Sowing The Seeds Of Obsession - A Beginning

He powered down the central hub for the weekend, locked the pod, and made his way down the long flight of stairs to the exit. By the street door and lying on the floor was a small envelope. He picked it up, turned it over to inspect it, but found no indication of its origin; indeed, there was no writing or typed text on it at all. He opened the envelope and inside was a small key and a handwritten note. "You will need this when you arrive home" was the sum of its content.

Deposited at the city transport hub at the top of his street, he walked on down to the entrance to his block. Taking the opportunity to forgo the lift he ascended the three flights of stairs at speed, the only exercise he got all day in the week, and, breathing hard he arrived at his door. He passed the keycard through the lock and stepped into the hallway.

When he walked into the living space, there it was. He approached it with a mild curiosity. Viewed from the left side it appeared to be orange. He noticed that changed as he looked at it from different angles. It spoke to him without a voice. He sat down cross-legged in front of it and stared deeply at it. He was aware that a passage of time had passed as a faintly gnawing hunger eventually forced him to leave it and make his way to the kitchen. As soon as he opened the fridge door he realised he was missing it already. Hurriedly, he grabbed a bottle of beer, opened it and threw together a cold meat sandwich, and then rushed back to the living space fearing it would be gone.

It was still there. He resumed his position of supplication, this time at a different angle, to see if another perspective would be illuminating. Again it tugged at his soul. He was compelled to pick it up, and passing it from one one hand to the other he noticed it was warm to the touch in one hand, icy cold in the other. After an indeterminate while he put it down and saw a slit in one face of it.

Then he remembered the key. He rushed to the coat stand by the front door where he had hung his jacket, seemingly in another era. He retrieved the envelope, tore it open and extracted the key, while running back to the living space. He sat back down in front of it. The slit was no longer there. Panic rose through the very core of his being. His heart rate was increasing alarmingly. He picked it up again in his left hand and it stung like a thousand wasps, but he could not let go. Shaking with the pain that had subsumed his fear, he discovered that simply by transferring it to his right hand, all the pain went away. He put it down and the slit was there again.

Gingerly, but knowing it had to be done, he inserted the key. He could not recall turning the key, but he was suddenly filled with a surge of joyous wonderment as everything was revealed in its stark beauty.

Days later, he told his psychepractor "I remember very little, but I know it took a long long time. And when it was over, it had really only just begun".

...there may be more...but then again, there may not...

Gazapacho Soup - Part Sevenish - Christmas at War

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.

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.

Gazpacho Soup - Part Five - Well, Stap Me!

He had the hump, did our Dave, for he was an ungulate of the dromedary variety and not a bachtrian. Having abandoned his master in the car park of the Doon Bingo & Social Club the previous evening in search of the finest quality golden brown, unfortunately for him he had been unable to score. Now hunched in the doorway of a 24 hour convenience store, the sweat poured from him like mealy mouthed platitudes from a politician, for it too was indigestible.

Meanwhile back at Burwood Towers, the weather forecast was not promising. A warm front of hot fetid breath bubbling up from the south, a spectacle of tumescence worthy of the burgeoning ego of Colonel Gaddafi, was about to collide with a cold front of wet libdem wobbles from the west. Scorchio it was not, and indeed, all Hell could break loose at any moment. The Lord Of The Manor and famous interstellar explorer The Hon. Rogers Wintington-Smythe MP, DSO & BOC awoke asleepily from his torpid slumbers, overflowed out of bed and, be-trousered, shambling stumbled to the water closet. "Phrrrrrrmmph" went the exhuming of last night's Octopi Vindaloo, falling away like a tropical mudslide, followed, but luckily for him not followed through with, a mighty "Blooooooooooooooooorch". "Feck, for I needed that" said Rogers. Now four pounds lighter, our hero lurched back across the upper landing, staggered down the stairs and walked on down the hall. He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he....paid a visit to his brother, and then he...He walked on down the hall, and...oh no, hang on a minute, let me turn that cd off.

After watching blearily and soon after leerily the ample heaving bosom of Mrs Shreeves displacing many litres of air while she toiled over M'lud's breakfast of six mugs of disgustingly sweet tea to chase down three Smoked Kippers with a side of order of "I'll be back by Tuesday". followed by seven slices of toast topped with crushed beetle and marmite marmalade, Rogers plucked betwixt his fagstained fingers enough wiry hair from his ear lobes to knit one and two fifths mittens. They don't wash too well though.

