IMAGINE a particularly vivid dream in which you tell all your classmates what you really think of them, call your form teacher an “ugly old bag” and inform your geography master he’s a “bald headed cunt”…. before throwing up over most of them.
Then you wake up in your underpants in a French hospital with tubes coming out of your nose, attached to a stomach pump machine – and, to your horror, discover it wasn’t a dream at all.
This was my first visit to Boulogne at the age of 14. We had been invited to visit there by our twinned French school … or some shit (I don’t really care).
Long before I experienced the joys of Spiced rum chasers with Nigerian Guinness, I gunned back two litres of rough-as-fuck French white wine (the two francs a bottle variety) during a school day trip.
I couldn’t tell you much about the town, except that it was full of horrified French people.
One French nurse that felt the full Beer Goggles brunt informed me: “Eet is not good to drink so much at your age”. “Fuck off you four eyed bitch,” I calmly told her. That set her straight. She should have been relieved I didn’t throw up on her.
The “ugly old bag” form teacher was entrusted with taking my classmates home on the ferry, while the BHC had to wait for my tummy to be pumped.
We shared an awkward silence on the journey back home. The only thing I can remember him saying to me during the long journey back was, “You might want to ditch those jeans.” He was right: they were caked in puke and literally stank to high heavens.
Next day, the shit hit the fan and I was ordered to write letters of apology to all the people I had insulted. That was a lot of paper. The UOB threw my heartfelt letter back in my face.
Unsurprisingly, our school was never invited back to Boulogne again…
