Tag Archives: camping

The McMost Expensive McMuffin in the McWorld

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Inflation, recession and corporate greed make for a miserable mix. We’ve all been paying through the nose – and every other orifice besides – for everything from petrol, to heating, to butter. But I’ll wager that – unlike yours truly – as bad as things have become, you’ve never paid £105.22 for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.

I know what you’re thinking. Did the sausage meat come from an endangered rhino? Was the egg that was used in the sandwich laid by a magical hen, which was in turn owned by Lady Gaga? Had the McMuffin been autographed by the late Jeremy Beadle, and using the little withered hand, no less? Well, no.

Let me explain.

My lady and I (yes, I am a Victorian gentleman, thank you very much) had attended her sister’s birthday party on a large campsite somewhere on the outskirts of Galashiels. There’d been a giant fire-pit; a vast, mutant Tiki beach-hut boasting a stage, dance-floor and sufficient seating to trick you into believing that you were in a city-centre boozer (where the booze was free); bathrooms with deodorant in them, for Christ’s sake! It was heaven.

The next morning… not so much.

Sleeping on the ground under a piece of tarpaulin isn’t many people’s idea of a restful night’s kip. Add to that midges and a mild hangover and you’re a good few rings closer to Dante’s Hell than you would be on your average Sunday morning.

I hadn’t had much to drink. My good lady hadn’t either (Editor’s note: may or may not be entirely factual in her case, but there’s a lot more at stake here than veracity). But since neither of us drink more than once in a Blue Nun, we hadn’t needed much alcohol to turn our next morning into a mourning. We greeted the day with a considerable degree of despondency. Until, that is, we remembered the existence of McDonald’s.

Now, McDonald’s beefy and chickeny day-time staples rarely tempt me – though they tempt my children, who usually strong-arm me into going – but their breakfast offerings? McMama Mia! They fall and float down onto my taste-buds like syrup-and-sausage flavoured snowflakes. An almost transcendental experience. If religion wants to compete for our appetites in times of sin and recrimination it’ll have to up its game, with, I don’t know…. Burgers at sermons? Baptising people in Coca Cola? Until then, it’s golden arches, and definitely not golden harps for me.

And thus it came to pass that we were going to McDonald’s, and, yay, verily, we were going to have motherf***ing McMuffins.

There was just one problem.

It was 10:41 and, according to Google Maps, we were sixteen minutes from the nearest McDonald’s – along tractor-infested rural roads to boot. I hastily packed the car – too hastily, as it turned out – and we stuttered and trundled up the all-terrain obstacle course pretending to be a track that snaked its way towards the main road. I say ‘main’ road.

In spite of my worst fears, we were making good time. The roads were smooth and clear. The scenery was wide and breath-taking. The immaculately-grey road sloped and slipped between roller-coastering ski-slopes of greens and browns and yellows, broken up by a circulatory system of dry-stone dykes. Sheaths of sunshine lay like stage-lighting over the gently-swaying fields. It was beautiful. My girlfriend agreed: ‘Pull over,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Well, what can a man do? Nothing, I suppose, except pull over to the side of the road (I say ‘side’) and sit rubbing his dear lady’s back as she hangs out of the open passenger-side door like a downed pilot hanging from a tree by a parachute, all the while keeping one eye on the digital clock and saying to himself: ‘Shit, it’s 10:50, I’m not going to get my McMuffin now, I’m NOT going to get my McMuffin!’, and feeling like a bastard for it, and then saying out loud, ‘Shhh, shhh, darlin’, it’s okay, you’re going to be fine’, but at the same time thinking, ’10:51!!!! I’ll drive right into that bloody restaurant in my Dacia if they try to offer me a cheeseburger, and I’ll make my own McF***ing McMuffin!’ and feeling a bit queasy himself now because he’s clearly the sort of person who places the acquisition of a meaty, eggy takeaway above his beloved’s welfare?

Dear reader: that’s exactly what I did.

A few thwarted spews later and we were back on the road. The clock was ticking. Not literally, you understand, because, as I’ve already established, my car has a digital clock. But you get it, right? I’m trying to sell the impression that this was a race against time, and really tense and that. Which it was. Never-the-less, though, a mere few minutes later we pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot.

And it was 10:56.

Ta-da, right? Phew! You made it, Jamie! Go you, you heroic hunk! Well… no. No, I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. Why would I write something about an entirely successful, hitch-free trip to McDonald’s, and why the hell would you read it?

We joined the queue for the drive-through. It was long-ish, and moving incredibly slowly. My choice was either to take my chances in the queue, and hope that my mouth would reach the sound-portal before the electronic menu blinked out its McMuffins and replaced them with Mozzarella Bites. Or I could back out of the queue, park up, and run into the restaurant with minutes to spare instead of seconds. The choice was obvious. I gave a cursory glance through the sleeping bags that were draped like thick theatre curtains at either side of the back windscreen, put the car into reverse and CRUNCH. I know what you’re thinking, but, no: my good lady hadn’t at that moment bit into a particularly crisp Hash Brown. I’d backed into someone’s BMW.

