HW: Watney's Red Barr

[Hall, Russell J]

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 plagues 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.....