Once I finally got in, I quickly got chatting to my camp mates, trying to work out who I was the most compatible with. Now I always try to look for the good in people even if they’re crappy personalities (life’s easier that way) but I didn’t have to try at all. It’s a cliché I know but I honestly was so lucky to be put in a camp with such amazing people. I mean obviously me and Martin Roberts didn’t hit it off straight away and we clashed quite quickly (I’ll chat more about that later) but everyone else was lovely.
After being rescued (I’d still be in that canoe now to be honest if it wasn’t for Larry), it was the start of a beautiful friendship for Larry and me. Larry (or Lazeruth as we all nicknamed him) is such a kind soul and would do anything he could to help us all. If I was missing home or it was all getting too much, it was Larry I would go and speak to. His wise words and his magic hugs seemed to make everything all right again. Everyone would agree with me that Larry was the boss; it didn’t matter who got voted for by the public, Larry was our King of the Jungle. He is like a boy scouts leader; before Larry and I arrived no one knew how to light a fire so they were actually trying to burn Adam Thomas’s trousers. I could be exaggerating here but Larry literally started a fire by just staring at a piece of wood and flint. He is at one with nature.
He didn’t give a shit about any trials; when we had to do the Rancid Retreat which was a cold tub of water filled with fish guts in which they threw more fish and gloop onto us, he was just coolly diving underneath to collect the stars. At one point he put one of the dead fish in his pocket and said he would cook it later. Some of the boys got shown right up by him – all the boys would be doing press-ups with nothing but little tiny pants on (I mean seriously, I had such a hard life in there having to watch all them boys’ six-packs glistening in the sun, I don’t know how I got through it) and Larry would just strut into the middle of camp, take his top off and start pumping iron, out-squatting most of them. Sometimes he would even count in different languages just to spice things up a bit. He was definitely eye candy for those ladies with their free bus passes.
Yeah, Larry was the father of the camp and Carol Vorderman was the yummy mummy of the group. What a beautiful lady, inside and out. I loved listening to Carol’s stories. She has grafted hard all of her life and made her mum, Jean, so proud. She has Jean (who sounded like a truly amazing woman) to thank for giving Carol the push to do Countdown. See, Jean saw an advert in a local newspaper about this new TV channel (Channel 4) and how they were doing a show that required a lady who was good at maths. That’s an understatement: Carol is the mental arithmetic queen, Princess of Pythagoras. She can do mental arithmetic as quick as I can order a Domino’s pizza (and that is quick), to the point where I’d take her answer over a calculator’s. She sent a letter off to the channel without Carol knowing and encouraged her to go to the interview. I am so pleased she did because now the British public have got to know Carol Vorderman. Not many people can say they’re a pilot, they’re a graduate from Cambridge, they have an MBE and they’ve won Rear of the Year (twice).
One of the highlights of my experience in the jungle and one of the most surreal moments of my life is when Carol washed my hair for me. Because the shower and creek is so cold, your hair just stinks constantly; you end up with soap suds, dead bugs and all sorts in there. I think I managed to get a comb through my hair twice during the whole month I was in there. So this time I was lying on the creek and Carol had boiled some water for me and gave me a little head massage and everything. I mean the Carol Vorderman was washing my hair. Talk about surreal. When I was younger and my dad would finish work at two, he would pick me up from school and we would watch Countdown together. We would get a pen and paper out and play along. ‘Two from the top and four from the bottom please, Carol.’ I grew up with her in my house. I once even burnt down the kitchen in my mam and dad’s house because of Carol and here she was playing Vidal Sassoon with me.
How that happened was I got that engrossed in a game of Countdown I forgot I had put some potato wedges under the grill. The whole kitchen went up in flames and the firemen had to open every window in the house including the ones upstairs which brought black soot all up the new cream carpet. So we had to get a new kitchen and new carpets throughout. My mam and dad were not happy that day, mostly because of my response to one of the firemen.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘I’m absolutely starving, I was craving those wedges.’
Me and Carol had lots of in-depth
