Tales from my handbag

On the final day of my Icelandic sojourn, the girls suggested we go to  a sweat lodge. Now this is not a particularly Icelandic pursuit but in the spirit of doing everything once, apart from incest and drinking your own wee, I agreed to take part. The sweat lodge was located in the back garden of a ramshackle bungalow, down a cinder path just off highway number 1 on the outskirts of Reykjavik. On arrival, we were greeted by two old queens and a herd of rabbits (I know this isn’t the correct collective noun but they were seriously en masse). Everywhere I looked there were bunnies – around our ankles, under the cars, in the bushes. Why there were so many and why they were so tame was never explained but this is Iceland – a country that believes in elves and trolls so let’s say no more. The house itself (which was thankfully bunny-free) was a labyrinth of small interlinked rooms, each one festonned with fairy lights, lurid murals and various eclectic nicky nacky noos. No surface was untouched by the hand of kitsch.

The first stage of the sweat involved putting on some cheap plastic sunglasses that corresponded to our date of birth (I was turquoise), having our pulse points dabbed with a melange of suspicious smelling unguents and then going inside for some wild dancing in the disco room. Here, 18 barefoot men and women in various stages of undress moved, grooved, shimmied and flailed to the likes of Frankie goes to Hollywood, bongo from the Congo and something by Madonna involving the lyrics ‘kill the bitch’. It wasn’t exactly spiritual but we did all get off on the raw energy of  ‘Relax, don’t do it’ and I had tremendous fun shaking my maracas. After we’d worked up a light sweat, we put our cozzies on and went out into the chill night air to the sweat lodge itself, a low-level yurt type construction covered with tarpaulin and blankets with no windows and only a small entrance. We had to bend double to get in – scrabbling to find a space in the dark, smoky interior. There we sat, cheek by jowl in a circle around a fireplace waiting for the sweat to start. Then the hot stones came in, the flap went down, the water went on, and the chanting began. ‘ooooooohhh I’m not claustrophobic, I’m not claustrophobic’, I chanted to myself as the Mexican lady with the big legs next to me keeled over. In between each 15 minute session of wailing and panting, the flap would open and someone would throw a wet flannel and a bottle of water at us. By the end of the fifth session, one girl had had a panic attack and legged it and I was rolling around moaning and wiping my face in the dirt – the only piece of cool in the whole ruddy place.  Then Nonni (Master of the Flannel and ecstatic dance DJ) said we were done and could leave. I crawled out and collapsed on the grass, a quivering wreck. Nonni came over and threw a bucket of cold water over me and we all got in a hot tub. Later on, around midnight we had some watery soup and Nonni read my rune stones. He said I shouldn’t travel the next day as something would happen. I felt like slapping him.

The night after the coffee cup reading, I went on an adventure in a tank. Our group was mostly German but for some light relief, there was also an odd Japanese woman who spent the whole day eating dried fish on the back seat. We were heading to Thorsmork, scene of the volcanic eruption that blighted the airline industry early last year. On the way, we passed by an aluminium factory, an ‘Elf Church’, and a town full of greenhouses. With the Icelandic diet full of stuff like shark, sheep heads and fish balls, apparently, they go ga-ga for exotic fruits. Yes, this was banana city. Anyway, the town, our trusty guide told us, is built on a very thin crust of earth which can make gardening a bit of a precarious business. No double digging here then! In fact, one family famously had a geyser explode in their front room one Friday night while they were watching Deal or no Deal. Moving on to the volcano, we collected a plastic bag of volcanic ash, went to the toilet and got soaking wet trying to cross a glacial stream. Oh how we laughed as we stumbled across volcanic boulders, leaping from one rock to another and occasionally losing our balance and toppling into the raging torrents of water, right up to our knees, soaking right through our two pairs of trousers, special rambling socks and new leather boots. Gggrrrrr! At the end of the trip, back at Friend A’s, I had a quick sulphorous shower then it was onto the ladies-only ecstatic dance class. With Moby on the sound system and the honk of incense in the air, we twizzled, swooned and skipped our way barefoot around the room. There was a bit of ‘smudging’ – although that had to stop when one lady singed her snood – and at one point we all had a group hug. I found this a little claustrophobic as I was on the inside and had a very hefty lady called Stella who was giving me way too much love from behind and pressing me into Olin’s quite frankly, dangerous breasts. Of course, my other problem was wind – what with all that jumping up and down on my eggs and cold meat breakfast, I had terrible difficulty holding in my gases. Finally, the ecstasy reached a climax and we sat around in a circle, massaging each other’s knobbly bits. And so, with my chakras wide open and positively tingling, it was time to get pissed. We headed down to the local pub, a cavernous working men’s club style gaff rammed to the gills with one-armed bandits and pool tables. Sadly, they were short on punters, save for three be-hooded odd-bods who were sat at the bar, huddled over their pints, watching a documentary about polar bears on the bar’s big screen. In the ad break, one of them staggered over, slipped me some Icelandic blarney and kissed the top of my head. Was this my coffee-cup hero? God help me.

