The one about the birds…

Barbados is a beautiful island, of that there is no doubt, Bajan people are among the warmest and friendliest people I have ever met, of that there is no doubt.

Their birdlife leaves a lot to be desired though, the birds on Barbados are some of the rudest most pushy birds I have ever encountered, and their eating habits are disgusting.

Let me explain,

It was, I think, on the third trip to that tropical paradise island, the one where I actually installed and commissioned the equipment that we had sold to the all inclusive hotel (did I mention it was all inclusive, well it was), the trip when, against my better judgement and even in the face of the time warp hangover experience on the first trip (see last post), even after all that, I accepted an invitation to go out boozing again with some of the hotel waiters, I am my friends, a fool, I accept the charge without mitigation.

There is some background needed here – three days before I took this business trip (yes, it was seven days hard work, I will not hear another word on the subject) we moved house – it wasn’t exactly good timing.

We moved house to this huge mansion of a house – this was back in the days when we were rich, the business was doing well – we were exporting to Barbados for gods sake – and the bank would lend me anything I wanted, I borrowed an extraordinary amount of money and bought the biggest house in this part of Leeds and we moved in three days before I set off for Barbados, well, it impressed the neighbours anyway.

After a ten hour flight via Antigua I finally arrived at the hotel and this time they had given me a room rather than an apartment, it still had a small kitchen and a bathroom to one side and the manager had filled the fridge with bottles of Banks’ beer for me in compensation – and I mean filled – I didn’t complain, he’d paid for the flights and the rooms and the food and the drinks for the week and then he was compensating me for not giving me an apartment, I told you that Bajans are lovely didn’t I ?

It was early evening when I dumped my bags in the room, opened the fridge and cracked open the first of many bottles of Banks, went and stood on the balcony in the still oppressive heat while the sun set behind a bunch of King Palms at the opposite side of the fairway that my room faced onto – and I rang home.

Now I didn’t know it at the time but back home just happened to be the coldest day of the year and of course it was now sometime around 10pm, and the heating was not working in our new but very old and very large house, Suzanne and the girls were jogging on the spot wearing all of their winter coats in an attempt to keep warm, it would be a very cold seven nights for them until I returned and switched on the thermostat, such a simple task but beyond the wit of my womenfolk, so they were not in the best of moods when I rang…

“I’m stood on my balcony with an ice cold beer watching the sunset behind some palms and its still fekking boiling here, the sweat is pouring off me…” I started to explain.

There followed ten minutes of expletives from the England end of the phone line which can be basically summarised by saying it was all my fault.

I ended up hanging up the phone line after I realised that the call was costing me something like twenty dollars a minute to listen to my wife explaining what a fooking twat I was for leaving them with no heating etc etc etc.

I didn’t ring again for the rest of the week, we have a rule when I am away on business (or pleasure), I have to ring every night, aren’t I good, but on this occasion I didn’t fancy paying $100 every night to be abused again, so I didn’t bother.

Thats the background info that you needed, ok ?

Fast forward to my last night on the paradise island and a farewell boozy session with some of the waiters, I think we went into Bridgetown, truth is I haven’t a clue where we went, all I know is that someone put me in a taxi afterwards and gave the driver the correct address.

The next morning I awoke early, far too early, with another mother of all hangovers but this time without the time warp, so at least we’d stayed off the blue jelly stuff this time.

I awoke early, too early because the phone next to my bed was ringing, I picked it up.

There was a long pause.

“Oh so you’re still alive then” came a sarcastic voice I sort of recognised, I braced myself ready for another haranguing from the mother of my children who was paying $20 a minute to continue her nagging from across the Atlantic, no matter how far I travel, no matter what the cost in currency, I will never escape that womans haranguing.

My response at hearing her voice was to lean out of bed and throw up on the floor, she asked me what that noise was, I asked her what time it was whilst still spitting lumps of last nights meal out from the back of my throat, it was 10am in England which meant that it was 5am in Barbados, the cow knew I’d still be asleep, she didn’t know I’d just vomited all over my hotel room floor though and as I made my excuses and promised that I’d be on that afternoons flight home I noticed for the first time that I’d actually vomited all over a sheepskin rug, just my bloody luck, the rest of the room was floored with marble tiles, I’d managed to hit the only piece of fabric on the floor for miles around, that was going to take someone a long time to clean up.

A few minutes later I realised that with no wife to do the cleaning up, the cleaner-up was going to have to be me, bollacks thats all I needed, the mother of all hangovers, a sheepskin rug to clean, and cases to pack, this was not a good start to the day.

I picked the sheepskin rug up by holding both ends, carried it into the bathroom and threw it in the bath, then stood and observed it for some minutes before finally lifting one end of it up and applying the shower head to it, turned up full, the smell was disgusting especially with the water on “hot” and I had to make several pauses for more hockling, this time in the toilet.

