His seasonal gifts into the sandpit, good old Rex’s festive perk,
In the yard so far below us, where the cheerful motors lurk;
Bright the paintwork on the Nissan, brighter still the stolen Merc.
In his love nest down in Peckham, Dad has left his girl asleep,
Through the gridlock out to Barking, sees his bronze Toyota creep;
A family meal with all united, this is how it’s meant to be.
Hasn’t seen the wife in ages; never mind, just let them be:
A hero’s welcome now awaits him, bearer of the KFC.
In our cosy flatlet gather’d, Sharleen shows her navel stud,
Body pierced like Saint Sebastian, skin still damp with teenage blood;
Mum parades her shiny highlights, snowy white from roots of coal;
Darren staggers in triumphant – his team won and his the goal;
And – joy of Paschal joys exceeding – Gary’s joined us on parole!
ENID BLYTON
sees the Famous Five grown up
After their success in catching Blackbeard and the Foreign-Looking Man at Smuggler’s Cove, the Five found they had been posted to the Anti-Terrorist Squad in London.
‘Poo-ee,’ said Anne on their first afternoon in the office. ‘Let’s have a jolly good tidy up, shall we? I’ll do the washing up.’
‘Shut it,’ barked Julian, who had picked up the new office talk. ‘You can’t wash up a styrofoam cup.’
‘Well I’ve had enough takeaway chips,’ said Dick. ‘I vote we have a proper picnic with apples and cherry cakes and lemonade.’
Julian was lighting a Benson and Hedges as the phone rang. ‘I’ve got you,’ he said grimly into the receiver. 12.05, Westminster Bridge.’ He put the receiver down glumly. ‘It’s a bomb warning,’ he elaborated. ‘Where’s the dog?’
‘But, J—Julian,’ George stammered, ‘Timmy’s not trained for this Semtex stuff. I vote—’
‘There’s no votes any more,’ Dick confided. ‘But Julian, how do you know it’s not a bluff? How do you know it’s really them?’
‘Because he used the right code,’ Julian explained.
‘But, Julian,’ sobbed Anne, setting to work with a J-cloth on the Flying Squad divisional ashtray, ‘why don’t we just arrest their leader?’
Julian banged the table. ‘Because’, he exploded, ‘he’s the Minister for Education in Belfast.’
‘I say,’ expostulated Dick. ‘That’s a pretty rum show.’
THE BRONTËS
place some lonely hearts ads
CHARACTER FROM Wuthering Heights
Orphan gypsy boy, aged 12, from Liverpool seeks loving family for quiet life. Countryside preferred.
CHARLOTTE
Yorkshirewoman, aged 26, bossy, consumptive, plain, seeks bald Belgian pedagogue for weekends of prayer, fasting and possible domination. No Catholics.
BRANWELL
Halifax railway booking clerk, male, 27, seeks fellow adventurer, interested in: mystic literature, sex, alcohol, opium and railway timetables. No geeks.
REVEREND PATRICK
Man of the cloth, recently widowed, seeks mother’s help-cum-housekeeper to help with lively brood in draughty rectory. GSOH essential!
ANNE
Are you my Mr Bounderby? Youngest of three N. Yorks sisters seeks escape from repressive family novel-writing business. Anything to get away from the daily grind of plots and characterisation! Office or manufacturing work preferred.
CHARACTER FROM Jane Eyre
Married woman, 32, recently certified, seeks loft conversion specialist.
DAN BROWN
visits the cash dispenser
The world-renowned author stabbed his dagger-like debit card into the slot. ‘Welcome to NatWest,’ barked the blushing grey light of the screen to the forty-two-year-old man. He had only two thoughts.
NatWest is a perfect heptogram.
Scratching his aquiline head, frantically trying to remember a number, the sun came up at last and rained its orange beams on Dan Brown. ‘What do you want to do?’ asserted the blinking screen. His options were stark for Brown, more than ever now. ‘Get Mini Statement’. ‘Withdraw Cash’. ‘Change PIN’. For what seemed an eternity, trying to remember his PIN, the screen mocked the famous writer.
