California Syrup of Figs

About 6 years ago, some friends and I decided to go camping in Scotland.  I had recently passed my driving test, and as I worked at a garage, I had my pick of cars.

The plan was to drive up to the Isle of Mull overnight, which isn't THAT far, and spend the week there.  There would be four of us in total, and the car, a Citroen XM, was absolutely big enough.

The weeks leading up to the great expedition were heady times, many trips were made to Camping International in Gillingham, waterproofs were purchased, the car was prepped and checked over dozens of times.  We were ready for the holiday of a lifetime.

At 6pm I drove around to my friends houses, collecting them and their belongings.  In the rear of the car were Dave and Anne, who were almost dating, but only just.  In the front with me was Catherine.

Dave's stuff didn't take up too much room, but Anne had packed all of her belongings.  She lived in a tiny house and I still don't know how she fitted all that crap in her house, let alone our car.  The footwells were completely stuffed with her shit, and they both had to sit cross legged, which at the time of departure seemed fine.

The Hotel Grand, Penrith

We set off, and the roads I know well passed quickly.  Up through Birmingham and into the North, stopping occasionally for pee breaks and coffee, passing Manchester, Liverpool… and then nothing.  For miles, there was darkness and uphill climbing.  It went on forever.  Being a proud Southerner I had never really considered what the North was like, except industrial and bleak.  What I didn't realise is that when the North isn't being industrial, it's just bleak.  And there is loads of North.  Literally shitloads of it.  Northerners are miserable for two reasons - the North is industrial and bleak AND everything is far away.  Eventually we came to Carlisle, and by that time I wanted to die.  There was nothing left in me.  My arse and the car seat had become as one, I was an empty husk.

I turned to Dave in the back, realising he hadn't had a single pee break. He looked wretched, haunted - as if he had been to hell and back.  Anne was asleep, and he whispered to me that he'd needed the loo since Birmingham but had kept getting boners (I have no idea how, but apparently this happens if you sit cross legged in an uncomfortable car for hours) and each time we'd stopped he hadn't been able to get out due to his priapic situation.  He could now not feel or move his legs, and was pretty sure he still had a stiffy.  I got out and helped him from the car, and after a couple of seconds leaning on me he took flight, and ran full pelt into the services.  It was like releasing a wild animal back into his habitat.

With Dave sorted, I needed to wake myself up. I still had to get to Oban in time for the ferry, and I wasn't sure we'd do it.  There was definitely no time for sleep.  I wandered into the services and picked up a four pack of a new drink called Relentless, which tasted even shittier than Red Bull and was in cans twice the size.  I drank them all.

By the time we were in Scotland I was buzzing.  I was no longer aware of my body, although it was still doing the driving thing and seemed to be twitching a LOT; I was amazed at how green everything was, and how fresh the air was coming in the window.  I would have looked a lot like a junkie round about now.

By the time we rolled out of Glasgow I was on the come down, and I still had the Trossachs to drive through.  Twisty mountain roads I didn't know, with no sleep and tweeked on energy drinks.  I shan't go into detail, but I don't know how I didn't kill us all.

The entire journey took 14 hours, including the ferry and the drive to the campsite in Tobermory.  I then erected my tent in torrential rain.  A lot of people use the phrase "torrential rain", but this really was.  It was like God had upturned a sea on me. I hated this holiday, I hated Scotland, I hated the rain, I hated everything.

After two days in Scotland it became apparent that my endurance driving had made me horribly constipated.  There is no delicate way to put it, I go every morning without fail - but nothing had passed.  Nothing at all. I found this more and more upsetting, I had to take action. We had planned to go over to the Holy Island of Iona for a day trip, so on the way down I stopped in at the chemists in Tobermory and quietly told the assistant my tale.  She handed me a bottle of brown syrup that read "California Syrup of Figs".  Great, I thought, some stupid herbal remedy.  I wanted CHEMICALS.  Something with warning labels on, skulls and crossbones, hands being dissolved by droplets of corrosive acid bases.  A tincture of figs really wasn't going to do it, I thought, but I was desperate and bought the bottle.

I got in the car, turned over the engine, got the bottle out of the bag, told my friends how ridiculous it was that they should give me this herbal rubbish, and drank half the bottle.

I took the bottle from my lips, and saw two horrified faces staring at me in the rearview mirror.  I looked to my left, and saw another equally horrified face.  Their eyes were wide, their mouths gaping. They all swore blind that "California Syrup of Figs" was the most potent laxative on the face of the planet.  Apparently, you should only have a teaspoonful.

Whatever.

