All The Birds In The Air

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

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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.

After Ever After

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “happiness”…

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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”.

Hop It

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

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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.

Get A Grip

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “handles”…

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The King looked up as Sir Olaf the Inventor entered his throne room. He moaned, and not just because he did not want to see Sir Olaf.

Kind Frederick of Saxe-Coburg was King of, well, Saxe-Coburg (sometimes the answer to the question “what’s in a name?” is “everything”), part of what is now Germany. It was Oktoberfest and the King felt that it was part of his Royal duty to join in. Then, as now, Oktoberfest was a month of quaffing, an old Germanic word meaning “pouring beer down the front of your face”. Oktoberfest meant mornings of sore heads – some caused by hangovers, some by being punched in bar-brawls, and some by banging the back of your head on the toilet-cistern when getting up after throwing up. It was a time of debauching, bauching, and de-flowering, which is stealing flowers from gardens to present to your wife in a desperate attempt to atone for the fact that you have come home five hours after you said you would, and that you are wearing a traffic-cone on your head.

Even when the King was feeling at his best a meeting with Sir Olaf was difficult, as Olaf’s inventions tended to be a little odd. He had, for example, invented the bicycle pump, although he had to admit that since nobody had yet invented the bicycle it was of limited use. He had invented the German war helmet with the spike on top. This was only useful if you charged head-down at an opponent, but many had learned to step aside so that you impaled yourself into the fence behind them, with some of them adding insult to injury by shouting “Olé” as you passed by.

The King had given Olaf a knighthood in the hope that he would take it as a hint to retire. Instead he had invented the knight hood, though it had no eye-holes in it since, as he said, the hood would only be worn at night.

He was a remarkable inventor, but not very good at spelling.

“Ok, Olaf,” sighed the King, “what is it this time?”

Sir Olaf reached into his satchel and produced a goblet, though one with a difference.

The King shook his head. This was a mistake, since it caused the feeling that someone had just struck the inside of his forehead with a tin bucket. “It seems to have grown ears,” he said, when his head stopped spinning.

“I call them handles,” said Olaf proudly.

“What are they for?” said the King.

“They are for carousing with your friends,” said Olaf. “If, for example, you are in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen and would like to clink and drink one down, you can do so without trapping your fingers between the goblets.”

“I see,” said the King. “And this goblet -”

“It’s not a goblet,” said Olaf, “I call it a tankard.”

“Why?” asked the King.

“Because I thank hard before I came up with the idea,” said Olaf, whose grammar was on a par with his spelling.

Just then Queen Margareta entered the throne room. She pointedly ignored King Frederick, and looked instead at Olaf and the tankard. “Interesting,” she said.

She took the tankard and, to Olaf’s horror, broke off one handle. She held it daintily by the other handle, and found that her little finger stuck out of its own accord.

“It would be perfect for drinking tea with the ladies,” she said, almost to herself.

“What’s tea?” asked Olaf.

“Don’t know,” she said. She smiled sweetly at him. “Invent it.”

She sailed galleon-like from the room. The King and Olaf looked at one another.

“She likes it,” said the King. “And it’s the first time she’s smiled since Oktoberfest began. This calls for a drink.”

The King poured some beer into his goblet and into Olaf’s tankard, which Olaf had to admit looked better with just the one handle.

“To the tankard,” said the King.

They clinked their vessels together. The King’s fingers got trapped between them.

The word that he uttered was the first ever in what is now often referred to as Anglo-Saxon.

Swing When You’re Spinnin’

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “swings and roundabouts”…..

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Something would have to be done about the Green Glade junction.

Each morning a line of apes would swing through the tress in a North-South direction, heading for the water-hole. At the same time a group heading to the banana-trees to the East would arrive from the West. There would be delays, grid-lock, and sometimes vine-rage.

Each evening the same thing would happen in the opposite direction.

Tarzan and Jane had decided to do something about it.

They made an odd couple. Tarzan, discovered as a baby in airplane wreckage by apes who then raised him, was not the sophisticated, clean-shaven, modestly loin-clothed creature we see in films. He was as naked as his foster-parents, walked as if he was carrying two invisible bowling-balls and continually rooted in his hair for fleas.

When he had first met Jane at the watering-hole he had beaten upon his chest, made that ape-noise that sounds like someone stepping into too cold a shower and then shown her his arse.

