Date: 26th August 2022
This week’s second blog from our Donald.
Mr. Dean gets it wrong…
Work for Mr. Dean recently has been a little tough. So, he has taken a break and headed up north where he is hoping to hide away.
On the train he has time to contemplate what went wrong in the Stamford Bridge branch. Having turned up for a meeting, he was unaware that the guy’s hair was dangling down before he put the photocopier on…
Anyway, he argued, he is of an age when anyone with hair that length would be a girl and not a bloke. And the carnage that followed was the fire brigade’s fault and not his. He didn’t phone them to come and help the poor guy. There were not many who heard his whining and gave him any credit or accepted his excuses.
He was then forced to apologise to a Mr. Romero who was only visiting the offices for some reason or another. By the Friday, Mr. Dean was fed up listening to the whole thing and booked a train that Saturday morning to disappear.
Picture the scene…
The train has now arrived at Edinburgh Waverley and Mr. Dean is hopeful of a restful and peaceful weekend in Scotland’s capital.
During the biggest arts festival in the world.
Mr. Dean has done it again…
Leaving the train station, he climbs up towards the Royal Mile, noticing the huge number of posters lining the climb along the way. As he reaches the Royal Mile, he is rather surprised to see that, rather than having time and loneliness to contemplate life he is confronted by a melee, masquerading as a crowd. It is bedlam…
All around him are vagabonds and vandals, curiosities and clowns, quaint Regency dresses and queer anthemic bondage gear…
What the hell…
He struggles through the crowd to try and get to his hotel on The Royal Mile, to find that it is a theatre venue and half filled with people trying to give him leaflets and engage him in conversation. Eventually he gets to the front desk where a smiling woman with long blond flowing locks smiles a welcome that makes it all worthwhile.
“Mr. Dean,” he blurts out.
She types the name into her computer and continues with the smile which makes Mr. Dean wonder if it has been painted on. Confirming his reservation, he is pointed towards another young girl, who could be her twin. They like to do things properly here and the second employee with the same smile arrives at his elbow to take his bags and inform him that she shall now show him to his room.
Within seconds they are at the lift.
Mr. Dean is then distracted by two shadowy figures entering the hotel, along with a sneaking suspicion that he does not have money to give this girl as a tip and therefore does not notice that when he hits the button for the now open lift, his new companion’s hair is in it, whilst they both are outside it. The lift doors close trapping the hair. It now begins to rise, taking the young girl off her feet.
The gasps of the crowd around him are only interrupted by the screams behind him. When he turns, he sees his companion three feet off the ground trapped by the hair in the doors of the lift. Mayhem ensues as employees of the hotel arrive with ladders, chairs, words of encouragement, gratitude that the lift has a fail-safe that stopped it from going any higher and Mr. Dean decides to beat a hasty retreat and take the stairs.
Mr. Dean arrives at his room, checks it out and decides he needs a drink.
Leaving the room, he goes back to the stairs, the lift now having a sign which says, “Out of Order”.
In the lobby he turns to his left and enters a bustling bar. Perhaps he had made a mistake he thought as a Maître D’ arrives with a menu, bleached teeth and the type of attitude that spelt smarmy…
Would sir like a menu? Would sir like a look at the drinks’ menu? Would sir like a window seat or to sit waiting for company? Mr. Dean just stops himself from asking if sir would like a punch in the face because this sir, wants peace and quiet.
But it is packed.
Mr. Dean finds a seat and sits down. Two minutes later a waiter arrives, a young man with such a head of hair he could have been a cousin of the girl in reception., it rivals hers in length and flowing beauty…
Mr. Dean feels like splashing out.
So, he gets some sparkling prosecco… decadence, he thinks as he plans on it being ALL for him…
The waiter promptly arrives and Mr. Dean wishing to show off refuses to allow the waiter to open the bottle deciding that he wants to indulge his sense of occasion and perform the opening ceremony. He takes the bottle and decides to open it after having given it a little shake. He is on holiday and wishes to enjoy it.
What happens next could not have been planned by the best Carry On producer.
Mr. Dean manages to get the cork out of the bottle, and it flies. It flies into the gantry of the bar where it hits a vodka bottle which is hanging by a thread. Marc, the barman, had been meaning to sort it for the last few days but had never got round to it.
It drops out of the casing, hits the shelf below, upsets the lemons waiting to be sliced catapulting one of them across the room and straight into the eye of a young Spanish lady minding her own business at the bar. Hitting her directly in the eye, her shock means she throws her hands out wide slapping her husband full in the face who winces in pain, turns with his wine glass and knocks directly into the waiter who had attended Mr. Dean. The waiter is knocked to the ground where he hits his head on a stray package and is rendered unconscious.
The whole room, distracted by the wine splashing everywhere from Mr. Dean’s bottle fails to notice that the family of fifteen from Wisconsin, who were oblivious to anything apart from getting to where THEY wanted to be had gathered up the poor waiter by his hair being caught in the wheels of their baggage and were now dragging him across the lobby to the stairs and into the taxi.
It was not until trying to board the plane at Edinburgh Airport that they noticed there was something wrong and the waiter was discovered. Rather battered and bruised when he returned to the hotel, he was appalled to discover he had been docked his entire shift as nobody believed such a ridiculous tale.
Back at the hotel, in the meantime… it being the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and filled with comedians, as Mr. Dean is contemplating his next meal those two sinister figures made another appearance. And that was when an Italian and a German walked into a bar…
Whilst the author asserts his right to this as an original tale, there no credible evidence that anyone can book a hotel room in Edinburgh in August on the weekend that they plan to travel, unless you know differently, so this is clearly a work of fiction.
The fact is that during the week, referee Mike Dean admitted an error in not asking referee Anthony Taylor to check his pitch side monitor after Cristian Romero’s hair-pull on Marc Cucurella during the visit of Tottenham Hotspur to Chelsea. Dean, the video assistant referee, allowed the incident to go and Harry Kane equalised for Spurs seconds later. There was then an investigation launched by the Football Association into German Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel’s post-match comments about Taylor and Spurs counterpart, Italian, Antonio Conte which led to being charged by the FA after an angry confrontation following the full-time whistle.
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