A Life in the Day of Ronnie - or - An Occasional Dip into the Life of a Benidorm Barman

Cars, Seats and the Spanish Inquisition

2007-07-04T15:33:00.000+02:00

Well.. I don't really know how to begin... maybe, er.. an apology to those who emailed me whilst waiting for my blog to be updated. I just got out of clink! There - that's it said...

I have been in jail for a month.

It all started with a drink (doesn't it always!) It was really all David's fault. I thought that my jail-time days were long over after I the stamp-fraud thing at Gibbons, but thanks to me listening to that old fool, I have been languishing amongst the great stinking Spanish unwashed in Alicante nick, eating dago food such as salad, pie-ella and torty-illa. Not a hint of a chipped potato or a good English fry-up in the slightest. No bloody sausage, no eggs fried in best Lincolnshire lard, no black pudding, no pies, no HP sauce or mugs of milky tea.

We had seen a car parked near to the bar as we packed up to go home. It was an old dago car - a Seat or Sofa or Chair or some-such thing. I don't know, do I! Now - to understand the background to what I am going to tell you you need to know that I had to surrender my licence to the magistrates in 1974 when they insisted that I should have known that the new M6 motorway was one-way BEFORE I caused the Mayor of Manchester's limo to end-up buried nose-first in a nearby field...

I digress - so back to the story.

David and I were on our way home when we saw the car. That in itself was normal - after all, there are more cars in Benidorm than people. Come to think of it, there are more bars in Benidorm than people and that has not done anybody any harm... so.. I continue... the car we saw had an open window and the engine was running. There was no-one in the car. David said something like " Ronnie - it's been a while since you drove, hasn't it...?". I retorted something suitable, and after a few minutes of drunken fecking about I suddenly found myself behind the steering wheel.

We were approaching Torrevieja, about two hours later when the Boys in Green got us. To be honest, I didn't even know that we were being followed until the gunshot took out the back screen and David fainted. We both spent the night in the ospedale and, apparently, the car is still stuffed tail-first somewhere in a salt flat. They can't recover it because its just next to a colony of nesting eagrets in some bird-reserve... oh woe is us...

The net result was this - the next morning the Guardia Civil behaved in an unusually civil fashion and provided David with some new trousers. They gave me a razor. They said that it was for me to 'take the fácil way out'. They pointed out that, as it was electric, the only way for me to kill myself effectively would be for me to stick the thing up my back passage and press the on-switch. They laughed rather un-Englishly, I thought. A bit like Ernst Stavro Blofeld out of James Bond, said David later.

And then to Court. For the odd one or two of you that have never before a court in Spain, I need to tell you that the Spanish Inquisition that we have all read about in our Monty Python history books IS FOR REAL!! (note - that is Mon-Tee Pieee-Thon for you Americans who keep mailing me asking for translations of my Englishspeak) I'd like to tell you that all the court dagos wear red capes and prance about in Papist dresses, but - they don't. They wear Italian suits. Apparently they stopped doing the transvestite thing after some person called Jennie Franky died in the 70s and left them all a history.

28 days in gaol. A couple off for good behaviour... that's for me- as the driver. David got 7 days detention, but was let out in 3 because he did some deal or other. My lawyer tried to play the Hilton Defense. I paid him enough to stay in the bloody Paris Hilton for a day or two to do it. It failed. I refused to "meet the local sheriff in private for a quarter of an hour" to discuss my early release...

I will tell you more when I can. At the moment, I am having a little trouble sitting down on my computer chair for more than 10 minutes at a time. I guess the motto of this sad tale is this... if you can't take it up the ass from some big blackie for nearly a month of long, long nights, then don't nick the car belonging to the girlfriend of the son of the local local Police Chief...