On my second night in Reykjavik, I had a choice of dinner – sheep’s head hot pot or fish balls. I’d seen the sheep in the supermarket and they didn’t say ‘eat me’ so I went with the balls. After dinner, we headed down to the local geothermal pool for a spot of hot tubbing. De rigeur in Iceland is a naked, and very thorough shower before you get anywhere near the water. Then, when all your bits are nicely warm and tingly, you slide into your cozzie and run barefoot and dripping outside into the dark, dank Icelandic night and flap around like a headless (and featherless) chicken looking for some sulphorous bubbles on which to park your frozen derriere. I simmered gently for a while in one tub then slipped into the adjacent tub  which was coming up to a rolling boil. It got a bit intense so I went and petted myself in the pool then nipped into the sauna but, as you’d expect, there were a lot of Viking types lying around on sun loungers with flannels over their dangly bits so I called it a night. The next evening I was invited to a Buddhist meeting at a nice little bungalow in the burbs. We did a bit of omming, lots of hugging, then had some nibbly cheese crackers. After that, by way of a spiritual finale, I had my coffee cup read. Apparently, I’m going to meet a 38 year old Icelandic hunk who won’t like me much for the first three weeks then will become like a limpet and never let me go. I am still waiting for this to occur….

Last weekend I had a sock incident in the Brecon Beacons. I was staying in Ponty Pandy’s only public house complete with bunkhouse attachment, stale nibbles and porcine landlord with pudding basin hair. Now I love a ramble, involving, as it usually does, a leisurely pace, a hot beverage with a Pppppppenguin and, if I’m lucky a wee in a bush.  However, this ramble was a 20 mile Challenge in the company of a bunch of seriously dull council employees. We had a trading standards officer, a couple of widget counters and a man who did something in leisure centres – think Gordon Brittas in waterproof trousers. The day didn’t get off to a good start – the pub had no muesli, no stewed prunes, not even any Rice Crispies. It was a Welsh-all-in or nothing, so I had a slaver of black pudding on a slice of 5050 (that’s brown bread that’s been bleached white but doesn’t taste of either) then it was check you’ve got your whistle, your survival bag and your sandwiches – more slices of pig on 5050 – and we were off. From one rain-sodden tussock to another we leapt whereupon I discovered my waterproof boots weren’t waterproof at all. We then chucked up the hugely steep and perilous Pen Y Fan. En route, we passed a woman with a handbag and a shawl, and, most peculiarly, a man with strange rubber shoes with individual toes in them who’d lost the plastic end of his walking pole and had walked all the way down to the bottom to find it, saving himself, oh I’d say about 50p. Meanwhile, the council boys, fuelled by their morning sausage, had chased each other to the top and were now eating bananas and laughing like drains at the impossibly named adjacent peak of Fan Y Big. The view was lovely but on the way down, my ultra chunky wet socks started to chafe and friend A got the urge to wee. With no bushes in sight, we could either form a human shield around her with the council bores, or she could hold it until the next check point (whose facilities turned out to be a bucket in the school stationery cupboard). By this time, we’d hooked up with a Scottish Munro bagger and a building inspector from Neath who for the next two hours, regaled us with tales of altitude sickness on Kilimanjaro. By tea time, our ordeal was over. Back at the bunkhouse, we fought over the shower and who was going to have the Welsh faggots – and then we went to bed. Tidy.

