I didn't cry but I couldn't speak when I held Angie for the last time before she mounted the Ferry steps . She had to get back to college and because I'd told everyone I was off round the world I was duty bound to get pedalling !
She promised she would write every day once I found a way to receive mail and would be waiting for me when I returned !
So I was on the quayside in Dieppe, watching her tiny figure disappear across the channel, just about penniless and still suffering from the effects of food poisoning and needing the toilet again!
The need to go quite blotted out the heartbreak of the end of a year or so's love and once I'd found and entered the public cubicles I had no choice but to use the most disgusting toilets in the world ! Squat of course and about one inch wider than my shoulders and covered from floor to ceiling in excrement both dropped and smeared on the walls !
What is wrong with people !
Mind you Ponteland public toilets aren't far behind !
I repeat, what IS wrong with people ?
Newcastle City spent a fortune a couple of years ago having an all bells and whistles self-cleaning public toilet built behind my market stall on The Quayside. It was
constructed by a team of four men contracted from CORNWALL who went home every weekend and their equipment was hired fron PENRITH ! Do we not have people capable of putting up a structure in the North ?
They took three months to flatten a small piece of land, lay on electricity and water and top their laboriously slow work with a prefabricated hut !
It cost twenty pence a go unless you were amongst the mean people who quickly discovered that a five pence piece would do the trick !
It never flushed away solid matter and it's floor was always drenching wet because of the self-cleaning mechanism which was a big brush on a cantilevered arm that came
out of a door and swept across the seatless toilet pan ! It's automatic toilet roll dispenser was often empty and supplemented by rolls tied up with string before being untied and dropped onto the soaking floor !
It's baby changing shelf was covered in the remnants of lines of cocaine and I once found an entire lumberjack's shirt stuffed down the pan just after a regular nutcase had been in there !
It's sink stunk of rot and the council never responded to my complaints !
Eventually, as part of their policy to save money the City Fathers had it taken down and in fact closed all the City's public toilets !
So now if I need a pee, which I generally do once I've set up my stall I have NO choice but to secret myself in a hidden corner and....well you don't need details !
Why aren't there spotlessly clean, attended toilets in EVERY street in the world ?
Anyway, rant over......I headed south towards Persia and hit Paris in a couple of days with three centimes in my pocket !
So in about five days I had lost my girlfriend, at least half my already low body weight, spent all my money on ineffective drugs and found myself riding a very narrow tyred racing tandem that although lightweight by the standards of the day, still weighed too much for me !
I knew my French sister-in-laws parents lived in the south of the city somewhere and so set off in search of an address I only vaguely knew in a direction which took me over every cobbled Avenue in the Metropolis !
So, worn out, sick, skint and starving I arrived by some miracle at their complex where their security guard took one look at me and refused to believe that I was who
I said I was !
I eventually fought my way in and actually received a warm welcome from the 'elderly' Madame Carton who only died last year aged one hundred and four, forty two years after my visit !
I left the next morning, clean and fed but as I was too proud to ask for money, just as skint as when I arrived and headed East to pick grapes in the Champagne region
!
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