Gazpacho Soup - Part Six - Dovetails In Space

Captain Richard holding a grouter (out of shot)

Most of you will not have met my brother in law Richard aka "Ozzie Bob" (those colonials always did get their Bobs and their Dicks in a tizz, and, hang on a minute, but wasn't he born in Devon?...oh well, onwards and upwards), but here he is as a young man. Richard was part of Great Britain's little known space exploration combined with sporting sabotage program in the 1970s, Operation Stink Finger, the aim of which was to fly low orbits over Sydney Cricket Ground in early January 1975 hoping to distract the locals long enough for Tony Grig's Inglind crickit team to scripe an unlikely win. Unfortunately the mission had to be scripped...damn, must ditch the Siff Iffrican inflexion...scrapped due to a sudden and shocking upsurge in the price of bacofoil caused by an equally dramatic and highly suspicious hike in the price of bauxite by the world's largest producer of the ore, yes you guessed it you lovely people, Australia. Had their spies got wind of our cunning plan, or is Richard's nickname, seen in the picture emblazoned across his spacesuit, an indication of subterfuge? We shall never know, for he never gives much away, our Richard (arf arf).

The resulting catastrophic financial shortfall rendered our plan to jettison a specially bred enormous foil space-suited cow into deep midwicket just as Greg Chappell was getting into his stride waaay over our budget, so much so that we ran out of foil leaving parts of the cow woefully unprotected, as you can see.



Cheeseboiger!


To have launched Daisy in a parabola over the SCG unprotected from burn up on re-entry would not only have been the height of cruelty, but would have gifted the colonials with presents of ready BBQ'd steak, and we do not want to make it any easier for them do we?

Despite gathering together the finest minds of a generation to design and build the space rocket "HMS Fuckin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmus", it was all to no avail. The boffins, among whom were Magnus Pyke, John Noakes, That Bloke From Magpie With The Perm, Peter Cook, Mike Oldfield, Dennis Potter and Patrick Moore, were highly narked, dischuffed and yay, frustrated at being given orders by Whitehall mandarins to search behind every sofa in the land for the necessary loose change needed to fund the bacofoil for Daisy's and Captain Richard's fetching off the shoulder spacesuits. Our cash strapped rulers were so hard up Mr Wilson could barely afford a...sorry...his shag, and unburied bodies were being hoisted up trees so as to deter rats, who as we all know suffer terrible vertigo. The vultures had a field day. Incidentally, this testing, time consuming and ultimately fruitless method of raising finance, The Sofa Grope, remains the favoured method at Everton Football Club to this day.

After some gurning and straining The Queen issued an eleventh hour dictat, and left telling anyone in earshot they should "...leave it five minutes if I were you". Woo and verily hoo, for The Queen intervened in an effort to save Blighty's prestigious project! Elton then decided that the bacofoil spacesuit design was to be scrapped and swapped for the much cheaper hot water immersion heater lagging design you see pictured, although he did try to sweeten the deal by offering to buy as many bunches of flowers as our boys with the Right Stuff wanted. The astronauts refused to wear this clumsy restricting and itchy fabric, as they longed for the sleek strapless foil number, and Captain Richard was a hayfever sufferer so flowers were a no-no anyway. Despite appearances in the signed publicity photo above, Richard was cursing under his breath while dreaming of beard topiary and obscure woodworking tools.

The astronauts all left the launchsite, a disused cattle market behind Brierly's Supermarket in Wellingborough, in a fit of pique, which wouldn't start so they had to walk. Operation Steenk Feeenger was doomed, never to be heard of again.

When asked to comment Richard mumbled something along the lines of  "I recently saw a wonderful 2" wide complex moulding plane with its mouth forced open. I guess the original tight mouth did not allow the 1" thick shavings the user was producing to clear the throat" I guess not. Richard was last seen leaving with his girlfriend, my lil' sister, who at the time was going under the pseudonym "Donna", for reasons I've never fully understood. Something to do with poteen and religious sects in deepest East Northants where they practice the Olde Religion, I think.

Australia went on to win the fourth test by 171 runs, Greg Chappell scoring a total of 228. Although Geoff Boycott did not play, it was doubtless his slow run rate that did for us. Or maybe we were simply shite?

Kenny Dalglish likes wearing the frocks left behind by Nando.

Next time - A Fish Called Bruno, a silly idea for a film if you ask me, and it's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time.