Sir Archibald Thrieves snuggled the butt of the blunderbuss into the crook of his shoulder, took aim and fired off several ounces of grapeshot after the retreating derriere of his nephew Ranulph as the latter attempted to scale the southern wall. Ranulph let out a yelp and then started whimpering like a chastised puppy as the lead shot settled nicely into the copious flesh of his more than ample arse.
"I told the inbred ingrates two days ago - if I invite the buggers to the annual Thrieves family Xmas excesses then any attempts at escape will be met with the severest punishment" said Sir Archie to no-one in particular. "Clegg, go get Ranulph and tie him to a tree so that Gloria can thrash 'im with a birch. She seems to take great pleasure from that, bless her prejudiced and diminished soul" spoke Sir Archie lovingly of his dear wife of 47 rain-soaked miserable summers.
Ranulph had earlier lost a bet with his cousin Piers that he couldn't get over the wall, make way to the village pub two miles down the lane, get completely bladdered and return from The Hairy Wench in time for breakfast. Piers was a peculiar cove, forever making eyes at his buxom if somewhat hirsute sister Nigella. It was quite unsettling the way he started dribbling whenever his sister got within six feet of him. Nigella professed to be a socialite with many friends but no-one had ever seen her with anyone that hadn't been paid to be there. It was also rumoured that she had vampire blood.
Archie's guests were his sister Pru's family, headed by The Hon. Rogers Wintington-Smythe MP, DSO & BOC, whose unwashed loins had brought forth Ranulph, now 27 both in age and in stone, Wisteria, his stick-thin and strange-smelling sister, 31 and untouched, and Hague, his stupid and dribbling older brother, 41, who had a job in Cabinet dreaming up new ways to persecute the proletariat for Gideon's newly elected Tory majority Government. Rogers always used to declaim in a perversely proud manner, that having had "trouser relations" as he put it with Prudence a mere five times in 35 years of trouble-free marriage, largely because they rarely met, that "three mewling and dribbling sprogs ain't a bad result, old bean." Indeed he often had to remind himself who this oddly proportioned female of the species was on the rare occasions they crossed paths at their sprawling pile of decay, Dalmellington Mansions, left them by Pru's barking mad and gratefully for all now departed father, Winston O'Bogie. He knew John Lennon you know, John never was godd at speling.
Christmas dinner had been interesting. Archie's loyal but sadly idiotic manservant Widdecombe had been well into his stride, plucking the goose ready to extract the shot from its massacred body, when he sneezed violently, the feathers and airborne pluckage irritating his sinuses to the point of no return. Having hardly any septum at all and a small but growing hole in the base of his skull just above where the diminshed septum hung, all this arising from decades of cocaine abuse, his nasal discharge also included parts of his frontal lobe, rendering him worse than useless for the duration. Archie locked him in the barn with the sick goat, sick ewe and sick cow where together they cooked up a virus so strong a team from Pilton Down had to be called out in the New Year to torch the place to the ground.
This unfortunate episode meant that Archie had to find another head servant to abuse, beat, and generally treat like a disenfranchised voter. This being Christmas Eve that was easier said than done, but luckily brother-in-law Rogers came to the rescue. "You can borrow the fawning and obsequious Clegg orf me if you want. I did give him Christmas Day off for the first time in 23 years so he could go visit his dying mother, but sod it, needs must." And so it was that Clegg saved the day, understandably an emotional mess, which added to the fawning and obsequiousness led to a sum of frankly unpleasant human characteristics, so much so that most of the inmates avoided his gaze whenever he was around, simultaneously rubbing his hands together, bowing, scraping and copiously blubbing, tears falling onto his ancient yellowing tux.
Next - Christmas dinner ends in a murder and a prolapse, not necessarily connected, and the entire Uruguayan nation go to Jamaica on holiday and shout the "N" word at the top of their collective voices in the middle of Kingston, claiming it is a cultural thing, you know, like. Luis Suarez is 13 and 3/4.
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