HW: Watney's Red Barr

[Tom Clark]

WOW!!  What a release!!! Feel better now?.....

"Hall, Russell J" wrote:

> 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.....