Inflated ego

I'm basically a genius at entertaining children me. I've got no evidence to support this, but I've got no evidence to support the fact that I'm good at Mongolian throat singing either, but I presume I am.

I've never actually, specifically tried Mongolian throat singing, but for some things you just know you'll be extra good at should you ever attempt them, and that's one of them.

Also bricklaying, fencing and beastiality.

And hunting monkeys with blow darts.

So you can imagine my consternation when, after glancing at the instructions for well over a second, I attempted to create a balloon flower for my offspring and the result wasn't quite the epitome of floral perfection that I'd intended.

Must've been a dodgy balloon. Or too much argon in the air.

Yeah. I'm going with that:

Crime and Fun-ishment

A couple of days ago I was enjoying the blue skies with, for the first time that I can remember, not a single vapour trail from high-flying jets thanks to the Icelandic volcano Eksvskdfmkjhsdfkj erupting and turning Europe into a no-fly zone.

It was quite peaceful.

Of course, there was an underlying current of worry for the UK, because it would've been a perfect time for an enemy invasion, what with our planes grounded and both our naval ships detailed to picking up stranded tourists from Spain. We would have been defenceless, allowing the intruding forces to fly unhindered over our land, to sail into our ports, and to launch their offensive.

And there are plenty of nations out there who covet our . . . er . . .

Actually, I can't think of anyone who would want to invade the UK anymore.

Why would they?

It'd cost them a fortune, they'd have to take on all the responsibilities of our declining industry, our debts, our crappy roads, our obsession with half-building housing estates, our empty factories and abandoned shop units, GMTV and, not least, our moaning.

We moan a lot.

The only country that might consider invading would be the French, and they'd only do it because it's been a while and they're probably due one now anyway, but they've got volcano-induced problems of their own.

I put those fears to the back of my mind, yet retained a psychological and very British DEFCON 2 status, willing to take on any invading army with a series of loud tuts and an occasional disapproving shake of my head. I then proceeded to enjoy the day.

To the park!

Giving the missus a spot of peace and quiet so she can feed our new baby without interruption from our son is a daily mission at the moment. So, thank goodness the local council provides playgrounds, which are not just hunting grounds for catholic priests, but also provide much needed distraction for a high-need child with more energy than the Large Hadron Collider.

A couple of minutes of the swings, then on the slide, followed by the see-saw and the climbing frame, concluding with some mad Brownian-motion-like running around, screaming as loudly and as squeakily as is humanly possible, then repeating all of the above until tired, hungry and/or very, very grumpy.

My son is even worse.

I think play parks are pretty standard the world over. Somewhere for the little primates to get in touch with their inner monkey.

Climbing frames are particularly popular, and we've got this battered old wooden one which appears to have slipped the usually all-encompassing net of health and safety compromise:




Hang on, what's that . . ?

Down in the corner of the neck-wrenching lattice.



Is that . . . a handcuff?



A rusty handcuff?

Yep. Definitely a rusty handcuff, which sounds like a euphemism for something I wouldn't want to do.

Or would I?

Anyway, I'm no council planner, but I don't think handcuffs are standard playground accoutrement.

Maybe in Brazil, but not in South West England.

This seemed a little disconcerting. I'm presuming there is a simple, innocent explanation for the presence of the rusty cuff, such as a naked man the night before his wedding experiencing a spot of affectionate humiliation at the hands of drunks whom, just hours before, he had thought of as his friends.

But it could have been something more . . . blogworthy.

And, with the magical application of imagination, it will be!

I reckon there was an insanely exciting police chase, culminating in one stalwart Peeler nabbing a rum sort, but having no time to take him down to the nick and process him with due diligence and attention to appropriate form filling, what with another shout occurring on his manor, and so 'cuffed him to the nearest convenient metal appliance ready to be dealt with at leisure.

Unfortunately, the resourceful blaggard chewed his own hand off to facilitate his escape. Now, he haunts the swings, scaring children by showing them his bloody, tooth-marked stump, gently swaying to and fro and wailing because he can't hold on very well these days.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

Realistically speaking, policing round here is generally undertaken by people called Police Community Support Officers, who fight crime by being paid half as much as coppers and not having powers of arrest.

I'm also not sure they're actually authorised to do any running.

So, maybe it wasn't that.

Maybe it was a new community-based punishment initiative, designed to alleviate crowding in jail. A bit like community service, where instead of locking them up, you get criminals to undertake a relevant punishment as part of paying their debt to society and rehabilitating them at the same time.

