Tall But True Tales of Touring
NEW AND EXCLUSIVE! Want to peel back the curtain? Want to learn the gritty truth about life on the road with the Angel Brothers? Then you need to read Keith Angel's Tall But True Tales of Touring.
Ode to an African Toilet
As some of you may already know , Keith Angel and Niki Seegers recently went on a month –long expedition to Mali in West Africa. This was no Palin –style Beeb –funded book promo & champers junket . Strictly low budget and hangin’ with the homies in some pretty isolated , heavy and occasionally desperate situations. Still, they came through alright and even camped out in a two man tent at the Festival of the Desert at Essakane near Timbuktu. The music was sublime and wild.The people of Mali were beautiful , hospitable, generous and life loving. The police and the ubiquitous checkpoint racketeers were none of these and treated the local people shamefully. Unfortunately ,more often than not , the sanitary arrangements were on the same level as the police….
Ode to an African Toilet
Oh African Toilet
How shall I describe thee?
Forever seatless glory hole
Your only comfort
The gentle tickling
Of coackroach antennae
On my tender nether regions
5am, Bamako
incarcerated
in a dark dungeon of a stinking latrine
My senses choked by the sour piss pong
Gagging on the unbelievable hot shit stench
-Take a look down there…
Deep into the rancid oozing bowels of Mother Africa
-It’s best not to
Gollum lurks
Or worse…
Until then
The worst I’d ever experienced
Was in Market Weighton , 1970
On our way to Brid
In our grandparents’ bottle green Morris Minor.
I was caught short again.
The dangling ‘Feu Orange’ air freshener
Insufficient to mask
My anxious little farts.
I sprinted into a roadside Gents
Only to come across
A veritable Kilamanjaro of kak
Rising majestically from the bowl
It’s peak far too high for a young lad to scale.
I was hoisted up, under the arms
By my gentle grandfather
Hovering in mid air above the summit
From where I caused
A small avalanche of my own
On the mountain’s fragrant brown slopes.
Glasto in the Sahara-
The tin pot loos of Timbuktu
Kamikhazi camel khazis
Fresh baked in the desert sun.
Sipping ice cold Castels and cokes
At the festival beer tent
We all watch as the lobster-red English woman
Enters the canvas sweatbox
She struggles to close the broken door
In the bent frame.
Succeeds at last
After a five minute battle for privacy
To light applause from the assembled drinkers.
Then, suddenly
The door is ripped from it’s flimsy string hinge
By a freak gust of wind
With a good sense of Malian irony.
It is blown far across the dunes
Like tumbleweed.
She sits there in shock
Pissing in the wind.
It’s a very English farce
Toilet humour at it’s best
In Africa, one should only expect
The Unexpected.
Fifteen hours and forty degrees of heat
On an over crowded pressure-cooker of a bus
From Bamako to Mopti.
Finally a toilet stop
At Segou bus depot.
I make dash for the hand painted sign
‘Hommes W.C.’
Entering the reeking hell-hole
I stumble across an insanitary tableau
Straight from the mind of Heironymous Bosch
-had he contracted crippling diahorrea.
A fecal moat fit to withstand an invading army
Powdered milk tins bobbing cheerily in the slurry
I am at least two hours past caring.
I leap the open sewer
To Devil’s Island,
Assume the cramped, unfamiliar position
And stare at the fly –blown wall,
Where some passing soul
Has scratched with a coin
-or perhaps even his nails-
‘Dieu merci!’
Until Then
The worst I’d ever experienced
Was in France , 1987.
Two ceramic foot prints at a truck stop & frites.
Bursting like a cowboy
Through the saloon door
I beheld a true work of art
Surely escaped from the Louvre?
A tour de force of turds comme le Tour Eiffel
Proudly tottering thigh high
Like some monstrous walnut whip.
And all this stylishly topped off
By a large edible crab
Balanced at a rakish, even provocative angle
Right where the nut should have been.
I think I imagined the beret, though…
An existential statement par excellence!
I could add nothing further
To this anally extruded ‘cri de couer’
So I made a rapid volte- face
Got back in the car
And contained myself further
‘Til the port of Calais.
For three days & nights down the mighty Niger
On a leaking ,medieval Pinasse Publique.
There’s an open fire on board
And twelve tons of salt slabs
Ten men and two women
Yet no sign of a toilet.
No one speaks French
Let alone English.
What exactly is Bambaara for
“J’ai vu la tete d’un tortoise dans le derriere de mes
pantalons”?
A smiling young deck hand climbs over
And politely informs Madame
That the toilette is, infact
In the next boat,
-Tied to the speeding stern of the mother ship.
My friend is as dauntless as she is intrepid.
So, to much smiling and laughter
She scales the length of the craft
Leaps the watery ravine to the small boat
Scrambles along the slippery gunwhale
And achieves her mission objective
-A sack cloth tent with a hole in the stern
She must be sure footed
Hold fast to the rail.
With the wild raging torrents
Of an indescribable continent
Only inches below
Her soft European bum.
