Oh, For Fucked Snake…

A true account of snakes and death.

The road where it all happened...

George Orwell once wrote a short, heart-wrenching essay about the death of an elephant. This won’t be like that. And it won’t be as exciting as ‘Snakes on a Plane’. This is ‘One Snake on a Road’, and I don’t think Samuel L Jackson would’ve starred in that movie:

‘Get this motherfucking snake off this motherfucking road.’

‘OK, Samuel, that’s me shifted it.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Anything else I can help you with?’

‘No, that’s fine. It was just the snake I was concerned about.’

‘Cool. You going to be OK now?’

‘Yeah. So long as there aren’t any motherfucking toads in that motherfucking grass.’

I was walking down the side of a rural road in Turkey with my girlfriend when two guys zoomed past us on reasonably shit-looking mopeds. I say zoomed. Imagine the noise of a coin-operated hair-dryer from a cheap motel passing you at the speed of evolution. One of the guys, who was rather fat – a reasonably irrelevant observation, but I just wanted you to be able to picture him; he had a moustache too, if that helps – made a sort of ‘Ahhhh-ooooop’ noise as he realised he’d ran over something. It was the noise of guilt, but a half-assed guilt. After all, he quickly discovered, he’d merely run over a snake. It’s not like it was a mouse or a puppy. ‘Fuck snakes,’ his ooooop seemed to say, ‘I actually found its maiming quite funny.’ If any crippling was to have its own pompy, trumpet-based theme-tune, then this would be the one. 

The snake after its moped incident. Not a happy snake.

We walked to the middle of the road to check how much damage had been done to the poor fella. He was a thick, long and black snake, his head, tail and body immobile. I got down on my haunches to look deep into his tiny snake eyes. They were red-rimmed and staring. His little forked tongue, still and silent, was poking out from his open jaws. Blotches of blood and bits of brain stained the concrete. I prodded his body with a stick I found near-by and watched as his length pathetically swished, curled and twitched from side to side; not knowing whether his movements were caused by some posthumous reflex, or indicative of a last-ditch fight for life. Whichever way I looked at it: that snake was fucked. 

The ideal method of reptile euthanasia.

I used the stick to push it to the grass at the side of the road. So what to do next? I’d never put a creature out of its misery before. I understood the noble inevitability behind the act of animal euthanasia in cases of extreme injury and illness, but always hoped I’d never have to administer it. Especially since this was no cosy vets’ surgery with a sterile needle and a panpipes’ tape. I was at the side of a Turkish road with a snake and a bunch of rocks.

So I picked one up. It was slightly bigger than the palm of my hand, and felt hot from the sun. It wasn’t terribly heavy, but heavy enough to turn a snake’s head into bloody mashed potato. Was I really going to do this?

‘Maybe it’ll get better and be able to slither away itself,’ worried my girlfriend. ‘Or grow a new head or something.’

Deep down, we both knew that this snake wasn’t going to dust itself off and belly into a hedge to gub a shrew. It had chomped its last rodent, terrified its last sandal-wearer. Still, the thought of pulverising this wounded creature made me feel uneasy, despite the mercy aspect.

‘You’re going to kill a snake?’ my girlfriend asked.

‘I think I’m going to kill a snake,’ I replied. 

An old Turkish peasant woman. Not the one I met, in fact this looks nothing like her. She was fatter and less buckled looking.

At that moment an old Muslim woman – head covered, and dressed in peasant apparel – approached us on her way up the road. She didn’t speak any English, but I decided to cross the language barrier by way of mime. I pointed to the snake’s unmoving body, making sure she noted its injury. Then I pointed to the spot on the road from whence I’d flicked it, making sure she saw the blood. I then mimed a man on a motorbike running over a snake. This was the strangest game of charades I’d ever played (sounds like ‘ooooooooop’). I showed her the rock in my hand, and then mimed me bashing in the snake’s head, but made sure to keep a sad expression on my face to let her know that I wasn’t relishing the prospect. After every mini-mime along the way of the long dramatisation of my intended snake-kill she shrugged her shoulders and nodded, a look of nonchalance on her leathery old face. She finally walked off, still nodding and shrugging, leaving me feeling vindicated. After all, this woman was as close to a resident expert on snakes I was likely to find. And, being Muslim, of course she was going to be supportive of a good stoning. The decision was made. I was going to kill that motherfucking snake. 

The snake's stomping (or slithering) ground.

