Goodness, it’s been simply weeks and weeks. NINE weeks, nearly. I do apologise, dear readers.
Funny how things all come together in one rambling way or another, isn’t it? Much as my first article about fleeing the prostitutes of the great continent of Europe was prompted by a late-night, post-gig proposition, my latest little stream of consciousness here has come into being through real life circumstances as well.
I have spent those last few weeks in something of a funk. Less strictly irritable, I suppose, but more uncharacteristically dejected and angry, as my experiences at trade have been rather less than happy ones; however the detail of why is far far too dull for here, and if spelt out might only hasten a foreshortening of my career if I chose to expand upon it in this public forum. The old internet can be a bit iffy like that. So: difficult times, suffice to say.
In my defence I would like to say I have not been particularly grumpy, per se, for as we know it was one of my New Year’s Resolutions to not be grumpy. Or to try to be less grumpy? I sort forget, and not being forgetful wasn’t one of the Resolutions. That much I remember. Anyway, instances of grumpy-guilt purchasing of flowers for the redoubtable SWK have been fairly few, instead they have been purchases born exclusively of love. All together now.. aaaah. <Vomit>
So, I seem to have actually had a few days in a row of employment without any major maelstrom or dreadful decent into despond. I am, for the moment at least, non-irritable, and, as such, reminded of the need to be creative (i.e. to blog) and thus to write, as promised, about my historic instances of irritability when travelling. As you do, when you’re feeling cheerful. Oh well, I did promise.
There. That’s the first 300-odd words sorted. This is easy!
So, basically, it’s all my Dad’s fault. To look at and listen to him now, you would think he has always and forever been the genial, pink-cheeked and silver-haired old buffer we now behold, snoozing on the sofa, holding hands with the dog. Do not be fooled. This is the result of a sharp-footed segue into partial early retirement at the age of 50. Had he laboured on for a further 15 years on a full time basis, I can safely predict, as carrier of the active irritability gene, that the ulcers would barely have healed by now.
I’m certainly not picking on the old boy, here, I should point out. No indeed; I love him as much as everyone else does, and he’s going to be my Best Man when SWK and I take the plunge this Summer, which is all really rather cool. My Stag Do will be me and him going to the pub, then me and him going for dinner. Perfect.
No, what I am doing is a bit of amateur sleuthing as to where the old X and Ys made me a trifle crosspatch. Not flamingly angry or anything, and for the most part I see the humour in everything and anything, but I do have the little doomsayer “ohbollocksitsallgonewrong” voice in my head, and sometimes he likes to use my mouth to be heard by everyone else. He’s addressed the Police, in the past, and we scarcely got away with it. I wish he’d keep a lower profile, I battle quite hard to shut him up and stay even-tempered, on frankly even those most happy, sunshine, skipping and daisy-chain making of days. ‘S lovely, being me.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would tell you that this does not come from my Mum. A well-organised, calm but determined woman with an unflappably even temperament, and successfully partnered to, well, to him for the last 57 years. No jury in the land would convict her in this case.
I can prove it’s him, and start to get ‘round to addressing a bit of actual travel. But first, I should say that part of the proof comes from the fact that whenever I am found to be demonstrating my characteristic irritability (and this irritability can be brought on by pretty much anything – I am just a delight to be around, for example, if I am make even the tiniest misstep in the kitchen), and he is around, the first sound one will hear is the hiss of his Muttley-like laughter escaping as he gathers his breath to say “hahahahah – you sound like me!”
Bugger. Case closed. Wouldn’t it be nice if, much in the way you can have all the blood in your body changed, you could flush out a pint or three of unfortunate traits like this? Oh well – one lives and tries to learn.
So, some time before I had my first adventure in longer term relationships and marriage, the old boy and I used to have a wee Summer holiday together. All most agreeable, it was. ‘Round the Republic of Ireland one year. ‘Round the North East another year and a circular Scottish odyssey on the other such occasion. We’ve had another trip away, since, in my break between marriages, which I will tell you about another time. Rather than an exercise in grouching, that was in fact an exercise in inspired coffee making, of which I remain very proud to this day. Anyway, ‘Frying Pan Coffee’ is for another day.
We were travelling, during year three of our Summer Spectaculars, from Inverness to Edinburgh, on a warm Sunday morning. Father was at the wheel. We’d been away about a week and had had a high old time, gadding about and living high on the hog. Too high, within the previous twelve hours.
Didn’t take to Inverness, if I am honest. Bit nothingy, much as I know it has its fans. Wedged into the latest of a series of Lilliputian rooms together at a B&B the small matter of 3259612056 miles outside the town (the internet being a big fat liar there), we had an interminable walk back over the river on a scruffy black iron bridge in pursuit of the evening’s nosebag. Once again, to a flea-bitten boozer for two pints of over-fizzed Tennent’s, which had become routine, but increasingly a chore.
