Where Is My Mind?

TREATMENT It’s twenty years ago.
A much younger and fitter Riley is being stretchered away from a surfing competition, leg in a splint, still wear- ing a wetsuit. Crying in pain he asks a medic if the dam- age is permanent. He is told he will be fine, no problems for sure! Sam ducks into the van whilst the medics are elsewhere and promptly nicks it, clearly on the run from the cops and carrying half a kilo of coke. He immediately runs over The Hippy who is loaded into the ambulance as well. An ambulance/car chase ensues with the local police. The Ambulance crashes horribly and we last see our heroes be- ing loaded into more ambulances. It’s Years Later. An older knackered version of Riley limps into a bar in Oxford with a walking stick. Sam and The Hippy are already sat at the bar, both sporting their own walking sticks, souvenirs from the same crash all those years ago. A copper walks into the bar flashes some ID and talks to the barman. Sam very obviously hides his head behind a drinks menu. Riley parks his walking stick and slams a crinkled flyer down on the bar - WORLD EX-PRO-MASTERS SURFING COMPETITION - LE PONCE WEST FRANCE SEPTEMBER 20 - 22. “So you know I was saying we should do something. Get our mojo back right? Well. This.” “No fucking way” is the group opinion. It’s now.
 A Cross Channel Ferry drifts across a blue sea beneath a blue sky bound for France. Offscreen can be heard, the sounds of a bar - talking laughing, glasses etc. At the bar, Riley is getting served and insulting the staff in record time (the walking stick is gone but the limp remains). He shares some of the pints with Sam and The Hippy and the trio discuss their ill advised plan to enter a surf competition 20 years after they last surfed. Later on Riley is carried out to the van and poured be- hind the driver’s seat. He promptly falls out of the door and lands snoring on the deck. After much bickering The Hippy is persuaded to let Sam drive and that he’s a much better driver now than he was all those years ago. The Van won’t start and has to be pushed off the ferry. The Hippy and Sam return for Riley and manage to sober him up enough to fix the van whilst they empty the beer fridge. Once in France, Sam, Riley and The Hippy continue to in- sult each other and the French generally. Eventually Riley can drive no more and the trio reluct- antly check into a French version of the Bates Motel. This place hasn’t seen life since the fifties. Riley who has a particular talent for insulting French types and is anyway unconscious, is left for dead whilst Sam and The Hippy explore the delightful trading estate they seem to have ended up in, searching for any boozer rather than the hell—hole truck stop attached to the Bates Motel. Forced to give up, Sam and The Hippy reluctantly venture into the Shitty bar next to the Motel hoping to keep a low profile. Miraculously Riley has made a complete re- covery and is already in the process of getting his head beaten in by some truck drivers. Sam hits upon the brilliant idea of paying for everyone’s drinks for the entire night. Hackles are smoothed and feathers un-ruffled. All is well and the French readily adopt Riley et.al as long lost cousins. Until it’s time to pay the bill that is. A run- ner is done via the toilet window and the boys escape in a deluge of bottles, glasses and insults. Upon reaching their destination for the Surfing Competi- tion, the trio find Le Ponce Town Square full of a wed- ding party which they promptly drive through running over the Best Man in the process with their camper van. The Best Man, and indeed, all the other wedding guests turn out to be the Truck Driver’s from the previous night. Bugger. Pandemonium breaks out and the idiots barely escape in a hail of bottles, glasses and insults. They guys are getting tired of all this bottles, glasses and insults bollocks and decide to try to keep a low pro- file whilst blaming Riley for pretty much everything. They limit themselves to the crappy surf bar attached to the derelict holiday village where they are staying in a shite chalet. Echoes of the Bate Motel again. Both it and the bar are falling apart - a fitting meta- phor for the state of our heroes themselves, both physic- ally and mentally. ‘Le Shack!’, the bar attached to the seemingly abandoned holiday park is a really crappy bar left over from the seventies and run by an old French guy, himself left over from the fifties