The Welsh Farce

I’ve been eating oddly over the last couple of weeks. Well, not in the sense of a bizarre mastication method (I think that’s pretty standard), but in the sense of what’s ending up in my stomach. Uncomplicatedly peculiar have been my daily ingestions. Perhaps not peculiar for some, but when placed in a historical context they’ve been very odd. Perhaps it’s this change of home, job, routine that’s thrown my appetite off kilter. Perhaps it’s London, or its water…or its unholy fumes. Whatever the reason, I’ve been eating fresh plums for breakfast most mornings – i’ve never eaten plums for breakfast that I can recall. If not plums then toast and marmalade, or fruit and fibre cereal. All these things are highly new to my breakfast stomach. Furthermore I’ve been eating pasta for lunch, and ready meals (waitrose ones – so not too filthy) for dinner. On Wednesday I even had a KFC. Plus, I’ve developed a keen addiction to large double shot americano coffees, which have become a pre-requisite to my working day. I buy one from the coffee shop at work before I head upstairs. Caffeine addiction is just one bad habit that has seeped into the pores of my metabollic system, another is the four o’clock vending machine visit. My afternoon no longer feels quite right without a Starbar, Mr. Tom, or Yorkie. This latter snack pattern is directly influenced, if not caused, by my fellow work colleagues, who have apparently been factoring in an afternoon ‘chocolate break’ for a lot longer than I’ve been working there. The thing that concerns me most about all this is that if i keep eating pasta and toast and chocolate i’m going to actually need to join a gym or something or face becoming an office fatty. Being fat is never adviseable of course, but here in London-town it seems rather rarer than back home in suburban Hampshire. People do seem thinner, and more fashionably dressed here, so I’ve already bought a couple of new bits to wear, just to avoid looking like the podgy bumpkin that I am.

We’ve been up in Twickenham for three weeks now, and last weekend the time came to venture out for a surf trip for the first time in quite a few months. It had been planned for a while, so in theory the trip was to be a smooth running, incident-free operation. An all round success was eagerly anticipated by all. However, and to be honest, not unusually, this turned out not to be the case. Although, I don’t think any of us thought it could have been quite so ridiculously, hopelessly, cack-handedly executed…I’ll run you through the whole stupid farce. Day by calamitous day.

Friday. An empty stomach.

I finish work, head next door with Chris, the copywriter bloke, for two swift pints of ale. Run to train, eat wasabi peas on train, get off train, get to Victoria and jump on a bus to Bristol. No dinner. Just wasabi peas. Arrive in bristol, ask taxi driver to take me to ‘The Hop House’ in Clifton. He’s never heard of it. I argue with him. Convince him it exists. We arrive. Unnecessarily, I drink several pints very quickly in order to catch up with the others. Return to Robs flat. Eat dinner (the remainder of my wasabi pea bag). Sleep.

Saturday. The day that took the biscuit.