I drove across the island and we boarded the foot ferry to Iona. Iona was so boring.  I'd like to say that it was enlightening and spiritual, but it wasn't, it was boring. Until I really needed the loo.  Then I discovered the one interesting thing about Iona - it's the only island in the world without a public toilet. I had drunk half a bottle of laxative and a sea separated me from a lavatory.  There is a monastery, with no public loo. There is a phone box, so I could call the mainland and tell them I needed the loo.  That's about it.  I waited on the beach for the ferry, which seemed to move only when you didn't look at it.  It was the longest time of my life.  And there was no loo on the ferry either.  I had to wait until I got to the terminal, where I finally went.  I was so happy, it was all gone, I could get on with my life.  That's the end of the movie - happily ever after, neatly flushed away.

We got back in the car, and drive about 5 minutes up the road before Dave saw a sign for a garage sale. He begged us to stop, which we did, and we all looked around this shitty garage sale.  Dave was loving it, and found himself a book he was very excited about, "Alien Killer Sprouts", which had a bad photoshop of a Brussels Sprout careening through space on the cover.  As he showed me this book, delighted, my entire body just shuddered.  I got chills.  My legs went from beneath me, and Dave and Catherine had to carry me out of the garage, like some fallen comrade in "Platoon".  This was serious. I expected a Medevac chopper to come and sweep me away. I was delivered back to the toilet at the ferry terminal where "California Syrup of Figs II: The Reckoning" played out.  I was in there for about 30 minutes, but I emerged a new woman.  It was over, and there was absolutely no room inside me for any more of THAT, I was certain; I could rest easy.

Eagle Bastards

We settled down for a drive back to Tobermory through the hills.  It was beautiful.  After a short while, I noticed a police car behind me. At this point it seems appropriate to remind you all that I'm driving a 20 year old Citroen, and I have just added 1000 miles to the odometer in the last 4 days.  I begin to feel like I need the loo again.  After about 5 minutes of this, I get stop lights flashing up across the dashboard - I'm losing LHM, the green oil that keeps the suspension, steering and brakes going on Citroens, and I'm about to have explosive diarrhoea. I pull over in a lay-by, and the Police pull over in the next lay-by, about 50 feet ahead.  It turns out that the police in Scotland patrol the mountain roads making sure people don't steal eagle eggs - at this juncture in my life I really didn't give a tupenny-you-know-what about the bastard eagle eggs. As Catherine and I fixed the car inbetween me doing the toilet dance, the police watched sternly.  There was absolutely no way I could go with them looking on, and the verges were strangely devoid of bushes or any undergrowth. Eventually we got the thing working again, after leaving a trail of green goo all over the beautiful mountain roads.  We're 35 miles from the nearest settlement, Craignure, so I put my foot down.  I feel sure that at any moment I'm going to shit myself.  I have to drive over 5 cattle grids in total, and find the only way to do it is to accelerate hard, then take my feet off the pedals, stand up in the footwell and only sit back down once we're over the grid.

I make it into Craignure, and somehow in the sleepy village, the public toilets are open and illuminated at 9pm.  I don't have time to park, so I mount the kerb and intentionally stall it as I put on the parking brake, and in one motion I jump out of the car.

Craignure Public Lavatory

I'm going to make it!

Dave is crying with laughter and finding it difficult to breathe, as I pass his passenger door he opens it and falls out of the car in a heap on the pavement.

I run into his door.

I trip over him.

And that, dear reader, is how I shat myself on holiday.

Medway Transmissions

When I was in my early twenties, I worked in a Citroen garage.  I got into working there because I could use a computer and answer the telephone, and it was owned by one of my best friends Dads.  After a while I started dismantling cars and doing minor repairs, amongst other things. I loved working there, and if I could have stayed, I would have, but there was no way he could ever pay me more than minimum wage.

On this particular day we had very little work, save for a clutch on a Xantia owned by the sweetest old man you could hope to meet.  His name was Cecil and he was Werther's Originals cute, like Fisher Price had made the perfect Grandad.  He was polite and well spoken, always smiling, and nicely turned out.  He even did that Grandad thing of sorting his hair with a wet comb.

He'd arrived a little early to pick up his car and the boys were still working on it. We talked in the office for a while, and then he asked if he could have a look around the workshop, as he'd been an engineer in his youth and missed the tools and the smells.  Of course I obliged, and showed him around, and then I left him to it.

Workshops are dangerous places.  In the 5 years I worked there, I was genuinely almost killed three times.  One time, we were fitting a new distributor cap to a TR7, and it exploded up past my head, brushing my hair as it passed, embedding itself in the roof which was 20 feet up. With this experience fairly fresh in my mind, I kept a watchful eye on Cecil in between my duties in the office.  I watched him fiddle with the bench vices and grinding wheels, rearrange the spanners and sockets into their correct places, and finally, take out his glasses and squint at the calendars.

