1998: One World Cup and Poo Hurled Floors

I’ll never forget where I was in the summer of 1998 as Scotland participated in the football World Cup: I was busy shitting myself to death. That’s a memory that tends to stick.

Now, if I were to equate the horrendous gastric issues my 18-year-old self suffered that summer with the horrors of war that my grandfathers faced at a similar age, then it would paint me in a very poor light indeed, so please look away now because that’s exactly what I’m about to do in the next two paragraphs.

Before you judge me, just think about it for a moment, alright? Did my grandfathers take a bullet? No. Did they have dysentery? No. Did they violently shit themselves in-front of their mates – many, many times – during a lads’ holiday to Magaluf? No. No, they didn’t. Quite frankly, they don’t know they’re born. Well, they don’t know anything at all, really, because they’re dead. But you get my point.

I mean, okay, okay, yes, yes: Hitler; war; mass genocide; being locked in a perpetual state of dread and terror; seeing friends die; having half the male population of your town wiped out; a world on the brink of Nazi enslavement, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. But did their giggling mates put their shitted pants on a stick and then fling them out the window? DID THEY FUCK!

The first lads’ holiday abroad is supposed to be filled with clumsy, meaningless sex, or at least the endless and pathetic pursuit of it. It’s supposed to be about drinking until you’ve got less of a grasp on time and reality than the dude from Memento; about narrowly avoiding being evicted from your hotel for pissing in the pool or scanting the manager. And it’s most definitely about childish intra-group pranks ranging from the dangerous to the borderline homo-erotic.

I was denied all of this, having bought the business end of a disease-ridden chicken-and-egg salad on the very first day of the holiday. A little tip for all you first-time travellers out there: if you’re lucky enough to avoid Covid, don’t go and ruin things by selecting as your maiden meal the combo voted: ‘Most Likely to Be Infested with Salmonella’. Because I ran that gauntlet and lost. I guess you could say I tripped over at the starting line, covered in my own fetid, liquid excrement.

Waking up on day two, after a hefty drinking session, I thought I was in the grip of nothing more bothersome than a hangover. I think it was somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth violent spew-poo (arse on toilet seat, head in bucket) that it dawned on me I was in the grip of something far worse. There were little hints everywhere. For instance, your brain usually gives your body ample warning of an impending eruption from Mount Ve-Poo-sius. Typically, you get anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes to find a toilet. When you’ve got salmonella, however, that message arrives by email rather than post, with the warning, more often than not, arriving in tandem with the shit itself. It’s the superpower nobody wanted: the power to summon diarrhoea with your mind.

Farts, of course, cease to exist; a dead concept; a literal blast from the past. You can’t risk them now. They lurk in your intestines, whispering falsehoods in your gut, but you must never listen to them. Not that it matters all that much anyway, because the decision is out of your hands – or anus, if you like. The dial on your arse has been turned from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC, and jammed in place. Your sphincter will spend many weeks propelling curried slurry from your arsehole with the speed of a pro-tennis serve, both when you least expect it, and also exactly when you expect it. All the time, in other words. Sometimes it feels like a malevolent elf is camped inside your rectum firing a staple gun out your bumhole.

On day three I went to hospital, a malnourished, raw-arsed wreck. I was no longer a man: merely a conduit through which myriad foul hues of excrement ripped and splashed their way into the world. A sip of water could see me stuck on the toilet bowl for twenty minutes. Mind you, not taking a sip of water could do that, too. Looking at water could do it. To make sure I stayed hydrated and, well, generally alive, I was hooked up to an IV drip, which was connected to what looked like a mobile hat-stand. I had to wheel it with me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.

Outside, the hot Balearic sun beat down upon my room’s balcony. On it there were two chairs and a small table, upon which was perched a glass ashtray. It must be for visitors, I thought. I know the Spanish are quite liberal and lackadaisical when it comes to lifestyle matters, but even they wouldn’t let ill people smoke inside a hospital… would they? I wheeled my hat-stand into the corridor and aimed a croaky ‘Excuse-me’ at the retreating back of a doctor, who turned casually to face me.

‘Erm, there’s an ashtray on my balcony. Can I… smoke here?’ I asked, apologetically.

‘Are you in here with something to do with your lungs?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then smoke!’

He sauntered off down the corridor.

Excellent. I wondered if that would work with alcohol. ‘My liver is top-notch, doc, mind if I get battered in to a bottle of Buckfast while you’re X-Raying my leg?’

During times such as these it’s tempting to speak out loud that infamous provocation to the universe: ‘At least things can’t get any worse.’ But don’t ever do that. Because they can. And they will. And they invariably do. In my case, I was about to witness the marriage of two of my least favourite things: shitting myself to death, and football.

In my room were two beds, one toilet, and a wall-mounted TV with satellite reception. For the first day or so I was alone, free to sit outside burning my pale Scottish skin on the balcony while reading a book on the horrors of Belsen, which – while not exactly cheering me up – managed to take my mind off of my own suffering. I was quite content to be alone, as I often am. Misery, I can assure you, does not like company, especially when that misery springs from one of the yukkiest and most humiliating ailments known to man. But misery got company anyway. A man soon arrived to occupy the vacant bed. What could I do to stop him? This wasn’t a hotel. I couldn’t exactly complain to the manager. Now, this is where the universe started to play real dirty. It was bad enough that my holiday had been ruined; bad enough that my friends had blamed me for an ant infestation following my explosive and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea in the hotel room, and bad enough that I had to share my shameful suffering with another mortal soul, but it was horror incarnate that I had to share it with another man who was also suffering with salmonella. Allow me to refer you to back to the first sentence of this paragraph: two beds… one toilet.

What the fuck was this? Some horrific Spanish game-show? Were there hidden cameras in the room? ‘Place your bets at home, signore. Whicha one of these British bastardos isa gonna be the first one to shit themselves? Let’s find out, when we play another exciting round of: THE UNITED STING-DOM!‘.

Any time that man so much as repositioned his foot, twitched his torso, or raised an eyebrow, I was out of that bed and clattering towards the toilet like a, well, like a man who was in imminent danger of shitting his breeks. As I’ve already established, when you’re operating on a one-to-five-second warning system, you can’t afford to have the only toilet in your immediate vicinity bagsied by the bumhole of another. It was dog-eat-dog. It was dog-shit-on-dog. Dear reader? I shat myself an ungodly amount of times.

And still the universe wasn’t finished with me. The man’s name was Trevor. He hailed from somewhere in the north of England. He was a very nice man, actually. I really quite liked him. It wasn’t his fault we’d been forced to compete for the same precious resource. If there was one thing I would have changed about Trevor, though, one teeny, tiny, teensy wee thing, it would probably be his social class. Not because I consider myself above anyone else, or believe myself to occupy a high social strata, because neither of those things is true. But if Trevor had been upper middle-class or aristocratic there would have existed a favourable statistical likelihood that he wouldn’t have liked fucking football.

But he did like football. He bloody well loved football. And it was the World Cup. And Trevor wanted to watch every single fucking game – plus after-match analysis. It got to the stage where I very much looked forward to those twenty to thirty times a day when I was painfully slithering volcanic green shit out of my aching bumhole. It came as something of a relief, actually. Was I dead? Was that the game? Was I dead and in hell? Is it because I lied when I was 17?

Trevor left, and I was blissfully happy for a day or two. My friends made the long journey to the hospital to visit, and left me a sneaky joint to enjoy on my sunny balcony. I shared it with the German fella who took Trevor’s place. The new guy didn’t speak any English, so communicating was a challenge. He readily understood ‘Do you want to share this joint?’ but not much else. He was good at miming though. I felt a new kinship between us when he successfully mimed how much he’d love to execute the stray cats that were prowling the hospital grounds many floors below us. Lovely fella. He liked football, too, because of course he fucking did.