Green Shield Stamps, Nobs and Clubs

2007-06-07T22:08:00.000+02:00

Her Royal Highness The Princess of Hearts is in the news again, as it's been 100 years since she died in the Channel Tunnel. We have been reading a lot recently in the Brit press here, about her two sons, the Princes of Clubs, raving it up on the south coast of England and in London. I think they kept Harry away from Iraq because it was considered that he could be more use patrolling the mean and dangerous streets of Bournemouth on a Saturday night... he certainly got in plenty of practice... I met the Princess on more than one occasion when I nipped up to Sandringham, Highgrove or Buckingham Palace to see her mother, a woman known to us all as The Queen of Great Britain, The Colonies including America, Most Of The Rest Of The World and (after July 1959) The Moon.

I was Deliverer of the Queen's Stamps, an ancient and venerated office which they told me when I started had been held before me by no less than Sir John of Klees, Sir Michael of Palin, Lord Bentine of Potti, Sir Robin of Loxley, most of The Knights Hospitalers of Ni and a woman Marl once met in the Post Office in Surbiton whos daughter had been out with the Prince of Wales before he was married.

Her Royal Majesty of Great Britain and the Holy British Empire is an avid collector of stamps, and spends most evenings in her secret vault in the bowels of Buck Palace poring over her collection using a very large magnifying-glass. It all began in 1970, when the Queen popped into a Shell filling station get a gallon of 5-star leaded petrol for her Daimler limo. When she handed over the shiny brand new 50p piece with her face on it to pay for the tankful, the colonial Petrol-Wallah humbly asked her (from the floor where he was kow-towing of course) if Her Gloriousness would like some Green-Shield Stamps. After explaining that if the Queen bought just less than a million and a half gallons of petrol, she could send the stamps off to Green Shield Hong-Kong Imports at Kowloon, and they would send her a hair-dryer, or a wardrobe made of paper.

This interested Her Loftiness so much that on this occasion she didn't have the colonial and his family sent to The Tower to die horribly at the hands of her torturer, Sir Paul of Kintyre, who was known to kill his victims slowly by singing John Lennon songs at them backwards until they renounced the Devil. Instead, she began on that day what was soon to become the world's most prized and pointless collection of trading stamps in the history of stamping... I will continue the story of Queenie's stamp collection, and tell you about how I saved it from destruction during the Iranian Embassy Siege of 1890 after I have had a little pick-me up and a sleep...

Holidays, Beetles, Bottom-users and My Eye

2007-05-28T23:17:00.000+02:00

Blimey - I'm glad that the end of May Bank Holiday is well and truly over and the tourists have buggered off back to their council-estates in Leeds and Manchester - I have never had to work so hard in my life. I did a whole THREE hours in the bar on Saturday and another FOUR on Sunday. On Monday I did another THREE!! This is all because Marl has been under the weather since her return from the UK. She says she was bitten by the Black Death Beetle when she was having a sponsored-sleep for charity and told David that they had to stitch one of her buttocks back on after it fell off due to the toxin. He doesn't believe her, but I think it could be true because she hasn't been able to sit down since she came back and won't show her arse in the bar like she usually does...

The brown stuff (and this time I don't mean Bovril or Marmite) really hit the fan when Marl took me to task over my deal with the other bar-owner that I told you about. To be fair, she was not too harsh with me (probably on account of her sore arse) and I have been told by the hospital that my retina will likely re-attach itself sometime later in the year...

I have had a couple of dozen emails from men called Nigel, Keith, Russell, Marcus, Troy, Adrian and Blair to say that not all camp gay-like airline-dressing-girly-singing men from England are actually poofs. Whilst I respect the views of those good people who sent the emails, please be aware that I, and the whole of the rest of the world without exception do truly believe that 'men' who dress up as airline stewards and ponce about wiggling their hips whilst singing a song about 'sucking' and 'nuts' on Eurovision or any other noncy-arsed TV show are indeed as queer as an arse-fest organised by Liberace's chiffon-wearing ghost and attended by all of Elton John's bottom-worshipping friends, fifty-thousand pairs of Freddy Mercury's silver panties and every Village People lookalike poofter band that ever minced its way out of the dark rooms of San Francisco, Amsterdam, Brighton or Nottingham whilst wearing gold lamé and sequin-studded cod-pieces...

