Tuesday, April 20

White Van Woman


Funny the way things work out; my diary says that I am abroad working at a glamorous international music event - the Icelandic volcano has put paid to that idea and, unbelievably, my would-be employers have decided to go ahead with their festivities without me.

Meanwhile the film office has been smoking with activity; the film crew got stuck in Madrid on their way back from Costa Rica. Miss Whiplash and I spent the weekend pacing around her desk and pointing fingers in the air as we hatched cunning plan after cunning plan. With typical brilliance Whiplash managed to fix a new filming schedule so that the crew can be occupied filming ants in Barcelona while awaiting rescue...

I have just collected a van huge enough to accommodate fifty hundred cases of filming equipment and some passengers. In the morning I will board a ferry for a 24-hour journey to Santander, I will then drive my great white leviathan towards the Mediterranean where I hope to find shining faces waiting for me.

Actually their faces might be shining, but from the reports we’ve been getting I expect the rest of their bodies to be quite nasty; someone has a fungal infection, one of the Camera Boys has a swollen leg and everyone is itchy from insect bites. The outright winner of the horrible disease competition though, is The Director with the many parasites that are currently burrowing around in his skin, this is much more impressive than last year’s return from Costa Rica when he played host to just a single botfly, then, we tried to entice the botfly out of his arm by strapping something fatty over it's airhole, the point being that it will burrow up into the new food, in search of air and thus get out of its human host*. The top picture shows my purchases for this purpose from the Italian delicatessen down the road, I bought a lovely bit of speck but it wasn’t bendy enough and the pork fat turned out to be easier to fit.


Gruesome body events are an occupational hazard for film crews and is the stuff of many a pub anecdote, we know someone who hatched spiders out of his forehead while trying to edit his footage and there is a very well known cameraman who used to remove his trousers at the drop of a hat to show the hole in his leg made by a hippo.

* Youtube has some very gross footage of botfly removal – don’t go there!

25 comments:

  1. Hats off to Lulu, Miss Whiplash, The Director, and the Camera Boys! That's the kind of inventiveness and perseverance that built the British Empire!

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  2. i second what xl said, sugar! xoxoxox

    (we're ok here, hon, thanks for the love!)

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  3. PS:

    "We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy."

    Winston Churchill


    Oh Hai Savannah!

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  4. Whoah Nelly! Hatching spiders from the forehead? Meat as bait strapped to a shoulder? Leg holes made my hippos? Get the cameras rolling we have here another Mono Cane!

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  5. You and your whole cavalcade are a bloody marvel. I only wish East Harling were on the way and we could both go Eastward ho. Bon Voyage & take plenty of Red Bull.( It's actually Joeyjojo not Richard Royale)

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  6. Mediterranean? I'm dangerously close to there... wanna cuppa on the way???

    Love

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  7. Sounds like my workplace... Infested... the difference being we don't even have shining faces to look forward to. Cheers.

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  8. I had typhoid once. Not very nice but I think preferable to insects living in one's skin! An insect infestation in my body would horribly hurt my mind.

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  9. I've never heard of botfly before and feel both ignorant and blessed. I want to know nothing more about them except: did the lard work?

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  10. Am I the only one who wasn't certain of the body part on display (at first) in that last photo?

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  11. Try dripping the fat onto his arm after melting it gently over an open fire. Nice arm, by the way.

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  12. am I the only one who ignored Lulu's sensible injunction about botfly videos?

    Man alive - those things leave a big hole behind after the extraction! I watched 3 videos in which no one was wearing gloves and only one person applied disinfectant after the procedure..... very scary

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  13. A rescue mission!
    Is your name Jane Bond?
    Sx

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  14. heeeeergggghhhhh ggh gh g

    I can show you a hole in my elbow from a pesky tropical ulcer, but I dont think it would impress you after this

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  15. Jeez, if a strong woman like you says the Youtube clips are hard to watch, a wooss like me would probably collapse in a heap.

    I have insect-phobia I think - but they love me, oh yes, they love me very much.

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  16. How awful to get invaded by an insect. Sorry you couldn't go on your trip, how dare Mother Nature screw with us?

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  17. That was rather gross Lulu, please can you stick to Whiplash next time.

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  18. Spider, meet forehead. Ugh. You see, parasites make Canadians squirm ... it's too cold here, and we just don't have 'em.

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  19. I do not wish to look at the botfly removal footage, thenk-yew. But, perhaps not so awful as that tiny Amazonian fish that merrily swims its way up the human urethra and causes untold woes.

    Anyway, I haven't been here in much too long, so I am happy I dropped by. I shall endeavor to be much more of a regular in my travels.

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  20. Thank you everyone for your good wishes and making me smile. I had a bit of an adventure getting to Barcelona but so far seem relatively unscathed.
    xxxx

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  21. The poor Director! He's lucky to have you as his erstwhile doc.

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  22. I looked up teratomas, and then unexpectedly got diagnosed with one. Don't think I'll be looking up botflies.

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  23. And I thought that I was bad having a splinter in my finger. I feel quite unimpressive now.

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  24. Eeeewwwwwwww!!!

    I love your blog :)

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  25. Ooooo it seems like I am one of the only ones that benefitted a little by all the flight delays...

    I wanna work with someone who has a hippo scar, only because it seems more sensible to drop your trousers for that than for... no reason!

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