Workshop calendars have come a long way.  When I was a little girl, I used to walk down to the truck fitting shop that my Uncle worked in to take him his lunch.  He'd let me "drive" big articulated lorries whilst he did the pedals and the gears, and I steered (sort of).  Back then at the dawn of the 1990s, calendars just showed boob.  You may get a girl in lacy knickers, but she'd be shot from behind and then you'd just get side-boob.

The calendars of 2007 were a world apart, and one particular calendar was the most prized in our workshop - that of Medway Transmissions.  I'm pretty sure we only used Medway Transmissions a few times a year so we could get a calendar.  It was serious.  Oiled up with no bras, no knickers (unless they were at ankle level), legs akimbo - and usually holding everything apart so you could get the best possible view.  Any girl from that calendar wouldn't need to visit her gynaecologist - she could just send them the picture.

I was really worried.  He was right in front of the Medway Transmissions calendar.  He leant forward, and actually took hold of the calendar.  I couldn't watch, and sat back down at the computer well away from the window.  I was pretty sure he'd never seen anything like that before.

I put this to the back of my mind, and after about 20 minutes Cecil returned to the office.  Shortly afterward his car was finished; I took payment, stamped his book, and told him that if he had any problems to bring it straight back.  He shook my hand and told me I was a delightful girl.  Cecil would have been a total charmer when he was young.

After he had left, I ventured into the workshop.  To my shame, I was curious as to what he had been looking at on the Medway Transmissions calendar.  I hoped against hope that it was a slightly tamer month, or that it had been moved to a different ramp station.  I was to be disappointed.

As I approached the calendar, something was wrong.  It looked different.  I took the calendar down from the hook and noticed something dreadful.

Cecil had ripped the vagina out of the picture.

I turned the page, no vagina.

All of the vaginas from this calendar had been harvested.  Crudely ripped holes were all that remained of the vaginas of the girls from Medway Transmissions.  I checked the bins, in case he'd been so disgusted at the calendar he'd done this in protest.  There were no vaginas in the bin.  The fitters were beside themselves, what monster had done this to their most prized calendar?

Somewhere, there is an unassuming old man driving a Citroen Xantia, with a pocketful of vaginas.

It's a hard life being an Arch Mage

Magic tip of the day

If your magical area has been desecrated by evil spirits or perhaps a parent looking for laundry, sprinkle magic salt in the four corners of the room to purify it once more.

My Grey Epiphany

I live in a small, nondescript house on an undesirable road in Maidstone.  The road isn't even exciting enough to be bad, it's just unremarkable. The bottom end of my road is more exciting, people get stabbed and there are raids by armed police, but I live in the top end.  All the houses except ours are rented by transient workers, Poles mostly, but there are a few Latvians and Lithuanians.  Since they raided and boarded up the crack house across the street, we're the only British people here, which is fine, but can make one feel fairly isolated. Although I lived in the Balkans for a good while, the Slavic languages differ enough that I can only understand when they're swearing at each other or asking where something is.  I live in this house with my mother, who is at best slightly kooky, and at worst, certifiably bat shit crazy.

I work in the most boring industry possible, so boring you couldn't imagine it if you tried.  You may be thinking something like "Concrete Sales", "Radiator Factory" or "Dust Analyst", and you'd be miles out.  But I love my job, I genuinely do, and wouldn't change it, I thrive on it. However, when I'm getting hit on by men (which is rarely), and they ask me what I do for a living, I just have to say the two words that name my industry and their eyes glaze over.  Instantly they look like they have been deprived of sleep for a week.  That is my world.

So, today I realised that my life consists of three things.

1.  Work.

2.  My Dog.

3.  Films starring Kurt Russell or young Charlie Sheen; watched alone at night. I often think I need a bigger television.

Upon realising all of the above, it became apparent that unless I add a few things to that list, it's only a matter of time before I get a few cats, start buying fleeces with airbrushed wolves on them, and give up on ever having real-life sex with a man again.

With this in mind, I have added to my list.

4.  Start doing Pilates again

5.  Start drawing properly again, and go to Sketchbook Club at my local pub (yeah, NO.)

6.  Stop buying unnecessary items such as food or clothing, save up for a Trans Am, fail at saving more then a few grand, then settle for a Toyota Celica.

7.  Make a blog.  That way, if I die anytime soon, I will have left some sort of mark on the world.

And so begins my attempt at Number 7.