All The Birds In The Air

Sidey’s Theme for last weekend was “a little bird told me”…

*************************************************************

I walked into the interrogation room, slapped a file down on the table, and stared at the suspect.

“They call you the Sparrow, right?” I said. “How come?”

“Er, it’s on account of me being a sparrow.” he said.

“Makes sense,” I said. “Anyway, I hear that you killed Cock Robin. With a bow and arrow.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Sez who?”

“Let’s just say a little bird told me,” I said.

“Not the Kite?” he said, “because he just talks a load of -”

“It wasn’t the Kite,” I said. In fact it was the Cormorant, my confidential informorant, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Look,” said the Sparrow, “you ain’t gonna make no stool-pigeon out of me over this. Word in the tree is that it was a hit, ordered by the Parrot.”

“Why would the Parrot want him dead?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Cherchez la femme,” he said.

“Meaning what?” I said, since I don’t speak Spanish.

“Tits,” he said.

“Er, what?”

“The Parrot’s nieces are the Tit sisters,” he said. “Bridget and Ingrid. Cock Robin was moving in on them.”

“And why would they go off with Cock Rob -” I began, then the full impact of his nickname hit me. “Oh,” I said.

“Exactly,” said the Sparrow. “Bridget is with egg now. Weren’t no way the Parrot was gonna take that, so he put a price on his head.”

“A carrot?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” said the Sparrow. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” I said. “Just like I’m guessing there isn’t going to be a ptarmigan in this story, is there?”

“Of course not,” said the Sparrow. “The Ptarmigan’s on holiday. In Lake Michigan.”

I felt myself starting to get a headache.

“Look, you’ve got nothing to hold me on,” he said. “I bet you don’t even have a body.”

“We do, actually,” I said. “We found it in a shallow grave. The Owl dug it, unsurprisingly with his trowel.”

He looked a bit worried at that.

“Listen, we know it wasn’t you,” I said. “It’d be too hard for you to shoot him with a bow and arrow, what with you having no hands or anything.”

The Sparrow snorted, which caused a disgusting worm of snot (probably consisting mostly of worm) to shoot out of his beak. “Too hard? Listen, the guy had a red breast, he might as well have painted a target on his chest. I couldn’t miss.”

There was a brief silence, then the Sparrow uttered one word, which he had probably borrowed from the Rook.

I smiled at him. “You’re Bustard,” I said.

As Write As Rain

At our Inksplinters writing group this week we had the challenge of picking a hobby or interest and write about it using as many clichés as possible. I don’t fish, by the way, but it was easier than writing about slumping in front of the telly….

****************************************************

I used to think that fishing was as easy as falling off a log, especially if, as I do, you do it sitting on a log. In fact it I thought it was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Then yesterday morning I woke up and smelled the coffee, then I got up with the lark and shot from my bed like a bullet out of a gun, grinning like a loon, ready to carpe the diem, and indeed hopefully the carp. I made my toast as easy as pie, then hopped into my car and drove off like a bat out of hell.

I whipped out my rod and opened a can of worms. This was because I hadn’t yet reached the lake, and whipping out your rod on an open road certainly does open a can of worms.

I made my apologies to the traffic cop and finished my trip. I sprang from my car and looked out at the lake.

There are more than fish in the lake. There was a line of ducks, all in a row.

I slung my hook, then got a nibble, but it slipped through my fingers like water through a sieve. I watched  its rear as it swam away, like a vet looking up a cow’s arse.

I was not a happy bunny, nor a ray of sunshine. I was crestfallen and down in the dumps. I was not as happy as Larry, who was fishing thirty yards away and had just landed a ten-pound mackerel.

Because you should have seen the one that got away. He was the size of a house. A big house, obviously, otherwise that sentence means nothing.

I was so pissed that I went to the pub, to get pissed. In the Depths of Despair (that’s the name of the pub) I drank like a, like a, well, like a fish actually. I got as drunk as a skunk, that well-known species of heavy drinkers. My barmates tried to tell me that there were plenty more fish in the sea. They told me keep my chin up, to cheer up and to buck up. I told them something that rhymes with that.

Going forward I’m going to fish with dynamite. There’ll be a big bang (no, not that one), there’ll be a whole new meaning to the expression “the fish are rising” and they’ll shoot from the water like a bullet from a gun, a sentence that’s as old as the hills, since I used it in the second paragraph.

Then it will rain fish, like it’s raining cats and dogs.

After Ever After

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “happiness”…

************************************************

It was the kind of bar that echoed regularly  to the clink of pool-cue hitting pool-ball, and almost equally regularly to the thwack of pool-cue hitting head. It was the kind of bar that had a juke-box that played only country & western music, sad songs about how someone’s woman done left them. It was the kind of bar filled with men whose women had done left them, precisely because they were the kind of men who drank in that kind of bar.

