well, my mission to the airport to collect the visiting spaniards went OK in the end.  this in spite of the fact that the bus we’ve hired [or the 'SS albatross' as she was soon christened] is an unwieldy bugger with all the acceleration and manoeuvreability of an oil-tanker. add to that a supposed ’safety feature’ which makes the beginning and end of each journey a heart-stopping moment and adventure was never very far away!

me and jim from college went and collected it last night.  he took it home and brought it round for me this morning, so i could do the airport mission.  as soon as i clamber aboard he warns me that the guy at the hire co. told him that there’s an ‘american safety feature’ on the bus which causes a large fuse to blow in the engine if you touch the clutch pedal whilst any of the doors are open. you then have to call out the hire co. to replace the fuse before the fucker will work again.  there are dire warning notices to this effect on the windscreen and near the passenger side door.

to try and pass this off as a ’safety feature’ is so obviously bullshit, designed to cover the fact that there’s a serious electrical fault in the vehicle that i’m surprised a cynical bugger like jim fell for it, but he seems to have done.  whatever the truth, the fact still remains that every time one of us climbs aboard the albatross there is a moment of trepidation while you check all doors are closed and locked before letting your feet go anywhere near the pedals.

anyway, me and mazza set off for the airport and got there just after one.  after leaving the good ship albatross straddling two parking spaces, we moseyed over to the terminal to await the visitors.  their flight was due in at 1:40 and was 5 mins late.  that added to the time taken to reclaim their baggage meant about three quarters of an hour’s wait.  this was a relaxing and self-esteem building time for me because, as is the way with these huge public buildings, the heating was turned on full and there was fluorescent lighting everywhere. so that when i repaired to the bogs at one stage to take a leak, i was confronted with what looked like a tomato wearing a bandana in the mirror.  ah! the joys of being afflicted with a fizzer that goes bright red at the slightest rise in temperature, in a world were almost everyone else seems to need to don a scarf and woolly hat if the thermometer falls below the level of a blast furnace!

when the spaniards eventually arrived, ‘el tomato’ and mazza greeted them and escorted them to the albatross.  as i feared, my lack of spanish practice made my attempts at communication embarrassingly fuckwitted, but one of the spaniards did at least have the decency to lie to me and say “hablas español muy bien” .

i dropped them lot off at the craft centre in town [where their work was to be exhibitted] and then i was charged with taking the albatross back to college and parking it in what is laughingly called ‘the college carpark’ but is in reality a walled off area slightly larger than a postage stamp at the front of the building and which is always full of cars anyway.  it took me about half an hour to wrestle the bastard bus into position, managing in the process to put a nice black rubber smear down one side from ‘tickling’ someone’s bumper.  poor wee mazza had to run round like a blue-arsed fly, continually checking my clearances at front and rear of the vehicle as i painfully slowly rocked back and forward trying to squeeze the great metal cunt into a space it didnae want to go into.

eventually i managed to shoehorn the fucker into a corner of the yard and went off and tipped the security man the wink to keep his eye on it on the CCTV, as all the spaniards’ luggage was still aboard.  then me and mazza buggered off home, leaving jim with the headache of how to get the albatross back out of the carpark when it came time to take the spaniards to their various doss houses near his gaff.

this bilge was posted on 28 February 2005 at 11:34and is filed under miscellaneous bilge. you can follow any responses to this bilge through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.