The mouse owned a house

And in it lived a louse

The mouse was a terrible landlord

Charged more than the louse could afford

The parasite protested

And was promptly arrested

The case was contested

Much time was invested

Any my interest in this poem did wane.

Ah, the thrill of chronic boredom… After a day where the most constructive thing I did was to wave at a nesting pigeon, I figured the only sensible thing to do was murder the few remaining hours of the day in the least useful way possible… and this is it.

 

Having spent a few despairing moments staring at the tat that litters my humble home in an attempt to locate something of vague merit I have come to the sudden realisation that pretty much everything I own is either worthless, knackered, trailing random wires that probably should be attached to things, or about as intriguing as the prospect of an evening with Keith Chegwin.

 

After giving up on the idea of enthusing about the delights of material possessions I then decided to rack my brains in an attempt to remember an event of such staggering excitement that any human being bored enough to stumble across this page would be unable to resist the urge to bounce up and down on the spot with excitement… I truly failed… but that has never stopped me before…

 

And so prepare for an enthralling tale from the strangest holiday I have ever been on… and one that taught me two valuable lessons:

 

1)        If you ever go on holiday with a group of people, make sure you hide in a dark place for the first five hours until everyone has stopped bitching and rowing.

 

And

 

2)        Never, EVER, go to a place designed solely for European tourists and expect anything other than the most mind-stabbingly surreal experience of your life…

 

 

 

Medieval Times…

 

Italy… seemingly a pleasant place to take a holiday… and it probably is provided somebody in your party doesn’t suggest forgoing a multitude of fine, family run, restaurants and tasteful little bars and instead decide that nothing could be finer than an evening at Medieval Times… the medieval theme restaurant of choice for pissed up tourists with a grudge against my senses.

 

One of the basic rules I have always stuck to in life was never to eat within ten feet of a horse… maybe I’m just odd but I never felt overly comfortable when faced with the prospect of horses’ unpredictable internal plumbing lurking around my meal. I fear that my “what the heck, let’s live a little…” attitude was a poorly timed negation of my usual level of apprehension… It was with a creeping sense of doom that I stumbled onto the bus.

 

The restaurant itself was conveniently located in quite possibly the most depressing tourist development ever witnessed… It was wedged in between a rock café that seemed to specialise solely in German rockers with mullets and monks’ outfits and, staggeringly, The Rambo Action Experience… Now I won’t lie and say I wasn’t strangely drawn to The Rambo Action Experience… maybe it was the brochures that pictured an incredibly short and hairy Italian Rambo jumping away from a very small explosion or it might just have been another indication of the fact that my instincts hate me with a tremulous passion…

 

Yet Medieval Times drew us in like mice to the cheese… or they would have done if it hadn’t taken half an hour for them to open their bloody doors… This meant half an hour of standing outside on the pavement being forced to where a colourful cardboard crown by sadistic friends, listening to a jaunty medieval version of Moon River, and being “entertained” by possibly the swarthiest jester ever to have existed.

 

I wish, oh how I wish, that I had learnt more than a variety of drink orders in Italian before I went out there… then I would have been able to have told the jester exactly where to shove his jangly stick instead of merely staring at him until he gave up making exaggerated smiling faces in a hopeless attempt to illicit any more than a look of loathing from me. I had sat and watched the man spend twenty minutes trying to grab the arses of every single woman in the crowd and to be honest I was rapidly reaching the point of bludgeoning the man to death in an effort to advance humanity’s cause a great deal. Instead I merely settled for trying to smack him in the ankles with my walking stick when he went to move away.

 

Before we could enter the foul breeze-block castle we had to sit through the prologue to our damn meal… in four languages… and to be honest I was no more successful in understanding the English version than I was at comprehending the Spanish. To add utter joy to the experience they did some mime.

 

Once we finally were ushered past the pillocks in rusted armour and their plastic swords we then were able to enjoy the wonderfully claustrophobic experience of queuing in the dank corridors of a place that I doubted had seen a fire inspector that wouldn’t take a bribe. At the end of this nightmarish experience we were presented with the opportunity to have out photo taken with a Henry the Eight impersonator (or possibly just a fat man in a dress) and a small woman wearing a sack. Mercifully I only shelled out for two copies of that photograph, both of which I passed on to my friends, and thus I don’t have the wonderful memento of three happy looking friends and something that glowed pasty-white as death with his hands unfortunately positioned so that it appeared I was grabbing Henry’s arse. I hate photographs… I refuse to stare at myself recreated in anything more accurate than wax crayon.