Fine in theory, but I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t even like squashing spiders, hideous nether-beasts though they are. I clenched the rock in my hand, felt its hardness dig into the base of my fingers. I imagined what it would feel like to drive this object through living flesh, but couldn’t, having no frame of reference with which to compare. Maybe it was just resting. Maybe it was in shock, collecting its thoughts, watching its little snake life flashing before its blood-darkened eyes, waiting, just waiting, for some spark, some scintilla of strength to carry it swishing and bobbing back to the safety of its home in the long, lulling lengths of grass and swaying reeds; back to the snakestead; back to its little snake babies, and its anxious snake wife, who’d been so worried about her husband’s absence that she hadn’t even prepared his daily dinner of half-regurgitated rat, and was instead hissing a soft, sussurating lullaby to all the little baby snakes as they cried and cried and cried and cried for their SPLATT! THUD!! BIFF!! KERSPLURGE!!

Like 60’s Batman, but with more snake-blood. 

I couldn't find a picture of a smashed snake, so I chose this one of a bludgeoned woman instead.

By the time I knew what was happening I’d hammered its head about six times with the rock. Then I placed the rock on top of what was left of its skull and stomped down about another six times. Goo was on the roadside, and blood speckled my fingers. My girlfriend said I looked like a maniac. I just wanted it to be dead – medically and incontrovertibly dead – to deliver it from any further agony. The aim was to euthanise the snake, not subject it to a Guantanamo Bay-style shit-kicking.

Mission accomplished: it was dead. It now looked less like a formerly-living creature, and more like the end of a flex of cord that someone had dipped in tomato sauce. And the act of killing it had felt no more unpleasant than slamming a paperweight into a block of warm butter. Those are the kinds of sentences that serial killers smuggle out of prison when they’re writing their memoirs. ‘It all started with the snake. From there, hitch-hikers were easy…’

A German couple walking down the road saw me do it. I approached them, bloodied-rock in hand, shouting: ‘I’m not a snake murderer!’ and then attempted to explain my actions to them. They didn’t speak very good English, so I’m not sure what impression of British people I left them with.

A little farther along the road my girlfriend and I encountered a stray dog, hobbling and panting in the heat.

‘Poor beast,’ I said. ‘Looks on its last legs.’

She looked at me and smiled, ‘You’re not going to bash its head in with a rock, too, are you?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘No, of course not, no. Certainly not…’

‘no…’

‘…at least…’

It was a very poorly dog.

‘…I don’t think so…’

A Plea to Fate

I’m going on holiday next week, acutely aware that the odds of dying increase exponentially the farther you venture from your own fart-stained sofa (despite what all of those ads from the 80s told you, which featured old grannies being immolated by their plug sockets and big, fat guys with beards being cooked alive in chip-pan fires).

 

So this is my plea to fate, in which I don’t believe. Really, this is just a pointless ritual to make me feel better.

1) Air Disasters

None of that, please. I’ve been keeping an eye on recent news reports featuring crashes – thanks to @bigmarkdavies for his research assistance – and found evidence of at least 5 major incidents in the last fortnight. That should be plenty. You’ve had your fill, Fate. OK, the victims mostly have been Asian, but you don’t have diversity targets to hit. It’s all about the numbers, baby. Leave me out of it. By my reckoning, travelling after 5 crashes I should be virtually indestructible. Hence I’m going to remove my seat-belt mid-flight, send people texts from 20,000ft and run from side to side in an attempt to tip the plane.

2) Terrorism

I checked out the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, and read up on Turkey. The PKK, a Kurdish separatist group, announced in March that they plan to unleash a wave of terrorist atrocities on various parts of Turkey, including resorts popular with foreign tourists. Not a bad plan, chaps, and I’m not questioning the effectiveness of your terrifying campaign, but at least wait until the English school holidays. You’ll only get one shot at this, and you’ll want to ensure a large, broad selection of targets. And nobody would really give a shit if I died, so I’m a poor choice of victim. Plus, do you really want to take the chance that John Smeaton’s on vacation in Turkey? He’d fuck your entire organisation into the ground with one swift banjo. That man makes Bruce Willis look like Willis from Diff’rent Strokes. Thank you.

3) Highly contagious disease

Hello, pathogen. Skip me, please. I don’t really go out that much, so your chances of bringing down the species by infecting me with a highly contagious, incurable disease are slim. Plus, Swine Flu already came to Falkirk, and we kicked its porcine ass. Did you kill a single person, Swine Flu? No. All you did was give publicist Max Clifford work, and allowed a young Falkirk couple to cash in on their ‘We were infected on our Mexican honeymoon’ fame so they could get a new conservatory. You failed. Spanish Flu pissed itself laughing when it heard. And Bird Flu thought to itself, ‘At least I fucked over a few swans, and made some farmers shoot themselves.’ Here’s an idea, Fate: send giraffe flu to Swansea instead.

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.