I was discharged from hospital on the second to last day of the holiday, just in time to shock my friends with my uncanny impersonation of someone who’d spent six months in Belsen. I really rocked that skeletal chic. Truth be told, I could do with a bit of salmonella these days, in lieu of an exercise program and sensible diet.

There was just enough time to return to the restaurant that had served me the shonky chicken-and-egg salad, this time armed with a video camera, wielded by one of my friends. When the waitress came round for our order, we all requested ‘the salmonella’. To our amusement, she said, ‘We don’t have that’, perhaps not realising the satirical direction the evening was taking due to our impenetrable Scottish brogues. I snapped back, ‘Well, you don’t have it on the menu, but I believe you offer it as a special.’ Our amusement turned to astonishment when – camera still rolling – having made our meaning clear, the waitress proceeded to confess that there had been a number of cases of salmonella among the staff, not just at her branch, but at quite a few of them in the vicinity. Her candour won me the sympathy of Thomas Cook, who months later agreed to refund the cost of my holiday even though they had no affiliation or connection with the restaurant in question (I’m obviously not going to name the restaurant here, but suffice to say it’s my friend Tom Brown’s favourite place to eat in Spain).

Our plane touched down on Scottish soil, and my distraught mother – who’d been calling the hospital every day, and had been close to flying out to be with me – was waiting at the airport. She rushed to hug me. I was surrounded by my friends. So I did what any son would do in those circumstances. I physically blocked her from hugging me, said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ and then walked away scowling. I know that makes me look awful, but I’d already lost a stone-and-a-half and about a million tonnes of my insides. I didn’t feel like parting with what little scrap of manliness I still believed myself to possess. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother still brings that up to this day.

I was relieved to be going home. And do you know the first thing I did when I got there?

That’s right.

Not watch football.

And I’ve tried to keep it that way ever since.

Scots on a Plane: The Family Honeymoon

Airports are dreadful places that seem to exist only to give parents new reasons to shout at their children. Queues, shops, cafes, restaurants, crammed avenues and concourses: the modern airport is everywhere you’ve ever had to lose your shit at your children, all rolled into one. If the Mind-Flayer from Stranger Things was a building, it would definitely be an airport.

I’ve got to hand it to airport authorities: they’re ingenious, dastardly bastards. They know just how to work you, leading you through and along their labyrinths like coked-up rats in a maze. As soon as you’re through the security gates you’re funnelled into a giant shop (the first of many), where cries of ‘me want, me want, me want’ fill the air – and that’s just from my wife. She loves perfume. Not necessarily buying it. Just being around it. I had to spend a solid five minutes pivoting and dashing around snatching glass vials from the hands of my fleet-footed children while she sniffed seemingly every scent ever to have existed. Can there be any new smells left? Or any celebrities who haven’t endorsed a scent? We can’t be too far away from the arrival of ‘Diffidence’, by the late Bruce Forsyth.

I don’t know if I’ve overcome my fear of flying, or if my kids’ disobedience in the airport had left me no longer caring if I lived or died. Never-the-less, I was the best I’ve ever been on a flight without the aid of alcohol, pharmaceuticals or muttered promises to a God I don’t believe in.

I had to mask my true feelings about flying for the sake of the kids, to show them there was nothing to worry about, even though there clearly fucking is when you’re careening through the sky in a highly combustible tin dildo. If worst came to worst I’d like to think I would encourage us all to link hands and exchange looks of silent, sad acceptance, like the toys sliding down towards the furnace in Toy Story 3, but in reality I’d probably be screaming a bumper dictionary’s worth of swear words and hurling my own shit in the air like a chimp.

I’m not usually a fan of take-offs, but watching my eldest son lost in hysterical delight at the sensation in his stomach as we ascended (this was his first ever flight) distracted me from my unease. It was beautiful.

We flew with Ryanair, an airline whose passenger manifest seems to consist exclusively of hen-dos, stag-dos, old lads who still dress like sexual conquistadors in their mid-20s, and leathered-and-lacquered old ladies.

One of these such ladies – a boozy, crag-faced grandma – sat in the seats in-front of us. She fancied herself as something of a banter-merchant, a belief that only strengthened the more ferociously drunk she became. With each passing minute her cackles increased exponentially, in direct proportion to my rocketing despair. The more emboldened the drink made her, the steadier the barrage of banter that came my way. Had her banter been a flower, she would have picked it up, plucked its petals off and crushed its ovary to dust, before blowing the remnants in my face. I wasn’t exactly praying for an air disaster, but I would’ve been happy if a window had blown open just long enough to suck her out into oblivion.

My sister picked us up at Alicante, and we drove the half-an-hour or so to her villa. The first thing that struck me about my surroundings, gazing out the car window at the passing landscape, was that the concept of town-and-city planning didn’t seem to exist here. All there was for miles around was flat, scorched landscape, broken by the occasional incongruous crop of scraggy, withered green. Farms, houses, strip malls and holiday complexes were peppered around the panorama in a hopscotch way, with no discernible attempt to blend or group. I guess that’s what happens when corruption is the rule rather than the exception in the planning departments of local government.

“Senor, can I build a strip-club next to your funeral home?”

“Senor, you could put your strip-club IN the funeral home if the envelope’s big enough.”

As we got closer to my sister’s villa I saw more and more developments for ex-pats and tourists; little cubes that looked like they were designed by the Flintstones, but built by the Jetsons.

My sister had a lot of beds in her house, but small ones, and spread across two floors and three rooms. My wife and I had to sleep apart every night, keeping a kid each with us, Christopher, our youngest, taking the bed on the bottom floor, and Jack taking the bed on the first floor. We switched rooms and kids throughout the holiday, depending upon varying factors such as who Jack wanted to read him a story that night, and which of us could be arsed dealing with the more screamy one.

On the night I’m about to detail – which will henceforth be known as the night of blood-curdling terror – I was lying next to a sleeping Jack when a large, red moth descended from the shadows outside the lamp-light, and almost hit me straight in the face. It struck my shoulder and thudded down onto my rucksack that was lying on the floor at the bedside. I laughed, and watched its next moves with a smile. The moth sat there for a moment or two. Then it flapped and jumped towards the bed, before finally slithering behind it. It… what?

Wait a minute, I thought.

Moths…

…Moths don’t slither.

I wasn’t smiling any more.

A cold dread seized my skull, squeezing me alert. I dropped the book and hopped to my feet, staring from the empty space where the moth-thing had landed to the tiny gap it had squeezed through. If I’d been in a horror movie, I would’ve been the person shining a torch down a dark basement corridor saying, ‘Helloooo?’ in a croaky voice.

I carried Jack downstairs to the bed where his mother and brother lay sprawled, legs akimbo, limbs askew, and slotted him in next to them like a human Tetris piece. There was plenty of room for me – provided, that is, I contorted myself like a 12-year-old Russian gymnast. I didn’t care about comfort: better crumpled and cockroach-free than lying in a spacious bed with the haunted and twitchy demeanour of a combat soldier. My wife opened one eye; an eye that said the same as her mouth:

‘You’re not coming in here.’

‘There’s a cockroach up there,’ I said.

‘I heard,’ said the eye as it closed. ‘Pathetic.’

Pathetic? I was Indiana Jones, and that little guy was my pit of snakes; I was Superman, and he was my Kryptonite. That cockroach was the one chink in the armour of an otherwise impeccably brave man… except for when it comes to, em, wasps, heights, death, rejection, my mother, em… apart from that, though, the one chink in my armour.

Anyway, it was time to be brave. I needed my glasses, my book and my drink, which were all still encased within the roach room. I crept upstairs and stood in the door-frame, willing myself to walk inside. It took me about five minutes to work up the courage, and even then I ran in and out of that room with the speed of a little boy who’s just walked in on his parents shagging. In the morning the cockroach was gone, and so was my self-respect.

