee, what with the gap toothed diseased yokels and incomprehensible Olde English accents. There was a comforting familiarity to be found when gazing unbelieving at most of the patrons, its like I knew their back stories already, like old friends. Then I figured it out. The slack jawed mouth breathing, the somehow both wiry and greasy hair pulled back in a pony tail so tight that it gave the ladies expressions like a Japanese Commander rushing from the undergrowth waving his bayonet and shouting banzai yankee dogs. The tracksuits, if I could remove all the stripes, from all the tracksuits in there, I think it would comfortable stretch to the Sun and back. Yes, like I said, I figured it out, they had all been on Jeremy Kyle at some time or another getting DNA tests or I had seen them wired up to a lie detector.
The rides were pretty lame, it wasn't Ye Olde Universal Studios, that's for sure and they had a ghost train ride called "Smiffys Dungeon of Doom". It was Smiffy from the Bash Street Kids, despite not seeing him for 30 years I recognised him immediately, but I expect the kids there, and in fact, anyone under about 35 wouldn't have any clue as to who Smiffy was, he wasn't even a very prominent Bash Street Kid. Wonder how the rest of the Kids turned out? He was the highlight though, there was no dungeon, and no doom, the shambling Ned heads outside were scarier.
What is it with kids? They never ask for Irn Bru when we're out at home, where you can get it like cocaine in Pablo Escobars pantry. No, they wait till we are on foreign shores to get a penchant for it. This is Vimto country I tried to explain. The suggestion was made to smuggle some in and that immediately painted images in my head of ginger bearded, pasty skinned men, wading ashore in kilts on an isolated beach, pulling behind them a rowing boat full of barrels of Irn Bru to be stashed in some secret cove.
I've stayed in a lot of hotels, all over the world, its been a real thrill and a treat to have done so and the first thing I always do in them, is check the drawers for left behind belongings. Of course I have never found a thing, I presume the maid or whoever would be off with any booty, but I cant help looking. Hoping to find a yellowed treasure map or some forgotten manuscript that explains why if we evolved from Monkeys, there are still monkeys, or yes, when a tree falls in a forest when no one is there to hear it, it bloody does still make a noise.
This hotel, I don't even remember its name had many things you would expect to find in a hotel, comfortable rooms , a decent pool and quite the most terrible restaurant that I have ever eaten in , ever. I have stayed in hotels and eaten things that I didn't really know what it was, I ate things in Ghana that I was later told might have been bat, or rat, or cat, its the last time I stay at Dr Seuss's. But at least it was tasty and the service was always good.
This diner, I shall call it that, because that was what they called themselves was truly, truly rubbish. Gordon Ramsay would have machined gunned the lot of them that were responsible, minced the remains and then fed it to pigs, in the hope that they might have made a half decent roast at last. The waitressing was provided by teenage blondes more interested in gabbing and checking there hair in the mirrors, she should have checked her hair that was in my dinner , that would have been good.
The pizzas were obviously cooked by someone that didn't know anything about food because the they used cheap processed cheddar cheese that bled a yellowy grease over the whole thing, turning the Italian crust base, into a soggy, floppy disaster that Salvador Dali would have had problems making believable in paint.
The cheesy nachos suffered the same fate with the ill chosen cheese and crackers, resembling a plate of pot pourri covered in a bulemics stomach contents. I almost escaped by playing it safe with the salad, but after that Richard Hammond show last week that revealed the presence to the world of Vinegar Eels that live in salad dressing, I couldn't even live with that. A truly memorable dining experience. Still, the company was good and we will all laugh about it some time in the future.
So , that's it, I had hoped to talk about the election and politics but that can wait till I am in the mood.
Land may yer lum reek.
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