Gossip, Tony and The Cleaver

2007-05-20T19:44:00.000+02:00

I got a phone call from my pal Tony asking if he can drop into the bar on his way back from saying goodbye to the troops in Iraqistan. The problem is that we are just too busy. And his helicopter wouldn't fit on the roof now we have got the TV dish up there. It was different before when Tone used to pop over from Downing Street of an evening and see Marl and me when we were in the first few months after buying the bar.

We had more free-time in those days, because we hadn't yet started our Gossip Express side-line. How the Gossip-Express business works is like this - Something happens somewhere in Benidorm. Someone in Marl's employ hears whatever it is, and then rings Marl up to tell her all about it. Marl takes the information she has just been given and multiplies the facts by a Gossip Factor. She then gets on the phone to her network of Gossipers, and spreads the news... The business element comes from the original subjects of the story coming to Marl and paying her cash to change the story back into something more akin to the so-called truth... and so therefore saving a reputation or two.

An example of this was when a certain bar owner in the New Town had not been seen for a few days and his wife was spotted shortly after his disappearance sporting two lovely big black eyes. This was reported as-is to Marl, who decided that the story needed to be mulitplied by a high Gossip Factor to make it reach her sky-high standards of gossip. Within 24 hours, the whole of eastern Spain knew that the bar owner had beaten his wife to death with a meat-mallet and was in jail in Granada, where he had been caught following a fierce gun battle with the Policia Nacional, following a tip-off that he had gone there with his 15-year-old girlfriend (who was pregnant).

Marl was particularly proud of that one, and she was pleased as punch when the wife came to see Marl to 'put the record straight'. Apparently, a large sum of money changed hands and now the whole of eastern Spain believes the (far-fetched, and quite frankly, ridiculous) story that the bar owner had gone to Scotland to bury his brother who had died suddenly, and his wife stayed in Spain to recover from the cosmetic facial surgery that she had just had the morning that the brother died. Marl's version was clearly the truth, and I am sure that her recent trip abroad had nothing at all to do with the sudden return to Benidorm of Jock 'The Castlemilk Cleaver' McManus ...

National Pride, International Chicanery and the Dutch

2007-05-15T22:52:00.000+02:00

Marl left me strict instructions for the shopping whilst she's away. We have this Spanish supermarket round the corner from the apartment, and she told me NOT to use it because it's full of Spanish food. She told me that I should only shop at the English shop, about a kilometer away. She said that I should buy the following : Black Pudding (a negro delicacy of the industrial North of England), Haslet (a crushed and boiled meat delicacy of the farmlands of east England), Jellied Eels (a jellied snake delicacy of the south of England) and Welsh Lamb (a delicacy of the west of England). By buying this variation, Marl insists that we will be keeping to the true international spirit of all us expats in Spain...

Speaking of internationalism... what about Eurovision then...! Imagine that little foreign country winning the English Eurovision Song Contest! I didn't even know that Johnny Foreigner was able to watch it. I thought that they may have been able to listen to it on their English-made clockwork radios, but I can't believe that they are actually allowed to enter it. Back in my day before Korea, the Eurovision was always won by the English. It was staged in the village hall at Spalding in Lincolnshire, and broadcast around the neighbourhood by means of Mr Blenkinsop the radio repair-man's unique and thoroughly modern transmission equipment.

Old man Blenkinsop used to rig up this antenna contraption out of a Ford Model 'A' windscreen wiper, a galvanised pail, a broom handle, a bog brush, some urine and a length of that black cloth electrical insulating tape that that they don't make anymore 'cos it never stuck to anything. He would film the contest live using some old ciné-camera his son looted in Dortmund during the war, and by means of the aerial the signal was beamed all the way next door to Mrs Gedney's parlour, where the whole of the town would be crammed-in to wait excitedly for England to be declared the winner.