On our first full day we stopped off at Merca China for beach and pool supplies. Merca China is a chain of giant warehouses filled with baubles, bangles, beads and bad customer service; the very worst you’re ever likely to experience. The staff make you feel about as welcome as a rogue turd in a swimming pool that’s already bobbed half-way down an old woman’s throat.

The lady who served me didn’t look up at me once; just stood there staring angrily at the counter-top that rested between us, chewing gum like a speed-freak. She snatched the money from my hands and chucked the change at me with the rage-filled intensity of an aggrieved wife hurling her cheating husband’s clothes from a top-floor bedroom window. What crime had I committed beyond interrupting her afternoon mastication? I was aware of the unhelpful stereotype of Asian shop-keepers shouting ‘Hurry up and Buy’ at you, but this was the first time I’d experienced ‘Hurry up and die.’ The Merca China chain is closest in spirit and target market to our own B&M, except here both the B and the M stand for ‘Fuck You’.

We also experienced an authentic Spanish market, which was like a shanty town, but with second-hand sofas and cheap churros. I know markets like this usually attract an older demographic, but I’ve never visited one where you could sign up to start paying direct debits towards the cost of your funeral. No joke.

‘When you’re down the market, could you please bring back a dressing gown, a garden gnome, twenty packets of cigarette papers, some old models of vintage cars, a pound of oranges, and the peace of mind that can only come from a secure and flexible after-life plan?’

Whenever we went to a little cafe or tourist restaurant I always popped in to the ex-pat’s shops nearby. The range of second-hand paperbacks that were on sale helped to paint a picture of the ex-pat’s sociological make-up: Catherine Cooksons and Andy McNabs, sweeping romances and tales of war, spies, and intrigue. Clearly these were older people – retirees and escapees from Blighty – with an old-fashioned, romantic and defiantly binary view of the world; the sort of folks who would’ve voted Brexit, and probably still did, despite living in fucking Europe.

As the holiday was in part a honeymoon – by virtue of its proximity to our wedding – my sister recommended an eatery that would be just the ticket: a ‘traditional’ Spanish restaurant tucked away in an obscure suburban square, thoroughly off the beaten track, complete with mandatory tapas courses, and deliciously inexpensive carafes of wine (inexpensive is my favourite flavour). She said she’d drop us off, take the kids back to the house, feed and entertain them, then come back for us in a few hours’ time. At this point my gratitude started tussling with my paranoia, imagining Highway Robbers with little tick-lists of foreign blonde children.

We very rarely take time apart from our kids. We’re a family, for better or worse, and we do everything together, particularly mass mental breakdowns, at which we excel. This, however, was our honeymoon, so we felt entitled to a few hours’ respite from being maw and paw. Each of us separately has spent time apart from the kids, but it’s a strange feeling to be together, just the two of us, without them: a heady mix of guilt and joy, a cocktail we found was best washed down with copious amounts of wine. Or cocktails. I loved every minute of our freedom, but occasionally got a passing feeling like I’d just burned down an orphanage.

It helped that the restaurant our sister had recommended for us was like something out of a European art-house movie from a different era. The little trattoria has been owned by the same family for eons, and it shows in the personalised clutter and paraphernalia hanging from the walls and around the bar. People have been coming here for years, from all around the world, again and again, and they stay in touch. Up on the wall behind the bar were postcards from as far flung places as Britain, Australia, Scandinavia, and Texas.

I came armed with enough basic Spanish to ask for the menu, the bill, and to ask where the toilet was. I used my phone to Google any other phrases I needed. I always think it shows respect and value to use the native lingo, instead of just wandering in and shouting everything slowly in English like you’re talking to a dog (“I SAID DO. YOU. HAVE. THE. CHIPS. WITH. CHEESE, PEDRO? God, why don’t these people speak the Queen’s English?). Plus, it’s always good to learn new things. The bistro had its own resident cat. Good old Google told me how to ask the waitress its name. I was expecting it to be Ramone or something.

But it was called Fluffy.

That’s the memory of the holiday that will always stick with me: tipsy in that little trattoria, stuck in time, the minutes feeling like long, happy hours, the sun beating down outside; and in the town square just beyond the door, the spiral art installation, held in place by braces attached to trees, that we walked up – giggly and giddily – to survey the unbroken, dusty landscape beyond the town.

We stood there together in silence for a few moments, side-by-side, looking out at a different dusty landscape: that of our future.

All holidays and honeymoons have to end. As do all things, good and bad.

I’ll drink a cheap carafe of wine to that.

Adios, amigos.


Read a separate article from the same holiday about our trip to the mountains, featuring excitement, despair and a stolen car HERE

Scottish Panic in the Spanish Mountains

We went on our first family holiday abroad this past June: me; my new wife, Chelsea; and our two kids, Jack, 4, and Christopher, 2, staying with my sister in her rented house in the Alicante region of Spain. We were having a great time. It was hot, it was sunny, there was lots to see and do.

Beaches are nice. So are bright and sun-kist touristy areas teeming with hustle, bustle and hockery, but I was hungry to devour the ‘real’ Spain. A Spain with Spaniards in it: Spaniards who would find us as objectionable as they did incomprehensible.

The ‘real Spain’. I wasn’t even sure what I meant by that. Maybe I’m a pretentious sod; maybe I’ve let too many stereotypes seep into my consciousness; maybe the real Spain is whatever it looks like at any given moment and the idea that there is a ‘real’ Spain to find is the real illusion here. Maybe. Maybe that’s all true.

I just knew that I didn’t want us to have traveled across the ocean in an airborne death-cone just to join migratory hordes of English and Dutch people. I wanted us to see the things that happen in Spain when no-one is watching, or at least when no-one with blotchy red skin or a bum-bag was watching. Life under the rock. Life unfiltered and unfettered. That’s a tough call in Costa Blanca. Some towns and principalities within the region contain 60 to 80 per cent foreigners. More full English breakfasts per square mile than paellas.

“I could take you to the mountains,” said my sister. “I’ve never been there.”

“Then let’s go to the mountains,” we said.

I hasten to qualify that we would be visiting the area around the base of the mountains, not scaling the mountains themselves. I’m a man who often resents having to trudge upstairs for a piss half-way through an episode of Stranger Things, so I’m unlikely to be enthused by the prospect of scaling vast monoliths of rock in 34 degree heat.

Jack was up for it, though.

“We’ll climb that,” I said with an air of mischeviousness as we got closer.

“Yeah!” he shouted, seconds away from somersaulting out of the moving car.

“Jack, I’m only joking. We’re not really going up the mountain.”

“I want to.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“Can we though?”

“We can’t.”

He kept staring up at the inky giant, tracing its outline with his eyes as it silently towered over the little town below. “But I want to.”

“Maybe another time,” I said, every parent’s favourite fob-off. Yeah, as if. We’ll come back next week with some pick axes and a team of fucking Sherpas. Whatever. It seemed to placate him.

We arrived in some dusty little barrio and parked on a patch of gravel in a deserted street. There were pick-up trucks and sand-coloured, one-storey buildings, all baking in the oppressive heat. I wondered for a second if we’d driven through a time-and-space portal into 1950s Arizona or New Mexico. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being inside my favourite computer game from when I was a kid, the Commodore Amiga classic ‘It Came From the Desert’ [it was a sci-fi open-world/shooty mystery game about giant, mutant ants over-running a dusty US frontier town, itself based on the black-and-white B-movie ‘Them’]. I half-expected to see a stubble-chinned, grinning exemplar of transatlantic Desperate Dan-ness standing in the street in a wide-brimmed hat, shaking his head and muttering about ‘those damn hippies’ and ‘killer ants, sheesh’.

I love the post-apocalyptic feel of a mid-summer siesta. Most of the streets we walked down were empty, save for the invisible tumble-weeds and sheets of newspaper I imagined blowing down them. The wind was imaginary, too. There wasn’t even a breeze. The heat hung in the air like a slab. It felt like we ruled the place, a bunch of wild west gunslingers moseying into town at high noon.