Graffiti artists clean local walls, shoplifters scour supermarket car parks and give any dropped items back to their owners, and murderers reanimate corpses in council-funded eerie castles on craggy peaks.

I suppose you could handcuff a paedophile to a climbing frame, because that would be like sewing up a fat person's gob and then locking them in a bakery.

Punishment indeed.

Spawning a moo moo bench

You know when you're on the look out for photo opportunities, perhaps to test out a new camera, or maybe the one on your phone, or just because you're in a snap happy mood, or possibly because you haven't done a blog entry for a while and need to post something, anything, before it seizes up with internet rust and has to be waggled back and forth in a bath of WD40 whilst you try and remember what your old Dad told you about loosening up stiff old blogs, probably?

Yeah, you do.

Well, it can go two ways really, the picture hunt.

First, and this is the dread, nothing at all occurs.

And keeps on occurring.

It's as if the world, in a sudden bout of anthropocentric concern, has decided that, with all the wars, disasters, diseases, accidents and what-not, there really should be a few minutes of inactivity as a sort of time-out so reality can catch its metaphorical breath.

So, for just a few moments, nothing interesting happens at all.

This can be a good thing, because maintaining the status quo is the secret of eternal happiness. Or at least it would be if things didn't change all the time.

So, a static universe can be viewed positively, unless you had your camera at the ready and were just waiting for something out of the ordinary to come along. Instead, you're left with an optical desert without so much as a prairie dog turd to catch your interest.

When this happens, one must take a photo of something anyway:



Ooh, frogspawn!

I like frogspawn, because it heralds the continuation of life, the warming of the year, the beauty of the cyclical nature of the biosphere, a small, encapsulated metaphor for the whole living world. It made my heart swell, the sap rise in my humors, and momentarily I felt at one with my animal brethren.

Then I thought realistically about just how many of those eggs will make it to adulthood and I got all depressed, so went off looking for something else to photograph with the pitiful effort that my Blackberry calls a camera.

There must be something, I thought as I walked through my local park, looking hither, yon, and then hither again for a picture.

And Cthulu bless those rambunctious teens who like nothing more than to torment a disabled elderly man by moving his garden furniture:



It's not right, but it does make for a good pic.

I took that picture yesterday, and went back today to see the elderly owner has taken to keeping the bench in his living room. It looked like quite a struggle getting it out so he could enjoy the April sunshine and I nearly took another photo for your enjoyment.

However, sense prevailed and I realised that, should I do that, it might not only mark me in an unfavourable light, but it would also mean standing up from behind the parked car I was crouching behind, and he might then ask for my help.

So, frogspawn and a roofiated seat. That's blogworthy I thought, and made my way home, a little sated.

Photographically speaking.

Later, it was time to drive a couple of hours up the motorway to see if the in laws would agree to let the children live with them so I could pursue a life of leisure. I hitched up the child wagon, put in some fresh straw and chew toys, locked them safely in and off we went.

Driving along. I used my phone.

Not for texting or making a phone call, because that is illegal and irresponsible and I cannot countenance anything other than obeying every law and statute passed by our superiors in authority. I even ensure I give the tail of any washed up dead whale I find to the queen, help pregnant ladies relieve themselves into policemens helmets whether they want to or not and, when in the city of York, keep a suspicious watchful eye out for medievally armed Scotsmen.

I was taking a photo, which is far safer, obviously.

This photo is unusual because, firstly, you can actually see some of the tarmac of the M6. Usually, the road surface is completely invisible 'neath a sea of immobile vehicles, noses pressed up to rears like the worlds biggest sycophant gathering.

For any foreign types unfamiliar with the nomenclature of British roads, a motorway is a large three or four lane road originally designed to allow vehicles to travel freely from place to place at 70 mph, but more recently a handy place to keep cars for extended periods whilst their occupants can enjoy entertainment in the form of roadworks.

The other (and main) reason the photo stands out is the cattle truck on the left, which had a song title relating to it's function as a cow transporter:



For those of you who can't read it, it says "We're all bound for moo moo land" which is a KLF lyric. Sort of.

Now, I think this is a good idea and vehicles having song titles on their paintwork which accurately reflect their cargo or function should become a modern tradition.

Fire Engines could have Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" emblazoned on the side.

Yeah, that's right. Emblazoned.

RSPCA vans could have "Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden; Ambulances might sport "Fix you" by Cold Play or perhaps "The Drugs Don't Work" by The Verve.

"Good Riddance" by Green Day could go on the back of bin lorries.

