Mike "that hankie you’re waving could do with a jolly good boil" Lockley
Jan 23 2009
By Mike Lockley
A MAN was collared by police for walking with a computer under one arm, swivel chair under the other and desk strapped to his back. “I’m arresting you for impersonating an office, sir,” the policeman told him.
MY MATE’S applied to live in Australia.
To be able to get into the great country, you’ve got to prove you possess the skill to fill a void in the jobs market over there. Basically, no Australian can do what you do.My mate makes boomerangs. He had to endure a grilling at the embassy.
“Have you a criminal record?” asked the Oz civil servant.
“No,” answered my pal firmly, before whispering: “Do you think that will count against me?”
I SIMPLY refuse to stand back and watch our dwindling band of morris dancers - there are now only three of them, and one of those is missing his left leg - become another part of rural life consigned to the history books.
Youngsters are no longer coming through the ranks, apparently. The fertility dance doesn’t work, then.
Today’s young people would rather take drugs and indulge in illicit sexual activity than prance around with bells on their trousers. Their loss, I say.
This is a country tragedy. Morris dancing keeps kids off the streets by, errr, putting them on the streets and gives them a sense of direction: the direction being four steps forward, skip, bang sticks together, then four steps backwards.
I’ve asked my own son to join-up, but he wants to have a go at it on Nintendo Wii first. “Come on,” I demanded, “you’ll be surprised. I ‘pulled’ no end of women while morris dancing.”
Admittedly, morris dancers attract a certain kind of woman - the kind who accepts being struck around the head with a pig’s bladder as foreplay.
How times have changed. As a kid, I yearned for the day when I’d be able to don my bells. Fellow classmates had posters of Farrah Fawcett-Majors in their lockers. I had that morris dancer who wears the antlers: I think he might be the grand wizard.
In a bid to save our local troupe from extinction, I signed-up and endured quite a grilling before being granted membership. “You’ve received a call,” announced the troupe’s leader dramatically during the interview. “Farmer Smith’s prize cow is enduring the agonies of a breach-birth. What’s your first move?”
“Call a vet?” I stammered.
“No, no, no,” he tutted. “It’s three hops on the spot with your left leg, three hops with your right, then flourish your hankie four times.”
Damn. I knew that.
Last week I took part in my first morris dancing foray for many years: a hastily arranged fixture to ensure the gods smile on our doctor’s new vasectomy clinic. We were asked to do the fertility dance backwards. “If you don’t mind me saying,” shouted one ungrateful member of the public, “that hankie you’re waving could do with a jolly good boil.”
Due to the spiralling cost of pig bladders, we were forced to strike each other with caseballs. Two members were bludgeoned unconscious and one had to sit down because his ears wouldn’t stop ringing. It could’ve been worse - someone suggested using Spacehoppers.
I only survived because of the crash helmet I’d donned. This is a part of the tradition the public don’t see - the legion of ‘bladder drunk’ former morrismen who hung around for one dance too many. When punch drunk ex-fighters hear a bell they start throwing punches. Former morris dancers start skipping.
It causes havoc on hospital wards: beefy porters desperately trying to prise the sticks from deranged, dribbling ex-dancers.
In a bid to attract a younger audience, we now skip along to ditties by a gangsta rap artist called Fifty Cents. When he raps about ’wasting brothers in the hood’ we hit each other a lot harder and faster with the caseballs. We’re thinking of introducing sheepdogs for the bits about ‘bitches’.
“We need to move with the times,” announced the grand wizard. “Pole dancing’s very big business at the moment - let’s give it a go.”
On Wednesday, the troupe launched the first of its pole morris dancing members evenings at the Assemby Rooms.
After gyrating seductively, his white shirt and trousers smothered in baby oil, 72-year-old Tom began shimmying up the apparatus while wealthy businessmen bayed for me.
“Help, I’m stuck,” he pleaded after five minutes, “my feet are caught in the ribbons and my nose is bleeding.”
“On reflection,” conceded the troupe’s boss in the aftermath of the chaotic evening, “using a 16 foot maypole was a tad ambitious.”
THE ETERNALLY chipper owner of our convenience store - it would be a lot more convenient if he filled-in potholes on the car park - has welcomed every customer during the big freeze with a hearty: “Cold enough for you?”
Armed robbers plundered the place last week. He just had time to enquire ‘cold enough for you?’ before they tightened the gag over his mouth.
How is one supposed to respond to such an enquiry? “Not really. I like to go outside, urinate and watch Jack Frost turn the yellow fluid into ice-cubes before it hits the ground.”
“Me too,” he nodded, “but you can’t have everything.”
What I’d give for a pair of Eskimos to walk into the place in t-shirts. He’d then have to switch to his summer mantra: “Hot enough for you?”
The conditions may be inclement, but there’s no doubt our rural retreat has been turned into a winter wonderland, which is why the weekly newspaper sends a photographer during each cold snap to take pictures of swans struggling on the frozen village pond.
This year I collared the ‘snapper’ and dropped the bombshell that an ambulance had been called to Number 83 after reports an elderly householder was suffering from hypothermia.
“Thanks,” he said, matter-of-factly, “but I think I’ll stick to pictures of the swans - I’ve got the wrong lens.”
“Unless,” he added hopefully, “you can get the old dear out on the pool. We could get a picture of her with the swans.”
In this month’s edition of our church magazine, trendy vicar, The Rev Ricky, has written a bizarre leader urging parishioners to ‘watch out for pensioners’, as if talking about fallen trees on the highway. I’ve been out no end of times and one hasn’t fallen on me yet.
I’ve taken his advice, however, and shouted ‘cold enough for you?’ through the letterboxes of a number of bungalows. “How do you find a weather?” I asked one old gent.
“It’s just outside my door,” he replied.
The magazine also urged us to check electric blankets - for pensioners, presumably - and ensure titbits for birds are not left out long enough to become infected by salmonella.
That, surely, is nonsense? Not a single robin has vomited in my garden.
It’s the farmers I feel sorry for. “It’s almost impossible to get milk from the cows,” moaned Farmer Smith.
“They don’t produce in freezing conditions?” I asked.
“No - as soon as you grab their udders with your cold hands they stampede.”
NUMBER One Son’s paper round has become a tiresome burden to the teenager - a chore the 17-year-old feels robs him of street cred.
Instead, I’m left to place dignity on the backburner, hump the fluorescent bag over my shoulder and deliver the papers. Last week I had to leg it after being chased by a Doberman - a sign the rabid mutt likes me, claims its owner. I was lucky. The milkman needed seven stitches to seal a gashed leg. The dog must love him.
I’ve also blackened the nails of three finger after getting them trapped in a heavy duty, spring-loaded letterbox. The householder said she had the deadly device installed to punish drunken youths who tried to urinate through it: a kind of penis fly trap.
The pain and weather conditions, I can stand. It’s the banter from customers that’s wearing me down.
“I know you said you worked in newspapers, but...,” quipped one. “Bloody hell - the paperboy’s grown,” shouted another. “Here he is,” laughed a pensioner, “the world’s oldest paperboy.”
I simply tell them I’m desperately trying to scrape together enough cash to pay for a new kidney. That usually shuts them up. One asked what was up with the old one: I told him I was bored with it.
“We usually give your son a bag of sweets on Fridays,” trilled one sweet old lady, “but you’re a bit old for that.”