Some time later, after a little snooze and much farting, Rogers took his morning constitutional on the Upper Lawn, the scene of many a daydream, some still sticky. On the horizon our hero could vaguely discern the ensuing battle between the hot fetid breath and the cold wet wobbles. It did not look at all pleasant. "Therebe strange portents I wouldn't wonder" he muttered to himself through a still lingering smog of stale beer and curry. "Blooorch", a scratchit gassy man he was that morn.

At that moment, Clegg, the fawning obsequious retainer appeared in the distance on the Lower Lawn, a shotgun casually slung over his round wimpy shoulders. Shoulders that looked like they could bear no responsibility at all. "Ah, m'lud" he hollered, although it would be hard to differentiate his shouting from his usual weedy tones, "Therebe some sort of monster trying to get into the grounds." "What sort of monster? If it's edible I'll 'ave it fur me tea!" Bellowed His Lardship. "I dunno" wimpered Clegg "...but judging from it's shifty look and the track marks on its legs, I'd say it was no good for the eating." "Better off it then Cleggy, ya fuckwit, but don't lay a finger on it 'til I get there." Now his gander was goosed by the imminent pleasures of filling something, anything, with plentiful piles of lead shot, Rogers charged back to the house and pulled out a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun from the pile of small arms under the kitchen table. "You can never be too careful these days" he used to say, for "...you never know what useless bunch of workshy gross so-called relatives might be visiting next hoping to get in the will."

Eyes aflame with bloodlust, the twenty three stones of His Lardship thundered across the Upper Lawn, down the many steps to the Lower Lawn and was soon beside his loathed retainer Clegg, a man as thick in the head as an elephant's leg. "Clegg" Rogers wheezed, coagulating greasy sweat dripping lumpily off the end of his garrulous nose "..where's the prey then, ya sack'o'shit?" "Over there m'lud" whined the sap, pointing to a clearly distressed dromedary. "Dave, is that you?" said Rogers, recognising the heroin addled mess that was his steed of choice back in those heady days of exploration and exploitation....mmmm the exploitation, oh the joy.....


Next...a camel in rehab is not a pretty sight, the England cricket team astound the nation with a routine and very dull victory, seven beans make five, Chili Paneer and Kadai Aloo Baingan is a dinner from heaven.

In memory of that marvellous English eccentric Viv Stanshall

Gazpacho Soup - Part Eleventyone - Smaller and Smaller

It was whilst traversing the bleak and arid cultural deserts of Ballantrae on a camel called Dave, and accoutered by only a toga and a fez, that I noticed that everything around me was incrementally increasing in size. I put it down to over-enthusiastic consumption of Crème De Menthe and mescaline with the White Rabbit and William Burroughs the previous evening back at base camp. No, it was definitely happening, the camel, the toga, and the fez were all growing in size, as was the surrounding scenery, or was I shrinking? A moot philosophical point, but not one I was in any mood to ponder. This was, as they say, serious shit.

I set up camp that evening in the back of a burnt out VW Golf in the idyllic surroundings of the car park at the back of the Doon Bingo & Social Club in a nearby hellhole of rampant Protestantism, as tumbleweeds of past nightmares rolled across the vistas of long dead industry. This was not before the slack jawed local populace inveigled me of their fine hospitality by inviting me "Fook off, ye Sassenach weirdo, and tek ye camel wi' ye." I was very tempted to take them up on the offer, but Dave the camel needed to feed his smack habit and this seemed like just the place.

A fine entertainment establishment in Ballantrae, note the lyrical curves of the architecture...

The following morning I awoke bathed in the sweat of recurrent nightmares involving fish, ledgers, and cheese, and those strange three wheeled lorries with the shark toothed radiator grilles that used to deliver fizzy drinks to your door. Dave the camel was nowhere to be seen, did he even exist? Quantum theory, he say yes, and in two places at once, forsooth! I leaped out of the VW Golf, dressed in a jiffy, which are bloody difficult to get in my size I can tell you, and I noticed it was happening again, the world had increased in size, or I had shrunk. This was a tad disconcerting, so I vowed to see the local doctor, who it turns out was a wizened little man with the fragrance of cheap whisky and fag smoke clinging to him like drool on an idiot's chin. I sat there in a surgery waiting room full of fat men and fatter women, standing out like a caring thought in a Tory Cabinet meeting. Every so often the Doc would poke his head out of the office and shout "Next Double Whopper with Cheese if you'd be so kind", which I later discovered equated to obese females with genital thrush. A greasy and sloppily fat man appeared from the surgery, blubbing as he said to his wife "Aye, I be a-suffrin' from Dunlap Syndrome, my belly dun lapped over my waistband ..........." As he blubbered, a 1980s TV remote control the size of a housebrick fell from a fold of hitherto undisturbed fat and hit floor with a dull thud, slimily and snail-like slithering across the polished floor. There was a deafening silence in the room as this seemed to be a move of extreme gaucheness on the part of our lardy friend. He should have done that behind closed doors.

