Gazpacho Soup - Part Eleventyone - Smaller and Smaller

It was whilst traversing the bleak and arid cultural deserts of Ballantrae on a camel called Dave, and accoutered by only a toga and a fez, that I noticed that everything around me was incrementally increasing in size. I put it down to over-enthusiastic consumption of Crème De Menthe and mescaline with the White Rabbit and William Burroughs the previous evening back at base camp. No, it was definitely happening, the camel, the toga, and the fez were all growing in size, as was the surrounding scenery, or was I shrinking? A moot philosophical point, but not one I was in any mood to ponder. This was, as they say, serious shit.

I set up camp that evening in the back of a burnt out VW Golf in the idyllic surroundings of the car park at the back of the Doon Bingo & Social Club in a nearby hellhole of rampant Protestantism, as tumbleweeds of past nightmares rolled across the vistas of long dead industry. This was not before the slack jawed local populace inveigled me of their fine hospitality by inviting me "Fook off, ye Sassenach weirdo, and tek ye camel wi' ye." I was very tempted to take them up on the offer, but Dave the camel needed to feed his smack habit and this seemed like just the place.

A fine entertainment establishment in Ballantrae, note the lyrical curves of the architecture...

The following morning I awoke bathed in the sweat of recurrent nightmares involving fish, ledgers, and cheese, and those strange three wheeled lorries with the shark toothed radiator grilles that used to deliver fizzy drinks to your door. Dave the camel was nowhere to be seen, did he even exist? Quantum theory, he say yes, and in two places at once, forsooth! I leaped out of the VW Golf, dressed in a jiffy, which are bloody difficult to get in my size I can tell you, and I noticed it was happening again, the world had increased in size, or I had shrunk. This was a tad disconcerting, so I vowed to see the local doctor, who it turns out was a wizened little man with the fragrance of cheap whisky and fag smoke clinging to him like drool on an idiot's chin. I sat there in a surgery waiting room full of fat men and fatter women, standing out like a caring thought in a Tory Cabinet meeting. Every so often the Doc would poke his head out of the office and shout "Next Double Whopper with Cheese if you'd be so kind", which I later discovered equated to obese females with genital thrush. A greasy and sloppily fat man appeared from the surgery, blubbing as he said to his wife "Aye, I be a-suffrin' from Dunlap Syndrome, my belly dun lapped over my waistband ..........." As he blubbered, a 1980s TV remote control the size of a housebrick fell from a fold of hitherto undisturbed fat and hit floor with a dull thud, slimily and snail-like slithering across the polished floor. There was a deafening silence in the room as this seemed to be a move of extreme gaucheness on the part of our lardy friend. He should have done that behind closed doors.

When it came to my turn I had just walked through the surgery door in my by now slightly too large clothing, and it happened again, right in front of the mad quack's eyes!

"Ach" said the doc, "Ah havnae seen one of these in a while".
"Good" says I, "So you know what it is then?".
"Aye sonny - what do you do for a living?"
" I try to avoid it as much as possible, but, nay, for I am an accountant for my sins"
"I thought as much, and do you frequently make disparaging remarks about your profession and yourself in a mildly humorous stylee?"
"It has been known, good Sir, yes"
"Then I'm afraid you are suffering from self-depreciating humour..."

I got my coat and.......almost disappeared....

Next time - Norbert Dentressangle joins the British Oxygen Company, why and wheretofore, therein and hereabouts, hitherto and suchlike. I cannot remember the 1830s, so I must have been there, and a heron and a cucumber sandwich make hay in the midday sun....