Travel Agency

Tourist: Good morining
Secretary: Oh good morning, Do you want to come
upstairs?
Tourist: What?
Secretary: Do you want to come upstairs? Or have you
come to arrange a holiday?
Tourist: Er.......to arrange a holiday
Secretary: Oh sorry
Tourist: What's all this about going upstairs?
Secretary: Oh, nothing, nothing. Now where were you
thinking of going?
Tourist: India
Secretary: Ah one of our adventure holidays
Tourist: Yes
Secretary: Well you'd better see Mr Bounder about that.
(Calls out to Mr Bounder) Mr Bounder, this gentleman is
interested in the India Overland
(walks over to Mr Bounder's desk)
Bounder: Ah good morning. I'm Bounder of Adventure
Tourist: My name is Smoke-too-much
Bounder: Well you'd better cut down a little then
Tourist: What?
Bounder: You'd better cut down a little then
Tourist: Oh I see! Cut down a little then.....
Bounder: Yes...I expect you get people making jokes
about your name all the time?
Tourist: No, no actually it never struck me before.
Smoke...to...much....(laughs)
Bounder: Anyway you're interested in one of our
adventure holidays?
Tourist: Yes I saw your advert in the bolour supplement
Bounder: The what?
Tourist: The bolour supplement
Bounder: The colour supplement?
Tourist: Yes I'm sorry I can't say the letter 'B'
Bounder: C?
Tourist: Yes that's right. It's all due to a trauma I
suffered when I was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat
Bounder: A cat?
Tourist: No a bat
Bounder: Can you say the letter 'K'
Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble
Bollege Oxford
Bounder: Why don't you say the letter 'K' instead of
the letter 'C'
Tourist: what you mean.....spell bolour with a K
Bounder: Yes
Tourist: Kolour. Oh that's very good, I never thought
of that what a silly bunt
Bounder: Anyway about the holiday
Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've
been on package tours several times you see, and I
decided that this was for me
Bounder: Ah good
Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what's the point of
being treated like sheep. What's the pointof 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."
Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I
quite agree...
Tourist: 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.
Bounder: (beggining to get fed up) Yes, yes now......
Tourist: And then some 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 Pow ell can speak and then
he throws up over the Cuba Libres.
Bounder: Will you be quiet please
Tourist: 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'.
Bounder: Shut up
Tourist: Food very greasy but we've found a charming
little local place hidden away in the back streets
Bounder: Shut up!
Tourist: where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and
cheese and onion.......
Bounder: Shut up your bloody gob....
Tourist: 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