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….

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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”…

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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.

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.

Weekly Photo Challenge: In The Background

Tinman’s camera-less version of the WordPress Photo Challenge…

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Steve ran. Oh, how he ran, wide-eyed in panic, every now and again looking back over his shoulder, because when you must, absolutely must, run as fast as you possibly can nothing keeps you going full-out like breaking stride every couple of seconds to look backwards.

It was all to no avail anyway. The Empire State Building still fell on him.

The Director called “cut”. Steve pushed away the cardboard boulders under which he had supposedly been crushed, and headed off for lunch.

They were filming Independence Day, and he was an extra.

That was his job. He had hurled himself into the water in Titanic and begun swimming, presumably towards America, or perhaps Southampton. He had been an expendable crewman in Star Trek, and an expendable baddie in The Expendables. He’d been attacked by piranha in Piranha, by snakes on a plane in Snakes On A Plane and (with Samantha of course) had had sex in the city in Sex And The City.

Sometimes he had more than one part, an extra extra if you like. He had been both a wizard and a muggle in Harry Potter, an orc and an ent in the Lord of the Rings (he’d never been sure which was which) and, thanks to the marvels of CGI, he had sword-fought himself in Braveheart.

He had never had a speaking part, although occasionally he got to yell “aargh”.

And why did he do it? Because it meant he was in the movies.

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.

Old Timer

It had been a long dusty trip from Jerusalem to Samarrah, and so I stopped at an inn for a cup of wine. There was just one other customer, an old man whose eyes lit up at seeing someone to talk to, a victim to reminisce at. I sighed as I sat at the counter with my drink.

“I remember when around here was all desert,” was his opening gambit.

“Really,” I countered, as unenthusiastically as I could.

“Yes. That was before the Flood, of course.”

“Yes, I suppose that would have watered the area pretty – hang on, you can remember before the Flood?”

“Sure can.”

“But that was over six hundred years ago,” I said. “Just how old are you?”

“Nine hundred,” he said. He held out an old, gnarled hand, like those you find on bog people, or at least will do at some time in the future. I shook it, feeling like a water-diviner waving a stick over a hidden well. “Methuselah,” he said.

“Ezekiel,” I said.

“Bless you,” he said.

“No, that’s my name,” I said. “So you’re nine hundred years old?”

“Yes, I’ve had a good innings, I suppose.”

“What’s an innings?”

“Um, don’t know, actually, but whatever it is I’ve had a good one.”

“And you say you were around at the time of the Flood. What did you do, sneak onto the ark in a giraffe costume?”

“No, I went to Switzerland, where the rain fell as snow. Spent six weeks skiing. I don’t know why more people didn’t think of it.”

“You must have done all sorts of things in all that time,” I said, now hooked firmly into the conversation. You must have seen lots.”

“Lot’s what?”

“No, I didn’t mean Lot the person.”

“Oh. Mind you, I knew his wife.”

“You mean -”

“No, not that way. I mean we were at school together.”

“In Sodom-and-Gomorrah?”

“That’s right.”

“And how did you survive that?”

“Wasn’t there. I’d gone to Jericho for the weekend. I was trying to sell this new drink I’d invented – the Methuselah of champagne.”

“How did that go?”

“Not too well. It was so shaken after the camel-ride there that the cork, which was the size of a boulder, shot out. It knocked down a wall.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. That was the first of a long string of jobs – for a while I was a barber. I used to cut Samson’s hair.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I had to give it up after I made an awful balls of one of his haircuts.”

“I’d say Samson wasn’t too happy,” I said. “I heard he was very proud of his hair.”

“Oh, he went mental. Absolutely wrecked the place. After that I ran away to sea. It was me who rescued Jonah from the whale.”

“How?”

“Smacked the whale straight in the face with an oar, and Jonah got blown out through the blow-hole.”

“Well,” I said, “you’ve certainly lived a full life.”

“In every way,” he said. “I’ve been married sixty-two times.”

“So you’ve outlived sixty-two wives?”

“Well, sixty-one, actually. My current wife is still alive. In fact,” he went on, “here she is now. She works here as a waitress.” I looked up and saw a young blonde girl with huge jugs, which she was carrying on a tray. She looked oddly familiar.

“Hang on,“ I said. “Isn’t that Jezebel?”

“Sure is,” he said proudly.

“As in “The Dirty Jezebel”?”

“She doesn’t like to be called that anymore, not now that she’s respectably married.”

“But why would she marry a guy who’s nine hundred?” I said. “Er, no offence.”

“None taken,” he said. “Some girls go for older men.”

“Yes, but that phrase usually means about twenty years older. It doesn’t tend to refer to someone who remembers you from three re-incarnations back.”

“Well, I’m still quite a catch, you know,” he said defiantly. “I work out at the gym.” I just stared at him, one eyebrow raised, and the facade crumpled. “Ok,” he admitted. “I work, out at the gym. I sit and take the registrations. I know that she really married me just because I’m fabulously rich.”

“How come? You don’t seem to have done very well in any of your jobs.”

“No, but when you’ve been collecting the old-age pension for eight hundred and thirty-four years, it’s amazing how much money you can put by.”

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

Tinman’s weekly camera-less attempt at the WordPress Photo Challenge…

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It came from above, descending at tremendous speed through the Earth’s atmosphere.

It would have hit the ground with force had it not instead hit Newton, who was asleep under the tree from which it had fallen, straight on the top of the head.

He sat up with a start and stared at the apple, now rocking gently beside him on the grass.

