Fiona Smith's Blog › The Spanish Conspiracy:…

The Spanish Conspiracy: Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 9 months ago

Today's Light Bite is from Shortbread's Queen of Comedy, Joanne Fitzgerald. Her stories are always guaranteed to raise a smile, and today's tale is perfect for this rather rainy August day.

The Spanish Conspiracy by Joanne Fitzgerald

I was once told I was allergic to the sun. No, this was not another cheap joke at a ginger’s expense. It was a Spanish doctor who was about to stick an antihistamine injection in my arse.

My mother had spent the morning frantically searching for the holiday rep in our hotel crying that my throat was going to swell up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, and I would die. I was too busy nursing my elephant features, a swollen face and a leper-rash to protest against my mother’s ramblings or the needle wielding doctor. And as usual, it was my father who was to blame. He was the one who had dragged us along on the seven hour bike ride all the way across Majorca. One of those things my mother would agree to at the time, but later, when it all went wrong, would be screaming, ‘You idiot, I told you this was a bad idea!’ Meanwhile, my father was spurting out his conspiracy theories. I wasn’t really allergic to the sun, it was a mass cover-up of the polluted Spanish water system which had gotten so out of hand that the government were now bribing their medical staff to keep quiet in order to save the tourism industry. It wasn’t his bike ride of death that had made me sick at all, it was the brief dip in the Spanish ocean.

That was the last time I was ever allergic to anything. I demolish a bag of cashews in one minute, I snigger at those weaklings who suffer from hay fever and during my student years I survived on a gluten-based diet of bread and pasta. Of course there was the odd case of thrush here and there caused by my mother’s wash powder, but I think anyone would be slightly sensitive to their underwear being chemically sterilised with a ratio of one whole bottle of liquid-detergent to one miniature thong.

For someone who is ‘allergic to the sun’, I was pleasantly surprised the other day when my co-worker asked me if I had got a suntan. I was halfway through listening to the CD about what to do if you get diarrhea in a book store (my work can be somewhat random at times) and I looked up and smiled, ‘No Stacey, I haven’t been out in the sun.’

The truth was I had spent the whole weekend nursing a hangover in bed after drinking too much whisky at an electro rave and getting locked on the roof of my apartment building (don’t ask). Before I had come to work, I hadn’t left my sofa for 48 hours. If anything, I should have got whiter.

So no, I wasn’t suntanned at all. Was this a witty remark? Had the persecution of The Gingers spread as far as Asia?

What Stacey had meant was I looked sunburned. The ginger equivalent to a tan.

‘When was the last time you looked in the mirror?’ she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. I had been listening to that diarrhea CD and munching on my fish noodles for a while now. Had I been sitting under some sort of UV lamp? Now that would be a really sick joke to play on a strawberry blonde.

I wandered off to the bathroom to check.

The bubbling red rash could have been easily confused with sunburn. The type of sunburn that pasty old men get when they’ve been sitting on the beach all day in their speedos. I started at the bathroom mirror confused. Had I actually got sunburnt by natural daylight? How had this happened? I used factor fifty! I was wearing UV filter sunglasses! Why did I look like David Cameron’s twin sister?

The media could never get hold of this story. It would make perfect ginger-hate propaganda. I shrugged it off and went back to work. It would give my co-workers something new to gossip about in Chinese whilst I sat there forking my fish noodles drizzled in ketchup. Besides, I was desperate to find out what happens if your bowel malfunctions in the children’s fiction section.

At first I noticed I was getting hot. Then the head started to swell, what felt like from the inside out. I was also scratching my hives like I was some sort of warty tomato. I didn’t usually have hives.

‘I think it’s getting worse,’ said Stacey.

Vomit.

‘Yes, it’s definitely getting worse,’ she added.

The doctor showed me where I was on the allergic reaction severity chart. Kind of proud that I made it almost to the top. Those bastards who die from nut allergies beat me. Can’t win them all.

This time, turns out, I’m allergic to fish.

If it’s not the ginger jokes, it’s the Grimsby ones.

Another antihistamine injection, thankfully this time not in my arse, but in my arm. It starts me questioning whether the real conspiracy lies with the Spanish ocean, or rather with the Spanish doctor’s methods of treating twelve year old girls. Still, I get to tell the story, which will eventually evolve and be exaggerated until it is the memoir of my near death experience. It will give those hypochondriacs who can’t eat nuts a run for their money, I’m sure.

If you have enjoyed reading this story, please let the author know!

Share This Blog Post

Recommend this blog post to other social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.