Daft, yes, but there's a serious message, even if you do have to wait for it.
Mysteries Aplenty
The temporary perma home (because I’ve been thrown out of everywhere else) of a wannabe comedian who specialises in mysteries of the cosy and not so cosy variety, mostly with a large serving of humour. I do not keep personal data. All works copyright David Robinson (at least those that are mine). To return to main dwrob.com site, click link to the right
Sunday, 17 January 2021
THE JAB (Cue theme from Quatermass)
Saturday, 9 January 2021
A Full Moon Over Withernsea
All right, here’s a bit of a treat
for you, designed to cheer you up in these dark days of winter and lockdown.
It’s the opening of an untitled project
designed as pure humour. Comments welcome but they are subject to moderation.
***
A Full Moon Over Withernsea
Dennis Rockliffe yanked on the
starter cord, confident that the lawnmower engine would roar into life. Much to
his surprise, chagrin and puzzlement, the cord came away in his hand and the
mower remained malevolently static, as if waiting for him to attend to its
needs. He could almost feel the machine tapping an impatient foot on the dusty
concrete of the workshop floor and muttering, ‘You made a right mess of that,
didn’t you?’
Rocky, as he was known to all and
sundry pushed back his flat cap and ran a grimy hand through his thinning hair.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded as if the cord had committed some infringement
of his human rights.
Through a side door in the workshop,
he could hear the muffled sound of Eric Wharrier raising his voice at another
piece of intransigent equipment.
Relieved at the opportunity to
forget the lawnmower if only for the moment, Rocky shouted, “You all right in
there, Geronimo?”
Wharrier, whose surname had given
rise to the soubriquet ‘Geronimo’, emerged from the paint shop. His boiler suit,
once a shade of pale blue, resembled a Jackson Pollock original, but less
ordered and sporting more colours above the underlying grunge. His lugubrious
face remained half hidden behind a mask covering his mouth, and stained goggles
which kept the paint from his eyes. When he removed them, he had the appearance
of a latter-day Lone Ranger, but where unknown hero of the old west had dressed
in blue with a black mask, Geronimo was clad in what amounted to Joseph’s
Amazing Technicolor Dream Overalls, and while the rest his features were
equally gaudy, his mask appeared as a band of pale skin cutting through his
splash coloured features.
“It’s this damn spray gun,” he
complained holding up the offending item from which red paint dripped. “It
leaves blobs everywhere. Here I am trying to put an even finish on Mrs Saperia’s
G-plan kitchen cabinet, and it’s giving me blobs.”
Rocky scratched his balding forehead
again, the oil on his hand turning the white skin a delicate shade of charcoal.
Setting the cap back into place, he ventured, “I wonder why she wants it
painted red anyway.”
“Well, now, that’s another thing.
The instructions said ‘fiery’. I assumed that to mean red. I mean fiery usually
means red, doesn’t it.”
“Or yellow.”
“Well, yes, flames can be yellow,
but—”
“Orange is another fiery type of
colour.”
“I can see where you’re coming from,
but—”
“Or even blue if it’s aerated like a
Bunsen burner.”
Geronimo paused to consider this.
“Why would anyone want a kitchen cabinet that looked like a Bunsen burner?”
“Well, you never know. Happen she’s
into chemistry. Or happen her husband’s into chemistry.”
“No, Rocky, Maggie Saperia is a
dinner lady at Hallhowden Primary, and her husband, Tommy, was a bus driver
until that incident outside the Woolcombers.”
Rocky’s eclectic memory clicked into
place, signalled by a knowing nod. “Oh. That was him, was it?”
Geronimo nodded in unison. “A sad
business. A twenty-year unblemished record gone in ten seconds of sheer
madness. And look at him now. Part time glass collector and washer-up in the
Carder’s Arms. And he’s banned from the Woolcombers for life, you know. Not
that it bothers him. He lives the other side of town, and the incident was the
only time he’d ever been in there.” Geronimo shook his head and delivered a
series of sympathetic tuts which reminded Rocky of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been wearing proper trousers. But he had
those jogging pants on. You know. No, er, zipper.”
Rocky understood at once. “So he had
to let them down to er… Well, even so he must have been wearing underpants.”
“Trunk shorts,” Geronimo said with
sufficient gravity to make sure Rocky got the message. “He had to let those
down, too, and that’s where his real problems began.”
Rocky examined the broken pull cord
for the lawnmower while giving the Saperia situation some thought. “We’ve all
done it, haven’t we? Walked into the ladies by mistake.”