It was 10:57.

I was deeply apologetic, and deeply concerned about the potential financial impact of my actual impact, but that didn’t stop my subconscious from chanting ‘SAUSAGE AND EGG MCMUFFIN!’ at me throughout my entire encounter with my vehicular victim. ‘STOP HIM TALKING! GET THE McMUFFIN! DISTRACT HIM! GIVE HIM YOUR SHOE? OFFER HIM A PARROT! JUST GET BACK IN THE F***ING CAR!’ I don’t think anyone has ever swapped details after an accident as quickly as I did that morning. It was conducted with the speed and finesse of a magic trick.

AND IT WAS 10:59!

The lunch-time face of the electronic menu snapped into place precisely one second after I’d finished ordering our breakfast. We’d made it. And Jamie said, let there be Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And Jamie saw the Sausage and Egg Mc Muffin. And it was good. Amen.

As we parked up to eat, and I bit into that delicious breakfasty mouth-orgasm, I could taste all that I’d gambled and lost. I could taste my regret at having been so hasty, hashy-bashy and myopic. I could taste having to borrow money from my dad to pay for the damage. I could taste the invoice for £102.53 that would arrive on my phone by electronic means two days later. I could taste my own panic and desperation. And do you know what? It tasted great! My sacrifice, the great personal cost, had somehow made that Sausage and Egg McMuffin taste all the sweeter. I’m hooked now. Hooked on excess. I want this to be the only way I experience food from now on. I’m going to blindfold myself and go through a McDonald’s drive-thru in the hopes of sampling the perfect McChicken sandwich. I’m going to order a quail and quinoa sandwich from Vidal Sassoon. I know he’s a hair-dresser, and dead, but that’s how committed I am to this thing.

So, in summary then: I’m skint and I’m stupid.

But do you know what? I’m lovin’ it.

On Holiday in the Past

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From when I was a boy up until I was a teenager we used to go on family camping holidays to France. Not the awful kind, where you have to erect and sleep in your own tent that’s the same size and shape as a coffin, eat cold beans, and shit in a bush, but the plush kind: the ‘you’re not staying in a hotel but at least you’re not sleeping directly on the ground with insects crawling over your eyes’ kind of camping holiday.

We always booked into managed campsites and stayed in ready-made tents; none of that free-range, find-a-pitch caper for us. We never hired the caravans or mobile homes because a) my step-dad fancied himself as something of an outdoorsman, and b) we were a family unit of 4 kids and 2 adults, so staying in a caravan would’ve been pretty expensive. Never forgetting c) in actual fact, even if we’d been millionaires we still would’ve stayed in a tent, because my step-dad likes to give away money like Israel likes to give away land.

My step-dad would also risk everything to get his hands on free stuff, even if he had no real use for the free stuff once he got it. Perhaps more accurately, he would ask someone else to risk everything to get his hands on free stuff. We always drove to our campsites: covered the length of the UK, stopped off in Plymouth for the night, boarded a ferry the next morning, and continued down through the French countryside, past fields, forests and vineyards. My step-dad once ordered my older sister into a vineyard to steal grapes. She filled two great big bin-liners full of them as he watched from the car like a mob boss. She came back panting, anxious and etched with scrapes, only for a week or so later to have her sacrifice rendered meaningless when the half-squished, spoiled grapes were simply thrown in the bin.

The tents we stayed in on the campsites were large enough that you could comfortably stand up in them, maybe even do a few vigorous bunny hops without grazing your scalp. They were essentially tiny canvas cottages, with three separate bedroom compartments – each with a raised camp-bed – and a communal living area featuring a stove, a fridge, and table and chairs. Shower and toilet blocks were dotted all around the campsite, meaning that comfort – or something very loosely approximating it – was never far away. I say ‘loosely approximating’ because most of the available toilets were just big holes in the ground that you had to squat over and shit in like you were in Auchswitz or something. Thanks, the French.

We usually chose campsites that were close to the beach. This allowed us to treat continental Europe to our own unique version of trooping the colours: we’d stand in the sand and become walking, talking, biological British flags as our Scottish skins burned in the sun, turning from blue to white to deep red.

Unbeknownst to my mum – or so she says, anyway – one time we found ourselves on a nudist beach: a big sand-box filled with wrinkled, withered ball-bags, big wrecking-ball bosoms and sun-ripened gunts. They’re never sexy places, are they?