It's all different nowadays I believe. Apparently last Saturday, about 50 foreign types were allowed into the Albert Hall to watch a dozen or so foreign bands compete for our trophy. I have been told by a Spanish woman who lives in an apartment above the shop where I buy my smokes, that England lost the contest because our song was something to do with some dirty homosexual people queering it up dressed as airline stewards and going on about nuts and sucking things. This is surely filthy disgusting lies!! The Spanish woman obviously doesn't know that English people have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to queers, pooves, shirt-lifters, bum-bandits, Friends of Dorothy and those who tread the other path! Besides, our English morality will never allow the country to advertise any kind of bottom-teasing antics openly. No! The Spanish woman must be mixing us up with the Dutch...

Cats, Barbers and Boot Polish

2007-05-11T16:36:00.000+02:00

I always liked Yul Brynner (Russian: Юлий Борúсович Брúннер). I always liked Telly Savalas (Greek: Television Savalas). I think men with bald heads seem to be able to act in films and on the box better than men with hair. I wrote to my good friend Greg Dyke at the BBC a while ago suggesting that he make all the 'actors' in that Eastenders shouty-screamy soap thing shave their heads in order to improve their acting. He replied that they had tried it - and it didn't work - he cited as examples the Mitchell brothers and that toerag that is the dad of the kid that looks like Prince Harry and is shagging the fat bird (Prince Harry's ex) who is more ugly than his own wife. I see his point...

Baldness suits humans. It suits cats somewhat less. I found this out the hard way. It all started when I went in the bar to have a beer with David. After about half an hour we had drunk about 8 pints each and decided to go home. Dave's been living with me and Marl ever since his first wife kicked him out about 20 years ago. One day I may tell you a bit more about all that. Anyway - me and Dave wandered home via some other bars. Suffice it to say, when woke up in the lounge at home we were both covered in what looked like - well - it's hard to say - but it was brown - and stank...

After about an hour David realised that there was an empty jar of Marmite in the corner of the room, balanced on top of that portrait of Marl dressed up as The Last Empress of China. Then it dawned on us that we were covered in sticky brown stinky Marmite, not, as we had supposed, BOVRIL. The trouble was - so was one of the cats...

If you have ever tried to shave a cat with a Lady-shave you will know not to bother. We didn't have a Lady-shave to try, as Marl gets her shave at the barber on the corner (or at least she did until he closed down suddenly, saying that he hadn't worked as a barber for 80 years in order to wind-up shaving English ladies), so we used Dave's old wind-up electric shaver from the Korean war.

After a while it worked, and the cat was free of Marmite. It was also pissed, as that was the only way we could get it to keep still... The trouble is now that instead of having four black cats, we have three black cats and a pink one. Marl is due back before too long and I think she will notice. The question is this - do we cover the pink cat in black boot polish or do we shave the rest and tell Marl that they all came down with Spanish cat flu that led to alopecia...

Playing Away and Clever Deals

2007-05-09T23:33:00.000+02:00

Wahayyy.... Marl is away for a few days, so no work for me..!!!! I told David and The Night Shift Girl that I was ill with scurvy again and now that they have stopped calling me I have planned to sit at home and watch re-runs of all of my ex-girlfriend Georgina Spelvin's classic greats. My particular favourite is her 1973 classic The Devil In Miss Jones, where Rigsby gets to do Miss Jones in the tradesman's entrance whilst the well-endowed tribal chieftain Philip watches... I used to spend many a happy night waiting for Georgina to come home from work when she was making these films, but I always got a good night's sleep when mum brought me my tablets...