It wasn’t actually called The Bar Brawl, but it might as well have been.

It was the last place you would expect to find her, but there, on a high-stool at the counter, swigging back her fifth beer from the bottle, sat Snow White.

Two years had passed since her dramatic awakening at the hands, well, the lips of the Prince. The wedding had been wonderful, the palace was spectacular, Princessness was the businessness. But she was married to a guy that she had met just once, after she had heard him sing “One Song, I Have But One Song”.

She hadn’t realised then that he meant that literally.

He sang the song in the shower, hummed it whilst driving in the carriage, whistled it while he worked. She now hated it with a deep, deep hatred, the kind of hatred people normally reserve only for My Heart Will Go On.

And she was starting to hate him. They had nothing in common – he liked falconry (hunting with falcons) archery (hunting with archers) and husbandry (hunting with other husbands). She, having been hunted herself, did not. She had to drink endless amounts of tea with ladies of high breeding who moaned about their servants, smelled strongly of gin and hinted that they were having it off with their gardener.

Dinner-time conversation between herself and the Prince, along the length of a thirty-foot table, was along the lines of “How was your day?”, “Fine”, and then silence.

So this night she had taken off, stormed from the castle and marched into this bar. It had fallen silent when she entered, thirty sets of eyes looking suspiciously at her. Then someone had said “well, hello, doll”, and patted her on the bum. She had punched him in the face.

The bar relaxed, the man she had punched laughed and bought her a beer. She was in.

Now she drained her bottle, and nodded to the bar-owner.

“I’ll have another,” she said.

“Make that two,” said a voice. The Prince sat down on the stool beside her.

“How did you know I’d be here?” she said, astonished.

“Because I know you, better than you think I do,” he said. “I know that you’re just a simple girl at heart, and I know that the Royal life is not easy for you. I know that you’re not happy.”

“No, but I know that I should be,” she said. “We all live happily ever after. The story says so.”

“Yet none of us are happy,” said the Prince.

“Well, Happy is,” said Snow White.

“Ok, apart from him,” said the Prince. “The thing is, the story stopped there. It never told us how to be a couple.”

“Exactly,” she said. “We’re not really a husband and wife. We don’t even, er….”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to,” said the Prince. “The story doesn’t say ‘and they all shagged happily ever after’. I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

She giggled, and he blushed. “Ok, that sentence needed thinking through before I said it,” he said. He looked into her eyes.  “I do love you, you know,” he said softly.

She returned his look , then smiled . “I’ll give you a game of darts,” she said.

They played darts, then pool. They had a belching contest, which she won with a thundering rumble that earned her whoops of appreciation from the entire bar.

They walked home hand in hand. He told her about his plans for the kingdom, the first time he had done so, and listened seriously to suggestions that she made about them. She told him that she believed a princess could do so much more, and again he listened. She told him she never wanted to hear “One Song” ever again.

“I thought it was our song,” he said.

“Nope,” she said, “let’s stick to Wind Beneath My Wings like normal couples.”

They went home. They went to bed.

A year later (it doesn’t work the first time, that would just be a fairy tale) she sat cradling her new-born baby, Snow Whiter.

“Are you happy?” asked the Prince.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“And I am too,” he said, and a twinkle came into his eye, “about one love,” he continued, “only for you”.

Globe Trotting

The Tinhouse is bereft of women this week, as Mrs Tin and Tingirl have gone to London. They intend to indulge in mother-daughter bonding, visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum (Tingirl is a firm fan) and shop, According to an email I got from Tingirl they have already been to a “beetles exhibition”, by which I don’t think she meant something about insects.

The main purpose of the trip, though, is to visit the Globe Theatre, since Tingirl is so consumed by acting and intends to try to pursue it as a career.

They are going tonight to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, firstly because, well, it’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Secondly they picked that because the School Musical this year was All Shook Up, which is built of course around Elvis songs, but apparently it uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a framework upon which to build it.

This may be why it’s better than Mamma Mia, which is built around Abba songs, but apparently upon a framework of the actors saying whatever comes into their heads next.

The girls bought the tickets online. We have all bought stuff online, and are used to filling in the little drop-down box that asks if we are Mr, Mrs or Ms. Slightly posher websites may also concede that some of us might like to be referred to as “Dr” (I haven‘t seen one that that offers the option “Bgr” for blogger, though looking at the abbreviation, it’s probably just as well).

Buy tickets for the Globe, though, and you are offered these choices:

We chickened out of Princess, but I hope that Air Commodore Tingirl has a super time.

On The Brink

The Leaving Certificate is the final, state-run examination which marks the end of our school cycle. After this students, depending on their results and upon their wishes, can go on to university or some other college, or out into the world of work, or, as it is known now in Ireland, unemployment.

