The Esperance Incident

One of the issues Sandra and I have had to address whilst living in a tent is that toilet facilities are not quite what they are at home. While most commercial campsites do provide facilities of a reasonable nature and even the national parks have come on leaps and bounds since we first experienced their “long drops” years ago, there still comes a time when nipping behind the nearest bush is the only available option. For many of these stops, where digging a hole is not a requirement, I as a man am better equipped to deal with these calls of nature than Sandra – although I must admit that, even in Scotland, she has never been reluctant to drop them as the need demands – although usually with a modicum of circumspection.

On the day in question we were in Esperance, a pleasant coastal town in the south of Western Australia. I had known since the last service in Perth that the car required new brake pads and thought it would be a good idea to get this done before heading back into more difficult country. Touring around the local industrial area we found a garage that would be able to do the work but we would have to wait for about 45 minutes – could we bring the car back then? No problem so, as we hadn’t had breakfast and it was 10.30, we went looking for somewhere to eat. With no time to go into town to find a café we suddenly spotted the “Bay of Isles Lunch Bar” – just the job.

The Bay of Isles Lunch Bar is what I might, perhaps somewhat unfairly, refer to as a “greasy spoon” café set up to service the cholesterol intake of employees from the local light service industries in the area – thus the queue of spotty apprentices sent down for the bacon rolls. As we ordered a meal from the extensive “chips with everything” menu, the waitress seemed bemused when we asked for our meal to be served on a plate rather than in a brown paper bag and even more bemused when we asked if we could sit down in the “restaurant”. The restaurant was a small area up a flight of stairs near the door and out of sight of the servery. It was sparsely furnished with three small tables and chairs of the plastic and formica variety and a pot plant in one corner, just what we needed to kill half an hour before taking the car back to the garage.

The meal, pie and chips, was taking a long time to appear so I amused myself reading the Health and Safety notices on the wall and leafing through a pile of down market womens magazines most of which seemed pre-possessed with the love life of David Beckham (is he still on the go?) Turning round I got the shock of my life. In the opposite corner of the room I saw Sandra squatting by the pot plant with her trousers down at her ankles. Having witnessed this performance many times over the past few months it was obvious what she was doing, and equally obvious she had temporarily lost control of either her mind or her bladder – possibly both! Had our standards dropped so much since leaving Scotland?

Before I could remonstrate things, already bad enough in my mind, took a turn for the worse – out of the corner of my eye I saw the waitress coming up the steps holding two plates of pie and chips. There was no time for me to warn Sandra and there was no way I could intercept the waitress, things just had to take their course.

At this point let’s freeze the tableau – me looking shocked and embarrassed, Sandra wondering why I was looking shocked and embarrassed and the waitress trying not to look shocked and embarrassed and failing miserably – and turn the clock back several months.

We were at a campsite in Broome, Western Australia and still travelling with Sandra’s sister Johann and Stretch. The site was packed and we were all jammed in like sardines. Next to us were a couple with a camper trailer and S & J got speaking to the wife - swapping traveller’s tales and the problems of leaving home for a life on the road. One of these problems, and it could only be a woman’s problem, was how to keep your clothes clean when living under canvas. The main grouse seemed to be getting dirty when packing up the tent etc as, at the end of the exercise, your clothes are invariably dirty. The lady in question, I never learnt her name, gave them a tip – when packing up, wear the clothes you intend wearing for the day BUT put them on inside out. Then, at the end of the packing up, simply turn them the right way round and, hey presto, clean clothes.

Sandra had obviously taken this advice to heart and, on the day in question, had tried the inside-out trick. Unfortunately, at the end of the packing, she had neglected to turn her trousers the right way around thus found herself in the Bay of Isles Lunch Bar restaurant with inside out trousers. Thinking that she had a minute or two to spare she decided to take them off and turn them the right way round but unfortunately her timing was slightly off and she was caught by both me and the waitress.

So all was not as it seemed. Sandra however was horrified that I could even think she would do what I thought she was doing. I have learned, yet again, not to jump to conclusions - how justified they may appear to be at the time. And as for the waitress - it was quite obvious that she didn’t believe a word of Sandra’s inside-out explanation and is probably even now regaling spotty apprentices with the story of the “Scotch sheila who took a leak in the potted plant”