Last night, a rival bar-owner came in and told us to stop selling beer to his punters because the stress of his customers coming to drink in our bar was making his granddaughter unwell. I agreed, but the negotiations were long and hard (a bit like the tribal chieftain), and finally I agreed to sell our beer at double the normal price to his customers whilst Marl is away. How it works is like this - His customers go to his bar and buy beer at his prices. They then come in our bar and buy beer at our prices. (They come in because they think we are cheaper, but - and here is the clever bit - we are not and they are too pissed to notice!!) After a few hours I call time and tell them that we are closing up. They then leave and go back to the other bar. The next day, I give the other bar-owner half the amount of money that his customers spent in our bar. Its what he calls a win-win situation and Marl is sure to be pleased when she comes home...

Teeth at the Speed of Light

2007-05-08T22:53:00.000+02:00

My teeth have been gypping me all day again. I said I'd tell you about the teeth anyway. I was always known for having pretty rotten teeth. My good friend Shane MacGowan out of the Pogues used to love to go out for a beer or two with me because when he stood next to me his manky choppers actually looked as if they had been manufactured by The Queen's Own Tooth Makers out of flawless diamonds...

So... I was asked last year by Marl to consider getting them seen to - well - if truth be told, she threatened to make me work an extra hour a week if I didn't get them fixed. She said that just because she hadn't kissed me for 17 years it didn't mean that it didn't make her ill to go to bed each night and see my hideous grin across the room as I snored off my beer.

Now, here in Spain dentists are about 40% cheaper than in England. Having said that, it was to cost €300,000 to have my teeth removed, sent to Holland to be re-profiled, sent on to South Africa to be hardened with a diamond coating and then forwarded to Switzerland to be fired round the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at CERN at nearly the speed of light to see if they would withstand a miniature Big Bang.

As I only had €300 I opted to have them all taken out and replaced with falsies made of wood. I got two sets for the money though.. an upper AND a lower set...

Of Bogs and bandits

2007-05-07T16:04:00.000+02:00

Wandered down the hill from the apartment towards the Old Town today carrying a bottle of bleach and a bog brush. Marl had told me to unblock the toilet before I opened up today. I had come home last night and told her that the bog was bunged up after a fat tourist had done something unspeakable. Truthfully, and between you and me, it was me, and I had hoped to get her to go down and clean it out, but as she was intending to watch Star Trek at home, the job fell back to me.

I then wanted David to do it, but he had mysteriously developed Ebola virus or something and taken to his bed. I decided to visit Vincents Corner Bar on the way in, and got some funny looks as I sat there with three pints in front of me and a bottle of Generalissimo Franco's best bleach and the bog brush. I think they were expecting me to ask for a small glass to make my own chaser.

Marl wobbled in the bar later to tell me that David was up and about. Apparently it wasn't Ebola virus, but rather a spider bite that made his leg swell up. It seems that the swelling vanished over the previous couple of hours but he was still feeling too poorly sick to do any work today. The net result was that I did a double-shift until our night time girl came in.

We used to have a little weasel-like bloke called Bobby doing the night shift, but he was always pissed by the time he started his shift, and so was never able to stop the till being robbed. At least that's what he used to tell Marl had happened regularly when the till was down by the whole day's takings (€40 or so I think). The previous owners of the bar refused to ever have any woman work nights on her own, but Marl and me think it's a great idea because the robbers can get an eyeful of a good-looking girl as they rob the bar, so they will be less likely to stab her, and more to the point, they will be far less likely to smash the place up... magic idea...

Working on Bank Holiday Indeed

2007-05-05T22:38:00.000+02:00

It's Brit bank holiday weekend, and we have had an upsurge of customers as you lot flock over here in your dozens to get away from my pal Tony Blair's dictatorship. Weather's not bad here -about 23 degrees - What this means is that, sadly, I have to work hard, and do at least 2 hours a day in the bar. I don't go out much if it's sunny- I hate the heat. There is nothing worse than heat for warming up your can of beer when you're walking about. For some reason people think we brits all like warm beer. Well - I for one don't. Unless I'm feeling cold, then I do.