Jane too had been found in airplane wreckage, but by a herd of elephants, so she had replied by taking a huge mouthful of water and then blowing it down her nostrils into his face.

They had realised, though, that they were different, and this had drawn them together. And now, as they watched the daily traffic-jam at Green Glade junction they had come up with a plan.

“It’s called a roundabout,” said Tarzan, showing the apes the diagram that he had drawn on a huge leaf, with a stick. This tree here is the focal point. As you approach it, if there is an ape swinging towards you from the right you let him go first. When it’s your turn you swing around the tree and then off in the direction you want to go.”

“The two things to remember,” said Jane, flicking a bun up with a twitch of her nose and into her mouth, “is that you must indicate when you are leaving the roundabout, and that you must go around it in a clockwise direction.”

The apes looked doubtful, but they agreed, since they more than once seen Tarzan wrestle a crocodile, so generally tried not to piss him off.

The plan started from the following morning. Jane arrived in a traffic-cop outfit that she had made out of some old rags (Tarzan found himself oddly turned on the by the sight of her in a uniform and also, though he had no idea what they were, had to keep fighting off the urge to ask if she had made handcuffs). She blew her whistle, and the morning rush-hour began.

In the beginning all went well. The first ape to arrive grabbed a vine in his right hand, swung half-way round the tree, then grabbed another vine in his left and swung off in the desired direction.

As I say, the beginning went well. But that was the end of the beginning. What happened next was the beginning of the end.

As that first ape passed though the ape approaching from his left made the discovery that while yielding to traffic might be simple on paper (or leaf), on a vine travelling at speed it is no easy matter, since there is no known way of stopping it in mid-swing. His only answer was to let go, dropping onto a branch below like a schoolboy slipping off his bike-saddle and onto a crossbar, then sliding off to crash onto the jungle floor.

The next ape was doing fine as he went round the tree till he met an ape coming the other way, because if you don’t have clocks, then of course the word “clockwise” means nothing to you. The pair collided head-on, then dropped like stones, clinging to one another, onto the jungle floor.

The next ape remembered at the last second that he was supposed to indicate, and did so with the wrong hand, the one holding his vine. He joined the others on a jungle-floor that was increasingly being peppered by ape-droppings, in every meaning of that phrase.

The next ape lost his bearings as he swing around the roundabout, couldn’t figure out which was his exit and just continued to rotate around the tree, with his vine getting shorter and shorter, until he crashed face-first into it. He then dropped, not onto the jungle floor, but onto Jane’s Mum, who was passing by underneath. Enraged by this Jane’s Dad grabbed the ape in his trunk and, just when the ape had been thinking that he couldn’t possibly get any dizzier, swung him round and round before propelling him into a bush.

Within less than two minutes it was over and, in fairness, there was no traffic jam. Down below on the jungle floor, however, there were over thirty apes, in a huge heap of pain, dizziness and even flatter noses than usual.

Tarzan and Jane stared down at them.

“Now that,” said Tarzan, “is possibly the most literal use ever of the phrase “traffic pile-up”.”

Just Deserts

Sidey’s theme for last weekend was “sunshine”….

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It appeared on the horizon, a funnel above the shimmering water. As it got nearer, however, it emerged through the water, which was a mere mirage in the sun-baked haze, and the funnel revealed itself to be the head of a camel.

I suppose that’s why they call it the ship of the desert, thought Shafrid, watching from his juice-bar at the oasis. He continued to watch, waiting.

The camel reached the oasis and dipped his head forward thirstily into the pool. His rider shot over the camel’s head and into the water.

Shafrid grinned. Every time the camel did this, and every time Omar literally fell for it.

Shafrid went back behind his counter as Omar arrived, dripping, into the shop, swearing at camels, tent-like clothing that clung to you when wet, and life in general. He was the local postman, the one with longest route yet smallest number of houses on the planet.

Shafrid was his nearest customer within fifty miles. Shafrid had established his business for that very reason, figuring that he would have no competition. It hadn’t occurred to him that he would have no customers either.

He called his juice-bar the Showadi Wadi.

People had said he was mad. Many of those people were his wives, three of whom had simply left him. The rest sat around in their tents all day, bemoaning the lack of Wi-Fi and ordering catalogues from Victoria’s Secrets. This was how Omar was such a regular visitor.