Jonny and I awake in good spirits, then head off to a coffee shop. Still not having eaten anything but wasabi peas since Friday lunch i get dangerously high on a dark triple shot continental coffee. Meanwhile Tim and Rob go somewhere to sort something out. They return. We go back to the flat to faff. We then go out to the shops to faff and not buy clothes, before returning once again to the flat to faff a lot more, and discuss how much we don’t want to drive to Wales to camp in the cold. After doing this, we are all decided – we really don’t want to go to Wales. So we go. Hit traffic on the M4 near Bridgend. A funny situation is fast becoming an upsetting one. We debate whether or not to turn back, but the guilt of upsetting Matt outruns us (Matt – the soon-to-be Afghanistan-bound army doctor; who is already waiting in a tent for us and for whom we are travelling to wales for). The traffic jam disperses but our spirits are reluctant to lift. We find the funny side though, mostly talking about the amusing but disturbing new concept of Granvestitism – it’s like transvestitism, only it’s about wanting to dress like a Granny… Things begin to look a little less bleak until we take a wrong turn and, seemingly by some sort of malevolent force, end up buying unhealthy lunch snacks at a massive, truly disgusting Tesco store near Swansea or somewhere. We arrive at the camp site just outside the Goweran village of Burry Green just before 4pm. A large elderly man stands by the entrance to the campsite. Thinking him the proprietor, Tim (driver) puts the passenger window down so I can tell the man what we’re doing (which is looking for Matt). He looks blankly at us. Blank and confused – isn’t that how Welsh people normally look? We drive aimlessly around the campsite to find Matt’s empty tent. He’s at the beach. As we leave, it dawns on us that the elderly ‘proprietor’ was almost certainly just a random local who happened to be passing by the campsite. When confronted with a car-load of bleary-eyed englishmen intent on making their presence felt, it’s no wonder he looked bemused. We drive on, our progress towards the beach impeded at least four times by human obstacles, including a motionless rambler, a slow-motion cyclist, and a titanic 4×4 car blocking the lane. Pay money upon entry to car park. Llangenith beach is (as we already knew) a biggy. Greeted by a vast expanse of sand and a large number of possible surfing Matts, we scan the beach. From about 500metres away, we home-in on a girl with a dog who we hope to be matt’s girlfriend and dog. Luckily, they are. We chat. Own up to our plan to return home in a few hours. No, we didn’t even camp. We took the tents and barbecues and bags of fresh meat and booze all the way there, but they were just ballast. Tescos tipped us over the edge – we didn’t want a cold nights sleep in a tent to further damage our already tatty weekend. And so, while we waited for Matt to emerge from the surf we went for a casual stroll down the beach. Picking the northern headland as our destination, there was nothing but sand and the odd bit sea-puke between us. Despite having acres of (relatively) clean, smooth sand before us we chose to hug the tide line, analysing its tapestried bounty of seaweed, marine skank, and plastic junk. The embarassing legacy of human consumerism and waste, regurgitated by the sea. A fine pursuit for a fine day. We found treasures, delights and wonders such as old wheels, flip-flops, plastic containers (a lot of those), and no less than 3 orange utiltiy gloves. We also found several perished crab shells, which we examined like monkeys might examine, well an old crab shell really. We celebrated all these finds by excitedly throwing stones at first a plastic flower pot that we had thought was a sandcastle, then a large rusty oil drum. We were like teenagers. All we needed now was some cheap booze and some ‘biftas’ or ‘doobie’ etc. We had neither. Upon reaching the northern headland, we paused, looked for living crabs , found none and turned back into the sun. This walk was, believe it or not, rather pleasant. The surf was as bad as usual – blown out and messy, so it wasn’t as if we were missing out on anything wholesome. We strolled back and met Matt on the Dunes, then headed back to the pub where we had a bad pub meal and a chat with Matt and left. It was back to Bristol, the pub and then a toast to how good wakeboarding on Sunday was bound to be.

Sunday. Admitting defeat.

That toast in the pub was large and multitudinous. In fact I had already had 2 pints in wales earlier in the evening, and continued the self-abuse by swigging strong cider in the car on the way back to bristol. After we returned from the pub we all stayed up, and yes drank some more before collapsing at 3am. Consequentially, my brain was rather soft on Sunday. We fed ourselves the barbecue meats for breakfast. Consuming tea, juices, bread, with the usual eagerness and hope of a miraculous hangover cure, which, of course did not come. We do some sofa-based faffing, watching such televisual feasts as Unbeatable Banzuke (an excellent, if ridiculous, japanese obstacle course game show hosted by a gimp-suit-wearing Brian Blessed), Something for the Weekend (that shambolic show where they cook things half-heartedly, and talk inanely to minor celebs) and Scrapheap Challenge – surely the ultimate waste of time and energy, where teams of foolish greasemonkeys are let loose in a scrapyard to make outrageous contraptions badly and with far too little given time. This week they were building giant skateboards. Why? We didn’t stay to find out. Instead we finally headed off in the cars to go for an invigorating session of wakeboarding. The weekend would be validated. The faffing forgotten. The hangovers cured…well probably not cured exactly but improved at least. Two miles after we leave, I hear a strange noise coming from Rob’s front wheels. We pull over. I’m forced to squeeze into the second car while Rob has to limp home. We are now convinced of a cursed conspiracy; a cosmic plot against us. Naturally, we get lost a mile away from the wakeboarding place, largely due to my poor navigating. We’re all a little ratty by now. I feel hurrendous. I get dragged and slammed into the water at least a dozen times, before finally getting to my feet. My brain as clouded as the lake itself, and the alcoholic poisoning showing no signs of diluting, despite the activity and chill, I stagger out and into the toilet to poo. I pooed 5 times that day in all. Bowel emptying on a hangover often is a long drawn out affair. Much like my journey home. Tim kindly took me and Jonny as far as Basingstoke, a mere 38 miles from home. Unfortunately though, in what has now become as much a British Sunday tradition as over-eating on roasted meat and watching the Antiques Roadshow, we were victims of Sunday engineering works. The trains gave way to replacement bus services, and our respective journey times were at least doubled. I eventually arrived back in Twickenham 3 hours later. What a weekend. Certainly not a success. Still, all shits and giggles really.