I am no longer sure why I had been in Leicester earlier in the day, or why I would be in Glasgow that evening. The details have been fried out of existence in the intense heat created by the memory of what happened on the journey north.
I had stopped at the Scotch Corner service station on the A1(M) to attend to personal matters. Towards the end of this process, I was standing at a sink, trying to operate one of those taps which, according to notices put up by shameless liars, dispense water for fifteen seconds even though in practice they rarely do so for more than one and a half, when I became aware of two vending machines to my immediate left.
At first I thought they might contain those ruinously expensive little freshen-up packs containing tiny amounts of toothpaste and shaving cream, along with blunt razors and self-destructing combs, all of them guaranteed to cause disappointment if found in a Christmas cracker.
But no. The machine closer to me was in fact full of flavoured condoms. There were about twenty varieties, including chocolate, strawberry and, I was intrigued to discover, whisky.
I remembered a conversation I’d once had with an elderly and slightly stuffy gentleman who had recently heard about flavoured condoms for the first time and simply could not see the point of them. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to offer an explanation.
“I mean,” he went on, “are you supposed to chew them?” I said I was fairly sure nobody was supposed to chew them.
Being a well-travelled fellow, I had seen vending machines of this type before. What I hadn’t seen was anything like the one next to it. This also sold flavoured condoms, but of chocolate or strawberry or whisky there was no sign. According to what was written on the front of the machine, the only flavour available here was kangaroo.
I had to re-read that several times. Until now, I had never been aware of kangaroo-flavoured anything, never mind kangaroo-flavoured these. I knew about, and had been careful to avoid, hedgehog-flavoured crisps, but they now seemed tame and conventional, words I would never use to describe kangaroo-flavoured condoms.
They must have been imported from Australia, I thought, and it so happened that within a few hours I would have an opportunity to confirm this. In Glasgow, I would be meeting an Australian chap called Graham. I would ask him.
I did, and his jaw nearly hit the floor. No, he said, he had never heard of kangaroo-flavoured condoms, and he was convinced they were not available in his homeland. If they were, he added with considerable emphasis, he was absolutely sure he would have remembered seeing them.
For the second time that day I wondered if my mind had been playing cruel tricks on me, a suspicion boosted by the fact that no one else I spoke to over the next few weeks admitted to having encountered vending machines replete with kangaroo-flavoured condoms either.
They definitely exist, though, or at least they did back then. (This was early in the century. Things might have changed.) Six months later, I saw another one, this time at Frankley Services on the M5. I had a closer look at the writing this time, and discovered that the company which made these items – by a process I would prefer not to hear about – marketed them under the name Billabonk. For some reason, that made me very happy.
Top image copyright Daniel Dvorský via Unsplash.
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