I found an old story...

[Chris Plumb]

Brilliant as ever Terry!

 

C.

[Wordbender]

Never one to know when I've out-stayed my welcome, here's another 'blast from the past', which again is absolutely true...right down to the last agonising detail.

 

I’M SORRY – FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY…

 

When I was a mercury-limbed teenager I built a high seat in the branches of a huge elm tree (so you can already tell how long ago that was, then). This scrap timber construction gave me aerial access to a rabbit warren and I made full use of it, courtesy of my BSA Airsporter and gathering sniping skills. Climbing the elm was made easier by the totally non-tree-friendly tactic of hammering a ‘ladder’ of six-inch nails into the trunk on the blind side of the warren.

 

With my ‘sporter slung about my shoulders, I could swarm up that tree in seconds, and down again pretty sharpish whenever rabbit retrieval was required. It was a credible hunting system and I spent countless hours sitting in my high seat thinking rural teenage thoughts between pumps of rabbit-inspired adrenaline. My only worry was running out of pellets and even then I knew that turning our sofa upside-down and beating it would produce a usable selection of ammo.

 

Rabbit sniping, being mainly an early morning and late evening sort of sport, often meant my having to push through dew-sodden saplings at the base of my hide tree, and arriving at my high seat decidedly damp. I sorted this by breaking off enough of these saplings to allow me dry passage and thought no more of it – until the day that Mother Nature paid me back for my blatant tree abuse.

 

I’d just shot a rabbit, and, as I’d done so many times before, slithered down my nail ladder to make the retrieve. Only this time I stepped off the final nail a nail too soon and found myself free-falling the last four feet to the ground. I landed full-square on one of my freshly broken saplings, the splintery stump of which made short work of the crutch of my Tesco-bomber denims before burying itself smack-bang in the place where piles now flourish. Yes, there. There by at least three inches, as it happens.

 

Some types of pain transcend normal barriers. This was exactly that type of pain. There I was, propped like some grotesque Airfix model, standing on tip-toes, wide-eyed, open-mouthed and screaming silently, with an elm sapling stuck up my bum. Only by hauling myself back up the tree could I un-dock from the sapling and go howling home, loping like a chimp, Airsporter and rabbit forgotten, bleating manfully for my mother.

 

I was at the doctor’s surgery in minutes, where he ‘tutted’ at my stupidity as he tweazered bloodied elm splinters from my bottom. Once I was de-wooded, the doctor prescribed regular applications of a magical healing compound called Betnovate. For the next six months, tubes of Betnovate ointment became my life-support system. After a full day’s worth of active country doings, a ‘certain area’ would be in dire need of Betnovate and a single, generous application would always soothe and subdue. Then, one evening, after inflaming my ‘problem’ with a four-hour footslog behind a couple of manic lurchers, in my haste and in the half-light, I slapped on not the gentle coolness of Betnovate – but a handful of Deep Heat.

 

Once again, the pain that dare not speak its name raged through me, as I grabbed cold flannels, bath sponges and our new shower attachment, desperate to flush the monster from my bottom. Until you’ve tried to plunge your burning bum in a sinkful of cold water, with every non-irrigated second a living hell, you can’t possibly know what true panic means. I know panic and I know it far too intimately. I also know that Mother Nature is a wonderful friend, but to those who abuse her tree-children – she’s a terrible, vengeful parent.

[Clifftop]

Keep em coming WB. Great stuff.

[medwaygreen]

Terry,

 

You could never out stay your welcome with stories like that.

 

[Ken Davison South Wales]

A great tale, I only stopped laughing as I winced when he let fly with the catapult, brilliant.

[Gerbil0154]

Thanks Mate. Although I'm a Gorbals boy and we did not get many rabbits in the Glasgow Tenements, I loved that story and had tears coursing down my cheeks.

 

Deap Heat applied to that unspoken place is excruciating. I once witnessed its applicacation to a fellow team member straight out of the showers after he was being particularly vocal in his condemnation of his team mates. A jet engine would not have got him into the showers any faster.

 

Quite amusing to watch a grown man attempting handstands under the shower.

 

Keep em coming.

[RobStubbs]

Another cracking set of tales, keep them coming

 

Rob.

[Bluey]

I remember both of those stories from the first time I read them, for some reason both stayed in my memory.