Tinson2 starts his Leaving Certificate exams tomorrow.

He is eighteen now, and stands almost at a door between two worlds, one foot still in childhood, the other stepping towards the door into adulthood. After tomorrow that foot will be through the door and th other foot will have lifted from the ground to follow it. He will still be a teenager, wonderful and bewildering, daft and then brilliant, filling you with frustration and then with joy.

The ultra-laid-back manner which makes him such a lovely person has not been a great advantage when it came to studying and preparing for these exams, and I worry for him and for how he might get on.

But whatever happens he is still our magnificent, maddening, charming, baffling, super son, and we love him for that, for the amazing person that he is.

All the best tomorrow, my son and my friend.

Hop It

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “down a rabbit hole”…

********************************************************* 

Bugs Bunny stopped at what looked like an ordinary grass bank, looked around to make sure that there was no-one watching, and slipped down into the rabbit-hole.

Down below was the enormous bustling town of Warren Peace, home to thousands of rabbits.

Bugs strolled along the main street, which featured a greengrocers, a greengrocers, a pub (the Berk and Hare) and a salad-bar, which was simply an upmarket greengrocers.

A football match was taking place in the park. Bugs knew that the final score would be something like 62-59, which is what happens when a goalkeeper whose paws are very small has to try to save shots from players whose feet are very big.

Bugs saw groups of young bucks showing off in front of giggling, wiggling bunny girls. Later, he knew, they would all go off to the cinema together, crowd into the back-row and go at it like rabbits.

He dropped a coin into the begging-bowl of Old Stumpy, who had a crutch and only one leg, a cautionary reminder to the whole town that when it comes to a Lucky Rabbit’s Foot it is not generally the rabbit who is lucky.

Bugs had lived in the town all his life, but others had left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Before she married Roger Rabbit and went off to Hollywood Jessica Rabbit had grown up there, though in those days her name had been, well, Jessica Rabbit actually.

Bugs went into his house and into his kitchen. It used to be fairly light on kitchen equipment, which had consisted simply of a vegetable rack, but Bugs had recently bought a small George-Foreman-Grill-like cooker in which he was able to produce steamed carrots, grilled carrots, braised carrots and in which he could have made Carrot and Coriander Soup, had he had any idea what coriander was.

The cooker was called the Bunny Boiler.

Bugs was soon so busy cooking that he didn’t hear the footsteps approaching stealthily from behind him. Elmer J Fudd turned, apparently to us reading this, put a finger to his lips and said “be vewy, vewy, qwiet. I’m hunting wabbit”. He crept up to Bugs, lifted his double-barrelled shotgun, and fired.

When the smoke cleared there was an Elmer-shaped hole in the wall, and his shotgun lay on the ground, its barrels peeled back like banana-skins.

Just as Elmer had fired Bugs had stuck a carrot into each barrel. Sometimes the old clichés are the best.

Bugs took his dinner into the sitting room and ate it in front of the TV. He was limited in the number of channels he could watch because he didn’t have cable, just an old rabbit’s-ears aerial.

Just as he was stretching and thinking about bed there was a tremendous rumbling in the wall. Bugs sighed. Dwarves were mining the area beside Warren Peace, and would sometimes break through into the town by mistake.

Sure enough, a hole suddenly opened up in the wall, and after a couple of seconds a dwarf’s head poked through it, looking about him in confusion.

“Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?” said Bugs.

Throw Those Curtains Wide

This is our June Bank Holiday weekend, and at eight o’clock this morning, looking at this:

you realise that, if only we had the weather, we’d be the best country on earth.

The Finished Posts of May

Since I started my run of posts for the last nine days of May with a post about how I was going to have a run of posts for the last nine days of May it seems only appropriate that I should end the sequence with a post about how I have now had a run of posts for the last nine days of May.

To those of you still here even though you now know how dull this post is going to be, or those of you still wading your way through that opening sentence (don’t worry, I’ll wait for you) all I can say is that the exercise taught me very little that I didn’t know before, but reminded me of things that I needed reminding of.

Firstly, you can’t beat a good vow. Promising to the world at large, even if the large part of the world at large isn’t listening, that you are going to post every day concentrates the mind wonderfully, or horribly if you like, forcing you into thinking of something, anything, to write about. Topics that you would normally dismiss with scorn, like for example walking upstairs, are viewed as having definite potential. Watch out for future posts about me using my bus ticket on the bus, the fact that the grass in my garden is green, and which leg I put into my trousers first.

What this reinforces is that writing causes writing. Starting a topic, no matter how mundane, will lead you in directions that you didn’t expect to go, grow jokes inside your head, give you sudden ideas for things you can put in which are actually not bad.

