Tour Guide Removal Service

Old ruined castles. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They’ll have battlements, and a keep, and a gift shop where the armoury used to be, called “The Armoury Gift Shop”, or some other life-sappingly imaginative name. Worse still, they’ll run a guided tour.
It’s bad enough walking around these fetid piles of stone and feudalism. Trudge trudge. Look, some stones! Trudge trudge. This is where they fired arrows at attackers! It looks a lot like the other holes they used to fire arrows at attackers! Trudge trudge. Does anyone think that pile of stones there looks like a boot? Shut up and keep trudging! But then an overly chirpy or terminally bored very young or very old person will walk you around the ruin, pointing out all of the tiny little details you didn’t notice before because you really have better things to do, like counting the number of spots on that man’s face, or guessing how many people threw themselves from the battlements on one of the guided tours. You will be informed there is a re-enactment at midday, in which a couple of gap-year students dress up in ill-fitting false armour and go through a painfully unexciting impression of a swordfight, or a jousting match, or a demonstration of how bad sanitation was back then. Ha ha, he threw poo on his head! How savage these people are, with their lack of flushing toilets.
None of this compares, however to the most hideous experience of all: The guided tour abroad.
It’s the same combination of boredom and rock. But this time the endless droning may as well be in Elvish for all you know. Your look of bored befuddlement will be noticed by the tour guide, who will suddenly stop his incredibly long sentence and turn to you. In the tone used by adults explaining to a child that the custard goes into the mouth, not in the ears, they will say “is tower”. All of that, just to say that it was a tower? Any other details are irrelevant really. It’s a tower. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle might have died there (as many French tour guides are keen to suggest, the smug people from France), but I really don’t care. Rock is rock, stone is stone, homicidal impulses are making a great deal of sense right now. Then you feel guilty and stupid, as your failure to listen at school has required the tour guide to stop boring the tears out of the others to direct the boredom beam straight at you. All that boredom isn’t just for you, you know! Now keep trudging! Allez!