Or hearses.

Anyway, you get the idea. I quite obviously haven't given this much in the way of thought, but that's rarely stopped me pursuing daft ideas before so why should I give in now.

Motorway Maintenance Vehicles should be required to have "Highway To Hell" printed on them.

Suggestions anyone?

Drinking to the past

Drinking at work is fraught with danger.

I'm not talking about alcohol, because what's dangerous about that? It's just a hobby.

I'm referring to hot drinks, made with water, like tea and coffee.

These drinks are prevalent and important in the workplace. They are used as a psychological crutch, or as an eye-opener, or as an excuse to chat with your mates, or as a substitute cigarette for those people without the willpower to continue smoking, but still want the fag break they've got used to.

And it's important to stock up on a decent cuppa before going to my place of employment because they don't do tea or coffee, just steaming cups of hot-brown. We don't know what it is, but it's hot and brown.

Our glorious leaders, or at least the myopic scrooge-like creatures in charge of the finances, have decided that, because they provide dried hot-brown to us free of charge (unless you count the cost of kidney and cerebral cortex damage, but who does that?), then they have fulfilled their duty as a compassionate, caring organisation who want to improve the working lot for their valued underlings, and so do not provide milk.

No milk?

We argued.

"But . . . " we cried, "We're British!"

The British tend to put milk in everything. Tea. Coffee. Hot Chocolate. Cows. You'll find milk in them all.

But they were not for the turning. You must take your hot-brown without milk, they told us.It will still be hot, but black instead of brown. We also received an accompanying memo telling us not to call it hot-black because of a) copyright reasons from Douglas Adams and b) it's racialist against bovril.

From now on, it would be hot-dark-brown.

We wailed. We gnashed what was left of our undissolved teeth, and there was much greeting and wearing of black armbands. We choked down the hot-dark-brown, grimacing and shuddering as we did so, so no change there then.

"You could buy your own milk." The managerial types suggested.

After the walkout, we came back to work a few weeks later (because we were thirsty) but they were adamant in their miserliness. We were, at the end of the day, milkless.

Maybe we would get used to it, we wondered. After all, we can change. It's been done before. Remember when everyone in the country, and I mean everyone, took two sugars in their tea?

Well we don't now do we?

It's only toddlers and builders that spoon the white stuff in there these days.

When did that happen? Sugary tea has gone the way of Texan bars and white dog poo, relegated to a bygone era when cars came in orange with brown velour seats and the weather men on the telly stuck magnetic clouds onto wobbly cut-outs of the country.

The past, in other words.

So maybe, just maybe, we could change our milk habits as well.

Actually, we already have done.

Once upon a time, when semi-skimmed and skimmed milk were specialist diet drinks, we all drank only full fat milk?

You had to shake the bottle to mix in the layer of cream that had settled out at the top. If it was delivered, you would often have to fight off lactose-addicted blue-tits who would peck the thin foil lid off the bottles whilst staring down cats who knew better than to interrupt them before they'd got their hit.

Then you'd wonder whether it was safe to drink the milk, what with the little holes in the lid and the droppings on the side of the bottle. You invariably did drink it though, because these were the days before salmonella, when the worse thing you could catch off a bird was an STD.

Now the only ones who drink full-fat milk are old ladies in Jersey and calves.

For the next few weeks we choked down the steaming brews of hot-dark-brown, each cup making Sisyphus's labour with the big marble seem like a summer job stuffing envelopes in comparison, yet we persevered because . . . it was free!

Some of us fell by the wayside and brought in small labelled tupperware containers of instant coffee, or maybe a tea-bag sealed in a sandwich box and hidden from others as if it were the most precious of treasures.

And yes, friends, even I was tempted to take some comfort in that plan, but that would mean they had won, which would be a taste more bitter than that of the most mug-melting works beverage.

Then, one day, the skies darkened and a creature representing the financial department descended on bat-like wings into our workhouse. We scurried like rodents 'neath a raptor, running for cover as we knew what such visits invariably meant.

Cutbacks.

But there was little to be done, so we left the financial demon perched in a supervisors office and tried to look outrageously inconspicuous.

In a moment of audacious bravery, someone gave the visiting incubus a cup of hot-dark-brown, and he absent-mindedly took a sip before the steam from it made his eyebrows fall out.

And then it happened.

His face turned inside out, as if he'd sucked the suckiest of lemons, and he retched a little. His neck went a slightly blue colour, and tremors gripped him. His quill and ink-pot (balanced on his laptop) toppled unnoticed to the floor.