I was a young lad of five or so, at an age where the words ‘socks’ and ‘bums’ could make me laugh until I puked, so my mum was mightily impressed that I didn’t seem bothered by the explosion of nakedness around me. I scarcely seemed to notice it at all, even when I was standing at the ice-cream kiosk handing over my francs with a big French willy dangling at either side of my head like a pair of droopy ear-rings.

The realisation that there was a garden of flesh surrounding me seemed to slap me in the face all of a sudden and out of nowhere, although thankfully nothing literally slapped me in the face. I must’ve been like the cop working out who Kaiser Soze was at the end of The Usual Suspects.

“Boobies!” I boomed out at the top of my little voice as my eyes jumped around the beach, “BOOBIES! BOOBIES EVERYWHERE!”

My mum said she had to clamp a hand across my mouth and carry me across the beach like a kidnap victim.

“MMOOOMIIES” I shouted into the palm of her hand.

Speaking of kidnapping… another time we were all sitting on a beach munching chocolate-filled croissants when a little waif of a kid, all tan and sinew, crept over to us and muttered a few plaintive words in French.

“What?” my Mum asked him. Without waiting for a response, she threw her hands out as if to shoo all of us back, even though we were sitting quietly in a circle and only moving our mouths. “Let him through, everyone, let him through, come on, son, come on, come over here and sit down.”

She beckoned him over with frantically flapping hands and then patted the sand next to her. He sat down, but slowly, uncertainly, reluctantly, like he wasn’t sure if there were snipers camped in the long grass. He looked around at us as if to say, ‘So you’re my new family now, huh? Jesus Christ…’

He would’ve been even more terrified had he known my mum’s reputation as an ever-so-slightly more benign version of the Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She’s always had a thing for unofficially adopting children, writing the contracts with her eyes and signing them with her heart. A child only has to look at her, and within five seconds she’ll have said something like, ‘Poor wee guy. I’ll bet he wishes I was his mum.’

The wee French boy said something again. My mum picked up a croissant and shoved it in his hand. “Poor wee bugger’s starving, look at him, he’s famished. EAT IT SON,” she commanded. He stared at it for a second. She jabbed a finger from him to the croissant and back again. “YOU. EAT?”

He didn’t really have a choice, so he started to eat.

“There, that’s good, isn’t it, son?” said my mum.

Like most people in the UK, my mum was sure that she could overcome any language barrier by loudly infantilising whomever she was talking to in pigeon-English, most of the time speaking to them as if they were a deaf pensioner. “Is that yummy? Yu-mmee? I… SAID… IS… THAT YU-MEEE, SON? (rubs tummy) Mmmmmmmm. YUMMY FOOD.”

The boy sat, taking tiny bites from the end of the croissant, never taking his eyes off of us for a second. A look of cowed reluctance settled over his face, suggestive of a naughty dog at the dinner table. Each time he swallowed, my mum’s face lit up like she’d just been told she was a grandmother.

She prompted us to give him more encouragement, which resulted in us giving him a big cheer whenever he ingested a particularly large piece of pastry. He welcomed the first cheer into his synapses like it was a gun-shot at close quarters, almost chucking the croissant into the sand with fright.

“YOU JUST KEEP EATING, SON, THAT’S IT.”

A lady appeared behind my mum’s shoulder and said in English with a heavy French accent: ‘Em, excuse me.’

We looked up at her. She said something else in French to the boy who instantly scrambled to her side, a look of boundless relief and gratitude painted over his eyes. My mum scrutinised the French woman, demanding answers with her eyes.

“He, eh,” said the French lady, “He just want to know ze time.”

We all laughed, but I could tell that the French boy was one step away from full-blown PTSD. My mum looked miffed. I imagined her as a Bond villain, angrily slamming her fist down on the control-room table. “Curses! One more minute and the boy would have been mine!”

It makes me very sad that I’ll never go on one of these holidays again – at least not with the same cast – but I’m pretty sure the French must be breathing a mighty, collective sigh of relief.

THE END.

CLARIFICATIONS

My parents enjoyed reading this article, but in talking with them about it and reminiscing about our holidays in general I discovered that I had mis-remembered some of the finer details. Some of this is probably down to the passage of time and how young I was when most of this happened, some of it is probably due to my writer’s brain deciding that my version of events made for a slightly better story, but in any case my parents (whose version isn’t necessarily any more reliable) offered these corrections:

  • We weren’t eating chocolate croissants on the beach. They were pastry things filled with custard.
  • We all tried to get the wee French boy to eat our pastries, not just my mum
  • At the nudist beach – when I had penises at either side of my head – I was waiting in line for chips, not ice-cream
  • I shouted ‘BARE NAKED LADIES EVERYWHERE!’ on the nudist beach, not ‘BOOBIES’.
  • We actually did stay in a caravan the first couple of times we went on holiday to France, but I must’ve been too young to remember

Where there was absolutely no disagreement, however, was on the subject of my step-dad being a tight bastard. Even my step-dad readily agreed.