Someone somewhere knows my four-figure PIN.
Whatever my PIN was once is still my PIN and in some remote safe someone somewhere still knows it.
In Paddington Station, an iconic railway terminal with a glass roof like the bastard offspring of a greenhouse and a railway station, a line of fellow travellers was waiting on Brown. Brown frowned down at his brown shoes and for the hundredth time that morning wondered what destiny may have in store for the Exeter, New Hampshire graduate.
The sandy-haired former plagiarism defendant felt his receding temples pounding in his guts. Four figures. Four figures, you halfwit, he almost found himself murmuring in Brown’s ear, close at hand.
Tentatively his fingers pounded their remorseless melody upon the NatWest keyboard, numerically. He watched his fingers work with sallow eyes.
He typed in anything, literally anything, desperately. He didn’t know what affect it may have.
The headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland resides in a hydraulically sealed ninety-eight-storey building guarded by hair-trigger sensitive nuclear firedogs at 49 18, 2 74th Street in Manhattan, America, whose security protocol is known to only six elves whose tongues have been cut out for security by the Cyrenian Knights of Albania, the capital of Greece.
In an instant, the famous writer remembered their bleeding skin from barbed wire.
Of course. They must pass on the secret PIN. An unbroken chain whose links are not forged (not in that sense).
9 … 8 … 7 … 6. His fingers pronounced the Sigma number. The Sigma number was almost impossible to fake, whereby the Liberace Sequence was quite easy to forge for prominent author Dan Br own.
The cash machine cleared its throat and breathed in with a rasping exhalation that seemed to shake its very belly. Then finally it expectorated wheezily up twenty-eight million dollars into the fingers pregnant with expectation of the forty-two-year-old man.
‘Take your cash now please,’ pleaded the mocking screen, no longer mocking.
It’s like giving candy to a baby, it occurred to the universe-celebrated prose stylist.
It’s like shelling eggs.
LORD BYRON
sends another innocent abroad, in terza rima
The President promoted his old mate
With a kiss upon the cheek for Condoleeza.
He sent her off to fashion Europe’s fate
(In truth he would do anything to please her).
Then soon he called his secretary of state
For fear those Euro-bums would tease her:
‘Now, Condy, you be brave and spunky
‘With that two-bit French surrender-monkey.’
‘Oh boy,’ he thought, ‘she’s through with Helmut Schröder.
‘I think our best hope lies with Berlusconi.
‘We sure can’t let a jerk like that railroad her.
‘There’s no one left to give her such a whirl as Tony.
‘For all the wine and cheese with which he’ll load her
‘I know that Chirac thinks my girl’s a phony.
‘So bring home Condy now, it’s like I’m missing her.
‘And furthermore I don’t like Henry Kissinger.’
LEWIS CARROLL
moves Alice into the 1960s
‘I know!’ said Alice, who had made a point of always studying the daily newspaper. ‘Let’s form a popular music group!’
‘Right on, little lady,’ said the White Rabbit. ‘But what are we going to call ourselves?’
‘The Carpenters?’ said the Walrus.
‘You, Caterpillar, dear,’ said Alice, ‘you shall play the harmonium.’
‘No, baby, me I’m strictly rhythm,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘But y
ou want the Mad Hatter on drums. He makes Keith Moon look like the Dormouse.’
‘I know,’ said the Gryphon. ‘Let’s call ourselves the Turtles.’
‘Or one could call us after oneself,’ said the Queen.
‘Hey,’ said the Cheshire Cat, ‘you want to try a line of Jabberwock?’
‘“’Twas brillig …”’ began Alice, who always remembered her lessons from the schoolroom.
‘No, you don’t say a line, you sniff it. Like this.’
‘My word,’ said Alice, ‘this is the oddest powder that ever I saw. Something marked “Poison” is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.’
