The adventures of Captain Hairy Bumchin

(A story for my friend Rebecca.)

“YAAARRGH!” shouted Captain Hairy Bumchin, wobbling precariously on the rolling deck of his ship. “SHIVER ME TIMBERS, YO HO HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM!” He added.

For good measure he then bellowed “HORNSWAGGLERS!” before tripping over a coiled piece of rope and landing, face first, at the feet of a determined looking young Pirate.

Red Becca eyed him warily, before fixing him with her best steely gaze. “I don’t speak Pirate fluently yet.” she said. “But I think you’re saying that there’s a hole in the side of the boat.”

“ARRRRRR!!” roared Bumchin, approvingly. “That there be, young fella me lad!”

“Girl.” Said Red Becca, wrinkling her nose slightly in annoyance. “I’m a girl, not a boy. And that was very poor use of the English language, by the way.” Bumchin looked slightly uncomfortable.

After sailing the seas for many years, being a salty old sea-dog and generally making a nuisance of himself in pursuit of some shiny treasure, he wasn’t used to being spoken to like that by a nine year old landlubber. “You bilge sucking lassie!” he growled “I’ll cleave you to the...”

He didn’t get to finish his carefully crafted insult, as Red Becca interrupted him by pointing at a missing plank, raising one eyebrow and saying, curtly: “Be quiet! If we don’t get this hole fixed, we’ll sink, and then you won’t be so Jolly, Roger!”

“How did thee know my real name be Roger?” asked Bumchin.

Red Becca smiled slowly, whilst adjusting her eye patch. “Never mind. I’m really spectacularly clever like that. I once made a pizza with chocolate on, you know. Now, pass me that plank quickly, or we’ll be feeding the fishes. With ourselves.”

As Bumchin swung the plank round, he nearly clonked Red Becca with the other end. “Avast behind!” shrieked Red Becca, jumping out of the way.

“Arrr.” Said Bumchin, sadly. “Tis not my fault my behind be vast. Tis all the Captain’s Biscuits I’ve scoffed.”

Red Becca tried to push the plank into the hole. It almost fitted, but the rough edges just stopped it from sliding into place. She thought about it carefully for a moment or two, and looked at the Parrot on her shoulder, who just shrugged unhelpfully, before muttering “Pieces of Seven!” and falling asleep. “

Stupid bird.” Said Red Becca, shaking her head. She looked at Bumchin whilst thinking furiously. And then she spied the rough, prickly, stubbly chin, lurking at bottom of his face (as they often do), like a slightly disappointing hedgehog. An idea burst into her head. “Lean forward, Bumchin!” She instructed, lifting the plank up to his face. “I just need to sand a bit off the edge of this, using your sandpapery chin...”

Five minutes later, and the plank was in place. The ship was saved! Bumchin gingerly pulled a splinter out of his chin, before surveying the repaired ship. “Arrrr, lassie! Blow me down! We’ll nary be visiting Davy Jones locker today! A grand job thee have done, young Buccaneer. How can I reward thee?”

“Well....” said Red. “I reckon we should hoist the Mizzen, splice the mainbrace, and heave-ho on the poop deck”.

Bumchin roared with laughter, until tears ran down his wooden leg. “You said poop!” he managed to get out, before collapsing again with the giggles. Red Becca glared at the guffawing Captain, wondering if a cat o’nine tails would sort him out. Possibly ten, or even eleven, would be better.

At that very moment, a hoard of rather posh looking pirates boarded the ship, waving their cutlasses whilst trying not to get dirt on their tunics. The leader of the very neat band of pirates marched up to Bumchin, and announced (in a fairly posh voice): “Captain Bumchin! I and my crew are all called William, and we have come to claim back the Dubloons you stole from us, when we were attending the ‘Jolly Nice Chaps Called William’ convention. What do you have to say for yourself, you rogue?!”

Red Becca smiled, before looking at Bumchin, who was cowering behind a barrel, and said: “See? That’s what happens if you don’t pay your Bills...”

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog