Sick again

For lunch today we went to the Tron, a pub behind the Tron Church, which didn't have any light cycles or Master Control computer programs hanging out at the bar. There was a very loud bunch of lads on a stag do, at 11:30 in the morning, which seemed a bit keen, but I suppose you should be happy people can wear hats with fake ginger hair and a bobble on top at first thing in the morning.

I had a plate of vegetarian sausages and then we went to Marks & Spencer to buy underpants and socks, an apparently unglamourous shopping expedition but one that becomes terribly exciting when you realise how much cheaper those pants are than buying them in Singapore. I was pleased even before I realised I could claim the tax back on my socks. Cheered by this, we went downstairs and bought too many chocolate bars, then went to the Travelodge down the street when our friends were staying.

The rooms at the Travelodge are minimalist masterpieces; the rooms have a bed, a desk with a bottle opener bolted to the side, and a big space in the room where there should be a chair. Our room at our hotel has two enormous double beds, and a television that takes a strangely specific 18 seconds to turn on once you hit the power button. Unimpressed by the Travelodge, we walked back to the Royal Mile and went to the pub.

I started to feel a little bit off. I wondered if this was from drinking a pint too fast. We left the pub and went to the Mercat Cross for a tour of Edinburgh. I continued to felt a bit off-colour. The tour guide told us about Englishmen being whipped and then we went down to the vaults below the town. I felt worse.

The tour consists of a lot of walking through dark tunnels, being told about the smoky, shit-stained, oyster-shell covered rooms that people inhabited in the 19th century. My stomach began to rotate a bit too fast for comfort.

The tour guide told us about Burke & Hare, and their money making schemes involving recently dead people. It turns out that for a 19th century slum landlord, it's more profitable to murder your tenants and sell them to medical students than it is to charge them rent.

She began to explain how you murder them, and at this point I told my wife to empty the bag of undergarments, and then then boked into it as hard as I could, then fled the catacombs.

I don't know what everyone else made of it. I guess they thought there was a lily-livered Englishman with a weak stomach, unsuited to hearing about graverobbers. I went outside and carried on throwing up, which isn't a rare occurrence in Scotland, but I was cheered to have various passers-by asking if I was ok.

It was the sausages. I suffer from some kind of allergy where if I eat the wrong kind of vegetarian sausage, my body waits for a couple of hours then goes into full purge-and-evacuate mode for an hour. This is a bit inconvenient, and should teach me to check what sort of sausages are, but I'm very diffident and don't like to make a fuss. I'd rather be chucking up my guts on Cowgate in the middle of the afternoon, looking like the world's least competent drinker.

I went back to the Tron, ruined their toilet, then walked home and was sick for a bit more, then crawled into bed and hid from the world until my body forgave me. I hope I was a highlight of the tour.