riding the elephant

She was a repetitive type, although purportedly of decent sort she nonetheless struggled to conceal her violent racism, which for many peers and colleagues was fundamentally at odds with same. She took great relish in easily surmising entire nations with basic adjectival stereotypes, and though she felt at least some minimal affinity towards primarily white English speaking nations (our “flawed cousins”, she said) she continued to denounce the same, swollen, murderous, claiming with great sincerity that her racism was not, in fact, racist and was instead a matter of generic, unfocussed hatred of all peoples, including the British, an awful association of cunts, whispering the foul word so as to soften its impact.


How high's the racist, momma?
Five feet two in flat shoes.

She reeked of ancient sweat and it was eye-wateringly strong, and she regaled the office with long narratives relating to her extensive world travels which, she said, gave her some authority on the off-the-cuff dismissal of the qualities (or otherwise) of entire nationality groups. She said that whilst many people had the money but not the time for travel, she had the time, great fucking slabs of it, but not the money, though she refused to get into debt for anything and destroyed credit cards with relish, instead demanding ever increasing overtime commitments from her devastated husband to fund their pleasure cruises and “real experience!” holidays. They wanted to get off the beaten track, she said, to experience the real culture that these countries had to offer, which is why they insisted on exclusively booking themselves onto off-the-beaten-track coach tours with forty or so other like-minded, culturally aware tourists. Authenticity was important to them; she’d ridden an elephant for God’s sake, huge sweat rings in the armpits of her blouse in the brutal Sri Lankan heat. She told the story most weeks, illustrated with countless badly composed photographs, about how she suffered from food poisoning or maybe just sun stroke and shat liquid for a constant run of eight hours, sobbing by the end and washing her arse in the sink, her husband asleep in the room next door and dreaming of immense spiders.