We found a play-park in a central square, overlooked by flats that lined its perimeter like fortress walls. Far above them sat the silent, hulking mountain. It’s rare to find an abandoned play-park during daylight hours back home. We quickly found out why this one was free for the taking. Almost every metal and plastic surface was hot enough to cook the glazed hind legs of a giant ant (delicious with parsley and garlic butter, so I’m told). Our kids’ screams kept us apprised of the developing situation.

The town’s eerie, holocaustic vibe didn’t keep us in thrall for long, despite its unusual cavalcade of street graffiti, which included a Pulp Fiction-era Samuel L Jackson and a giant, spray-painted cock-and-balls [presumably the work of Alicante’s very own Wanksy].

We returned to the car and sped off in search of further adventures, arriving in the historic town of Orihuela a short while later. Google told us it had a castle and an historic seminary. We crept around town looking for a parking space. Eventually, we found a side street that presumably contained a time portal back to the late 19th century, because the long street running perpendicular to it was all cobbles and steps and dusty facades and shutters and old swarthy moustachioed men sipping coffee from tiny cups at tiny tables perched outside their front steps. Only the line of cars up both sides of the street belied the date on the calendar.

It was still siesta time, so there was barely a soul in sight. We parked the car outside a dinky police station – more of a police bakery, size-wise – figuring that there were few safer places to leave a car. That proved to be something of a miscalculation. But we’ll get to that.

It was approaching thirty-five degrees and the humidity was high so each step was a trudge. The shade was our friend. We hid in the hulking shadows of tall buildings. Close to where we’d parked was a path that winded up the mountain to the Castillo de Orihuela, the ruins of a Moorish castle that lent spectacular views across the town itself. The castle was the reason we’d come to Orihuela, but we didn’t want it to be the reason we died of heat exhaustion half way up a mountain. We decided to sight-see around town for a while until it got a bit cooler, or at least until it wasn’t so hot that mosquitoes were considering us medium-rare. There was always the seminary in the meantime, the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo.

Orihuela is like the first four episodes of The Wire: this is what I look like, it says, this is how I talk, this is how I am, this is what I’m about, and if you don’t understand it, or you don’t like it, more fool you, you philistine. Don’t let the Colegio hit you on the way out. Orihuela makes few concessions to tourists. While we walked its streets the town was largely indifferent to us, and the part that wasn’t fucking hated us. I loved it.

We couldn’t find the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo, despite a long search. I was sure we’d passed it only moments before finding our parking space, but no-one believed me. After winding a circuitous route around the town we were parched and tender-toed. We eventually found a cafe with tables outside where we could stave off thirst and exhaustion a little while longer.

An old lady sat at the table next to us, and despite her not speaking English, and me speaking very little Spanish, I tried to ask her where the nearest barber-shop was. We struck up a conversation, and I can assure you that I’m using the word ‘conversation’ in its loosest possible sense. I thought it polite to tell her a little bit about us, our names, where we were from. It wasn’t the first time that holiday I’d tried to tell a bona fide, non-English-speaking Spaniard that I was Scottish, but it was the last.

To my incredulity, the word ‘Scotland’ didn’t register with her. At all. Her old eyes narrowed with irritation as I continued to labour the point. I refused to give up, and started to mime the bagpipes. Still nothing.

Up in Catalonia my country’s struggle for independence is synonymous with their’s (although thankfully Scotland’s route hasn’t been so fraught with police action and political violence), so the land of William Wallace and battered haggis suppers is very much alive in their thoughts and imaginations. But in the Alicante region? In Orihuela? Wow. Nunca has visto Braveheart, anciana?

Maybe I’m just not very good at charades, which I concede might be the case. This was my technique for miming the bagpipes: I held my left fist up to my mouth, adopted the ‘I’m a little teapot’ pose with my right arm and waggled it about at my waist, all the while puffing my cheeks out and making an intense blaring sound. It’s possible that the old lady interpreted this mime as either a chicken having a mental breakdown or some sort of sinister sexual request.

“It’s not your mimes,” said my sister. “They don’t know. They don’t care.”

‘What?’ I thought, with a not insignificant amount of disdain. ‘Not know SCOTLAND? But we’re the darlings and heroes of the world. There are probably kids running through the Brazilian rainforests and beach-combing on Vanuatu right now wearing ‘CU Jimmy’ hats. When people trace their ancestry, they’d give anything to find a wee Scottish laird in there somewhere. How DARE these old Spanish ladies not know what Scotland is!’

“They only know England,” continued my sister, who I feel it’s appropriate to point out was born in Essex.

Our thirst proved to be a great sat-nav. The cafe looked on to the Colegio. It was an interesting place, our visit to which was only mildly marred by my two lunatic children, who were determined to fight their way through this historic relic, even though there was nothing and no-one to fight. Well, except each other.

As we left the Colegio and walked to the top of the street, we realised that we’d been parked a side-street away from it all along. We’d set off in the wrong direction from the very first moment. Well, I say ‘we’. Visionary that I am, and as hinted a few paragraphs ago, I’d known this all along. I’d lobbied hard to steer the group left, but the women, who always thought they were right, urged me right. They were wrong. I knew I was right, I KNEW it, but I’d buckled under the weight of my wife’s heat-bolstered bolshiness and sunkist rage. I was too hot to argue, so I slinked and shuffled behind her muttering unkind remarks, like I was one of the kids and I’d just been told to go tidy my room.

I was right, though. I was right. They should’ve been ringing the bells. The mayor of Orihuela should’ve ordered the streets shut to traffic and thrown a carnival in my honour. Cruelly, I was denied my moment in the sun, couldn’t bask and dance a jig in the fierce light of the truth, because a troubling scenario had presented itself: the unexpected absence of cars in the street in which we’d parked.

All cars.

All gone.

My sister’s car, too.

Stolen.

As I stormed up and down the nearly deserted Spanish street I temporarily allied myself with Donald Trump by shouting, ‘I see you can’t even park your car outside of a fucking police station without it getting nicked in this shit-hole of a country!’ I was waving my hands around like an orchestra conductor wired directly to the electricity grid. A dark-skinned boy in basketball garb bounced past me with a confused smile on his face, obviously wondering why the big pink-and-red flabby guy was trying to summon a heart-attack.

I thought it must be street urchins. Shoeless motherfuckers from ye olde tenements at the top end of the street. An old man was sitting outside his glorified cubicle of a house, sipping tea at a small table with a chequered table-cloth draped over it. He raised himself up, balancing his body atop his bandy old legs and tip-toed through a curtain into his house. That earned him a place in the vast tapestry of my car-thieving conspiracy. What was he, the lookout? HOW MUCH WERE THOSE URCHINS PAYING HIM?!

This wasn’t the one we found, but it’s the same idea

I scoured the empty space where the car used to be. Did I expect the car to mysteriously reappear once I’d looked for it in the same place forty times? Miraculously, though, on approximately the forty-eighth time of looking, I found something. A flat, triangular sign stuck to the ground near the spot. I’m not very good at reading Spanish, but you don’t have to be Miguel de Cervantes to recognise a picture of a tow-truck. I showed it to my sister, and watched as her panic turned to relief then to anger, then to dread, then back to panic again. We crowded round the triangle like it was some mysterious artefact, trying to unlock its secrets with our eyes. The kids thought this was a fun game, ‘Hide That Car’ or something, and were rioting up and down the street, stopping now and then to ask unwelcome questions like, ‘Where did the car go, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Will we ever get the car back again, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Does this mean we can’t go to the castle, Aunty Ali?’

I could tell that Aunty Ali, who normally found the children unremittingly cute no matter what they did, was ready to fucking throttle them. I herded them up, and took them along the street with me to a little art gallery we’d passed where I hoped very much the gallery owner spoke English.

