And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney’s Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there’s a bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.
Ni!
I told them we already had one. :: giggles ::
I will not buy this record, it is scratched!
And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel, and one night they take you to a local restaurant with local colour and colouring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’ and complaining about the food - ‘Oh! It’s so greasy isn’t it?’ and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s ‘Daily Express’ and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
Well my manager explained it to me: you see if you’re five miles out over the English Channel, with nothing but sea underneath you, there is a very great impetus to say in the air.
Or Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam.
…and there’s nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomitting and throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you it’ll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of ‘unforeseen difficulties’. i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody’s swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and when you finally get to the hotel, there’s no water in the taps, there’s no water in the pool, there’s no water in the bog and there’s a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are double-booked and you can’t sleep anyway…
Well that was a bit of fun wasn’t it. Ha, ha, ha. And a special good evening to you. Not just an ordinary good evening like you get from all the other announcers, but a special good evening from me to you. Well, what have we got next? This is fun isn’t it. Look, I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything that any of you may be doing at home, but I want you to think of me as an old queen. Friend, ha, ha, ha. Well, let’s see what we’ve got next. In a few moments ‘It’s A Tree’ and in the chair as usual is Arthur Tree, and starring in the show will be a host of star guests as his star guests. And then at 9.30 we’ve got another rollocking half hour of laughter-packed squalor with ‘Yes it’s the Sewage Farm Attendants’. And this week Dan falls into a vat of human dung with hilarious consequences. Ha, ha, ha. But now it’s the glittering world of show business with Arthur Tree…
It is a good shrubbery. I like the laurels particularly.
Lemon curry?
We interrupt this program to annoy you and make things generally irritating.
Well, this is the main hall. We’re going to have all this knocked through, and made into one big, uh, living room.
No. 1. The Larch. The… Larch.
Well that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh, but I would like to assure you that you’d never be treated like that if you had an interview here at the Careers Advisory Board. Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am the Head of the Careers Advisory Board. I wanted to be a doctor, but there we are, I’m Head of the Careers Advisory Board. (emotionally) Or a sculptor, something artistic, or an engineer, with all those dams, but there we are, it’s no use crying over split milk, the facts are there and that’s that. I’m the Head of this lousy Board.
Well, stout yeoman, four ounces of Caerphilly, if you please.
This…is an ex-parrot!
I don’t care how fucking runny it is. Hand it over with all speed.
Ooh I don’t like this, Ooh I don’t like that. Oh I don’t think much to all this. Oh fancy using that wallpaper. Fancy using mustard. Oo is that a proper one? Oo it’s not real. Oh I don’t think it’s a proper restaurant unless they give you finger bowls. Oo I don’t like him. I’m going to have a baby in a few years.
People get killed, properly dead, sir, no barely-crossed fingers, sir. A bloke was telling me, if you’re in the Army and there’s a war, you have to go and fight!