A strange, unfamiliar expression drifted across his ravaged features. His eyes moistened slightly, and his head dropped. A sigh escaped his toothed beak, like a wet fetid breeze emanating from an ancient flooded tomb.

It was, we realised, compassion.

"We . . . didn't know . . ." he croaked in a voice like a strimmer blinding a hedgehog. "We didn't know."

He looked up.

We had all put on hats so we could line up in front of him, take them off and hold them in two hands in front of us like serfs, and we stuck our trembling bottom lips out.

"Very well." He said, picking up the uniform checklist he had been using to record how many boots we had, and in his opinion how many we actually needed (two and one respectively), and stood up, half drunk cup of hot-dark-brown left on the desk.

We held our collected breath. One of my colleagues whimpered "Milk?" expectantly.

"We shall send you something to lighten this . . ." he sneered at the cup, the handle of which was sliding off into a puddle of liquid ceramic, " . . . abomination."

And then he spread out his wings, let out a screech, and flew back to HQ.

And he was true to his word.

Just a few short months later, a parcel arrived. We saw the word "MILK" on the side, but the rest of the words were covered over by mysterious runes and incantations used by the financial department to ward off auditors. Still, that single word excited us, and caused anticipatory shivers up and down our oesophaguses.

We opened the box like children on christmas day. Like children opening a box on christmas day, not us opening children on christmas day because that is wrong. And messy. And frowned upon.

Inside, as I have previously aforementioned prior to this, was our employers "gift". Sure enough, it was something that would take away the deep bitterness of the hot-dark-brown, and turn it once more into the hot-brown we had become accustomed to.

But it wasn't milk:



Tastes Like Fresh Milk?

That's actually what it's called. It's resemblance to milk stopped at the word "milk" on the lid, because the closest this has ever been to milk was when it drove past a field of cows whilst on the M5.

'Tastes Like Fresh Milk' is just its name, so it doesn't have to be accurate. Mars bars aren't the size of a planet. A Ford Escort doesn't look like a prostitute. Eminem isn't small, yellow and bad for you. Actually, scratch that last one. It's fairly accurate.

We tried it, and sure enough, our hot-brown looked like it always had done. Hot and brown. We tasted it, and it resembled having ones tongue removed with sacateurs, placed in a rat, buried in an old dulux white emulsion tin, dug up after a month, seived back out through a pair of tights worn by bank robbers on a hot day (and not over their faces), before being surgically reattached into your mouth by a man called Olaf who made his name sewing ears back on Russian mobsters in the eighties.

More or less.

Like a deal made with a minion from the atrium of the bowels of the arse end of Hades itself, we got what we wanted. But at what price?

What price indeed.

Babbling on

I live in a world dominated by poo.

If you're new to The Gravel Farm, don't worry. You haven't accidentally stumbled upon a blog dedicated to the arguable delights of coprophilia*.

I have a baby:



A hairy one.

We shall call her "Bonobo".

Now, I don't particularly want to write a blog about babies, because there are lots of specialist blogs dedicated to the hormonally challenged which are far better at depicting cutesie sprog pics and gushing prose about Juniors every move, but at the moment it's all I know.

So forgive the momentary lapse into goo territory.

There are only a few things babies are good at:

Crying. Doing an impression of a tortoise on it's back. Slow blinking. Weeing like tiny racehorses. Grabbing their own eyes. Hiccuping.

And poo.

They are very good at poo.

You get obsessed with the stuff.

Is it there? Is there enough of it? Is there too much? It's black! Is it supposed to be black? Is it black enough? Is it too black? It's green! Is it supposed to be green? Is it green enough? Is it too green? It's yellow! Is it supposed to be yellow? Is it yellow enough? Is it too yellow?

You get the drift.

This is the second time I've been through this and, although I'm definitely a bit more relaxed about it now, I still worry.

My nappy changing skillz are phat, mind.

You start off gritting your teeth and panicking about the tiniest crumb of potential contamination, and you end up changing a full nappy with one hand and not putting your doughnut down with the other.

Like I said, skillz.

Of course, the other thing babies are good at is making your chest swell and your emotions run high, so you're happy to stare at them like a soppy hawk for no reason at all and run to attend to their every need.

Conniving little critters.



*If you were looking for such a site can I direct you to this purveyor of specialist hot tubs. No need to thank me. Each to their own. I'm not one to judge. Mind if we don't shake?

Knocked up for six

I wrote this over a fortnight ago.

----------------

For the last 8 or 9 months, Mrs The Jules has insisted on being pregnant.