And, though again I knew this already, it reminded me that I have a group of loyal readers who are also now friends and who will come here and support me, even if my post consists of a Chinese take-away menu written backwards (watch out for it, there’s a joke about Pork Sour And Sweet that’s absolutely hilarious).

Most of all it’s reminded me that if writing makes you feel less depressed, then there is no sense in stopping writing because you are depressed.

So I’m looking forward to getting back into it, to hopefully thinking up stuff, to writing every day.

Though I might take tomorrow off.

Upstairs Downstairs

People who have been reading this blog for a long time (I mean you’ve read a lot of posts, not that you’re slow readers) will be familiar with this picture:

Which is of the Tinhouse. People who have been reading this week, and have been paying attention, will have read this sentence in the recent Step by Step post:

Indeed I’d done 681 before I’d even left the house, which is what happens when you run downstairs, put the kettle on, run back up to bring your clothes into the bathroom, go back down to make your tea, go up and have your shower….

There are four references there to our stairs and, as you can see, we live in a bungalow.

What’s going on here? Is Tinman deluded, thinking he leaves in a bigger house than he does? Or do the Tinfamily live in a house like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than on the out?

Or perhaps there’s a Tincave beneath the house from which Tinman fights crime, where he parks the Tinmobile (well, not that bit, obviously, you can see it in the driveway), his Tinsuit and his valuable array of Gizmos, including his Tin-Utility-Belt (it contains all utilities, including light (a torch), communications (a mobile phone and gas (a tin of beans), his Tin-Metal-Detector (it doesn‘t work, it just keeps pointing at him), and, in case of emergency, his Tin Whistle.

In fact, the answer is quite simple. When you enter our house you are in a hallway, surrounded by the bedrooms. The sitting-room is in front of you, and because our street was built on a hill there are three steps down into it.

Walking up these three steps is known in the Tinhouse as “going upstairs”.

This is a cause for much merriment among my friends. Whenever I say things like “I went up to bed” they say “what, in your bungalow?”. And it is not only me. I have heard Tingirl on the phone saying “no, it’s upstairs, I’ll go and get it” and then saying “we do so have an upstairs. Yes we do, stop laughing”. I’ve asked the Tinsons, and the same thing happens to them.

That’s all for today, then. I’m going to close my laptop now, and charge it in my bedroom.

Upstairs.

Tiny But Tough

*

This time they had employed a girl.

The Wolf smiled to himself. This was going to be even easier than the last time.

The last shepherd had been a boy who had let the sheep wander into the meadow, which was practically the Wolf’s frying-pan. The boy himself was under a haystack and, despite the scratchy, potentially eye-poking nature of the hay, was fast asleep.

Little Boy Blue had eventually arrived, blowing his horn, but by then the Wolf had made off with a month’s supply of mutton, spare ribs and rack-of-lamb.

A quick detour through Mary, Mary Quite Contrary’s garden on the way home had got him some fresh mint to top the whole thing off.

The boy had been fired and they had advertised for a replacement. Since the only requirement was a willingness to be delighted by a red sky at night you’d have thought there’d have been lots of applicants, yet somehow they’d ended up with this young girl.

She had had the job for less than a day now, and seemed to have lost her sheep.

It’s not easy to see how she could do this, what sheep mainly do is follow, so you’d have thought she’d have been unable to shake them off unless she’d taken up rock-climbing, but there she was, and there the sheep weren’t.

The Wolf prowled the area, and after an hour or so he found them. They were on their way home, dragging their tails behind them, not an easy trick when your tail is three inches long.

A thought struck the Wolf. If can they find their way home, he thought, then why on earth do they need the girl?

A crook struck the Wolf. He turned in surprise.

The girl stood there, swinging the crook back for another go.

“I’m Little Bo Peep,” said the girl. “Leave my sheep alone.”

“Not a chance,” said the Wolf, “I’m in the mood for a kebab.”

“Then you’re wasting your time,” said Bo Peep. “I’ve seen the lump of meat they slice kebabs from, and none of my sheep have a leg that thick. Come to think of it, no sheep on the planet have a leg that thick. I think you’ve been eating elephant.”

She swung the crook again and caught the Wolf on the side of the head, the most painful thing to have happened to him since Little Red Riding Hood had punched him in the face. (Why is everyone called “Little” in this town, thought the Wolf as he fled, they’re all as strong as horses).

Eventually he stopped running, at the top of a hill overlooking a small valley. There were three small houses in the valley, and each house seemed to be built slightly differently, as if the local store carried only a very small stock of each type of building material. Three pigs (the Wolf just know that they would be called “Little” Pigs) were sitting chatting in the garden of one of the houses.

All thoughts of lamb vanished from the Wolf’s mind. It was time, he thought, to bring home the bacon.

Still huffing and puffing from his long run, he started down the hill.

Surely nothing could go wrong this time.