Still, we’d espied a curry house, and ducked in for an early Saturday evening feed. Most agreeable it was, and we waddled back pleasingly full, across the endless bridge, to get heads down before the journey South through Perthshire the following morning.
On rising, I think we were temporarily fooled into a feeling of hunger, somehow. I recall a dusty and rather overheated breakfast room in the morning sunshine, and beading with sweat as the third sausage went down. Fool’s errand. I know now, of course, that simply because food is free, one doesn’t actually have to press it down like compacting rubbish into one’s wheelie bin.
A headache set in, as I reached for the map and dropped, steatopygous, into the passenger seat. Father strained under the wheel of our little (ghastly orange) Peugeot and the little car fought its way, under a substantial burden, onto the high road. Even it seemed a bit moody.
Travel does odd things to the body. I don’t want to be indecorous here, but like many of us, one likes to feel ‘regular’. No crime to mention that, surely? Apologies for the fainter-hearted; I’ll get off the subject shortly. It’s just I have found on so many occasions that my arrival in a new place, generally by aeroplane, then heralds an unfortunate period of being, er, ‘bound up’. Bound up = irritable. Like a big baby, really. Not good.
Back in those days, one launched an assault each new morning on the unwilling lower workings with the two gifts of caffeine and nicotine. More often than not, one would feel an inner stirring of a pleasing familiarity, and all would be well. Even shit coffee could lead to a good shit! And heaven knows I could knock you out about 25,000 words any time you like on my views on coffee and hotel breakfast rooms. That’s one of my favourite subjects to get irritable about. How familiar to me has become the long, post-breakfast search through the Old Town of somewhere or other in desperate need of something, almost anything, to replace the taste of the crumbled wet mud one had been forced to endure as an accompaniment to one’s ‘Full English’, or crazy overseas equivalent. Instances of good breakfast coffee are rare indeed. I’m a real picnic, when I have failed to have a nice coffee, as you can imagine.
So there we sat, wheezing our way to points South, the structural integrity of our outer dermic and muscular layers under considerable threat from a package of food that looked less likely to prove digestible than would a stone of Ailsa Craig granite.
You know we’re both irritable when it goes quiet. Normally in shared company we witter on, amusing one another and annoying my Mother. Not that she ever shows this, being, as we have seen, a nice person. Nope, silence, near enough.
Tried, and failed , to get Test Match Special on the car radio. Too many hills (the scenery was spectacular – I can conjure it in my mind’s eye, but was insufficiently praising of it at the time, as we wandered biliously down the A9). This led to irritability. It was too warm. This led to irritability. The storm clouds gathered in our little cockpit. We bickered a little about whether or not Margate FC had a game on Monday night and how we would find out the result. The truly irritable would manage to bicker about anything.
The crashing downpour of f-ing and blinding finally came when, for about the 107th time, a car and caravan weaved, without signal, out of its lane and into our path, halting progress from a nice downhill 68mph to a snail-like 43mph, as we waited for the convoy to re-enter the slower flowing stream to our left. It may have been a car and caravan; equally it may have been one of those big ‘things’, that Americans call Winnebagos (I think) that we delight in calling ‘Commodore’, ‘Senator’ or ‘Clubman’, or ‘Pioneer’, for fuck’s sake. A strengthened cardboard box, with a barrel of chemicals and poo somewhere within its structure anyway (not that we were jealous).
The cure for the irritability came in our solidarity over the irritability. All of a sudden, we had our teeth into the subject. Casting aspersions as to the characters of the owners of this behemoths. Constructing descriptions of their fiery demise, far below us in the valley. Drawing up legislation to enforce the usage of these vehicles between 11.00pm and 5.00am only, that would, of course, skip lightly through parliament, because of course, everyone felt as we did, in that moment, didn’t they?
Whatever the case, it did the trick. With eyes of fire, we were punch-lining one another’s jokes, and giggling like children. The temperature gauge dropped, the sun went out of our eyes, and digestion recommenced. I suppose, in retrospect, one might argue that road rage is good for irritability? Hmmm. Or at least indigestion? Not sure, but it got us through that morning, anyway. And we did have a game on the Monday, and I was right.
I became fabulously irritable on two occasions, some years apart, but around roughly the same issue. Much more irritable than I was that Sunday. The cause of my eye-popping ire? The position of seat-backs. Oh for heaven’s sake that’s one that really ticks me right off. My teeth are a good 2mm shorter than they should be thanks to that. One instance was on a return from Macedonia, innumerable years ago, following a wedding and with a hangover of really quite spectacular proportions. The other was more recent; on a short shift from Croatia into Montenegro, when, though no prudes, we found ourselves with some appallingly arrogant and self-satisfied young people seemingly intent upon on international congress in our laps. I shall bring all these stories and more together next time in an upcoming dizzying epic:
How I became Marilyn: Matrimony, Macedonian-style, with black drinks, and your phone in the river as you want to puke on a Ukrainian
suggzy 