 

However that did not stop me from spraying the monitor with hot tea when I read them again, and rolling up into a ball of choking hysterics of laughter. I'm sorry but my particular style of humour finds predicaments like that to be extremely funny. Whilst I have sympathy for the sufferer, I still can't help letting out a snigger or two, and having to leave the room.

 

Your stories have been passed onto to others who I meet and they also find them funny, keep them coming and don't spare any blushes whatsoever.

 

[Wordbender]

Well, you asked for it. Here's another re-print, this time on a fishing theme.

 

 

DOWN THE TUBE

 

When my mates and I were kids, fishing figured prominently in the merry-go-round of our country pursuits and, as with every sporting direction we took, a leader would emerge. Petey Webb was top-dog when it came to fishing and deservedly so. True, his parents’ tied cottage was almost next door to our favourite stream and Petey haunted its banks like a scruffy heron, but, when it came to winkling out a gudgeon or chub, for a 10 year-old boy - he was the man.

 

This stream boasted a small stone bridge which acted as a watcher’s gallery for those that couldn’t muster a fishing rod, while the intrepid anglers among us sat astride a large iron pipe that ran parallel to the bridge, five feet above the water, some ten feet downstream. This pipe was rumoured to carry mains water or gas or even ‘letric cables an’ that’ but we weren’t at all interested in such details. Its two-foot diameter and the cat-like balance of country kids that spent half of their lives climbing trees, provided a fine fishing platform. There we’d sit, sideways-on to the current, watching our floats trotting downstream bearing impaled worms for imaginary monsters. It was our angling adventure playground and we loved it.

 

Six of us were assembled there one summer Saturday morning, made unusual only by the absence of Petey Webb. “’Ees gotta go to ‘is sister’s weddin’, ain’t ‘ee?” mumbled one of the gallery, as I fished alone on the pipe. “Ees a bleedin’ page boy an’all!” mocked another, and we all laughed in conspiratorial fashion, despite most of us not having a clue what a page boy was. Then Petey arrived and we were struck dumb.

 

The vicious, wicked, heartless sods had done the full Fauntleroy on him. Petey’s wiry hair had been nailed flat via a fistful of Brylcreme, and every inch of our pleasantly grubby pal had been scoured into violent cleanliness. Even his freckles appeared to have been scrubbed away. This unnatural state of hygiene was bad enough, but Petey’s pageboy outfit took boyhood shame to a whole new level.

 

He stood before us in mauve velvet knickerbockers and matching jacket, its pure awfulness compounded by a frilly white shirt, long white socks (with harmonising frilly gaiters, yet) and a pair of patent leather shoes, two sizes too big, and bedecked with shiny buckles the size of drain covers. As Petey endured the rolling-on-the-floor laughter of his fellows, the voice of his mother boomed from the gate of chez Webb, “Get back here, Peter! And don’t you get so much as a mark on that suit!”

 

Petey was defiant in the face of such unprecedented humiliation and pushed through the gallery before mounting the pipe and sliding out toward me. “Gizza go, Tel” he muttered, reaching for my yellow, fibreglass ‘Junior Fisherman’ rod. I handed it to him, only he wasn’t there to take it. Petey Webb, who’d spent thousands of hours straddling this pipe without mishap, had just slipped off it and now lay sideways in the mud, floundering and spluttering, at the stream’s edge.

 

I dropped the rod so that I could use both arms and legs to grip the pipe as hysterical laughter racked my body for fully ten minutes. Petey, one side of him still wedding-pristine, the other oily black and reeking, finally un-stuck himself from the ooze and stood there, arms held out, eyes pleading with us to get him out of this terrible predicament. We couldn’t even help him out of the mud. We were too busy rolling around, holding our sides and drumming our feet on the ground. Petey said simply “Aw, blingin’eck” before hauling himself onto dry land and squelching off home. Seconds later, the hysterical screams that greeted Petey’s arrival triggered more pipe-hugging from me and the genuine fear that I’d never breathe again.

 

We learned many great lessons from our feral upbringing but, sadly, the differing frictional properties of mauve velvet pantaloons and supermarket denims was not among them. Except, of course, for poor Petey Webb.

 

------------------------- e n d -----------------------

[Elton]

There are a few more Wordbender articles on a fishing theme here:

 

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/Carp-Fishing-A...rever_carp.html

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/Carp-Fishing-A...agent_carp.html

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/Coarse-Fishing...ng_to_fish.html

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/Coarse-Fishing..._rice_lake.html

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/Miscellaneous-Articles/432.html