Alice took a great snort and felt her toves go slithy. Her garden was full of flowering grass; there was whiffling in her tulge; they said that heaven was ten zillion light years away.
‘Golly,’ said Alice, ‘what would my dear cat Dinah say? From here, the poor creature seems invisibly distant, almost unimaginably remote.’
‘Yeah,’ said the Caterpillar, ‘like far out.’
RAYMOND CHANDLER
goes to Wodehouse country1
I had a short let at the time on an apartment in Berkeley Mansions. The rent was low because the owner was away in Pentonville and the rusty elevator screeched like a Palm Springs widow at a blackjack table. The super was called ‘Fancy’ Jeeves, the sort of stuck-up guy who reads Spinoza for the gags.
I asked him for directions to a luncheonette and wound up in some speakeasy called The Drones. I ordered a sidecar and a T-bone steak, done rare. Some lowlifes were pitching bagels at the electric chandelier with a spreadbet operation on how many throws it was going to take to knock off a crystal. I bought low from Oofy Prosser, a guy who looked like a blowfish in a tux, and shot clean through the flex with my Smith and Wesson.
Back in the apartment, I was counting my winnings when Fancy Jeeves came in and started plucking at my sleeve. ‘There is a Miss Madeleine Bassett to see you, sir. The lady has been waiting a considerable time.’
He showed in a young blonde with eyes like the foglamps on an Oldsmobile.
‘I don’t do matrimonial,’ I said.
‘You naughty boy!’ she trilled. ‘I know you’ve always held a torch for me and now I’ve got good news for you. I have broken off my engagement to Augustus – which means I’m free once more.’
I sat down heavily behind the desk. Suddenly the day held about as much appeal for me as a stevedore’s undershirt.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
celebrates the appointment of Geri Halliwell to be UN ambassador on AIDS education to Africa
Whilom in Dagenham there dwelt
A Girl of Spice that highte Geraldine.
Upon hir heed were locks of copper hue;
Gat-toothed was she, hir legs were like a
Longbow set to fire, and in her eye a gleme
That any sturdy wight might rue. In piercing tone
She shriek’d with other gentil damosels
In minstrel troupe; and yet full serious was she,
Well learned in high diplomacie, and to
Confound the folk who doubted her intent
Gan pullen up hir smok, and ‘Lok,’ cried
She, ‘I have the Union flag upon mine queynte.’
Forthwith was she despatched from
Court as messenger from the United Natiouns.
Eek to the tribes of Indies and Afrik she
Voyaged mightily and took hir stande upon a stage –
Yet was hir stature smalle. ‘By Christes bones,’
Quoth she, ‘when that ye desirous be to swyve thy wif,
Tak care in caul or bladders greased to wrap thy knob,
Such as men call letters of the Frankish
Kinde, for that ye gat not increase of poxe.’
A wondrous wench was she. Full fearsome was
Hir voice, yet of increase of it there was no ende.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
from Murder in the Bathhouse (1980)
The door of the cubicle in the San Francisco bathhouse swung open to reveal a naked young man, lying dead on the floor.
‘We’re baffled,’ said Sergeant O’Brien. ‘But I have detained these eight other naked men at the scene of the crime.’
Poirot’s egg-shaped head jerked forward curiously. ‘So, Hastings,’ he said, ‘what mysterious link bring nine men together in such circumstance?’
‘I suppose’, said Hastings, ‘the drought’s caused a water shortage and all these chaps have got together to share a bath.’
‘Look a little more carefully, my English friend. Do they have something in common?’
‘By golly, Poirot, they’ve all got moustaches. I think they were all members of the same bomber squadron during the war. One of the poor fellows was so badly shot up by the Hun he can’t perform his own ablutions and his old comrades have got together to give him a blanket bath.’
‘A little warmer, Hastings. But our murderer is not a man. It is a virus.’
‘A what, Poirot?’
‘A virus. The HIV.’