The two sat in the cool shade of the juice-bar. It served a variety of drinks, if three can be called variety. Omar was drinking a Fig Surprise. The surprise would come in about an hour’s time, but that wouldn’t be a problem. You could look at the Gobi desert either as half-a-million square miles without a toilet, or as the biggest toilet in the world.

The other drinks on offer were the Cactus-Leaf Smoothie, despite the fact that there is little that is smooth about a drink full of spikes, and the Palm-frond Shake.

As regards food, Shafrid sold falafel. Most visitors bought this, although no-one knows what it is, since the only other item on the menu was Camel Nuggets, and people reckoned that this was not meant in a chicken nugget type of way.

They looked out of the bar. The sun was shining. It always did.

“Nice day,” said Shafrid.

“Piss off,” said Omar.

“What’s wrong?” asked Shafrid.

“It’s always a nice day, that’s what’s wrong,” said Omar. “Nothing but bloody sunshine, all day every day.”

“There’s the rainy season,” Shafrid pointed out.

“Oh yes,” said Omar. “Ten minutes in mid-July when the equivalent of Niagara Falls drops in a vertical sheet, falling so hard that it punches holes in the sand. Then the sun comes back out, and what water you’ve collected in buckets just evaporates as you’re looking at it. It’s as if it’s being drunk by an invisible genie.”

“I was reading the other day in one of the wives’ Cosmo,” began Shafrid. Omar looked at him. “The radio wasn’t working,” said Shafrid defensively. “Anyway, I was reading about a country called Ireland. Apparently their rainy season lasts from April to March.”

“What, no sunshine?” said Omar.

“No, sunshine,” replied Shafrid.

“No sun-tan?”

“Nope. It seems their skin is sun-resistant. They have something called freckles that fight it off.”

“Sounds like heaven,” said Omar. “I hope they know how lucky they are.”

Begging Your Pardon

I’m only getting around to Sidey’s Weekend Theme now, which was “manners”…

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“…. and yes, your bum does look big in that,” said Josef.

Anke, sitting opposite him, smiled.

The tiny statelet of Etteket is in the Alps, unknown to almost everyone. It is an astonishingly beautiful country, with stunning views and carpet-soft ski-slopes, yet they have no tourist industry, because they don’t like to brag about themselves.

They are the best-mannered nation on the planet. Their motto is “nil utterum bono, nil utterum nil”, which roughly translates as “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say nothing at all”.

You may think that living there would be paradise. The people of Etteket would tell you that you would be wrong, or rather they wouldn’t because that would be bad mannered.

And therein lies the problem. The people are polite, almost insanely so. They have been invaded during several wars, if invaded is the correct word to use about a nation who welcome you in with wide smiles, but the invaders usually leave out of boredom after a couple of years, beaten into submission by calm submission.

Their football team lose every game because their opponents have discovered that if they say “excuse me” the players will simply let them through with the ball.

If two Ettekettians ever arrive at a door at the same time, then neither goes through. They simply wave each other forward until one of them collapses from exhaustion.

There are no pub-arguments. There is no political debate. Their anti-drugs slogan is “just say ‘no, thank you’.”

And all of this eventually gets to you. It’s like living at a perpetual cocktail party, full of polite, meaningless conversation.

And so Anke founded Rude Health, a secret, hard-to-find club down a secret, hard-to-find alley, where people can please their inner urge not to please.

There is a farting room. There is a room where you can hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer, and swear long and loud. There is a driving-simulation game in which you can refuse to let cars coming out of side roads into the traffic. You can describe the weather as shite, rather than “not quite as pleasant as one would have hoped”.  There are Simon Cowell outfits (a jet-black wig and nipple-high trousers), which you can wear while you tell imaginary contestants that they sound like an electric toothbrush trapped in a metal bucket. And, as we have seen, customers like Josef can tell a mannequin in jeans that yes, your bum does look big in that.

Oh, sorry, I realise looking back that I may have given the impression in the opening lines that Josef was addressing his comment to Anke.

There is, of course, no country on earth where a man would get away with that.

