1 post tagged “collection of skulls”
So I cobbed a lift to Cardiff to join some buddies out on a birthday rugbyathon. They were in an O'Neill's only a few doors down from the Millennium Stadium, so unsurprisingly the pub was *throbbing*. I gave my chum Jellycube a Mini Egg chocolate cake for her birthday, which she proceeded to eat as one might a cookie. We were with a gaggle of loopy Irish girls, who danced, fought, and rubbed the fondant centre of Creme Eggs over one another. I got a kiss on the cheek from a girl who looked like Claudia Schiffer. I fluffed things up with a pretty brown-eyed girl by telling her about my collection of skulls. It was a bit of a high voltage afternoon.
The evening reached a fork. I could either stay out and go boogying with the Irish lasses, or get a lift back to Chez Walrus with my uncle. As I had nowhere to stay, no transport to get back in the morning, and The Walrus and co would almost certainly pick up a ruby on the way back, I elected to go for the latter. Plus, I escaped a hangover this way. Before anybody chides me for not spending more time with a big band of merry women, it's worth mentioning that I got a phone number, so I will hook up with them again in future.
I left at about nine o'clock with my uncle, The Walrus, and an old mate of his from university. My uncle's new Merc started unexpectedly juddering somewhere short of Bridgend. We pulled over onto the hard shoulder, and realised that my uncle had caught a flat on the rear driver's side. I noticed a couple of screws, each about five or six inches long, on the ground behind the car. Further investigation revealed that there were screws scattered all over the motorway. It later transpired that one of these blighters had indeed pierced the tyre. As we'd been juddering for almost a mile before stopping, we realised that there must have been screw-slick on the M4 at least a mile long. This was peculiar.
We set about changing the tyre. On a new Merc, in the rain, in the dark, on the hard shoulder of a motorway, this isn't as easy as one might expect. As a few tonnes of metal whizzed just past me at eighty miles an hour as I jacked up the car, we decided that this was probably a bit dangerous, and called the AA instead. A good thing too, as apparently if you get your steel and alloy nuts mixed up, you can cause untold harm. I don't understand stuff like this. It's a silver one.
My uncle didn't have the AA number on him, so The Walrus called his wife to ask her to get the number off the intermcweb. He also asked her to call a take away that would deliver to the house, as we were unlikely to get to one in a timely fashion. She got annoyed, and accused him of being drunk. I don't think that asking her to get the number for the "A.A.A.A." had aided his cause any.
Whilst waiting for the AA man to show up, my dad's mate decided to go for a slash. He stepped over the barrier, and then disappeared. "I realised I was drunk when I suddenly found myself in the ditch, looking up at the sky," he told us later.
We'd been told by the AA person over the phone that we should wait outside the car, on the far side of the barrier if possible, as staying in the car was too dangerous. But it was raining and cold. So we waited in the car until the AA man was about a minute away, and then got out and waited. Except for my dad's friend, who'd fallen asleep by this point. We only realised this when we got in the cab of the AA pickup. The nice AA man woke him up, and he got to sit in the front of the cab. He then realised that the seats bounced up and down, which caused him some excitement for a minute or so ("It's like a bouncy castle!"). We were driven with the car in tow to the next services, where the nice man would change the tyre whilst we got a cup of coffee. It's worth noting that this took a pro over twenty minutes, so it's a good thing we'd given up. Anyway, the cab of the pickup was pretty big and high, and there were steps perpendicular to the ground to get in and out. As you couldn't get any purchase getting out forward, you'd either have to climb out of the cab backwards, or jump out if you were sufficiently limber. My dad's mate invented a third way, by simply tumbling out of the cab, and dropping a few feet to the hard, welcoming ground. I imagine his Sunday was a pretty sore one.
