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Published: December 4th 2007
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Bongo Bashing
Involves no cruelty, except perhaps liver damage & sore heads. We have a newly adopted member of our family. His name is Bongo & he's a car. His greatest attribute is, whilst intrinsically being a tin box, he is kitted out like a little house. There's a kitchen, with cooker & sink and a dining table. The roof goes up by pushing a button, which at night-time makes a bedroom upstairs. Downstairs, the table lies between the folded down middle & rear seats to make a huge bed.
Bongo is my new best friend.
My keepers have taken me to many varied locations during my stay with them, but now a whole new world has been opened up to me. All of a sudden we get 52 holidays a year! Every weekend we can bugger off to a beautiful spot, build a fire (using bags of logs grown from sustainable sources - of course!) Get bladdered, have a great nights kip & cook a full breakfast in the morning amongst the scenery we choose.
Fantastic!
We adopted Bongo from a place called Ebay which I think is in South Wales 'cos that's where we had to go to collect him. A bit
of a trauma coming home though, he got quite sick. First there were bladder problems when he leaked out all his wee. Then he got really hot, like he had a fever. We had to call out the man from the AA. Now, I'm all for giving work experience to the less fortunate members of society but should recovering alcoholics really be tinkering with other peoples cars - let alone driving vans?? I digress. The AA man said it was v. bad & got Bongo on a towtruck for a ride back to Yorkshire.
Bummer.
On the plus side we found a local Bongo Hospital who made him as good as new pretty quickly & we've not looked back since. I'm lucky enough to live within a couple of hours of some World Class scenery. Bongo has a 4 wheel drive thingy which means he can take us wherever we want to go. So far its been mostly the Yorkshire Dales but there has also been a jaunt up the Lancashire coast & a trip to North Wales where we took a narrowboat out for a few days. I'm a very lucky Munkey indeed!!
Just returned
from our 1st Bongo Bash. This do involved a number of people with silly names but sensible vehicles, braving Hurricane Harry in the grounds of a country hotel near Buxton. We headed down early Saturday so missed the drama of the Friday night. The storm had evidently been a touch nasty, pulling a marquee up & wrapping it around a precious Bongo. Many people had to put their roofs down because of the wind - sleeping under trees in a relatively flimsy room seemed a tad risky. Although nice & sunny when we arrived, the evidence of the night before was plain to see. Quagmire mud akimbo! Even with the 4WD wotsit, Dad had a bit of trouble getting into a spot by the electric hook up. Once parked up they set about fitting another room to Bongos side, a big tent affair with another bedroom inside, connected up the electric fan heater & set about cooking lunch & drinking beer. Happy days!.
The evening was spent in the company of a gang of pantomime characters in the freshly repaired marquee. As regular readers of my posts will know, I'm still studying for my Masters Degree in Anthroplogy. The
more I see of these humans in their natural habitat, the less I understand. Plenty of material here with this bunch though. In a field, atop a hill, in near zero temperatures, sideways rain, with many men wearing dresses or underwear on the outside - enough to fill a socio-psychology thesis here too! I sat quietly in a corner taking notes until I realised that the lovely fruit juice I'd been glugging on was in fact a brew called Punch. Before long I was seeing double, my fingers froze & then completely lost the ability to use my legs.
The keepers took me to bed.
Breakfast in the morning was a welcome relief. Full English in the restaurant of the hotel. Fuel for the mind body & spirit. I helped pack up the side room, pop down the upstairs room & tidy up the kitchen before we made our way back across the Peak District to the Big House in Yorkshire.
This Bongo Gang really are a terrific bunch. Great fun, full of enthusiasm & as mad as a box of frogs. There seems to be a common thread to this crowd even though a more varied selection of the dregs of society would be hard to find gathered together, the sense of loyalty & kinship fused by these fine machines is unique.
I've read of those with Special Needs.
A Bongo
IS Special. Its all we need.
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RoosterUK
non-member comment
Said it all
A Brilliant Blog mate. It was a meet never to forget and it sorted out the tuff nuts.... It was great to meet you and everyone else at the meet, heres to many more. Karl and Krew