Campers, Ceilidhs and Occasional Cramp by Anderson Stephen Fraser;

Campers, Ceilidhs and Occasional Cramp by Anderson Stephen Fraser;

Author:Anderson, Stephen Fraser;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-05-31T00:00:00+00:00


8th August

It was Friday and the days excitement was to get the car serviced, which resulted in three hours to kill in Inverness while the garage worked their servicing magic. A wander around Inverness, lunch and a browse of the shops was the plan. I had noticed that my notes from this point on were written in nicely formed handwriting and were presented in navy blue Quink ink. I had bought a modestly priced fountain pen to enhance the note writing experience, and to allow for a more legible note to be written. It’s amazing what three hours to kill in a shopping centre can lead to. I also bought some CD’s to freshen the in car play list including Tom Lehrer’s ‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’, an all-time classic and designed to furnish adversity with a smile. All of this was good, what however my neat notes had reminded me was not good, was that I had more or less managed to download a Pizza Express cheap lunch offer on my phone, and so had set off to use it. The Pizza Express in Inverness seemed to be much loved by young mothers with small children who were happy to exercise their well-trained lungs in public places. My starter arrived in due course (no pun intended), the main however did not, so I waited for an inordinate period of time in the noise. Finally my patience cracked and I flagged down one of the young girls who were ‘serving’ in the loosest sense of the word, and enquired whether I may have possibly been forgotten. Almost instantly a rather burnt four season’s classic pizza arrived. I crunched my way through it, I was somewhat disgruntled and left after finally being allowed to pay, having endured another long wait at the till. No tip was given! I was just glad I had not ordered the Carbonara, or maybe in hindsight I had, carbon had featured quite strongly. I set my sights on the door and swept out stage left, doing a passable Mr Grumpy.

I had also been trying to get a haircut, and finally tracked one down on the other side of the river. After another long wait in the barbershop as a family of three young and noisily bored boys were all shorn to within half an inch of their scalps. A situation not particularly enjoyed by the youngest who protested loudly throughout. There were lots of eastern Europeans in Inverness, and I noticed that the barber had a Polish-English dictionary on the counter, so as to presumably reduce the chances of a barber-customer misunderstanding, of the ‘I wanted half an inch taken off, not half an inch left on’ variety.

There was a festival on that weekend called Belladrum just outside Beauly, so there were lots of youngsters with unfeasibly large backpacks descending on Inverness. I was speculating on what they had deemed appropriate to pack in such quantity for a weekend. Forty cans of beer and a change of socks quite possibly.



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