 

The fun was truly about to start…

 

The inside of the restaurant resembled a warehouse in the midst of the seediest of industrial estates… the kind of place you go to only when you want to buy a box of Christmas crackers for less than a pound or a bottle of soy sauce five times taller than yourself and an expiry date of 1980. Several incredibly uncomfortable benches ranged around a central arena that smelt vaguely similar to a freshly opened bag of composted badgers. Much to my utter joy I discovered that we were all provided with faux-pewter plates and bowls… which every single other bastard in the place decided to bang together with such glee that I began to pray for death… The noise created by those bastards is something akin to the noise I imagine a combine harvester would make when running over a crazed, metallic, Roy Castle during one of his enthralling mass tap-dancing record attempts.

 

Then the fan really hit the shit…

 

As we were presented with a small olive roll we were warned, in four languages, not to throw anything at the performers… I lowered my roll with despair. What followed is somewhat vague because I had forgotten to bring my glasses and thus couldn’t actually see a bloody thing. Apparently there were horses transporting short Italians round at high speed while they hit things but that didn’t intrigue me anywhere near as much as whatever the hell it was they were trying to ladle into my bowl. The mysterious liquid did have the advantage of stopping the majority of people from banging their crockery together although it didn’t dissuade a heroic few from continuing and successfully showering the place with bits of soup. All the while we were being given important plot information in four languages… which to be honest is a really effective way to mess with a human being’s brain… It was akin to having a bedtime story read to you by an amnesiac with a split personality disorder.

Then the strobe-lights kicked off…

 

|Now me and strobes don’t really get along all that well and so I was busy twitching furiously and frothing at the mouth for the next few minutes and so I may have missed some major character development… either way, the short Italian men were now trying to twat each other with swords… although sadly not trying hard enough.

 

The next course of our gastronomic torture consisted of an entire chicken each along with some highly medieval potato wedges and mayonnaise… On closer inspection the chicken did not ring true… It was definitely chicken-shaped, I’ll give it that, but it was roughly the size of a pigeon and gave the impression that, whatever the hell it had been in its former existence, it didn’t originally look like that. My theory was that when the place opened the proprietors bought a flock of diseased herons from a disreputable man in a cape and quickly came to the realisation that only the drunkest human being could finish the monstrosities. They then decided to take the remains of the creatures and press them into chicken-shaped moulds and then serve them to the next poor batch of bastards through the door. I just ate the wedges, although I was damn sure to avoid any part that the mayonnaise had touched.

If you take into account the fact that you were meant to eat with your fingers, the lack of anywhere to wash your hands before you began, the great age of the components of the meal, and the fact a horse’s arse was often hovering literally inches from your face, I believe that the average meal at Medieval Times had a mortality rate of 60%.

 

Hilarity then ensued when the proceeded to fill the place with dry ice and my asthmatic friend started to die next to me. After she had been aided in staggering outside our party was down to only me and the poor beleaguered girl who helped add a hint of sanity to the whole holiday. A waitress staggered by and proceeded to drop some mysterious lump of pastry-encased dessert on the floor in front of us and wandered off. She then returned to deposit a dollop of ice cream that was 99% ice on my plate. I sat and watched it slide along the table and then drop down to join its pastry friend. It was at roughly that point that we decided to cut our losses and run like dogs.

 

What followed was a half hour wait in the rain for a cab, in the meantime enjoying the continuous loop of the jaunty medieval version of Moon River … When the cab finally arrived I made the mistake of not grasping the fundamental rule of sharing the back seat of a cab with three people… there is a very distinct pecking order that I shall attempt to summarise:

 

1 st Person in: Takes as much space as they need.

2 nd Person in: Takes up as much of the remaining space as possible.

3 rd Person in: Balances on the door handle at an angle of 45 degrees and spends the journey trying not to land face first in 2 nd Person’s cleavage.

 

Guess which one I was…

 

The whole holiday was about as surreal as an experience can get without a walrus emerging from a buck wearing a tutu… There are many longwinded tales that nobody even has the vaguest interest in, especially the next night’s visit to the rock café… oh god… don’t get me started.

 

Time for the rating bit:

 

Medieval Times:

 

Food: 1/5 (5/5 if you don’t eat it and merely admire it from a great distance)

 

Ambience: 1/5 (5/5 if you’re a big fan of ungodly noises, shirtless Europeans, and dung)

 

Entertainment value: 1/5 (5/5 if someone in your party suffers a life-threatening ailment that will be triggered by pretty much every single element of the show or if you happen to be even faintly epileptic)

 

Cleanliness: 1/5 (5/5 if compared to the armpits of Bernard Manning or the pastimes of a sweaty dog)

 

Surrealism: Trout/Cabbage (Table/Goldfinger if monkey chicken thunder thighs spatula tennis racket)

 

In summation: Just eat in a ditch with a TB addled badger instead, it’s preferable in pretty much every way.