When it came to my turn I had just walked through the surgery door in my by now slightly too large clothing, and it happened again, right in front of the mad quack's eyes!

"Ach" said the doc, "Ah havnae seen one of these in a while".
"Good" says I, "So you know what it is then?".
"Aye sonny - what do you do for a living?"
" I try to avoid it as much as possible, but, nay, for I am an accountant for my sins"
"I thought as much, and do you frequently make disparaging remarks about your profession and yourself in a mildly humorous stylee?"
"It has been known, good Sir, yes"
"Then I'm afraid you are suffering from self-depreciating humour..."

I got my coat and.......almost disappeared....

Next time - Norbert Dentressangle joins the British Oxygen Company, why and wheretofore, therein and hereabouts, hitherto and suchlike. I cannot remember the 1830s, so I must have been there, and a heron and a cucumber sandwich make hay in the midday sun....

Gazpacho Soup - Part Three - The Windermere Self-Immolation Society

After the war I decamped to the English Lake District, where inspired by a song from West Country beat combo XTC's first long playing phonograph recording, I set about establishing a quasi-religious cult under the banner of The Windermere Self-Immolation Society, whose headquarters was to be local eaterie Woger's Westawant, featured dish Woast Wack Of Wamb with Tawagon Gwavy.

mmm...my favewit

Formed on Tuesday morning at 10:07, our two strong cabal, the other member being Colonius Theokojak, honorary Purloiner Of Sticky Buns and otherwise known as Bob Dylan's Grandmother , were soon aware of the arrival in town of retired pirate and one-legged psychopath Bryan Gurvitz, cousin of Adrian who, as we all know, once wrote a song in an attic. He need not have bothered.

Gurvitz was to set up rival cult The TeePees, a shortened version of the full name Twenty Pints Of Boddies On A Friday Night And I'm Looking For A Fight. Bryan would attempt to induct and brainwash unsuspecting travellers and passers-by by luring them onto his pirate ship, the Jolly Roger festooned Good Ship Jaaaag and forcing his by now quaking shipmates to listen to looped music consisting solely of Straight Outta Compton by the charmingly monikered Niggers With Attitude, followed by Beer & Sex & Chips & Gravy by talent free uncouth Northerners The Macc Lads, ad infinitum. Now gibbering and dribbling a bit and in a trance-like state, the passengers could be bent to Bryan's evil will. Although first thought to be wickedness personified, it transpires that the sole aim of the TeePees cult was to encourage its members to roll gigantic spliffs which were then consumed with alarming speed rendering all but the hardiest unconscious. Quite harmless in the grand scheme of things, and frankly better than the second degree burns being suffered over at the Westawant. The Windermere Self-Immolation Society disbanded at Tuesday lunchtime, around 1:30. They were stoned, but certainly not immaculate.

Next time.....the cream cake incident, giggling, Cheesy String on the Isle of Wight, French kissing, mad dogs and Welshmen, Denmark 1 England 2, and the machinations of NATSO, a secret society of Wesleyan Baptists dedicated to two dimensional fauna.

Gazpacho Soup - Part Two - The War Years

How I became ".....trapped in a box, help, I'm trapped in a box...."  in the cupboard under the stairs for six days is still a mystery but to wile away the time I conceived of a cunning plan to sting a Whist Drive at my local Home For The Terminally Bewildered. Although my Steve McQueen disguise held , unfortunately due to a fluke Jack of Hearts and an incident with Lily and Rosemary, I was almost rumbled, and were it not for breaking my finger in the bra strap of a Filipino care assistant I would have got clean away. At my trial I pleaded guilty and a stern faced member (of the judiciary) sentenced me to three Chinese Burns. That stung I can tell you.