She didn’t. If it was hard to mime ‘Scottish’ think how much harder it was to mime ‘my sister’s car has been towed from the street and they’ve left a little triangle on the pavement and do you know how far away the impound place is?’ Very hard. In fact I gave up. I offered a meek, polite but defeated smile, and backed out of the gallery, taking my two Tasmanian devils with me.

It wasn’t until days later we realised that 10 seconds from where the car was towed was the house of Miguel Hernandez, a famous Spanish poet

My sister was on the phone to the people from the triangle, slumped against the wall of a side-street as if she’d been shot, frantically trying – and largely failing – to understand and be understood by the policia. The kids bundled into their mother’s legs, then resumed spinning around the street in circles of screams. I silently surveyed the street. It was clear to me what had happened.

We’d arrived during siesta, where the normal rules of street parking didn’t apply. Presumably, everyone had returned in the dying minutes of siesta to move their cars, leaving ours sticking out like a Scottish person on an Iberian beach. We’d learned that parking outside a police station isn’t really that smart when you’re flagrantly violating local bye-laws.

The woman from the gallery appeared at the foot of the alley-way waving a map. She’d thought I was a lost and curious tourist asking for directions to museums and the like, and had decided to follow me and conclude our non-conversation on a positive note. I took the triangle from my sister’s hand and held it aloft for the gallery lady to see. The centimo dropped. She agreed to speak to the policia over the phone. After the call she was able to indicate on the map where we should haul our sorry, heavily-fined asses. Thankfully, the police car impound was a mere twenty minute walk across town, and easy to reach.

Although we were all relieved that the car hadn’t been re-appropriated by a pack of thieving Spanish peasants from my quasi-racist imaginings, my sister remained understandably upset. I felt bad for her, and consoled her as best I could, but now that we were out of immediate peril I was free to enjoy the adventure as it unfolded.

We were walking through parts of the town that tourists would never think, or want, to tread: the grimy parts, the neglected parts, the soulless and empty parts. We walked over raised walkways, behind graffitied walls, past car lots and junk piles, heading towards a taste of ordinary – albeit remarkably stressful – Spanish life in an every-day municipal building. This was an adventure. I was in heaven. ‘This’ll be fun to write about,’ I thought to myself. And do you know what? Summer me was right. It has been fun to write about.

A police station isn’t a cheery place. If you’re in there, you’re either a perpetrator of a crime, or a victim of one. Bright paint-jobs and murals of suns and butterflies aren’t really the order of the day. This particular police station was as muted and anti-septic as you would expect from any police station anywhere in the developed world. Luckily our kids were there, to break the sombre silence with their happy wee faces and delighted shrieks. Within moments, the policeman on the desk was sharing cheeky faces with them from behind the glass. My sister was very upset as we filled out the paperwork to get the car back. I half-hoped her very genuine display of emotion would inspire a movie-esque change of heart in the policeman, and he’d tear it all up and chuck us the keys, but the police don’t really work like that.

A few minutes later we were all in the freshly liberated car. My sister’s hands were still shaking, but we had overcome adversity and come out on top. We were safe. We had a story to tell.

OK, we’d never managed to reach the castle ruins or see much else of the towns around the mountains. But I felt we’d seen Spain. Really seen it.

For better or worse, it had been ‘real’.


Here’s that graffiti I mentioned earlier.

Scared to Get High: Jamie vs The Blackpool Tower

Some features of a place are so iconic that they become inextricably linked to the totality of the tourist experience: like climbing the Eifel Tower when you’re in Paris; visiting the Colosseum when you’re in Rome, or being shot and stabbed in the face when you’re in Airdrie.

Take Blackpool. If you think ‘Blackpool’ you might very well think about piers, donkeys, rollercoasters, dead entertainers, postcard kitsch, alcoholic armageddon, or trams, but the very first image to assail your mind will probably be the tower; it’s the thing that makes Blackpool indelibly ‘Blackpool’.

Blackpool without the tower is like fish without chips, yin without yang, Ant without De… OK, well, maybe not that last one.

Simply put, if you ‘do’ Blackpool without the tower, then you haven’t done Blackpool, my friend.

My family and I went on a short holiday there earlier this year. All that being said, there was no way I wasn’t doing the tower, right? It was a slam-dunk. Impossible to avoid. Just one snag, though: I’m a lily-livered, height-phobic fraidy-cat. As far as my adrenal gland is concerned a Ferris Wheel is the size of Jupiter, and the Blackpool Tower is two burning World Trade Centre towers stacked on top of the Empire State Building stacked on top of the mountains of Mordor.

Our kids were there with us, which changed things somewhat. I couldn’t deprive them of a chance to gaze across the ocean from the tower’s peak; and, more importantly, I couldn’t let them see me – their big hairy dad – quaking with pant-crapping terror.

We lose the luxury of our fears and phobias once we’ve got kids. Every spasm or moan or wobble or flip-out risks cursing them to mimic and then internalise the very worst and weakest points of your psychology. If you can’t exorcise your fear – and you probably can’t, at least not without a long, intensive course with a behavioural psychologist – then the trick is to hide it; put on the acting performance of your life so as not to overwrite the roadmap of your children’s nervous system with your own spaghettified neuroses: smile a grinding, rictus grin below bulging, terrified eyes, as you mutter reassuring sentiments by rote like a ventriloquist dummy with a phone jammed to its ear and a gun held to its head.

I haven’t always been afraid of heights. I remember as a child being quite the little daredevil. I also remember being in the backseat of our family car as it zig-zagged up the narrow, treacherous, precipice-fringed roads of the Pyrenees, staring dispassionately down into oblivion, as my mother shook and cried and wailed in the front seat like an Arab mother at a funeral. Maybe we inherit some of our fear; maybe as we get older and closer to death we become more acutely aware of the myriad ways we could meet it.

Mercifully, the Blackpool Tower wasn’t the first item on our itinerary. I had time to mentally prepare myself. Actually, that wasn’t a mercy at all. In reality I had time to build my fear into a fortress, complete with machine-gun turrets and flying tigers. Every day until the day of our fateful meeting, the tower stared at me across the sky: leering; jeering; taunting. Jutting into the sky like a great gravestone. ‘You can try to ignore me,’ it said. ‘But I’m here. And you’ll be here, too. Eventually. We both know it. You can’t escape it, my friend.’

I wasn’t going to be beaten by this vast, inanimate son-of-a-bitch. This towery bastard. Was I? No. I couldn’t let it beat me. But how could I possibly win? I had a less-than- impressive track record of winning fights against heights since reaching adulthood.

I’d like to submit into evidence the following incident: Paris.

I’d gone there with an ex-girlfriend many years ago, facing an almost identical dilemma to the one I would later face in Blackpool. You can’t do Paris without the Eiffel Tower, so you’ve no choice but to climb it.

So I climbed it.

Or tried to.

I say climbed.

The elevator that took visitors from the ground to the first floor was packed with children and other smiling bastards, who were all somehow actually excited at the prospect of being lifted into the sky high enough that if they dropped they would all die. As the elevator began its ascent my mouth began its descent into the foulest, most nightmarish filth ever uttered by a human being.

“Jamie, your language,” chided my girlfriend. “The children?”

“They’re all fucking French,” I said, “They’ve no idea what I’m saying.”

Another volley of fear propelled a fresh salvo of extra-spicy swears out through my mouth and into the air. What air was left after I’d finished hyper-ventilating, that is.

The first floor of the Eiffel Tower was fine, I suppose, if you’re content to describe as ‘fine’ a man who tip-toes ridiculously about the place like Joe 90 doing a space-walk as all around him children skip and run and laugh. I felt towards the edge of the platform like a blind-man suffering the DTs, and unfortunately found it. I slipped my fingers through the grating, as a guest at Guantanamo Bay would the walls of his cage, and peered down at the ground far, far, far below. I felt my heart da-doyng up into my throat, and my legs turn to jelly beneath me. “This is nice,” I said through gritted teeth, wearing the face of a gorilla who’d been found dead on a mountain-top after being kicked out of a plane.

