Nasty Nasty

This is a grubby little post. Blame Zilla for making the memory resurface, as she recently blogged about defiling the sheets of the filthy rich. I think it was the combination of the words sheets, defiling, and filthy. So now you know.

Once upon a teenage, excited, 'we know it all' type time, I went for my first ever dirty weekend, in Milton Keynes.

Shagging up alleyways behind the Ealing carpet megastore, or in other discrete but scuzzy corners, was de rigeur if you had a regular boyfriend. Parking under trees in his dad's borrowed car was the height of luxury, with heating and steamed up windows and locks on the doors. No parents let their child's partner stop over in those days, and no child even over eighteen admitted they were 'at it', so fumbled thanks for a lovely evening was creatively scheduled.

This time it was different. This time there was a concert, miles away and involving train travel, and we had an approved overnight stop.

Specifically it was the first ever concert at the Milton Keynes Bowl. UB40 were playing. It was going to be so exciting.

It rained solidly for a day or two before, and by the time we arrived, the grassy bowl had become a mud pool, trampled and turned by thousands of excited ticket holders. Some people were standing on beer cans to stop from sinking, and some were swigging more beer double fast. Males who bravely hoisted their ladies onto their shoulders would visibly sink, or fall over.

The show went on.

The toilets were a mile away, it seemed, along the edge of the bowl and it was no small feat to battle through the crowd and uphill through mud to get there. So we didn't. We stood at a suitable distance from the group of drunks in front, who were having fun threatening to kill each other and trying to pile drive each other into the ground and generally out-rowdy the PA system. We were cold, I was busting.

The music was great, but in the end it didn't really matter that we'd come all that way, paid all that money, secured historical 'first event' tickets etc etc, to stand cold, wet, muddy and miserable, because to our minds the best was yet to come.

An official, sanctioned, parentally blind-eyed overnight stop at a bed and breakfast establishment. Time enough to take our time. We were grown-ups, and we were going to get it on. In a real room. And then even talk to other grown ups over a breakfast table, afterwards. We were so naughty.

I don't remember what or if we ate on the way to or from the concert, I seem to recall that Milton Keynes closed before the concert did, but I do know that in spite of this, in the end we never even stayed for our long awaited, pre-paid 'Full English Breakfast' at Mrs Pinchnose's B&B.

Why?

Sheets.

Thin, glaringly purple, 100% nylon, bedsheets.

There were no tissues in the room. There was no access to toilet roll except via a communal hall to communal facilities (and we were teenagers, the idea of getting caught tiptoeing back with half a roll of paper was just mortifying).

Boyfriend was, therefore, so shockingly embarassed by the globulous, impertinent and immovable remains of his pre-dawn excitement, which sat proud on the dayglo nylon in an almost mocking fashion, that he volunteered to make the bed while I got washed. I came back to the room to find everything looking spotless and him slightly flushed in the face but dressed and ready to go. He was even wearing his rucksack.

Whilst I dressed, he went downstairs to settle up and cancel our breakfast. He returned wearing a fake, weak smile, being closely followed by the lady of the house, pinnied up and sour looking, who had obviously decided that if her kitchen skills were not required, she would get on with doing the room.

We left. Actually he mumbled something about missing our train and we fair nearly dashed out of there.

A couple of roads away, in the cool morning light, our stomachs grumbling, I asked him what he'd done.

He'd removed the bottom sheet completely and made the bed back up to hide its absence. He therefore needed us out of the house before she lifted up the coverlet and asked where it had gone.

The nasty damp nylon and and its resolutely established contents, he had folded up and hidden under the pillow, although he thought that was probably going to mark the pillow also, and mentioned that it may have already spotted the mattress.

We knew, there and then, that we would never attempt another dirty weekend together, for fear of nylon sheets.

And we ran.