Attention seeking, if you ask me.

Still, it worked, and I have been thus engaged, for the second time in my life, in attending to the multitudinous needs of a heavily pregnant lady.

When I look at other critters on this infested little rock we call Earth, I note that gestation and birth seem to go relatively smoothly. Especially for the males.

Unless you're a seahorse, because their males are just sooooo modern and reconstructed, giving birth to the kids for the girls. They probably frown upon the antics of other species who's menfolk practice the wham, bam, not even a thank you ma'am method of rearing their young. It would explain their long faces.

You can tell they're just a bit judgemental. Always looking down their noses at other sea creatures.

"Look at us, with our swollen man-wombs, bursting with multitudinous offspring. See that, turtle? Shark? Octopus? Get a load of my belly, all you other fish. Not you Siamese Fighting Fish. You're all right you are, apart from all that fighting and what-not."

Chuff knows what they'd think of cuckoos.

Anyway, the critters of this world keep the process relatively simple. They get knocked up, they get bigger, they go into labour, they give birth.

Us?

Well, there's back-to-back presentation, dodgy placentas, cord prolapses, huge heads, shoulder dystocia and generally being bipedal which is just silly because it means the . . . er . . . exit, points straight down.

Even gravity is agin us.

In true human, troublesome style, our little pre-bundle of joy is breech presentation and is steadfastly refusing to turn over into the normal upside down position with a stubbornness more typical of a donkey in a flower shop.

Typical.

I was talking to a midwife who said that these days, only 55% of pregnancies are complication free. Nearly half have some sort of problem!

That doesn't sound good.

But it's not just us that have obstetric difficulties, but it's also the species we've become responsible for. Domesticated animals have become infected with similar problems. How often do wild critters need a hairless ape to wrap a rope around their unborn child's hooves and drag it out onto the floor of the savannah?

Rarely, that's how often.

What have we humans got against problem free pregnancy that we inflict our own limitations on other creatures? Were we jealous of their easy entrance into the world and so thought we'd bugger it up for them as well? Let's artificially select for obesity, hyper milk production, short legs, dodgy respiratory tracts and abnormal sizes, and watch them suffer as well. Misery loves company yay!

So, because of our child's recalcitrance in not playing by the rules, we are booked in for an elective cesarean section next week. By we, I mean Mrs The Jules. I'm showing solidarity in saying we. I say "We're pregnant" and we both went to antenatal classes.

I even developed cravings, albeit it for beer and blue cheese.

We have a date. We have a method. We have a consultant.

It all makes me a little on edge.

We have a week of chewing our fingernails down to the humerus in nervous anticipation. At the end of the cliche, the only thing that is of concern is the safe arrival of number two child and the safety of Mrs The Jules, and it doesn't really matter if the have to use the side entrance.

So here we go. Deep breaths.

And the wife . . .

-----------------

Since then, three weeks early and by emergency cesarean after my wife's waters broke in the car, I am now the proud owner of a healthy baby girl.

Strangely, depsite my rationalistic and strictly anti-woo psyche, I refrained from posting it when I scribbled it in case something went wrong, maybe jinxed it. Hence it's placement now. Shows how base and animalistic we are when it comes to our kids.

Right, it's bedtime. I'm off for three solid hours of kip now.

I am very tired.

Plumbing the depths

The dishwasher has been playing up.

It's still under warranty so a chappy comes round, unclogs it and mutters something about half a chicken and some rabbit fur in the filter, before telling us that the plastic waste water pipe is tortuously convoluted, "Like the the very Labyrinth inhabited by the bipedal tauroid Minotaur himself, guv." were his exact words. "Get a plumber in and have it shortened."

A plumber?

In?

Shortened?

It's a piece of plastic piping, I think, affronted at the mere thought that, just because I occasionally boil a chicken in the dishwasher, I don't know about plumbing.

Of course, there is the fact that what I do know about plumbing was learned from watching Calgol adverts and eighties pornography. And I haven't even got the appropriate moustache.

Still I thought, I can do that, and promptly manhandle the washer out of its niche and begin poking about at the various orifices with a screwdriver. After 30 seconds staring at the ends of the pipes, (which look like something out of star trek) I realise I couldn't. Well, not without going to night school for the best part of a year anyway, and that seems impractical.

The Wife wanders over at me, still staring into its white rear.

"Go to Plumber Tim at Number 8," says The Wife. "He is a plumber. He can fix it."

"But . . . I haven't even googled it yet", I counteract.