Not In The Frame

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “that elusive photograph”…

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It was almost an hour after the spaceship landed when he saw its door open. A ladder was lowered to the surface and, as he watched with bated breath and readied camera, an alien appeared through the door and started down towards the surface.

The watcher was a bit startled. He had sometimes imagined aliens as little green men with wide, wide eyes, sometimes as spider-like multipeds, sometimes as mere heads floating in a ball of energy.

He had not imagined them to be rather chubby, shell-backed, and with a huge head with just one large eye in the centre.

Still, that was what Neil Armstrong, as he descended the ladder, looked like to the Man in the Moon.

All his life he Man in the Moon had looked up at the stars, the teeming, glorious, millions of stars, and refused to believe that there could be only one populated planet in all of that wonderful galaxy. He had even turned the moon into a giant beacon, which he switched on at night to attract visitors (there are people who say that the moon shines at night because it is reflecting the sun, without thinking through the flaw in that theory, which is that the sun is not shining at night).

Just as Armstrong reached the bottom of the ladder the Man in the Moon took a photo. At least he would have proof to show the Missus in the Moon.

She was a dear, sweet girl, and he loved her more deeply. To him she was the only girl in the world, and that fact that she was actually the only girl on their world only reinforced the truth of that sentence.

But she was a bit of a sceptic when it came to his theories about the possibility of alien-life. She dismissed passing vapour-trails as shooting stars, ignored the obvious runway surrounding Saturn and poked fun at his guiding-beacon, calling it the galaxy’s biggest Ouija board. She fondly called him a mulder, and he had no idea what that was.

But she would not be able to argue with the photo. He walked to their small house, where she was in the front garden eating lunch (green-cheese sandwiches) and placed it in front of her.

She argued with the photo.

“Photo-shopped,” she said.

“Seriously? You think I can do that?” he said. “I can’t even change the font in Microsoft Word.”

The Missus in the Moon thought about this. It was true that her husband knew as much about IT as he knew about swimming with dolphins (well, they didn’t have any), but she knew, just knew, that there were no such things as aliens.

“Well, I don’t know how you did it,” she said, “but I’ll still need more proof.”

Half-a-second later Buzz Aldrin’s golf ball landed between their feet.

“Ok,” she said quietly. “I sort of asked for that.”

“They’re firing at us!” said the Man in the Moon. “What happened to ’we come in peace’ and ‘take us to your leader’?”

“Don’t know,” said the Missus, “but let’s get out of here.”

And they did, since she was the leader that the aliens would have been directed to if they’d asked. The pair ran to the Sea of Tranquillity and dived into it, with just their heads visible above the surface.

While they were running the Man in the Moon dropped the photograph.

Buzz and Neil found it nearly an hour later. The thought that there had been someone there watching them scared the crap out of them, which is not as good thing while you are wearing a spacesuit. They grabbed the photo, swore never to tell anybody, and went home.

Somehow, though, the picture got mixed in with all the ones they took themselves, and has become almost as famous as the one where one of them is reflected in the helmet of the other. No one ever seems to wonder who, if Neil was the first person to step on the moon, was on the surface taking the photo of him doing so.

And the Man in the Moon has no photograph, but he doesn’t care. He has the memory, and a wife who now believes in him and who now shares his interest. They sit at night and watch the stars together, guessing at which ones might hold life and from which one their visitors might have come.

They look up at their moon, a brown-blue-green rock which , because it is so grubby looking, they have called Earth. They dream of going there one day, to collect rock samples and to speculate whether it might be capable of supporting life.

And every evening they light their beacon, their lighthouse to the universe, welcoming all comers to their home. Especially since they have now built a really good ray-gun in case future visitors prove to be as hostile as the first lot.

The truth is out there. Just not as far out there as they think.

(photo courtesy the Man in the Moon)

It’s All Over Now

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “the end of the world”….

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They were the first Emergency Responders.

Like fire-fighters in a fire station they had sat, waiting. People say that the waiting is the worst part, but they are people without the imagination to visualise the alternative. This group were ready to work when and if the need came, but hoping that it never would.

The need had just arrived.

It had begun in The Three Plinths, the bar on Mount Olympus. Adonis drunkenly suggested that since Aphrodite had had at least three lovers she was actually a bit of a slapper. She proved at least one meaning of that sentence true by slapping him hard across the face, sending him crashing onto a poker-table that collapsed remarkably easily beneath him. And, as always happens in bar-brawls, others got involved for no apparent reason.

