Emmets Get Lost!
A couple of years ago, before bidding farewell to Blighty and shacking up together in France, the lady girlfriend and I decided to go on a long weekend’s tour of Cornwall. The weekend was all very bucolic and picturesque, and regularly punctuated by clotted cream teas, but involved a lot of driving around and changes of scene, so in true desert rally style we set ourselves distance objectives for each day. This also meant booking a different hotel for each night.

On Saturday night we ended up in Tintagel. Saw the Arthurian castle thingy; saw the Old Post Office and thought of Postman Pat doing his rounds in chainmail; and bought some fudge from wobbly grannies. All that was left was to find the hotel.

Of course, since we’d been driving around for the entire day and most of the previous day, we had less petrol than a tramp’s breath. Any hopes of Tintagel being a big tourist destination and therefore having all the amenities (such as a petrol station) close at hand were dashed when we realised that they obviously wanted to maintain the Olde Worlde cachet of the place and had therefore banned anything so new-fangled from within a ten-mile radius.

Luckily, being organised and all that, I’d saved the number for the hotel on my phone. I rang them up and the nice lady said “Oh, it’s dead easy to find.” This in itself should have set alarm bells ringing, but it was getting dark and I was getting hungry, so it didn’t quite register. She then said “You just take the road out of town, and at the first bend you’ll see a big sign. Turn right at the sign and we’re a few metres down the road.”

Thanks love, etc. etc.

There was indeed only one road out of town, so we parked in Tintagel's central car park and walked down it until we got to a bend. It wasn’t very far at all. On the downside, it wasn’t very much of a bend at all either. It was more of a kink, really. On the other downside, there was absolutely no sign to be seen anywhere. Behind us: the trudge back to Tintagel, and its one pub with no rooms free. In front of us: the vast, unfathomable, Stygian darkness of the road, with no pavement and no streetlights. One short discussion later (during which the prospect of pressing on regardless was flatly declined), we found ourselves back in the car park. It was at this point that my girlfriend started having a major panic attack at the thought of sleeping in a car in pitch darkness surrounded by drunken yokels and various slavering forest animals.

All seemed lost, until a group of chaps were heard returning home from a night at t’pub and were promptly accosted at full speed and subjected to the complete sob story. One of them knew the hotel and promptly drove us round: down the road out of Tintagel, stopping at the not very bendy bend, then turning right through what can only be described as a hole in the hedge gnawed for access by anorexic hamsters. Even with full-beam headlights this road was damn near invisible. We duly got to the hotel, way after midnight by now, and collapsed on the bed, the missus in a twitching and tearful nervous wreck and myself in dire want of a beer.

After an admittedly excellent breakfast surrounded by sheep (outside, not in the hotel dining room) the next morning, I couldn’t resist asking the landlady about the sign that blatantly wasn’t there.

“Oh yes”, she said. “Someone must have crashed into it and knocked it into the hedge. It happens a lot.”

Fortunately for her there was nothing immediately to hand that could have been used for throttling.

*** standard first post w00tage and heartfelt apologies for my massive schlong ***
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 15:08, Reply)