“Gravity!” he said, which is an Olde English word meaning “bloody hell, that hurt.”

He went to see his friend James Watt, who was absent-mindedly watching a kettle boil.

“I’ve invented gravity!” shouted Newton.

“What’s gravity?” asked Watt.

“It’s what makes all things fall to earth.”

“Um, you may not have actually invented that,” said Watt. “I rather think that God did.”

“Really?” said Newton. “Well, I discovered it.”

“Don’t think you can even claim that,” said Watt. “I think that anyone who has, for example, dropped their toast buttered side down, or dropped a hammer onto their foot, or even been very heavily rained upon, would feel that they already know all about gravity. Or downfall, as we call it.”

“Er, I think your downfall means something else,” said Newton. “It’s something to do with meeting your doom.”

“Ever dropped a hammer onto your foot?” asked Watt.

“Ok, ok, I didn’t invent it and didn’t discover it,” said Newton, in the same grudging manner in which Hillary would later have to admit that he had neither invented nor discovered Everest, “but I’ve been developing theories about it.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I believe that if you dropped a ton of lead and a ton of feathers off a building, they would both hit the ground at the same time.”

“A ton of feathers? The bag would have to be the size of a hot-air balloon. You’d never get it up the stairs to the top of the building.”

“Yes, well that’s not the point, the point is -”

“I’d rather be hit by the ton of feathers, that’s all I can say,” said Watt.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Newton. “The important part of the phrase is the word “ton”. You’re going to be squashed flat either way.”

“Where are we going to get all this, anyway?”

“All of what?”

“Well, the lead, for example,” said Watt. “We’d have to strip the roof of every church in England. And as for the ton of feathers, we’d be plucking chickens for the next four thousand years.”

“Look, we wouldn’t actually -”

“And we’d be left with thousands of chickens. Perhaps we could open a chain of fried-chicken restaurants.”

“Wouldn’t work,” said Newton. “Who’d go to a place with only one choice on the menu?”

“I suppose so,” said Watt. “Perhaps we could drop the chickens off the building as well.”

“They wouldn’t be dead,” said Newton, “so they’d just fly off.”

“Ah, so your gravity doesn’t work on live things,” said Watt. “That’s good news. If I ever fall off a cliff it will be a great comfort to know that whatever is causing me to plummet to my downfall is not gravity.”

“Look,” said Newton, aware that the conversation had wandered, “there is no lead, nor feathers, nor chickens. None of it’s actually going to happen. It’s a theory.”

“Ah, good idea,” said Watt. “Theories are great, no-one can tell if they’re true or not. Like Einstein’s one about Relativity.”

“What’s that?” asked Newton.

“I think it’s something to do with meeting all of your relatives if you travel at the speed of light.”

“I’d say you have that the wrong way round,” said Newton. “It’s probably that if you hear that your relatives are coming to visit you run away at the speed of light.”

“Maybe so,” admitted Watt. He was still staring at the kettle, from which a cone of steam was now  spouting. “Do you know,” he said, “I reckon I could run a train on that.”

“Mmm,” said Newton. “If you used all the boiling water to run the train you wouldn’t be able to make tea for the passengers.“

“Ever tasted the tea on trains? It’s not made with boiling water.”

“Still, you’d need a really big kettle.”

“True,” said Watt. “Perhaps I could buy it in the shop where you buy your bag for the feathers.”

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”.”

Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture

Tinman’s weekly camera-less attempt at the WordPress Photo Challenge…

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“We can’t sell bacteria.”

“Well obviously we can’t sell bacteria,” said Sheila, Head of Marketing. “We’re going to sell yogurt.”

“What’s that?” said Dr Jones, Head of Research and Product Development.

“It’s an Arabic word.”

“Meaning what?” asked Jones suspiciously.

“Bacteria.”

“We’re going to have a very small market,” said Jones. “The only people who’ll buy it will be Bond villains.”

“No, everybody will buy it,” said Sheila. “Because we’re going to call it Good Bacteria.”

“What, like Good Sheep’s Piss?”

“Exactly. Or lager, as we decided to call it.”

“You don’t mean to say -” began Jones, then thought about the taste of lager. “Actually, that explains quite a lot,” he said.

“The bacteria – er, yogurt – was a brilliant idea,” said Sheila. “How did you invent it?”

“I didn’t invent it,” said Jones. “I was trying to develop a bleach that kills all germs on kitchen worktops, but that particular attempt kept eating holes in the worktop itself.”

“Well, it’s terrific,” said Sheila. “We’ll have different types, so that you have to take more than one each morning. We’ll give them names like Caseii Immunitas, which we’ll say helps your immune system, and Bifidus Digestivum, which helps your digestion.”

“And your bifid,” said Jones.

Sheila looked confused. “What’s your bifid?” she asked.

“No idea,” said Jones. “I thought we were playing at making up words.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Sheila. “No, we’ll tell people that that one prevents congestion and, er bloating.”

“Good idea. We could use the slogan ‘drink yogurt and have a massive dump’.”

“Of course not, we’ll say…” she thought for a moment….  “that it helps with your daily digestive transit.”

“That just sounds like someone driving to the shops to buy biscuits,” said Jones. “I still don’t see how you’ll get people to buy – and drink – bacteria every day. Live bacteria at that.”

“We prefer to think of it not as a bacteria, but as a culture,” said Sheila. “and people from our modern day culture won’t call the experience just drinking yogurt.”

“And what will they call it?” asked Jones.

“They’ll call it a lifestyle.”