Uranus broke a chair across Poseidon’s head. Apollo grabbed Achilles by his heel and hurled him out through the swing-doors in to the street (the double swing-doors had been installed to accommodate Demisroussos, the God of Girth). Hermes swung his winged sandal and kicked Pan hard in the pan-pipes. Gods flew across the room, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The goddesses joined in too. Demeter smacked Nike with her cornucopia, knocking him backwards over the bar counter. Hera grabbed Medusa by the hair, quickly realising that this wasn’t a particularly wise move. Throughout it all Dionysius frantically played on the honky-tonk piano in the corner, in the mistaken belief that loud, tinkly, filling-aching music would calm everyone down.

Then Pandora swung a huge right-hook at Ares. Ares ducked and Zeus, standing behind him, caught Pandora’s box straight in the face.

The enraged Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at Pandora, which missed her, fizzed through the door and struck a rocky outcrop, out beside the crops.

And Mount Olympus, as volcanic in nature as the gods were in temperament, erupted explosively. Slowly the world of the Greek Gods began to crumble.

The Responders silently watched all of this from a nearby hill, then stirred themselves into action. Each of them climbed above their steed, and clicked them forward with their heels.

Georgios stuffed the rest of his feta cheese into his mouth. Nikos knocked back the last of his retsina.

“So,” sighed Kostas, “war, death, famine and pestilence it is, then.”

“Guess so,” said Vasos. “When they tell you to beware Greeks bearing gifts, we’re the Greeks they’re talking about.”

The Four Horsemen of the Acropolis set off to work.

To Get To The Other Side

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “the question”….

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“So let me get this straight,” said Oedipus. “I have to answer a riddle, and if I get it right I can pass and enter the city of Thebes.”

“That’s right,” said the Sphinx.

“What happens if I get it wrong?” asked Oedipus.

“I strangle and then devour you,” said the Sphinx.

“Bloody hell,” said Oedipus. “What happened to good old ‘halt, who goes there?’.”

“How does that work?” asked the Sphinx.

“You say ‘halt, who goes there’, and I say ‘friend’ -”

“What happens if you’re foe?”

“Well, I say ‘friend’ anyway,” said Oedipus. “I’m not stupid.”

“As a method of keeping enemies out of your city,” said the Sphinx, “it seems to have a fairly obvious flaw in it.”

“Well, it’s better than yours,” said Oedipus. “People turn up at your gates and you you don’t even ask if they’re enemies or not, you just involve them in the equivalent of knock-knock jokes.”

“Er, “Knock-knock”?” asked the Sphinx.

“Who’s there?” said Oedipus.

There was silence.

“Ok,” said Oedipus eventually. “That would have gone better if I’d started it.”

“Try my riddle instead,” said the Sphinx. “What walks on all fours in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?” She smiled smugly.

“Man,” said Oedipus.

“Er, what?” said the Sphinx.

“He crawls out of bed on all fours in the morning because of his massive hangover, and by afternoon, after about fifteen Alka-Seltzer he is able to walk upright again,” said Oedipus. “And the three legs in the evening -”

“Don’t even think about finishing that sentence,” said the Sphinx. “Anyway, you’re wrong. He crawls like a baby in the morning of his life, stands erect -”

“That what I just -”

“Shut up,” snapped the Sphinx. “He stands erect during the prime of his mid-day, and walks with a cane in the evening of his old age.”

“Who does?” asked Oedipus.

“Man, of course,” said the Sphinx.

“So I’m right, then,” said Oedipus.

“No. Well, yes, but for the wrong reasons,” said the Sphinx.

“Bite me,” said Oedipus. The Sphinx raised one eyebrow, and Oedipus thought back a few sentences. “Ok, bad choice of words,” he said, “but least my answer had some logic behind it. Yours is just a load of metaphorical crap, and I mean that the answer is metaphorical, not the crap.”

“Oh, all right,” said the Sphinx crestfallenly, which, considering she had the body of a giant bird, is not just an expression. “You can pass.”

“Good,” said Oedipus. “I hear the Queen in this city is quite a looker, and I’m planning to chat her up.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said the Sphinx. “She’s old enough to be your mother.”