"Go to Plumber Tim at Number 8," The Wife retaliates. "He is a plumber. He can fix it."

"But . . . I could probably get the part for 4.99 and a special tool that all plumbing jobs require, called something like a splinker I expect, and do it myself within a timescale of less than one Gregorian year." I expectorate.

"Go to Plumber Tim at Number 8, The Wife corroborates. "He is a plumber. He can fix it."

Compromising, I then go over to Plumber Tim's at Number 8, him being a plumber and all.

"Is Plumber Tim in?" I ask his wife querulously.

"Yes." She looks at me all squinty like, perhaps trying to see if there was any residual trace of testosterone in my body, but like a metal detector on an incontinence sheet, found nothing desirable.

Plumber Tim is in his basement. He has an eye patch beneath a green card-dealers cap. The basement is a tangled lair of copper pipes, radiators stacked against the walls like huge, white, metal, corrugated dominoes used for heating, and one side taken up by a gigantic boiler with more parts than the Large Hadron Collider.

In the centre of it all, a poker table sits like an island, cards flat on its surface like the losers in a gunfight, a pall of cigar smoke hangs over everything like a curtain of carcinogenic attitude. Plumber Tim sits at the head of the table, a pile of washers in front of him, smiling around a cigar the size of a table leg.

He strikes a match on his stubble, lights his stogie, and then nods at me to approach. I creak off the bottom step of the stairs.

I remind him who I am, of our neighbourly affiliation, and that I need a favour.

He has three friends with him. They all wear headpieces. One a sombrero, another a stetson, and the third a dinosaur mask.

"There are mah buddies" Plumber Tim takes his giant cigar out of his mouth and indicates them one by one, "Mex, Tex and Rex." They look at each other and hiss when I mention the word "favour", as though it is a word of great power, a magical incantation the very utterance of which defines the difference between professional trade and mates rates.

"So what's this . . ." Plumber Tim stretches out arms that are so heavily muscled and tattooed they look like rolled up Persian rugs stuffed with coconuts. He only has one hand, the missing one replaced by an adjustable spanner rather than the traditional hook. It looks very useful. " . . . favour?" he finishes.

I tell him.

Mex, Tex and Rex shake their heads in derision.

"You tried doin' it yerslef?" plumber Tim grins at me.

"Well . . ." my voice quavers. "You know how it is, I'm sure I could, but time is short, and I've got . . . you know . . . bears to wrestle, knife fights to have, that sort of thing . . ." I tail off, having made my point on my manliness.

They are an eclectic bunch, Plumber Tim's friends, and I momentarily wonder how Rex can play cards with the limited visibility through his mask, and his tiny, tiny arms.

"You ain't got no cojones, friend!" Tex laughs at me. I see from his tattoos that he is Corgi registered. He spits a brown glob of tobacky into a spittoon, where it makes a 'klidonk' sound. Shortly afterwards, there is a small flush, because this is, after all, a plumbers lair.

"Yeah, no cojones gringo" Mex agrees.

"Raargh!" Rex confirms.

"I do so have cojones." I growl in a high pitched tremor, desperately trying to remember if cojones is slang for money or a type of olive. I decide on the first, as it seems to fit. "I'll get my wife's purse and show you!"

After the laughing dies down, Plumber Tim unwinds himself from his chair and pushes the green see-through visor of his dealer's cap back on his head. A moment later, he stands up, his head knocking the bare light bulb aside as he walks a few steps towards me, looking me up and down like a monkey examining a banana.

"Tell ya what." He growls, and his cigar moves from left to right across his scarred mouth, as if pushed by an invisible hand. "I'll come over to yer home. I'll help yer out. And I'll get me a look-see at yer sweet, sweet wife, maybe show her a few . . . plumbing tricks, eh?" He glances back over his shoulder as he says this, and his compadres guffaw and spit, their hacking coughs and laughs applauded by the tiny flushes of conveniently located spittoons.

"Well?" Plumber Tim leans forward and looks me in the eye with his own single one. "What do you say to my little . . ." He looks back over his shoulder again, and a couple of stifled laughs erupt from behind " . . . offer?"

"Super." I nod, and look back over my shoulder as well, which sort of confuses the issue. "Would Thursday be okay for that?" I ask.

Of course, some of the above might have been my imagination. My wife insists that Plumber Tim actually said "Sure, but it might have to be in a week or two because I'm a bit busy till then."

He also has two hands, is actually quite skinny and speaks with a pleasant bristolian lilt.

But he was thinking about my cojones.