I'm feeling a bit confused today. This happens over the weekend usually, and has been going on since I was a kid. I often wake up on a Saturday afternoon feeling a bit disorientated and groggy. It often happens on Sunday too. I once asked my good mate Dr Raj Persaud, the telly doctor about it and he suggested that I was suffering from hangovers. I told him I drank only the recommended government weekly allowance of 280 units of booze a week and he appeared a bit surprised. I know these quacks double what you tell them, so he probably thinks I drink more than I do...

Politics, Dust and Sand

2007-05-04T22:20:00.000+02:00

I nicked a copy of The Mirror from a customer who had nipped out to buy some fags and found out that there have been some elections in England. It was an early edition without all the results, but it looked like my good friend Tony Blair has had a bit of a kick in the Cheries... I rang Number Ten from the bar phone to ask him if the rumours were true but they told me to piss off and bother Cameroon. Why they would want me to ring a small Indian country I don't know. Anyway - it was engaged.

We have building work going on here in the town and there is a lot of dust in the air. I don't know what they are doing but I know that it's getting up my nose. The dust is bad enough, but the tourists keep bringing it in on their clothes. It gets everywhere, and it's so bad some days that I've got to cover the slops bucket so it doesn't settle on the beer. It's sand we really hate. The holi-wallys bring it in in spadeloads in their shoes, and Marl gets real pigged off. She can't understand why tourists have so much sand on them. She gets the brush out and really lets them know about it. It scares me how much sand we have in Spain. Apparently the Moors brought it with them when they moved to Granada - from the beeb I suppose - but how they got it all here beats me. Maybe they had it in their shoes, just like our tourists today...

Pigs flew past the window

2007-05-03T20:19:00.000+02:00

You wouldn't believe it but a ruddy great helium blimp just flew past the bar today. I thought it was a pig at first. I say it flew "past" but as we are in a ridiculously narrow back-street, it would have got stuck if it had. It would likely have burst too. It actually floated where it should be - in the sky - and quite right too if you ask me - floated over the rooftops in point of fact. I think it was advertising very cheap and nasty foreign Spanish beer - you know - the kind I won't drink in my bar, but will in someone else's because it's cheap.

Marl woke from her nap today with a headache, so I made myself scarce. Our friend Dave was looking after the bar today, so I went and sank a few with him. I hate going to the bar when I'm not working, but, hey - it's free (as long as Marl doesn't cotton-on). The worst case is that I go for a beer in the bar and Dave or Marl get busy and I have to help. I hate helping.

My teeth are hurting today. I had them all removed and replaced with wooden ones recently - I'll tell you all about that some other time. I think that either they are in need of some Cuprinol, or I fell on my face again on the way home last night...

Hello and an Important Question

2007-05-02T16:25:00.000+02:00

Er....hi..... I've just set this thingy up and I'm a bit worried that my missus Marl will find out. She's really private and doesn't like me talking to strangers and she never spreads stories. I didn't mean to set up a blog. I was trying to find a site online about traditional dutch shoes. Somehow, and I really don't know how, nine hours later I have a BLOG.

I can't wear just one blog on my feet, so I've decided to keep it for a bit and talk to it. I can use it to tell you how my life is going in the bar. Whilst I'm waiting for Marl to go to get up (she always has a nap between mid-day and 7pm) I'm going to pose a question that's been bugging me for a bit now - maybe someone can give me an answer -

the question first arose when my good mate Peter Murphy of Bauhaus once said that The Little Foxes Are Safe And Sound - They Are Not Dead - They've Gone To Ground.

When my other pal David Attenborough heard this he freaked, and roundly declared that tigers are more better than foxes all round and that Pete should SHUT UP.

Now then - I’ve got 4 cats. Both are betterer than foxes and tigers. And safer. My question is - are cats more edible and tasty than foxes and tigers? I am feeling peckish now the beer's wearing off and I really need to know...