The sheepskin rug was a bit cleaner than it had been but it was stained a dark brown now and inside the fleece I could still see what I’d eaten last night, hiding in there from the best of the shower pressure, I was going to have to scrub it, with my hands, oh god no.

And worse – the bath was now a quarter full of my diluted vomit, the plug hole was blocked and it was going to need a finger down there to wiggle the stuff around a bit and force it down the pipe, this was not good, it wasn’t yet 6am and this day was not good, not by a long stretch of the imagination.

And there was something else too – I needed to step into the bath to take a shower.

A management decision was called for, the water would drain away eventually, maybe while I was down at the restaurant for breakfast, all I needed to do was to have a shower, get dressed, go for breakfast and when I came back the bath would be empty, surely ?

So yes I admit, I stood in a bath of my own diluted vomit, just for the record it reached halfway up my calves, while I had a shower, washing my feet as I stepped out, mission accomplished I hung the sheepskin rug over the shower curtain rail and stepped out of the bathroom to dress – it really did stink in the room so that is when I made my fatal error, I opened the french windows onto the balcony to let some fresh air in, got dressed and went for breakfast.

It was a long leisurely breakfast involving all sorts of cooked meats and fried stuff and fruit juices and lots and lots of coffee and after a while I started to feel quite chipper again, especially when I noticed one of the waiters rushing out of the restaurant to have a vomit all of his own, we must have had a good night then.

But eventually I had to go back to my room and I made the fortunate precaution of informing the desk clerk that I wished to vacate my room a little later today and perhaps they shouldn’t send the maid around quite so soon, or perhaps not at all until I was safely off the premises – that stain on the sheepskin was not going to shift, I knew it wouldn’t.

I placed the key in the lock to my room, turned it, opened the door…

…and stood there in utter amazed shock.

The room was full of birds.

When I say full of birds, I mean full of birds, I doubt whether Alfred Hitchcock had employed this many birds in the making of his film, erm, The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock would have won an Oscar for best film if he’d only managed to cram this many birds into a hotel room.

They were everywhere, sparrows, starling-like birds and pink pigeons, flying around in circles in my hotel room with hundreds more waiting outside on the balcony rail to come in, I closed the door quietly, stood outside my room for a few minutes then opened the door again to peek in, no they were still there, there was more of them now and they were shitting all over the furniture.

I walked in the room waving my hands in the air and shouting words like “shoo” like you do when you are shoo-ing lots of birds from your hotel room (what do you mean you’ve never had to do that ?) and they erupted back outside via the french windows with a huge swoop and a-flapping of wings, a swarming of birds which surely didn’t go un-noticed back at the hotels main office, “what is he doing in that room” they must have been wondering down there.

I turned back to my room from the balcony to see still more birds coming into the room from the direction of my bathroom, some of them still eating…

Yes, thats why they were there, they were eating my vomit.

The disgusting bastards.

OK so it was partly my fault for leaving the balcony door open, but still, every bloody bird in Barbados had been feasting and shitting in my room while I was happily scoffing a monster breakfast, now look at it.

So I had the bath still to clean, a sheepskin rug to scrub with my bare hands and a tablet of that free hotel soap that goes nowhere when you introduce it to water, I had a case to pack before the maid came and now I had all of this bird shit to clean up too – and my hangover was starting to come back – this was not a good day, not by a long mark.

I rang the reception desk again and by means of begging managed to persuade them to let me keep the room until 12 noon, then when the maid was cleaning next door and had left her cleaning cart out on the veranda I managed to sneak out and steal four rolls of toilet paper off her, cleaning up of bird shit for the use of, and double locked my room door leaving the key in it so that she couldn’t get in.

Four hours later and the room was slightly more presentable, the vomit had been forced down the bath plughole where it now blocked the U bend but that was not one of my problems, I’d be off this island in a matter of hours, the worst of the bird shit was gone but the small waste paper bin was now full, full and crammed full again, of screwed up soggy bits of toilet roll, christ knows what the maid thought when she found that, how the hell can you explain that one ?

The sheepskin rug didn’t clean up at all well though, it was now brown in the middle instead of white so I hung it out on the balcony where, as I left, it was being attacked by another (or maybe the same) swarm of pink pigeons.

I checked out of the hotel at noon and literally ran across the car park for a taxi to the airport where the British Airways check-in desk were amazed to greet me a full five hours before my flight was due to depart, how could I explain that I was a fugitive room wrecker, how could I explain that my vomit was held in great esteem by their islands birdlife, I was on the run, fleeing the island and if I never see a pink pigeon again it will be too soon for me.