At my Friday night film premiere, I made the briefest of appearances on the big silver screen. It wasn’t like that on the night of filming; ‘lady with loud laugh at cocktail party’ had chit chatted her way through a very crucial scene. As usual, I was professional right down to my finger tips and had thrown myself into my part, creating quite a personality for Daphne, despite the fact that all I was required to do was drink Ribena in a tweed skirt with my head cocked on one side. I was a swinger from Saltdean with a very fat husband who was having it off with a lollipop lady. Anyway, on the set, I was positioned just inches away from our hero, David Morrissey, who was rammed up against the bookcase with no socks on, looking deranged. Trying hard not to look at Dave’s lovely feet (smooth and cornless) I was bantering with an elderly, limp (in a gay way) gentleman with a strong aroma of fags about him (ciggies not homosexuals). If my memory serves me right, I was telling him the joke about the wide mouthed toad, although this is quite hard to do with a plastic wine glass in one hand. Anyway, this was cut from the final version – all we saw was me sashaying across the room away from limp man, presumably, on my way back to my swinging, super fat husband. In close up, I have to say, I was very surprised to learn that when laughing, my right cheek looks enormous. Later on that night, I went to a Finnish pub where all the bar staff (and some of the punters) were dressed as Girl Guides, and everyone was drinking Fisherman Friend flavoured vodka and nibbling on chunks of reindeer; it was that sort of place. The next day, I went off to the Hop Farm Festival where I discovered Iggy Pop has one leg longer than the other and Lou Reed is a bit surly but has a lovely head of hair. Oh yeah, and leaving the Indie Disco, I saw Tricky Dicky, ex-East Enders bad lad having a conversation with a telegraph pole. What a weekend!

I have a few things to say about Berlin, city of a thousand sausages. The other week, I was staying in the very colourful Schoneberg district where Christopher Isherwood and other light-footed gentlemen used to galavant with impunity. At the end of my road, there was a. a big pork emporium where men in blue overalls ate sausage standing up, b. lots of lady prostitutes (and a couple that defied gender classification) jay walking among the bmws, and c. a gaggle of maxi-skirted Roma girlies who spent most evenings dancing around a phone box to a Slavic boom box. Around the corner, I had the dubious honour of early doors at Kumpelnest 3000, a fabulously indiscreet former knocking shop boasting elaborately carpeted walls, glitter balls and a very sticky dance floor where repressed housewives regularly flashed their baps. I resisted; I was recovering from an evening spent at a punk rock reunion party with a right charmer called Chaos whose chat up routine involved donning a penguin costume and slapping a pair of dentures on the table. Believe it or not, it takes more than false teeth to seduce me these days, Berlin or no Berlin.

Last Friday, an animal (possibly a bird or a fox on stilts) shat inside my jeans. I wasn’t wearing them at the time; the incident occurred while said jeans were on the line, drying. The excrement was the colour of a beige cardigan and it caused me some consternation because I didn’t see it until I was pulling up my jeans in the bathroom. Now my first thought was that I’d had a little accident. But wait, the offending streak was at the FRONT of my jeans, not the rear. Either something had gone horribly wrong with my back and front bottom plumbing or a careless seagull had eaten some Spanish cucumber and let rip over my washing. Any road up, as they say in Hinckley, I am hoping this incident will bring me luck. Later on that day, I found a slug in my nibble and tuppaware cupboard. It wasn’t eating; it was just lounging around on the bottom shelf. I chucked it over the fence with extreme prejudice. Talking about animals in crazy places, in Berlin last week, I went for a gander at the Brandenburg Gate. As if this marvellous edifice alone wasn’t enough to inspire awe in the tourists, the authorities had seen fit to jazz things up a bit with two teenagers in GDR guard costumes, a gorilla, a chicken and a Darth Vader. And no-one was laughing!

