A Nasty Surprise

Last night I found the most disgusting thing in the Vic toilets. It was so disgusting I can't actually tell you about it. It would make you want to die, let me tell you. There it was, ON THE TOILET SEAT, when I lifted the lid. Scandalised, I staggered out of the cubicle and grabbed an innocent girl washing her hands. 'MY GOD,' I panted, 'YOU MUST SEE THIS.' Warily, she allowed me to drag her into the cubicle then she fell about choking when she saw it. 'Oh fuck, that is horrendous!' she shrieked. 'I know!' I shrieked back as another girl came in the door. We, the first girl and I, both grabbed her and said 'You totally gotta see this!' and dragged her into the cubicle. 'Holy sh-' said our new victim. 'I know, right?' exclaimed the first girl, 'and I thought she had just done something she was really proud of and wanted to show it off!' With this she gestured at me and laughed. Ahem.

As they stood around retching and saying 'fucking hell!', I latched onto what little initiative I have not yet managed to drink away and pulled from my bag my trusty notepad and one of the seventeen pens I lug about with me for just such an occasion as this. My two new best buds, girl A and girl B, remarked on my quick thinking. Popping the piece of gum I had been chewing from my mouth, I leaned over and affixed my sign: 'DO NOT USE - TOTALLY GROSS' to the cubicle door. 'Ew', said girl A, 'did you just take gum out of your mouth and stick it to the door?' 'That is fucking disgusting' agreed girl B and the two of them hightailed it from the bathrooms, leaving me standing there sticking a sign over a bathroom full of shit.

Ce n'est pas gravé

I am home from France. It is cold here in Ireland. I am covered in mosquito bites including one on my eyelid prompting swelling that threatened the sight in my right eye there for a while. Also threatened: my startling good looks. Do you think anyone gave a shit? Not on your life. 'Oh, look at my eye, I am like that Hey you guys dude from the Goonies! Or maybe Paris Hilton, I don't know how bad it's gonna get.' Blank stares is all I got. Not an iota of sympathy, despite the fact that I now could not attempt to seduce the pool man, generally agreed to be the most handsome man in all France and evidently the richest if he can charge that much for 15 minutes work.

I was mislead about my holiday; I thought it was your typical French getaway, occasional swims and forays into local villages the only things to punctuate long spells of sunbathing, reading and lazing in hammocks. In fact it was a working holiday, and I was regularly spun from my book-reading, hammock-snoozing daze to sweep, dust, weed the garden and skim the pool.

I need hardly tell you that I would have thought twice on going on this free holiday if I'd known there would be any work involved. My excessive sleeping habits were commented on at least twice in the last six days, my ability to eat everything around me mocked at least once. And that's not the half of it: suspicious rumblings went round like warm cake when I was found to be hiding in the pool whenever something heavy wanted lifting down stairs.

'Good God, I cannot take these constant attacks!' I screamed but no one was around to hear me because I was in a seven bedroom villa in the South-West of France. 'How am I supposed to live in these conditions?' I asked of my only true friend, but he couldn't reply as he was only an empty champagne bottle, so I tossed him into a shrub and opened another. 'What is there left to enjoy of a persecuted life?' I wept miserably to the fields of sunflowers that rolled over the horizon.