One Night Stand

Strikes can be a good or a bad thing.

Good – A thirty yard scorcher into the  top corner. Strike, the early 90’s dance outfit with their smash song ‘U Sure Do’ , and finally when you knock all the pins down at bowling, thoughts creeping into your head that you could be a pro, whilst inexplicably high fiving everyone including the pop-corn kid and looking like a knob.

Bad – when you knock all the pins down at bowling, thoughts creeping into your head that you could be a pro, whilst inexplicably high fiving everyone including the pop-corn kid and looking like a knob. When snakes strike by launching themselves out of bushes and of course, Pete Moores, no sorry Michael PeterBarrymoores heinous game show, Strike it lucky.

For me they are an everyday occurrence.

After a night amongst a snoring symphony, I disembarked feeling radiant (angry), destination in theory Darjeeling, STRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE 1 – In a complete reverse of the Man from Del Monte’s famous speech, the people from the hills say ‘NO’, they’ve helped the tourists though by putting on some entertainment and calling a ‘bandh’, nice one! That was until someone explained it meant ‘strike’. Resisting the urge to ‘strike’ out at the nearest cheery morning person, we then attempted to go to Sikkim, ”its open, great”, but the roads are blocked by the first bunch of angry Indians…..

So ended up in Shillong (schlong), a haven to nature, waterfalls and supposedly the rainiest place on planet earth! It seems precipitation was also on strike when we were there, as not a splash of rainfall…..Further to this the only thing waterfall-esque and cascading was what I’m sat on right this instant…

Newsburst. Had a go at being a taxi announcer, shouting shillong, schlong, shillong and it finally appeared the rain had arrived, although in the form of tea cups and cabbages, outbreak of birdflu (chicken for tea last night BAKAAAAAAAAA , no, that’s probably mad cow disease – um yes tangent).  Someone found a hand grenade and before the chief officer could dispose of it safely, one of his subordinates, hid it in some sand….(mental note, no more sandcastle building). Took a tour to see some root bridges, made of, um, roots. Mr Richard, our driver, drove us around for 3 hours including to the Bangladesh border before sheepishly turning around, laughing and admitting he had no idea where they were – Striiiiiiiiiike 3. Mr ‘Dick’off the Christmas card list. (Nice joke for the ladies), Men and not asking for directions, eh!

Oh well at least I had the Cabbage Cup Final to look forward to, hotel with tv – check, beer – check, curtains to nibble on when nails had gone – check, Chelsea goalkeeper- cech! So settled down and then Striiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike 4, the hamster running the wheel on the generator had ambled off moaning that he hadn’t been given enough pellets or hadn’t had his whiskers trimmed recently. POWERCUT! The fat cheeked sod.

I WAITED PATIENTLY FOR 13 SECONDS BEFORE (darn) before asking the hotel owner in marvin gaye vocal  ”what’s going on”, ‘oh power cut sir, in a years time there won’t be any more ( a year, a year…..we won’t win anything for another 30). So i saT SULKINg wandering what to do besides sulk. Much sulking later and the game was long finished, as was I with India. Then at 11.45pm IST the TV came back on. Striiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike 5 , my motor functions gave up, I couldn’t even press the channel 63 into the remote, 3,6,36,366,663….

Thinking we’d lost. I looked for confirmation, only to catch the last 30 seconds of e.t. (extra time, not the brown midget alien), my roommate was woken by me frantically mouthing silent swear words and shaking the remote control with such vigour that it sounded like a maraca show. Woo hooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, only briefly saw the goals and none of the game, but we won, we won, we won, we won.

Thanks for listening (ignoring) that.

Back to the aptly named Silli-guri and another attempt at Darjeeling, via a night train, should’ve heeded the warning when the man opposite started doing nasal exercises followed by a thinly veiled threat from his wife ‘don’t you dare’, he dared alright, he dared to attempt a rhino’s mating call with his nostrils till 5 in the morning. It narked me off so much that I ended up following into my own routine of punching, poking and then pretending to be asleep every 5 minutes, so much poking in fact that I felt like a facebook stalker or weiner! At last the blockade and strike was over, not for Darjeeling mind, but for my backside, three toilet rolls in 24 hours and not a single blow of the hooter, say no more.