‘Not the high-speed locomotive, Poirot?’
‘No. I will hexplain.’
Poirot proceeded to instruct Hastings in some of the ways of the modern world.
‘Good golly, Poirot. Are you positive?’
‘I hope not, Hastings.’
‘But, but – how on earth do you know about such practices?’
‘Hastings, you forget one thing about Hercule Poirot. Since all my life I am famous for my use of the little gay cells.’
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
on an ambitious building project
In Shepherd’s Bush did Mister Khan
A new conservatory decree,
Where Alf, the master joiner, ran
The dodgiest business known to man,
For cash, no VAT.
So twice five yards of blighted ground
With scaffolding was fenced around
Where blossomed the odd apple-bearing tree
Beneath the gormless eyes of Sky TV.
But oh, that deep and structural chasm which slanted
Down the central ridge athwart the asphalt cover!
A nasty place! As holey and unwanted
As e’er beneath a leaking sky was haunted
By roofer waiting for his absent brover.
And from the floor, with septic turmoil seething,
As though old Alf in fast thick pants were breathing,
The ruptured water main was forced,
Amid whose violent interrupted burst
New-laid tiles vaulted like rebounding hail;
And sanitary ware rose through the glass
To rain down randomly upon the grass.
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated finally in the hundredth week,
Where was heard the mingled measure
Of the subsidence and leak.
It was a miracle of rare device –
Two years in building, at three times the price.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
finds new work for an old talent
JOHN MOTSON Sherlock Holmes, what a fantastic goal!
HOLMES On the contrary, it was childishly simple. On perceiving that the studs in the Italian goalkeeper’s boots were markedly more worn on one side than the other, I deduced that he was abnormally right-footed. Such morbid dexterity is common among the Genoese, whose mesomorphic body shape tends also to bow their legs.
MOTSON Very much so, in fact, Sherlock.
HOLMES I had previously noticed in a goalmouth skirmish the smell of pesto on the fellow’s breath, and at the point of his utmost advance I uttered a traditional Ligurian oath. In the moment of astonishment that followed, I was able to slide the ball with ease between his conveniently open legs.
MOTSON Nutmeg, no less!
HOLMES No, basil and pecorino.
MOTSON As you say, Sherlock. So: a few beers tonight, then?
HOLMES I propose a m
oderate irrigation of the appropriate canal.
MOTSON Which canal is that then, Sherlock?
HOLMES Alimentary, my dear Motson.
CATHERINE COOKSON
moves into toff country
The day Maggie went to work as a maid at Lord Fitzgeordie’s castle, the First World War broke out. The Germans invaded France and dug a long ditch from the English Channel to Switzerland. The French and the British dug one of their own a few yards away. Ten million men got shot, but then at last it was all over and the world moved into the Jazz Age.
Maggie loved working in Lord Fitzgeordie’s castle and soon became his friend.
One day he confided in her. ‘I am illegitimate,’ he said.
‘Whoah, soah am I,’ declared Maggie. ‘You know me sister, like, well she’s really me ma.’
‘Seems we have something in common,’ exclaimed Lord Fitzgeordie. ‘I was beaten at school, my mother is an alcoholic and my younger son was fathered by my late wife’s lover.’
‘That’s like weird, man,’ put in Maggie. ‘I was beaten in the work’ouse and me dad never had a job.’
‘Extraordinary,’ returned the Duke. ‘My pater never did a day’s work either. Trouble is, the bounder’s cut me out of his will.’
‘Whoah, no, don’t worry, man,’ said Maggie, ‘I’m the beneficiary of yer grandfather’s mystery will. I’m a millionairess, like.’
‘I love you, Maggie,’ exclaimed Lord Fitzgeordie. ‘Shall we get married.’
‘Married?’ exploded Maggie. ‘I’m not even pregnant, man. Anyroad, I’ve not quite worked it out yet, but I think you might be me dad.’
NOËL COWARD
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