Other Things That Happened

My Dear Princess and Lovely Nieces,

I am breaking blip rules today by posting a picture from last week. Well, here's the thing. You currently find me in a state of disembogulation. I am right now en route to Aotearoa but have been traveling so long that I have no idea what day it is or if more than one day has passed or what.

DISEMBOGULATED

I figured therefore that I could use this time to scoop up the other stories that happened while I was back in Yorkshire. See, my problem is that I like a theme, a narrative thread if you will, so I tend to bin those incidents which do not fit my daily theme.

Such as:

Mushrooms
"I want a bloody GRAVE when I go," said Tups as we sat drinking cider in the sun. "Summat people can leave FLOWERS on."

But, she explained,  she would be happy with just the grave. She doesn't need to be in it. As a keen gardener, she has plans for her remains.

"I want to be MULCHED," she said. "And they can use me to grow MUSHROOMS."

I pondered this.

"But who would EAT them?" I asked. "Do you expect Abi and Libby to stir you into an omlette?"

"Oh bloody hell, I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.

Later on I heard her telling Abi that I had "ruined" her mushroom idea.

Sooty
On my first visit to my dad, his old workmate Dave "Sooty" Sutcliffe was there.

He used to work for my dad, "Best boss I ever had," he said. He got quite emotional.

But then the stories came out. They worked together in Turkey back in the 1970s. In a place called Zonguldak. As blokes away from home there was the expected levels of drunkenness- Sooty had not one but TWO stories of my dad falling into holes while pished.

He also told of the visit of a female CSOS staff member. Apparently there was a song everyone would sing in the pub at night, the words written on a board on the wall. It was tradition to have someone lead the song by pointing at the words with a wooden ruler.

But when CSOS lady came to visit, someone (and here Sooty nodded at my dad) replaced the ruler with a big wooden phallus.

(I should explain that there were big wooden phalluses all over the place in Turkey in the 70s. They were representative of the old pagan beliefs of that area. My dad brought home a little man made of wood with a big twangy wooden nob on a spring that went BOI-OI-OI-OING when you twanged the end. I remember all of our elderly neighbours in Scarborough loved boing-ing it).

But I digress.

So according to Sooty this poor woman led a crowd of rowdy drunken men in a singalong while waving a big wooden willy around and asking what everyone was laughing about. She also made the mistake of leaving her camera on the bar when she left. The men returned it to her of course, but only after taking pictures of everyone's bum.

Tups asked how dangerous it had been. Sooty replied that they lost one bloke who was either shot by Kurdish rebels or by Turkish soldiers to BLAME on Kurdish rebels.

"The government wasn't going to acknowledge it or compensate his family either," said Sooty. "But your dad fought for it and got it for them."

"Best boss I ever had," he repeated, brushing away a tear.

Jesus
One of the annoying things about coming all the way to see my dad was the assumption amongst more distant relatives that I was also here to see THEM.

Not that I minded seeing My Cousin Vinnie* and Great Uncle Les. It's just that Great Uncle Les also comes as a set with Cousin Lesley. She's an odd woman who was raised to be a 1940s child star by her bonkers mum in the 1970s. She's been stuck like that ever since, a little like Baby Jane Hudson. And while I have sympathy for her, she's also devoted to JESUS praise be his name and if you just BELIEVE you will be HEALED.

Yes, she has told my dad this and sadly he no longer has the strength to tell her to get tae f*ck.

Lesley also once assaulted Libby, trying to cast out perceived demons. So however bad you think she is, double and triple it. You're still not close. Vinnie refers to her as "Judy Garland on acid".

I hadn't seen her by Wednesday. "I feel like there's some INVISIBLE FORCE keeping me from seeing him," she complained to Teresa.

If "lack of arsedness" is a force then she wasn't far wrong.

So I eventually caught up with her and Les. She was quite well behaved although she did turn up in a dress with her boobs spilling out. Tups's boyfriend Graham managed to trigger her though. He had a bad back and she massaged the pain away.

"Thanks Lesley!" he said, stretching.

"No Graham, that wasn't me, that was JESUS working through me! Thank Jesus! Praise Jesus!"

I told my dad later. He just rolled his eyes. "Jesus," was all he could say.

Those are all the additional stories I have for now. But given I'm still in the middle of the return journey that never ends I might return with more tomorrow. 

S.

* I actually really do have one.