Living for Disco

Rrrrrring…..

I am the only person here. Our nice-but-incredibly-pointless receptionist has gone to the dentist, so I’m answering the phones.

“Good Morning, [my organisation]”

Loooong pause. “Hello.”

“Hello, how can I help you?”

“I was just wondering did you get the email I sent?”

“Who is this?”

“Did you get the email I sent?”

“I don’t know. Who are you?”

“Borris.” Goody. I don’t know who he is.

“Who did you send it to?”

“The lady who gave me the email address.”

“Which email address was it?”

“It began with an E.”

“Oh, ok. Let me just check. Yep, we have it.”

“I have the certificate, and the thing.”

“(??) Jolly good. That’s great. Anything else I can help you with?”

“No.”

Beeeeeeep.

“Bye then. Call again soon.”

It is 1 am. The lights of the 24 hour Shell garage shine warmly into the thick darkness of the frog-filled night. My eyes are heavy with the bleariness of aeroplane sleep. My arse feels like a lifetime’s worth of cellulite has settled in the past 8 hours and will continue to make itself comfortable over the next 7. I have not eaten since lunch time, as I mistakenly assumed that 24 hour Shell garages were ubiquitous on Namibia’s rather swanky roads.

I have already fallen victim to the tolley-nazi once on this journey. Fortunately I had almost finished by beer before she marched up, all indignant bosom and accusing eyebrows, beckoned towards my can with an imperious wave of her talons, and said ‘Yes, please, thank you very much’ while staring off into the distance as if I did not exist. I think she may also have been tapping her foot. This is a woman who loves her job.

So, 1 am ticks slowly by. I am waiting for the door to open so that I can step outside and get some food. So is another man, standing patiently behind me.

“This is not a disembark”, barks the trolley-nazi, with an alarming degree of satisfaction at the idea of imprisoning a busload of clients so tantalizingly close to food.

“Would it be possible to get some food from the shop?” I ask politely, only to receive a glare in return.

The man behind me moves towards the door.

“Where do you think you’re going? I said this is not a disembark.”

I have not paid almost a third of my monthly allowance to be dictated to by a sexually-frustrated harridan in a stretchy orange shirt who probably whiles away the hours by conducting lurid fantasies involving the driver’s enormous couch-potato stomach. I follow her down to the door at the front of the bus, and demand to be allowed out to go to the shop. She ignores me. I make towards the open door. She stands in my way.

“I have opened the door at the back for you”.

I am not in the mood for nonsense, but nonsense seems to be in the mood for me.

“Why can’t I use the door at the front? It’s right here.”

She ignores me, and stands bulkily in my path. I’m glad that this woman is only in charge of making the lives of Intercape passengers intolerable, and not of something important, like passport control. I consider delivering a swift kick to the back of her head, but feel that this may result in me being stranded in Grootfontein in the middle of the night, with only a thousand frogs and a lascivious pump attendant for company, so I stomp off to the back door, wishing her very ill.

It is now 1.15 am. I am very tired, but I do, at least, have a hot steak and kidney pie in my hand. I move to pay, and a pleasant looking man standing at the till starts to make small talk.

“Are you going to Japan?” he asks, as if this is a perfectly normal question to be asking someone who has just got off the Intercape in fucking Grootfontein-over-nowhere in the middle of the night.

“No. Not today”, I reply.

“Where are you going?”

“Windhoek.”

“Windhoek?” He manages to make it sound as if I said ‘Mars’. “Are you German?”

“No, I’m English.”

“Aaaaaaah! I see. Have you been checking out these Olympics?”

“No.” By this point I am utterly confused, and starting to suspect that this is the aim of this conversation-from-the-twilight-zone. All I want is to eat my pie, and maybe the opportunity to drill holes in the trolley-nazi’s head, just for a little while.

I get back on the bus and she looks at me accusingly. “The kettle is broken. I don’t know who did it. You can’t have any coffee.”

At 6.10 this morning I was woken by the announcement that we had reached our destination. “All seats to be returned to an upright position, and luggage to be stored under the seat in front of you” she instructs us all. Realisation dawns. She clearly wants to be an airborne trolley-nazi, so that she can terrorise people at 30,000 ft, and not have to deal with the chaos engendered by the uncontrollable and untidy wandering of passengers over Shell station forecourts at silly o’clock in the morning.

I’m tying my shoelace when I feel my seat shaking. “Seats in an upright position I said!”, she shouts, whacking the back of my chair vigorously.

I step off the bus into the slow, chilly dawn and am instantly surrounded by taxi drivers. It’s going to be a long, long day.

I’m going on holiday.

Yes.

Again.

This time I’m going to the little pan-handly bit that sticks out of the top right hand corner of Namibia. Apparently there be dragons. Well, elephants, anyway. I’m off to see some friends.

The bus journey is 15 hours, and it starts at 6pm. I will probably be placed next to the toilet, as usually happens on long distance bus journeys.

Actually, last time I was on a journey anywhere near this long was in Cambodia. I got on the bus to Siem Reap in Bangkok, confident in the expectation that while the touted journey time of 4 hours was a little ambitious, it couldn’t possibly take longer than 6. I spent the following 17 hours on a bus with a bunch of singing Swiss, and when they weren’t warbling, Khmer bands doing translated covers of Elton John and Boyzone drifted softly into my waiting ears.

I have high hopes for this journey.

…you woke up one morning, to discover that the last two and a half years of your life have disappeared? You wake up, lying in bed next to someone you never expected/wanted to see again, listening to church bells confirm the nightmare, and praying that he doesn’t wake up, that you won’t have to go through one more minute of bad sex with the wrong man.

Would you have to remember every single thing that you did, and do it the same, at the same time, on the same day, to get to where you were when it all ceased to exist?

If you were with this person, and knew you still had some months to go before the inevitable demise of the relationship, would you stay in it until the appointed time, or would you end it immediately to avoid the horror, and risk losing everything that you will have in the future that makes you happy?

I don’t know why, as it’s clearly not going to happen, but the question is bothering me.

I have lost my eyebrow tweezers.

As most girls will agree, I’m sure, the selection of a pair of eyebrow tweezers can be a troublesome business. I had gone through a number of pairs of eyebrow tweezers that failed to tweeze to my satisfaction, including one promising pair that inexplicably stopped tweezing completely; then I found this pair. They’re made by Wilkinson’s Sword, by the way, if anyone is interested, and they were fabulous.

But anyway, I have lost them, and my eyebrows are threatening to take over the world. This is distressing for me, as my eyebrows, or eyebrow, more accurately, has always been rather effusive and enthusiastically rides roughshod over parts of my face in which it is not welcome.

I succumbed to madness last week, and tried to shave it. Have you ever tried to shave the bridge of your nose? It’s a terrifying experience. Also, it didn’t work, and now it is back, furring the area between my eyes and threatening to set up camp on the upper reaches of my cheeks. This is a problem.

Anyway, as I was attempting to find a picture of Chewbacca to which I could link to illustrate the rampant state of my facial hair, I discovered that Wikipedia have a whole section on the Chewbacca Defence.

I love it. It’s so pointless. But its also hilarious, and it’s taking my mind off the fact that tonight, my boyfriend will be confronted by the brutal realization that I am in fact directly descended from Brian Blessed.