36
The other reason Bond found it difficult to stay awake
was that he’d had very little sleep the previous night. In his anxiety to
get some food inside him he had relegated to the back of his mind the fact that
although he liked pork pies as much as the next man, pork pies did not like him,
invariably leaving him with heartburn and indigestion. He’d also had more
to drink than he had intended. His plan on returning to the bar had been to eat
the pork pie then retire for the evening, but the pie was even better than the
landlord had promised and he’d ordered a second. Another pie being not
much use without another pint he ordered another and while he was drinking it
the fearful racket from up the passageway came to a premature end when the
karaoke machine broke down. This didn’t stop the karaoke fans from singing,
but without the benefit of the music and microphone the volume was much quieter
now and Bond decided that another couple or three pints of Robbie’s, as
the locals affectionately called it, wouldn’t do him any harm at all. But
he reckoned without the pork pies and the two pints he’d already had, and
due to the heartburn and indigestion the pork pies had induced in him he
didn’t manage to drop off to sleep until turned one-o-clock, and by a
quarter past one he had woken up for a pee thanks to the five pints of bitter
he’d consumed.
To people fortunate enough
not to be plagued with a prostate condition this wouldn’t represent much
of a problem; they would merely empty their bladder and quickly return to the
Land of Nod and sleep soundly until morning. However people with a prostate
problem do not discharge their five pints of liquid in one go, it’s one
pint a time and then only if they’re lucky. Bond was not lucky in this
respect and had made eight trips to the bathroom before morning.
“Stockport is well provided with sporting and
recreational facilities,” Medlock droned on, “with twenty one sports
and activity centres with facilities for squash, badminton, basketball, weight
training and many other minority sports. There are nine indoor swimming pools,
over two hundred parks and playgrounds, many with facilities for tennis,
putting, bowling, soccer, cricket etc, two athletics tracks, eleven libraries,
two museums and two historic houses, an art gallery, a civic theatre and
fourteen golf courses."