We waited in the queue for the second elevator that would this time take us to the viewing platform at the very tip of the tower. Half-way to the front of the queue I buckled and bottled, and had to walk away, slowly and awkwardly, a pirate with MS losing his sea-legs, a defated man limping off into the future…

2018. We looked up at the Blackpool Tower.

My kids were excited.

“Are you sure about this?” asked my partner.

“Yes,” I lied. “Yes I am.”

Before I could fully activate my fear centre and adrenal gland, we first had to buy tickets from the pleasant girl at main reception. She was smiling. Why was she smiling? A little incongruous I thought. When a prisoner’s being led from his cell on death row to the electric chair, good customer service isn’t high up on his list of priorities.

“Thanks for using the State of Alabama Correctional Facilities Death Row Chair Number 3, Old Smoky in the vernacular, voted the Killiest Electrified Chair in Death Row Monthly’s state-sponsored execution awards six years’ running. If you could just take a moment or two to fill out our customer satisfaction card before you start convulsing in your very final terror and agony…”

I smiled back at the receptionist: the closed-lipped, stretch-mouthed grimace of the condemned man. She just smiled back all the harder, probably wondering if I was mental.

Because I’d never been inside the Blackpool Tower building I was unfamiliar with its layout. This was both a blessing and a curse. I had no idea exactly which set of stairs or which creaky elevator would lead me up into the tower itself. Our journey through the building placed my heart and mouth on a heady see-saw of panic and peace. At least the kids were there to distract me. It’s hard to surrender to terror when you’re busy trying to prevent two little humans from slapping each other in the face.

Up stairs, in lifts, along corridors, we – and some other groups of people – eventually arrived at a 4D cinema (the fourth D is having water sprayed in your face) where we had to watch a tower-themed promo video, which for some reason my eldest boy – then three – found more terrifying than anything else he’s experienced before or since.

We all spilled out of the cinema and trickled down the corridors, all of us travelling in the same direction, but none of us entirely sure why and, most crucially, where. A few right-angles later, we arrived at a small corridor, two lifts marking its limits. One of our number hit the call-button, while the rest of us stood by the walls or sat down on the floor with our kids, huddled together like refugees.

The lift opened, and we shuffled in. I figured we were heading for another floor, perhaps this time to sit through twenty minutes of juggling. We couldn’t be heading up to the tower, because our embarkment was too unceremonious. Surely there would have been at the very least a member of staff to lead us on our way – I don’t know: a lift attendant or something?

I nodded at the lift attendant as the doors closed behind us.

I noticed two things: one, that he was wearing a reasonably ceremonious uniform. And, two, his hand was resting on a switch.

My brain tried to hold reality at bay with all of its panicked might.

I kept nodding at the lift attendant, so intently that I almost slipped into a hypnotic fugue. I was certainly entranced enough not to immediately realise that one of my nods was actually an involuntary lurch caused by the lift starting to climb.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see girders dropping from sight, one after the other, then sky, then the tops of buildings, then road, then sea…

The lift attendant was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t hear anything above the rising cauldron of my panic; the blood whipping and roaring and lashing in ferocious waves against the cliffs of my skull. I stared straight at him, straight into his eyes, anything to avoid looking at the view to my left, the sea, the soaring sky, the tiny little people, getting tinier by the second, and then… out of the corner of my other eye, I saw something that as a bona fide scared person I was absolutely bloody delighted to see.

Someone who was even more scared than me!

My own fear had blinded me to his presence at first, but there he was, not even brave enough to eye-ball the attendant, hunched against the non-see-through portion of the lift, eyes closed, moaning softly. He was a little older than me, a fellow Scot, and though I felt some compassion for his plight, I drew great strength from his even greater misery.

I clapped him on the back and started wise-cracking.

Me, the mighty warrior, conquering the tower. LOOK AT THAT BRAVE FACE!

He was my cure. I actually rather enjoyed being at the top of the tower, and I’ve definitely got this guy to thank. Within a few minutes I was tap-dancing over the Perspex floor in the viewing gallery, oblivion just a few inches beneath my feet, as I watched him struggle to walk down an ordinary corridor without being pushed and propelled from behind by his kids.

“Come on, sweetheart,” I heard his wife say, “If that guy can do it, so can you.”

In your FACE, fraidy-cat!

My kids had a brilliant time, not a hint of fear or apprehension on their features as they looked down through the floor, or gazed out the windows, or walked up the steps to the very, very peak of the tower to peer through the gratings. The next day I even went on the Ferris Wheel.

Blackpool: I fucking own you. CN tower?: I’m coming for you, bitch.


We also visited Madame Tussauds. See the, em, rather disturbing pictures here.

I Hate Football. I Hate Football So Much.

Imagine an eerie, post-apocalyptic landscape. Sheets of newspaper crinkle in the wind, blowing down streets and beaches untrammelled by human feet. There are no people here. None at all. Nature’s sound-track falls and rises in roars and whispers across the deserted shop-fronts and smooth-as-silk sands. There’s definitely no football. Do you know where we are? We’re on my perfect holiday.

Not for me the hordes of scarlet hedonists scuttling over beach-towels like migrating crabs : the kind of hideous families who look like they’ve been created by Mr Blobby fucking a pot of lobsters. Or families from Paisley asking for directions to the nearest fish-and-chip shop – in Turkey. Or being surrounded by the sort of quasi-racist holidaymakers who insist on calling every foreigner they see ‘Manuel’, even if they’re on holiday in Norway. If the word ‘Uncovered’ can be tagged on to the name of my holiday destination for the purposes of a SKY1 documentary series, then you can count me out. And did I mention definitely no football?

So when my (now ex) girlfriend announced that our first holiday together – and my first trip abroad for seven years – would be to Salou – a Spanish resort town seen as a more exotic Blackpool by British boozehounds  – my heart didn’t so much sink as plummet through the earth’s molten core. She detected some of this in my facial expressions: ‘I know you’re disappointed, with it being so late in the year,’ she said, ‘but just because the place will be a ghost town doesn’t mean we won’t have fun.’

If I’d been a cartoon character, that would have been my cue for a double-take. I asked her to repeat the words ‘ghost town’. ‘Ghost town,’ she said again, puzzlement ruffling her brow. Ghost town: my kind of town.

We arrived at Edinburgh airport minus the baggage of life’s interruptions, looking forward to an undisturbed, relaxing week of each other’s company. I looked around the departure gate. Bald-spots, beer bellies and football strips abounded.

“Why are there so many Rangers supporters boarding this flight?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

Football’s supposed to be in my blood, but it isn’t. I go out of my way to avoid it; unfortunately, being male and Scottish love of the sport is seen as a non-negotiable prerequisite for ownership of a penis. Not liking football doesn’t compute. It leads people to suspect you’re one of ‘them’ they’ve read about in the Daily Mail.

“I don’t like football”, I tell them.

“Then…” they start to stammer, “what do you and your boyfriend do on a Saturday then?”

Strangers strike up intense, football-related conversations with me without ever assuming a lack of passion on my part, and then act appalled when I don’t know who scored the winning goal in last season’s Cup play-off. The way I see it, if I want to feel part of a feral, noisy, and violent tribe, I’ll visit my family. Football is nothing less than a stadium-sized distraction from the finer things in life.

And there I was, about to board a plane alongside scores of drunken zealots, the harbingers of doom now revealed in the shiny blue sea of their strips. The whole of Ibrox, Rangers’ spiritual home, was following me abroad.

“What’s going on?” I demanded of one of them.

“Rangers”, he slurred, “are playing Barcelona. You going to the game, mate?”

No, not THOSE Rangers.