“Not all of us.” Geronimo put on a
disdainful look, which lent greater emphasis to his Lone Ranger impression and
caused Rocky to glance over his shoulder in expectation of finding Tonto there.
“Besides, Tommy didn’t walk into the ladies.”
Rocky’s eyes popped. “Not the
ladies?”
“You see, you have to remember that
it was a new route for him. He’d been doing The Mill to Alderman Barncroft Memorial
Park for years. And like I say, he’s never been in the Woolcombers. Well, what
with the beer garden and the picnic tables, he thought the little shed was an
outside, er, convenience.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“No. It was where they keep the
empty beer barrels. Course, it had a bucket for cleaning up and Saperia thought
it was… well, I don’t need to draw you a diagram do I? And it was pure bad luck
that Annie, the landlady, happened to bring a couple of barrels out just as Saperia
was using the, er, convenience.
Rocky screwed up his face. “Rotten
bitta timing.”
“Couldn’t have been worse. Annie
said it reminded her of the Full Moon over Withernsea.”
“Aye, and no one knew better than Annie
Allsop what the full moon over Withernsea looked like.”
Geronimo agreed with a sanguine nod.
“She did have that kind of reputation when she was younger, true. Anyway, she reported
Tommy to the bus company and they called his eyesight into question. They said there
had to be something wrong with his eyes for him to mistake a storage shed for
the, er, conveniences.”
Rocky injected serious outrage into
his voice. “And they sacked him for being short-sighted?”
“Not quite. They sacked him for the
jogging pants. The company issued him with a uniform and jogging pants were not
part of it. Tommy argued that since his waist is wider than his hips, his
uniform trousers won’t stay up. Even with a belt. So he wore the jogging pants.
They fasten with an elastic waist and a pull string. And because he was sat
down all day, no one knew the difference.”
“So why didn’t he use braces on his
uniform pants?” Rocky wanted to know.
“He did originally. But you can’t
get trousers with buttons these days.”
“Or zippers, apparently.”
“I didn’t mean those kind of
buttons,” Geronimo said. “I meant the kind of buttons you fasten braces onto.
You know what I’m talking about. We all had them at school.”
“Aye, and they were holding up short
trousers, too. I remember ’’em, all right. Especially in winter.”
“Well, modern braces fasten with
little crocodile clips. Because he’s so tubby, when he sat in the driver’s
seat, it put intolerable strain the crocodile clips at the back and his braces
used to twang off and rattle him at the back of the neck. He said it was quite
dangerous when he was driving along. Many’s the time he thought he was being
attacked by a karate expert practising for a half-contact tournament. And one
time, he happened to be leaning forward, adjusting his seat. The crocodile
clips snapped off and the braces shot forward, right over his head and hit the
windscreen. He spent ten minutes looking for kids throwing stones at the bus
before he realised what had happened, and he only guessed then because his
pants were falling down.” Geronimo shook his head sadly. “Nigh on a riot that
night.”
“A riot?”
“Well, it was raining and he was
late picking up at the bingo hall on Pickling Street. He finished up with a
busload of soaking wet bingo freaks threatening to wreck the bus.”
Rocky placed the pull cord in a vice
on his workbench and began the search for a replacement connector. “I don’t
care what you say, there’s never any good comes of wearing jogging pants.”
Geronimo agreed. “Not when you’re
driving a bus.”
***
Enjoy that? Then let me know.
Wednesday, 22 July 2020
Canary Island Adventures
Last week, in
conjunction with darkstroke books, I announced the 20th Sanford 3rd Age Club
Mystery, A Tangle in Tenerife.
Here’s the promo:
© David Robinson 2020
Link:
https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4127-night-of-chaos
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
***
Joe and thirty of his 3rd-age pals jetting
off to the Island of Eternal Spring.
But as usual, all is not so simple. Who would wipe the images from a digital camera? Why do the young couple from Lancashire look so ill-at-ease, and why are they constantly arguing with a fellow holidaymaker from the same area? What kind of trouble is the courier in, and those card sharks… are they cheating or not.
It’s a Gordian knot for Joe and his chums as they try to unravel…
A TANGLE IN TENERIFE
(universal
link takes you to your local Amazon site)
Saturday, 6 June 2020
Chatting with Miriam Drori
Friday, 22 May 2020
Life in Lockdown
© David Robinson 2020
Check out my main site at: www.dwrob.com
Saturday, 9 May 2020
Chatting with Sue Barnard
Please feel free to share. You can learn more about Sue at: http://broad-thoughts-from-a-home.blogspot.com/ and as always, I’m at www.dwrob.com