and with a penchant for nude surfing and chain-smoking. He takes an immediate shine to the boys. The guys simply call the owner of the bar ‘Le Shack’, after the eponymous bar and quickly fall in with the chain smoking old git surfer. Riley isn’t sure at all with his built-in animosity toward the French but eventu- ally falls for the guy big time as the film goes on. Le Shack represents the kind of, chain-smoking, boozing, surfing dad he wished he’d had and the friendship goes a long way to healing the animosity he has felt for the French over the botched leg op which ended his career. It’s the first day of the competition and hurricane winds batter the West Coast. The boys struggle to get there hangovers together and de- cide to give the competition a swerve, opting instead to hole up in Le Shack. In Le Shack’s they hear of the angry mob on the hunt for the bastards who literally crashed the wedding yesterday. Being the cowards they are they quickly lay blame with the American surf contingent whom it turns out own a sim- ilar Scooby Doo van. Le Shack eventually persuades the boys to register and compete in the first day’s surf. At the beach competition headquarters they meet up with a selection of old enemies from their pro circuit days - fit healthy looking Aussies and Yanks - bastards like that. The Yanks complain about what the French have seem- ingly randomly done to their van. “Shocking” sympathises Riley. Old behaviours quickly emerge. Itching powder/Deep Heat is applied liberally to unguarded wet-suits. Other wetsuits are placed in a freezer so that they freeze sol- id. A skunk is placed inside another. All hilarious stuff. Unfortunately none of these wet-suits actually be- long to the Aussies or Yanks. Instead, they (you guessed it) belong to the Wedding Mob. FFS. The surf is HUGE and pretty much everyone takes a beat- ing. Boards are broken and competitors are stretchered off in a worrying reminder of the start of the film. The boys somehow survive with just bruises, black eyes, cuts and broken boards. They repair to Le Shack’s where they hear of the terrible vengeance wreaked by the Wedding Mob on the Americans and decide to make a run for it. Yet again Le Shack shames the lads into staying for the second day of the competi- tion and lends them hideous ancient surf boards. Fair enough they agree, but not without a LOT of booze. The boys venture into a local supermarket to stock up. Unfortunately back in the car park the boys find the Wed- ding Mob taking baseball bats to The Hippy’s beloved Scooby Doo camper van. Sam takes the opportunity to steal a pick-up truck rather than inconvenience the Wedding Mob. In an amazing stroke of luck the truck is full of booze and they laugh all the way back to the chalet where they assure The Hippy that they will go back for what’s left of his van later. And they should probably return the Pickup they stole as well, seeing as how it seems to belong to the Wedding Mob. Shit. Amazingly enough The Hippy's van, now missing most of it’s windows and doors and with some impressive holes in it, is still drivable. Which is just as well as the Wed- ding Mob truck is now ablaze where they drunkenly ploughed into the supermarket. On the second day of the competition, sporting ridiculous Magnum moustaches, sunnies and hangovers, the boys once again get into arguments with the remains of the Aussies and Americans. The surf is better though and whilst Sam and The Hippy both nearly drown, Riley somehow manages to win the bloody thing. Chuffed to bits with his own achievement, Riley spends the rest of the day bragging to whoever will listen. In- evitably this high profile prancing leads to him being recognised by someone from the Wedding Mob. The boys pile into what’s left of the van under a hail of bottles, glasses and insults. A chase ensues through the streets of Le Ponce. However the crappy camper van gives up the ghost and dies in a cul-de-sac. The mob catches up with them. It’s time to pay the ferry- man. As ever, Le Shack is there in the nick of time and tries to talk the mob down. It’s no use though and the mob bare down seeking blood. Before any violence can ensue, however, The Hippy torches his beloved camper van. This act of projected self immolation seems to take all the violence out of the mob who wander off shocked at the crazy Brit’s actions. (This forms the first act of a much larger work based on my book of the same name, still in development)