If – as the old saying goes − ‘War is how the Americans teach themselves geography’, then football is the Scots’ method; although in Scotland war and football are never mutually exclusive. The flight certainly wasn’t a dull one. Cabaret was provided by the Rangers’ fans; those maestros of the music of hate. The hairy gentleman seated behind me was responsible for percussion accompaniment, which involved using the back of my seat as a drum-kit. He gleefully kicked and thumped his approval to the sectarian songs that were filling the cabin like nerve-gas.

“One more thump and I’m saying something”, I said to my girlfriend, after the one-hundred and seventieth thump. I said it again thirty thumps later. The stewardess thundered down the aisle. Now they’d be sorry. She surveyed the army of tattooed tub-thumpers surrounding her on each side of the plane and decided that a genial “Come on, boys, be nice”, would do the trick. It didn’t. Off she swished, leaving us at their mercy once more.

By the end of the flight they’d turned the air as blue as their shirts. The stewardess, whose smile had been worn down to a hyphen, raised a conspiratorial eyebrow at me. I raised two in reply, as if to say ‘All evil needs to prevail is for good women to do nothing.’ I figured that was too verbose a message to be conveyed by brow, so followed up with a less-ambiguous scowl.

In the airport terminal I ranted like a half-mad savant, prophesying pain and torment for the duration of the holiday.

“Calm down, honey”, said my girlfriend. “The fans will be staying in Barcelona; they won’t come near Salou. It’ll be fine, OK?”

We greeted our airport transfer driver. It was a long journey from Barcelona’s airport to Salou. The background thrum of the road was all we felt able to process after our airborne aural assault, so we said nothing to each other, dreaming of cocktails on empty beach-fronts.

“I think it’s going to be OK”, I said as we pulled up outside the hotel.

“Me, too”, she trilled.

The smile I’d allowed to pull my cheeks apart slammed shut like a leather-bound book. There it stood, like a brothel in a monastery, the letters of its neon sign pulsing like poisoned veins: ‘The Ibrox Bar’. I gaped up at it: “Please tell me Ibrox is Spanish for ‘cocktail’.” Raucous laughter boomed from the bar’s open door, so loud it was almost visible. The advance party was already encamped. Reinforcements would surely follow. Shell-shocked, I stood on our hotel balcony. I lit a cigarette and gazed up into the cool night air. Draped over one of the top-floor balconies was a flag depicting the red-hand of Ulster. The hotel had been compromised, too.

“Let’s just go to that nice Italian restaurant across the street and forget about it for now, shall we?” she asked, not really asking. Over a civilised meal I chewed over some uncivilised sentiments.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll all die”, I said, stabbing my fork into a fat slice of chicken.

She pushed a piece of pizza to the back of her plate. “I’m here to have a nice, relaxing time, OK?”

I wondered how long my wine glass had been empty. “It’s not my fault we brought hundreds of marauding Vikings with us. I knew I should have paid more attention to football fixtures.”

Her hand slapped down on mine, a gesture of stern affection. She dared me to look at her. “Let’s just have a nice time. OK?”

I nodded, knowing she was scouring my features for any residual sulk. “OK.” In my head I pictured a Rangers’ fan burning in Hell.

“That’s what I mean”, she said. “Keep smiling like that.”

The scene outside the restaurant was like one from a zombie movie. Drunken, blue-clad louts staggered and zig-zagged up the street. “WE ARE THE PEO-PLE!” came the chorused cry. I felt like crying myself.

“Let’s go somewhere for a nice walk”, she said, emphasising the word ‘nice’ with a hiss.

“OK”, I agreed. “How about France?”

Palm trees were silhouettes against the purple-tipped sky. At the horizon the sky was alive with brilliant hues of yellow and orange, like flames cast from a furnace, or light thrown from a far-off nebula. The promenade was deserted, the only sounds our steady footfalls on the pavings. A soft sea-breeze teased our bare arms. We sat by the marina, legs dangling above the water. Boats whished and creaked against their moorings, gentle movements lulling in the darkness.

“You’re quiet”, she said, gently squeezing my fingers.

My eyes were fixed on the endless expanse of ocean: dark, deep, silent and eternal. “Yes”, I said, feeling a smile on my lips. “Yes, I am.”

The next day the blue-shirts took their battle to Barca stadium, leaving the sun-kist streets of Salou deserted. Only the odd sheet of newspaper dancing in the wind disturbed the calm. And I smiled. I am the people. One-nil to me, football.

One-nil.


I originally wrote this article for Scottish Comedy FC, where it appeared a few years ago.

If you like football and funny things combined, check it out. Blog and fortnightly podcast: http://scottishcomedyfc.com/

 

On Holiday in the Past

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.

Memories of Marmaris – Pt 2

Ah, Marmaris is beautiful. Nearby Turunc is beautiful. Everywhere I went was beautiful. On a jeep safari I saw sweeping, dusty fields, lit by the sun like the Benicio del Toro bits in Traffic; lush green forests winding over rugged rock; the snaking mountain roads skirting panoramic views you would be happy to fall towards to your death, spending your last moments snapping like some demented Japanese tourist. Out on the boats there were beautiful bays (to call them sun-kissed would be a cruel underestimation – the bays were sun-fucked); gently swaying palm trees planted in hot, jagged sand; giant, hazy-green hills standing guard over the coast-line in the distance; and water at the beach so pure, clean and clear you’d have thought it was invisible.

Tequila Islam-er

Turkey has a secular government, but culturally it’s predominantly Muslim: although you won’t find much evidence of this in Marmaris. Unless the Qu’ran’s been rewritten to include passages like this: ‘Blessed are they who cut about with their lips hanging out of their bikinis and drinking alcohol until they projectile vomit in each other’s mouths’.

You’ve got to love the woman on TripAdvisor who raged about her experience in Turkey, drawing particular attention to ‘the bloody singing from that mosque at half four EVERY morning!’ Love, I’d be annoyed if I had to put up with that racket outside of my window in Grangemouth, Scotland. Multiculturalism or no multiculturalism, I like my sleep, and if it was disturbed by a recording of some bearded Brian-Blessed-alike booming out holy shite even before the seagulls had started their daily wailing, then those speakers would be getting chucked into the River Forth. (so too, probably, would my dismembered, headless corpse, but at least I’d meet my death after a half-decent night’s sleep) But you’re on holiday in an Islamic country. Thomas Cook can’t make the Muslims renounce their religion and stop praying for a week just so you can have a nice, quiet holiday getting drunk and reading Jackie Collins’ novels by the poolside with your tits out.

Och Noo the Aye

On my first night in Marmaris, a Turkish tout asked me where I came from. ‘Scotland,’ I replied. He then made a particularly eerie noise. ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked. The penny soon dropped: he was trying to say: ‘Gonnae no dae that.’ Excellent. He then implored me to ask him, ‘How no?’, whereupon he ejaculated: ‘Just gonnae no!’ (allow me to make it clear that I’m using ‘ejaculated’ in the sense of ‘issued forth’, rather than suggesting that the poor little man was so excited by the prospect of imitating Ford Kiernan that he shot his bolt).

Another chap could tell me all about Falkirk, as ‘one of his ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex girlfriends (his words)’ was from there. As usual, the Marmaris definition of relationship is stretched to its very limits.

In the idyllic, sun-soaked bay of Turunc I encountered a man who could do a more impressively accurate Glasweigen accent than anyone of non-Scottish extraction in the history of the world. I wanted to take him home and place him in a circus somewhere. These people had done their homework. But you know why they’d done their homework, right? Correct. Every one of those cunts was trying to get money out of me. Which leads me to this next section…

The Real Hustle

Yes, Marmaris – and I’m sure all of Turkey itself – is beautiful. And, despite it being a relatively poor and horrendously corrupt country (if this piece was on Wikipedia, this is the point at which it would say: citation needed), the people are generally nice. But they do want your money: all of it. And the ingenuity they display in trying to part you from it is breath-taking.

It begins at the airport where you have to hand over an English tenner to a highly-uninterested and award-winningly grouchy customs officer. This is a down payment on all the rest of the money you’re going to have to spunk away over the course of your holiday.