Another day, another French film stuffed to the gunnels with crying and kissing. In a nutshell, we had a bunch of Gallic miseries on holiday doing a lot of moaning while their supposedly bezzie mate lay dying in hospital, having come off his scooter after a night snorting absinthe in a Parisian brothel. We never did find out what his injuries were although the shockingly bad make-up suggested botox gone wrong. ‘Oh woe is me’, various characters opined, having crashed their water skis or got a bit of cramp on an early morning beach run, after which they’d wail or shout or smash some of the beach hut crockery then drink lots of red wine. For some light relief, we had a few miscreant weasels in the attic and a man dressed as Bonnie Tyler. Oh, and there was an oyster fisherman with the biggest calves I’ve ever seen. However, the best thing about Little White Lies was the three children who spent the entire film looking bemused at the maelstrom of cheesy emotion that was swirling around over their cherubic curls. In the end, the friend dies and they all blub themselves into oblivion at the funeral, climaxed by the oyster fishermen emptying a big bag of sand into the grave. The French eh!

It’s all go on the allotment and not just in the vegetable department. Boring Brian, the octogenarian Nordic cruise lover who tells me he can dig for 9 hours without stopping has been hanging around my compost bin wanting to chat asparagus, while Emphysema Jeff has invited me to sit on his bench and have a rummage in his biscuit barrel. Meanwhile, in the community shed, there’s been a lot of shouting as Deaf Ron has been in charge of the shop which means simple requests like, ‘have you got any celery in the back?’ can take a while to elicit a response. I have taken to miming which can be a dangerous game when it comes to root vegetables. But my biggest current concern is Alan, two plots down, who may or may not have taken a shine to me. A thin and pasty, long haired individual, Alan, aka Eccentric Nobhead, spends most of his time lying down next to his pond, fiddling with flowers. At one point I thought he might be dead but then realised he was having a nap. Later on, he wandered over with his flask of nettle tea and lay down again, right by my broad beans. I have now discovered that this is a man who keeps his finger and toenail clippings in a jar on his desk, at work. Say no more….Some of the names have been changed.

I know it’s spring, not only because of seeing the odd flip flop but also because insects have started to copulate in my back bedroom. Yesterday, I tried to prize apart a couple of teensy flies who were bareback riding in amongst my brussel sprouts seedlings but unfortunately, I was a bit cack handed; it wasn’t so much coitus interruptus as coitus squashus; I only hope they were in the afterglow and not coming up to a rolling boil! Anyway, to continue on a theme of frustration, I went to see Archipelago at the cinema last night. It was set on a windswept island and mostly consisted of four people who didn’t much like each other, moaning, eating dinner, having long conversations about lobsters, and going to, and getting out of, bed. Every now and again, a Tony Blair lookie likie popped by to talk deep and meaningless, mostly to a young man who wore striped pyjamas and had a talking teddy (yes, it was as bad as that). To relieve the middle class ennui, there was a couple of scenes with working class people selling dead animals. As a result, I now know how to dress a pheasant which is a level of take-out not usually experienced from a cinematic environment. Anyway, there must have been a lot of weak bladders in the audience, either that, or people were leaving the screen in order to stab themselves in the eye in an effort to relieve the torpidity. Of course, they could have been going to complain that, in the distance, while riding his sit up and beg through the island’s windswept lanes, Edward’s corduroy trousers were a bit of a blur. We found out later that the Duke’s has had some men in and the focus has gone all doolally. I now feel a bit doolally myself!