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Travel Agent
Monty Python
What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy, raw, swollen, purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day." And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...
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The Cinema
Mey K.
Don't you hate going to a critically-acclaimed film that happens to be popular, which means paying a Friday night visit to the ugly Megaplex cinema, blandly named Grand Paradise or Manhattan Deluxe or some other generic nonsense, and standing in a long, Disneyland-esque queue that never moves behind some bald yuppie who gossips on his annoying, Bolero-ringing cell phone, casually blurting out the ending of your movie when you least expect it, even though he's going to a different one, some dull Bulgarian crap that the New York Times once mentioned, probably on that one day they ran out of fabricated international stories to print. And then a menacing, bearded bully in an old, randomly torn Metallica T-shirt and an even older black Pleather jacket cuts in line, mumbling something about being there before and calling you Buddy as he swirls his tongue-stud around, and you stand there nodding like an idiot as you feel your innards flapping about, but you stay behind the bastard and edge one tiny step at a time until ninety nerve-grinding days later you reach the ticket counter, only to discover that, rather predictably, the film is sold out, and all the other films playing are dreary parades of third-rate celebrities in stock yarns even an infant would find nap-inducing. And when you try and inquire on which is the lesser evil, the girl in the counter, who's plump and acne-ridden yet looks like she turned ten yesterday, answers your query with a blank glare, eventually suggesting you to see some horror cross-over, in the midst of blowing a giant Bazooka Gum bubble, then names a price which sounds not unlike ransom for a newborn son, and you grudgingly pay her, channeling your grandpa as you snarl that you could've seen twenty films for that price eleven years ago and still have enough left for some hard candy and a ferry ride. And incidentally, next in line is a man that may very well BE your grandpa - the odd lobby attendant, a squinty-eyed WWII veteran dressed like a bellboy, who insists on frisking you on account of 'November Ninth', and you tip the old man out of compassion, only to watch him rip your dollar in two and hand you a half, then pocket the ticket and grin lovingly. Then it's moving right along to the concession stand, where you have a moment to decide between wrinkly popcorn and waxy candy bars that lost popularity three decades ago, and settle for a soda drink as large as a whale's stomach and just as fragrant, and you hurry inside, though Lord knows why, as all that's displayed are endless trailers for mind-numbing special-effects films about natural disasters of biblical proportions or awkward, star-studded 'dramatic' vanity-projects, and cryptic commercials that turn out to be for something trivial like a litter box, yet for some odd reason the audience is applauding these, and at all the wrong moments. And finally the film opens with a bland narrator who tries to explain how the 'Alien' and 'Predator' monsters ever came to know one another, but as soon as the first consonant is uttered it's interrupted by another cell phone with a Bolero ringtone, and before you get a chance to think about the ringtone's appeal it's followed by a laser-pointer dot darting across the screen. And halfway into the film, a portly woman in a shapeless Hawaiian dress, that dragged her wailing baby to a violent, graphic bloodfest in order to save a couple of bucks on a sitter, parks herself directly in front of you, and the baby's brother, a four-year-old boy with big puppy eyes and some Dickensian-Orphan face-dirt, wanders the aisles and asks you if you'll be his buddy while fishing for boogers, and though the kid's variation is much more cordial than that Metallica Biker prick from earlier on, you rapidly decline, for the first murder is imminent, but the monster is stopped in its tracks by yet another Bolero ringtone, but you soon find that it isn't coming from the theatre seats as, before your widening eyes, the monster answers ITS OWN cell phone and growls into it for a while, and when the alien eventually lifts the phone up and slams its Nokia logo at the camera, thus insuring more dead-presidents for the director's gore budget, you sit there transfixed, simply nonplussed at what can only be termed 'Dadaism On Film', and after making sure you're not under the influence of some cannabis, you let out the bellowing roar, "Un-fucking-real!", cuing a teenaged usher to rush in, who, in an ironic twist, tells YOU to pipe down and mind YOUR manners - not the mother of the blaring human larva, not the beeping cell phones or the hooting and hissing hecklers, not even the damn bootlegger five feet to the left of the usher, cramped in his seat with a video camera fixed under his raincoat. And at that point the laser-pointer's beam penetrates your eye socket, liquefying an essential part of your brain, though not nearly enough to be entertained by latex Alien puppets, and you snap and run around, growing madder and madder as you scream: "Fridays are doomed! Aliens are among us! They're after our dime! They spend it on cell calls!", and as you run by the weird old attendant, his rabid spasms make sense at last, and you hotwire a van and pair up to incinerate all of the world's bad films, and after a few chants of Bolero, you hug him and declare, "You and me are a dying breed, buddy... a dying breed."
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