My coach driver stopped off at a small café bar about an hour out of Dalaman, where I experienced my first taste of Turkish creative accountancy. Gambling correctly on me being a clueless first-timer with no idea of New Turkish Lira’s value, the little boy behind the till (well, nobody seems to use tills – they rack up your bill on a calculator) lovingly sold me two cans of juice, a large packet of crisps, one packet of chewing gum and a bottle of water for the equivalent of 7.50GBP. So much for Turkey proving dirt cheap, as I’d been promised by all who’d been before.

Then there’s the constant touting, more bloodthirsty than anything you’ve ever experienced before. One typically sunny day, my then-girlfriend and I decided to eat at a restaurant by the marina. By the time we’d downed our hideously expensive Cokes, we were being frogmarched to a jewellery store by a wee guy who spoke no English. This was after listening to a long, eloquent speech by the proprietor about how in this small world, this global community, we must all be brothers and help each other out – ostensibly by buying hideously expensive Cokes from him, and then diamond rings and leather from some dodgy cunt mate of his in town. We managed to get free glasses of water from the jewellery store owner before he sussed out we were paupers and swiftly sent us packing. I think the look in my eyes that said ‘How fucking much?’ tipped him off.

Speaking of tips, there are tip boxes everywhere. On the sides of buildings, in the backs of taxis. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them in the backs of Turkish ambulances. ‘That’s 7.50GBP for a fractured wrist, and an agreement to buy a diamond bracelet from my dodgy mate for a broken leg.’ It’s like Turkey’s handed over the responsibility for its economy to Ryanair.

If things get out of hand, Scottish people, you can always phone 'The Polis.'

Although most of the bar workers are genuinely friendly people, you won’t remember – or care about – this after day three. Certainly my tolerance to touting underwent a radical transformation. I went from cheerfully engaging in banter with every touter who chanced his luck, to imagining their sweet, sweet collective deaths at the bottom of the ocean.

People, Turkish jaikeys presumably, even crashed roll-ups from me as I walked down the street. Not that such occurrences are unheard of down Falkirk high street, but still. Which reminds me: if you can find it over there, which I managed to do, don’t buy any tobacco. The packet may say Golden Virginia on it, but you can bet your bottom dollar (it’s all you’ll have left after a week) that the contents have been swept up from a barber’s-shop floor and cut with desiccated camel shite.

 

Memories of Marmaris – Pt 1

The cannibalisation of old material continues. Here’s a few thoughts I jotted down after a trip to Turkey a few years ago. I’m going to Turkey with my girlfriend later this year, a different part, but I enjoyed looking over old notes and reminiscing about all the beauty and sleaze the Turks have to offer holidaymakers in Marmaris – Jamie

 

Memories of Marmaris

Marmaris is a holiday resort in the south west of Turkey. It’s geared towards tourism, but the public transport is accessible enough to allow you to venture forth and enjoy towns, trails and villages off the beaten track. Also, the many excursions on offer by boat, jeep and camel are extremely good value for money, and well worth your time. That being said, it’s time for a bit of horrid honesty, and we’ll leave the wanky travelogue stuff to the late Jill Dando.

Driving Miss Daisy – Off a Cliff

The Turks have some simple, nifty ways to revolutionise the ordinary things we Scots take for granted. For example, Turkish traffic lights don’t bother with all that abstract ‘red, amber, green’ shit. The lights display a timed countdown from red to green. This innovation would be an extremely helpful stress reducer for British drivers, but the Turks seem to use it to measure how many seconds-worth of law they’ve just broken, so they can high-five their mates with the appropriate level of gusto. To say that Turkish drivers are a bunch of maniacs who care nothing for the rules of the road, health and safety, or human life, would be entirely accurate.

Turkish drivers like a bit of anger on the roads. Turkish cars must have four pedals as standard: gas, brake, accelerator and horn. And I’m sure it won’t be long before they fit Bond-style mini-missiles to their front bumpers. It’s little surprise that in 2006, according to data on the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, there were over fife-hundred-and-eight-five thousand car accidents in Turkey. This must be a conservative estimate. Perhaps three million of the people sent to survey dangerous driving were killed by dangerous drivers before they had a chance to submit their findings.

Turk in, my son

The sexiest cunt in all of Turkdom

Turkish men walk a fine line between charm and sleaze. The bar folk are undeniably friendly, but in a tourist resort like Marmaris, this could have something to do with their commission-based pay.

Do be prepared to have your girlfriend fawned over in a way that would have you reaching for your knuckle-duster back home. And, yes, it’s true that you’ll see an enormous amount of young Turkish guys ‘courting’ gorgeous young blonde girls (for ‘courting’ read ‘trying every trick in the book in order to make them part of a living, breathing Turkish kebab before the holiday-clock ticks away, so the girl can jet off home thinking they’ve found their prince when in reality he’s already got his todger stuck in another willing waif even before the pilot guns the engine for the flight home’). This is undeniably impressive when you consider that over the summer season most of these Supermen work seven days a week, often twenty hours a day, and still find time to shag a higher quota of girls than most of us will see in a lifetime. I’m impressed, in a kind of amoral way: their wives probably wouldn’t be.

Over summer, a lot of the waiters and bar guys come to Marmaris from the far corners of Turkey to make a bit of money for their families, before totting off home with their genitalia tucked between their legs. Winters are spent as mild-mannered Clark Kents; the kind of guys who love their wives and kids and definitely do NOT shag an army of drunk slags from Essex.

Take THAT, AIDS!!!

A word of caution for the ladies out there: there is a widespread belief among a large section of the male Turkish population that the best way to counteract nasty old AIDS, chlamydia and general knob rot is not to rubber up, but to thoroughly wash your bits afterwards. Yes. We all remember that from Dove’s last advertising campaign: Tom Hanks scrubbing his balls with a bar of soap, and smiling to himself about his new promotion at work. You’re not singing any more, Bruce Springsteen.

But what kind of guys can the ladies expect to meet? I’ve calculated that Turkish workers, especially in the bars, fall in to one of three physical categories: Gay Boyband Turk; Evil Hollywood Movie Turk; and Looks Like a Turkish Version of a Well-Known Celebrity Turk. For example, my very attentive hotel clerk looked like a Turkish David Arquette, and one of the wee waiters at a local restaurant looked like he was plotting to kill Arnold Swarzenegger.

Here, pussy, pussy, pussy

Pussy on a bike

It’s strange to come from a country where cats are pampered and beloved (some rich old British ladies have even been known to leave their vast million pound fortunes to spoiled Persian cats called Tiddles) to one where cats run wild and are even considered by some to be vermin. How cute they are, though. Well, the ones that aren’t horribly diseased and bedraggled, that is. Most of the street cats are considerably smaller than your average domesticated kitty, with tiny little faces and humongous, pointy ears. I always wanted to pat them. I wandered the Turkish streets dispensing a stroke here and a clap there, willing to touch the sick and the hungry, like some kind of Christ of the Cat People. Like a Steve Irwin who deals only with animals tame enough not to skewer him through the heart with a barbed part of their anatomy.

‘Any spare change, pal?’

It is a shame, though. Turkish people don’t appear to be as enlightened as we are when it comes to animals. No real equivalent of our RSPCA seems to exist in Turkey, although animal welfare matters are slowly gaining relevance and importance thanks to the actions of various volunteer and charity organisations. Earlier this year in Marmaris there was outrage over a mass poisoning of street cats by assailants unknown (although the farming community is suspected). Unfortunately, the attempted cull was indiscriminate, and many domestic dogs, cats and other trusty pets bought the farm along with them.

Remember the Turkish men who thought that washing their bits was the best and only defence against AIDS? Well, another widespread belief held by some morons is that ingestion of pet hair can be fatal. This means, ladies, that stroking a cat is the best form of contraception.