Another night train, another meeting for the ‘Institute of Snoring Research’ this time they’d assembled there loudest snorers in the sub-continent’ to see how many decibels could be reached, whether the train would de-rail and how an innocent subject would react, well I reacted by answering one of Austin Powers legendary questions ‘Who throws a shoe anyway?’ The answer was me, well more precisely a flip flop, Striiiiiiiiiiiiiike 6, in your snoring face.

February 29^th, Leap Year, my hammock leaped out of my sight into a street kids bag. Wow, what are the chances (1 in 4)…

Varanasi, then and quite an amazing place, here a sideshow bob look-alike warranted more attention than a naked Indian man brushing his teeth with his fingers. Life and death here is played out around the mighty River Ganges. Bathing and washing are commonplace in the river, but so is Burning of the dead on the ghats by the side of the river, walking down the narrow alleys you were sometimes pinned either by bulls or a funeral procession with the dead carried on a stretcher. I took this as a good time to do my laundry and have since had 9 re-incarnations and a strange desire to run up to cows and call them divine. Luckily the bulls saw through my ”possessed” guise and continued to hate me. Thinking I’d successfully walked past one without so much as an angry snort, I laughed to myself, instinctively the bull flicked his tail right in my bullocks! One of the highlights here is taking a boat ride to view the Ganges and ghats in their full glory, guess what? But noooooooooooo, Striiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike 7, the boatowners had to go and screw it up (thanks goonies). Enough strikes, I’m out of here, onto one final night train and I swear one of the ‘snorers’ stuck an amplifier, a ferry coming into dock and a  bean can up his nose, tied some string to another bean can, and then put that one in my ear…

I’m now on holiday from my holiday in Russia, sorry I mean Goa. Ended up having a ramble in Arambol, a hippy enclave in the 60’s  now bearing more than a striking resemblance to an Ivan Drago training camp…

(Note: For this section please imagine Russian accent)

(Not yet…) There seems to be a huge stand off developing between the ruskies and the hippies, with the sickle and hammer folk, walking around going (Now…) ‘what is, hurghppy ‘, whilst the hippies, bemoaning them for ruining the vibe and possibly controlling the weed monopoly. The ladies seem to think they’re here for the ‘Smirnoff calendar’ doing all these seductive poses i.e. lying in the sand rubbing their boobs, whilst boyfriend built like a small tractor, mouths,(Again…) ‘argggh good, more breast veronica, more breast’ (or something). There you go my daily observation, think I’ve been in the sun too long today, wibbldy whoopa. I’ve been running the last two days, much to the disgust of the blissed out hippies (think the Russians like it though, (Do accent now) ‘arggghh good, boy make quick run,’ even more so when I mumbled that my legs killed (one more time…) ‘whaaaaaaaaat this good , legs that kill. you make fine comrade)

It’s not all lying around though waiting for theRussian mafia to put a horses head next to me as I sunbathe, the hippies are fighting back with such pastimes as….

Re-birthing??? What on earth, how could that possibly work, I mean sure the skin loosens over a periods of time (striiiiiiiiike 8 – good taste) but a fully grown human would never fit back inside, especially with all those beads and dreadlocks.

Past Life Chanelling???? Turning your past life into TV channels? Sounds good, where’s the address for channel 5.

Re-awakening????? with, wait for it, Damiano! The blokes blatantly called Damien and just added an ‘o’ to make him sound cool and spiritual. Don’t know why anyone would want to be re-awakened, I’m pretty angry the first time round.

So, my tan is ace but don’t worry I’m still getting punished for my indulgence. Having fallen asleep yesterday to the sound of crashing waves soothing my soul of its entirety of bad vibes (thanks Damiano) a freak wave rolled over me, casting me afloat, feeling a bit like Kate Winslet on that door (in my case a sarong) in Titanic, I turned to not see Leonardo Di Crapio, but  an Indian chap smiling at me, do you know what he said?

 ‘ big wave, wet huh’….

 ‘Really? I didn’t see it? I said, picking the seaweed from my nostrils and hermit crabs from my ears….

That’s it then, last day in Smelly Delhi today…

Much Spiritual Love Briggs(o)

Xxx (not kisses or a Vin Petrol film, but another three strikes…)