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La vache qui rit
I was 18, working comme plongeur in the kitchens of a restaurant in a French coastal resort in Normandy. The work was hard and long hours and the (English) boss was a total cunt, and subsequently the staff, a mixture of French and Brits, used what little free time we had to let off steam in a fairly major way.

The usual plan on a Saturday was to finish about midnight, all pile in Laurent, the head waiter's car, drive to a FUCKING AWFUL nightclub which was truly and honestly called Le Rendezvous, drink ourselves silly while watching men in open necked shirts dance to Joe le Taxi and Tinita Tikaram (why? why?!). Then Laurent would drive us home drunk at 6am and we'd go straight to work. Happy days.

On the way to work was a butchers that had a large metal sign outside it with a picture of a smiling, happy cow stood up on two feet pointing in the direction of the shop as if to say 'Please, come inside and eat some of my fat bovine arse!'. I was and still am a vegetarian. These days, I couldn't give a shit about animals. Fuck em, I say. But back then, I was a bit more militant and immature and the sign used to rile me something rotten. It also used to rile this girl Julie too, a fellow vegetarian that I fancied really quite badly. So one dawn after a trip to Le Rendezvous, we're all staggering past le boucherie and I notice the sign and mention how much it gets on my tits. A devious smile passes across Julie's face. "Bet you a pack of Gauloises you can't throw in in the river". It was too good a challenge to resist. Fellow plongeur Tim and I decided we'd give it a go, so checking there was no one around, we picked up the sodding thing and starting walking it over to the riverside. Trouble is, we'd seriously underestimated how heavy it was. The concrete base was actually huge and we could barely lift it. But spurred on by male bravado and the promise of a pack of stinky French fags, we persevered. By the time we reached the riverside, we were knackered, so without looking, we lifted it one over and it plummeted into the river. Except there wasn't a splashing sound. It was a sound I'll remember for the rest of my life. The sound of a luxury boat's exterior having a large hole smashed into by a metal cow with a concrete base.

We looked over the edge and the cow had indeed landed on a yacht and fallen right through. I remember thinking the hole looked like something out of a cartoon. And the boat. Boy, it looked expensive. And there, right on the bow of the yacht, the cow stood proud through the hole, pointing cheerfully in the direction of the open seas. It was, I think, probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. And even though we knew we were in more trouble than we could imagine, we all fell about laughing. Even after the owners woke up and we realised we had to flee before they saw our faces, and eve as luck wouldn't have it, a police car spotted us leaving the site and chased us down the backstreets of the town, we still had tears rolling down our eyes as we fled.

The story made the local press and the police came to interview all of us at the restaurant as the yacht owner said he heard the culprits swearing in English. We stuck to our story ('We were asleep at the time') and amazingly, the trail went cold. The best thing was walking past the butchers every day seeing an empty spot where there used to be a laughing cow pointing us in the direction of its own meat. Linda McCartney and her underwhelming sausages would have been proud.
(Tue 12th May 2009, 18:44, More)