If you’re on holidays and you start drinking at 6 in the afternoon you should realize that it is not going to end well.
You still do it though.
After a day walking in the hills with Elli and Marion we decided it was time to get drunk. They were both finishing their working holiday in the UK and were heading back to Stuttgart in a few days. I was a rugby playing, Novocastrian engineer. We all had good excuses to drink in excess.
It all started so innocently with a few afternoon drinks in the last hours of twilight. Then we found a deck of cards and the mayhem began. We played drinking games of all variety and before long we had polished off 4 liters of cider and a six pack of beer. I was in good spirits, the girls were in slightly better spirits. It was still early so a decision had to be made, go to the pub now, go to the shop and buy more cider or wait around for a couple of hours then go to the pub. Yeah, more cider. So the twenty minute walk to the shop turned out to be a little longer when you are a little tipsy and recalling all the German you learnt in primary school.
“Eins, Zwei policei, drei, vier officier etc etc”
Memory begins to get a little hazy between opening the next bottle of cider and the morning. But, we walked back to the hostel and polished the rest of the cider. We then felt it was a good time to head up to the pub. Glencoe, where we were, is very small place, and this pub was about half an hours walk up a country road with no light of any description along the way. I hadn’t been to or seen this pub, so I was going on faith that there actually existed a pub. However about 40 mins later we arrived at really cool, country pub out in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t very busy but looked like it did get busy sometimes. There were some other young people there and also a mother and daughter from the hostel were having a beer together in the corner.
The girls grabbed a table and I sauntered up to the bar and ordered three real ales. I had to use that knack that can only be learnt in Australia. No matter how pissed you are somehow you are able to compose yourself enough to walk steadily up to the bar, eloquently order your drinks, pay, and walk away without the bartender knowing that you have been drinking all afternoon. It wasn’t long before he cottoned on.
From here memory becomes really bad. I remember sitting in a corner booth for a while drinking beer. Then I have a flash of memory of Elli and I kicking someone off the pool table and then throwing pool balls at each other.
Another flash of consciousness, and Elli and I were sitting at a different table with all our jackets pilled up on it. I flailed my head about but couldn’t see Marion. For some reason I knew it had been a long time since we had both seen her. After pondering the quandary for awhile we came to the conclusion that she must be in the toilet pagging. Yes, yes she was. We stumbled into the seedy toilets to find one drunken German lying beside the toilet cuddling that porcelain like it was her first teddy bear.
I was pretty pissed but not that bad. Getting up out of the chair and walking around gave me a second wind. We got Marion up and I walked her around a bit and she had a drink of water and seemed OK after her little nap. We went back into the bar to get our jackets and we came back into the toilet and Elli was on all fours investigated just exactly what was that vegetable on her sandwich from lunch. It was lettuce and we were out of there.
So we strolled of down the dark road, still too pissed to feel sorry for ourselves. I got shit talking to Marion as Elli ran ahead yelling something in some language. It is a distinct possibility that I had my iPod and Marion and I were listening to it, that may also be a construction of my hung-over mind the next morning.
So Marion and I strolled into the hostel just before curfew and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While I was struggling to work the tap Marion went to check on Elli in their room. She came out a little perplexed and asked me if I had seen Elli. “What, I can’t work the tap” was my reply. I soon realized that she wasn’t kidding. Elli was nowhere to be seen and it was the middle of the night in early spring in Scotland, and we were incapable of clear thought.
I went and got my headlamp and steamed off back up towards the pub yelling out “Elli” and other assorted German phrases. Marion somehow found the owner of the hostel and got in his car and drove the other way, thinking she had missed the hostel and kept walking.
Trying to search both sides of the road at once, I swung my head back and forth from side to side, while keeping up a slow jog. I was very drunk. This was not helping the situation. I hadn’t seen Elli when the lights of the pub came into view. Oh, shit where is she? What’s that! I held my light a steady as I could. Yep that’s her, or a dead sheep that didn’t grow back its coat this winter. No no, it’s her. Thank god.
She had run off ahead of Marion and I as soon as we left the pub and it seemed that as soon a ditch appeared on the side of the road, she promptly planted herself into it. Seriously she was within 100 meters of the pub.
By the time I found her she was shivering and blue. Even after giving her my coat and a rub she didn’t warm up. Back at the hostel, Marion was relieved to see her again. But Elli was still shivering and wouldn’t even have a cup of tea. So Marion took her to bed and she finally shook herself to sleep under the covers of those comfy youth hostel blankets.
Ditch girl, as she now will forever be known. Woke in the morning with vague recollections of a camping adventure in the middle of the night and made as little eye contact as possible while she prepared breakfast. No harm done, so we can laugh about it now.
