Free Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down by Jo Brand Page B

were that had attempted to detain me.
    ‘Oh,
they’re all really important American agents,’ he replied.
    Goodbye,
Hollywood.
     
    Montreal 2
    Weirdly, I can’t recall
much about my second Montreal trip. I took my friend Waggly with me that time
and it is only a very stressful epic journey I remember — a trip to the Niagara
Falls, which I decided I really wanted to see in person, as it were.
    We
intended to hire a car and drive there and back in a day on my day off. We had
failed to take into account a few very important things. Firstly we didn’t
really know where the fuck we were going, secondly I’d never driven an
automatic car on the wrong side of the road, and thirdly it was roughly a
900-mile round trip.
    Getting
out of Montreal itself was like some sort of nightmare odyssey I made several
wrong turns, entries down one-way streets and at one point we ended up on what
appeared to be a massive building site. A bloke in a fluorescent jacket
approached and I thought with some relief that he was going to redirect us. So
I wound down the window to apologise and ask directions. His words:
    ‘Move,
bitch.’ I did.
    After
roughly six hours of driving we neared our destination. The Niagara Falls is
set in a big park and we could hear the roar of the water as we entered.
    ‘Look,’
cried Waggly, all excited. ‘There it is!’
    ‘It’
turned out to be a fountain, and after some gentle piss-taking from me, we
parked opposite the great whooshing waterfall itself. Unfortunately by this
time it was getting dark and I was already worried about how long it was going
to take us to get back. So we must have done the quickest surveillance of the
Falls anyone has ever done, before we got back in the car and drove for another
six/seven hours, arriving back in Montreal exhausted and very slightly tearful.
    Waggly
and I had a lovely time in Montreal, mainly staying in bed very late, mooching
round town admiring the architecture, sitting in cafés doing bog-all for hours
on end, and recovering from our odyssey to Niagara Falls. Waggly was the
perfect companion, happy to go with the flow, pleased to be there, endlessly
entertaining and cheerful.
    One
evening when I had a night off we trawled the bars and clubs together, getting
more pissed as we went. We ended up in a sort of wine bar-type place and sat
down at a table and ordered a bottle of wine. Two guys moved in and started
trying to chat us up. This was most unusual for me, not so much for Waggly who
is lovely-looking and slim. But as a fat person you soon learn that your role
is to be that of the quirky joke-cracking friend and that you are going to get
the flawed friend or God forbid what they call ‘a chubby chaser’, and down that
road lie untold horrors for me. Even to this day I so resent being judged by my
appearance on first meeting, that it makes my blood boil when on-sight
assessments are made of me and I cannot help but turn into a piss-taking,
offhand old harridan.
    One of
the blokes was a reasonably attractive tall thin thing, and the friend was OK,
but not in the slightest my cup of tea as he appeared to be slightly to the
right of Mussolini and was steadfastly making cracks about Native Americans for
our entertainment. Waggly was missing all this as she was engaged in flirty
banter with the mate who, for some reason, was not a psycho and maybe was doing
his bit for the community by accompanying his friend round.
    Pissed as
I was, I knew I had to get out of there before I either tipped my drink down
the Canadian fascist’s front or worse. This is a constant dilemma for friends,
I think, when one of them has met someone they’re quite keen on and their mate
has just met the social equivalent of Jack the Ripper. Given that we were thousands
of miles from home, I didn’t really want to leave Waggly on her own with her
one, as for all I knew they were a double act of perviness hoovering up naive
foreign ladies to lock in their cellar. I could not find the