Suitably chastised I decided to restore my reputation with Good Works, but an ill-timed follow through in an Oxfam charity shop left me embarrassed and covered in my own vomit. Ejected onto the pavement I was run over by an elderly fellow on a motability scooter, who had the temerity to reverse over me to finish the job. Luckily I was spotted by my driver and whisked back to Burwood Towers, where under the warm summer sun I steamed gently on the Upper Lawn, and while thinking hard of a Welsh redheaded Breakfast presenter by the shadow cast could mimic a small lighthouse.

The outbreak of war was not good, in fact it was quite bad. Drafted into the kitchens of the 4th Bullingdon Toffs Cavalry I learned of a plan by Lord Mackaroon and his butler, the obsequious and fawning Clegg, to fleece our dear motherland of every spare penny in order to make good his Mephistophelean pact with The Two Horned Usurers of Canary Wharf. Armed only with an office stapler and a toothbrush I rushed headlong into battle, the tension hanging in the air like unforseen halitosis. Bringing the stapler down in a looping arc to fix Clegg's lip to Mackaroon's left buttock, thereby giving Clegg closer access to the origin of all Mackaroon's pronouncements, I left triumphant. The toothbrush was unused.

Next...find out how to retrieve a tv remote control hidden for years under folds of surplus fat, and how to construct a psychological theorem using only an empty cornflake box and some double sided sticky tape....

Gazpacho Soup - Part One

In an alternate reality I was born standing up, and, talking back no less. Raised by pater, a travelling atomic weapons salesman, and mamma, a kindly teacher of Welsh Sanskrit in the deep dark fields of Lancashire, at the age of three I had the ability to draw like Picasso in his Blue Period but thought better of it. At age seven I won small Lancashire village Holcombe Brook in a game of marbles, swapped it for the early beat single Ain't She Sweet by Tony Sheridan and The Beatles, and swapped this for a large hadron collider, which I still have in the loft somewhere.

School was a breeze, nay several breeze blocks with a roof. It was while at school in the winter of '67 that I collapsed in Quantum Mechanics Class 2B, and was rushed to hospital where it was discovered I had a severe allergy to v-neck jumpers. Age 9 I met and had a clandestine affair with Gina Lollobrigida, behind the bike sheds with a variety of exotic fruit. Nothing nefarious you understand, but the fruit was beautifully arranged. Behind the bike sheds was also where I smoked my first fag. He wasn't best pleased. Discretion being the better part of discretionary, I ran away from home and sailed the world with Sir Francis Chichester. He wasn't best pleased either. Abandoned on Diego Garcia, the US Navy mistook me for a small Russian spy and built the prison at Guantanamo Bay specially to hold me. Bet you didn't know that did you? I escaped from Cuba by disguising myself as a cigar, but not before being hand rolled on the thigh of a dusky maiden, a most pleasurable experience and I recommend it highly.

On returning to school and having used bribery, bread pudding and subtle thought manipulation I passed my 11-plus and invented Steve Jobs. It was 1970 and he was no use at all. It was around this time that I first kindled an interest in Association Football, and the new fangled concept of jumpers for goalposts. A use for the v-neck at last! Unfortunately this sporting interest was curtailed by a then lifelong fear of whistles which was overcome by 17 sessions of whistle aversion therapy. It is believed the phobia was caused by my pater, Gawd Bless 'Im, a cheery bloke who used to rise with the larks and whistle a happy tune while crashing about the ramshackle hut in a carefree fashion.

Although the scholarly life was pushing me in the direction of a life of drudgery as an accountant, I followed my inner calling and went on the road with the Goombay Dance Band for five years, along with my staff of thirteen. Just before setting out Patrick Spens the arse wiper and Mrs Shreeves the spittle groomer both had to be fired for crimes of passion with a carrot on the Upper Lawn, so I was soon down to a paltry staff of eleven, but enough to make a team. And so it came to pass that many a dull afternoon betwixt gigs were spent playing Association Fitbah with The Goombay Dance Band and their roadies. After the game it was regular practice for Joe Goombay and Mick Dance and the Band to hold court in their hotel room and make ginormous cakes which were passed around with gay abandon. Our heads were swimming with the effects of too much marzipan I can tell you! At some point during this malarkey a cherry was lost with a green haired girl from Scunthorpe whose name has receded into the mists of time. We'll call her Sophie Tightly, and why not?

Flying off at several tangents, more may follow, or not.
............................................................................................