Going Barmy in Britain

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I was coming across the bridge when I saw this bloke cycling towards me. There were many things about him that annoyed me. He was on a mountain bike and I don’t understand mountain bikes, I mean why would you want to ride an extremely heavy off the road vehicle when you are demonstrably not off the fucking road? He was wearing a T-shirt and that really annoyed me, I mean it was freezing. I never did get to harden up to the weather in Scotland after the Middle East and it really got to me when some skinny ten year old girl would come along to karate wearing shorts and a microscopic blouse when I was all bundled up in a four season Mountain Equipment anorak. But today what really got to me was that he was on his mobile phone and the distraction was causing him to weave about. I thought about kicking his front wheel and depositing him in a mangled heap on the tarmac but I realized that though this is understandable behavior it is socially unacceptable…and then someone went and did it. Oh brother, did he come a cropper! His phone went skittering across the road and he was lying there shouting his head up all sort of tangled up in his horrible mountain bike.

‘What the bloody hell? What the bloody hell? What the bloody hell?’ he roared, this was obviously not an articulate guy.

‘Are you alright dear?’ asked an old lady who was one of the seemingly hundreds of people who had come rushing around.

‘Of course I’m not fucking alright,’ he bawled at her, rather offensively I thought. ‘That fucking maniac just kicked me off my bike!’ I realized he was indicating me so I tried a pleasant smile and a light laugh…it didn’t work. One of the two men who were trying to extricate him from his machinery turned to me.

‘Did you kick him off his bike?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely,’ said honest Nick.

‘Why would you do that?’ asked a nursey sort of woman.

‘He was on his mobile phone,’ I tried. The thing I most remember was when I gave that truthful response one of the blokes gave an understanding nod of agreement and wandered off.

‘Well, I’d better get moving, I’ll be late,’ I said for apart from that one man I was scenting a lack of popularity so I made my way briskly back to my car and made my way homewards…my work here was done.

 

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Description

This is the sixth book in the series that started with: Going Round The Bend On The QE2 and concerns the time when Nick and his wife Anjanette have had to escape from the Middle East and have ended back in the UK penniless. It tells of how they move to a tiny house in the very wilds of Scotland where they nearly starve to death. Nick opens up his ballroom dance club: Dancing in the Dark just to support them and shortly afterwards he reopens Kernow Karate. Sinister events though are happening behind the scenes as his battles with the Middle East still continue and death threats become an almost commonplace thing. Nick goes on to fight many more battles, firstly with Reader’s Digest, then the whole of Inverness Council and on to a debt collecting boxer. As ever Nick can find the funny side of any situation and his mad mooning of the local vicar and his vendetta with a local farmer and the clash with the poor man who was on his phone while cycling across Inverness bridge will have readers in hysterics. As always the events in this book are absolutely true and it is a great contribution to the other books in this exciting series of autobiographical travelogues.

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