Skip to main content

Captain Hairy Bumchin II - Tales from a Watery Closet

(A sequel, for my friend and Niecelet Rebecca)

It was a normal day aboard the pirate ship. Assorted ruffians and hornswagglers were wandering around on deck in the sunshine, trying to look tough. It had been several weeks since the lookout pirate in the crow’s nest had shouted “Land-hooooooo!” and got everyone excited, before admitting it was actually a bit of fluff on his telescope lens, and not land at all.

After he’d recovered from being thrown overboard, he had spent the last week sulking in the crow’s nest, occasionally throwing weevil-infested ship’s biscuits at the angry pirates below.

Red Becca stood at the very bow of the ship, one foot resting on a barrel, staring thoughtfully into the distance. A strange, clomping sound of one boot, and a piece of wood, alternating on the deck behind her, alerted her to the approach of the ship’s rather hopeless captain.

“Hello, Bumchin.” Said Red, without looking over her shoulder.

“Yargh!” Replied the startled pirate. “How’d ye know it be me?”

Red sighed at the old sea dog’s poor use of English. “Pirate’s instincts.” Said Red, enjoying the look of confusion this brought to the grizzled pirate’s face.

“Why ye be staring out to sea, young fella me lass?” Asked Bumchin, before adding “Dubloon for ye thoughts?”

“Oh, nothing.” Said Red. “I’ve just seen them doing this in pirate movies, so I thought I’d do the same, and see what happened”.

There was a long pause, whilst Bumchin’s brain attempted to process what Red had just said. Unfortunately for him, this made his face contort in a variety of entertaining ways, leaving him looking like a finalist in a gurning contest.

“Well...” he finally said, changing the subject. “I’d best be off, then...” and turned and started walking away.

“Hold on a second!” shouted Red at the retreating figure. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about something?”

“Arrrr...” muttered Bumchin, turning to face the ship’s most formidable under-ten pirate and hopping from foot to wooden foot. “It be nothing”.

“What’s wrong with you?” Asked Red. “You look... uncomfortable”.

“Yargh.” Said Bumchin, blushing. “I... well, yar see... I....”

At this point, Bumchin looked away, coughed a couple of times, and appeared to be carefully studying the floor, about 4 inches away from Red’s shiny boot. Finally, the hairy pirate said, in a small voice most at odds with his big stature: “I... needs ye toilet”.

Red was startled by the Captain’s rather honest answer, but recovered quickly. “Well, you’d better... er... go, then.” She said, and watched the hairy pirate scuttle away in the direction of the ship’s WC, which was, in fact, a truly terrifying wooden shack, containing the smelliest and filthiest of toilets know to piratekind. The door slammed, and there were a few seconds of silence, broken only by the sound of waves, and a seagull attempting the first bit of “Mr Blue Sky” before giving up, and going back to squawking out of tune.

The loud crash caused all the pirates on deck to jump. It was immediately followed by the type of swearing only pirates can manage. The toilet door flew open, and a soaking wet Bumchin staggered out, bellowing “YARGHHHH! BUCKETS OF BLOOD! YE TOILET HAS ATTACKED ME!” Before attempting to pull his sword of it’s holster, realised it was stuck, and pretended to dust some dirt off his tunic so he didn’t look foolish. It didn’t work.

Red approached the stinky toilet cautiously, and peered in. The toilet was lying on it’s side on the floor, water, and some far, far, worse stuff, all over the floor. Holding her nose, she studied the strange collection of items mixed in with the mess.

“Captain!” She barked, sternly. “I thought you’d fixed the wobbly toilet! This is an urgent matter! There are 100 men, and one very clever nine year old, aboard this ship, and we need this toilet working!”

Red picked up a soggy, mangled flower from the items on the floor. “What. Is. THIS?” She shouted, staring angrily at the cowering Captain.

“Arrr.” Said Bumchin. “I did what ye asked, and I fixed the toilet to the wall using a Lupin.”

Red rolled her eyes. “No. I said a Loo Pin.” She replied, exasperated.

“Yarrrr! A Lupin!” said Bumchin proudly. “Just like ye said. But that didn’t work, so then I used that!” and he pointed at what looked suspiciously like a piece of a sailor’s belt buckle, specifically, the bit that pokes through the hole in the leather strap. Red picked up the small piece of metal and studied this carefully. Baffled, she looked at the captain, and said quietly “Exactly how is this a Loo Pin?”

“I swiped it from pirate Louis’ belt whilst he be asleep”. Bumchin replied, grinning.

Red considered this reply for a moment, before turning to pirate Louis, handing the puzzled man the small bit of mangled metal and saying “Here, Louis, I think this is yours. It appears our crazy captain thought it was “Lou’s pin”. He is phenomenally stupid.”

“Well, shiver me timbers”, said Pirate Lou. “I’d been wonderin’ where me pin had gone. I’ve had to holds me favourite swashbuckling trousers up with string”.

Exasperated, Red turned back to face the captain once more. Staring at him for several seconds (which made the old sea dog rather nervous), she smiled in a strained kind of way, before saying quietly “Right, then, captain. What did you try next?”

The captain now looked very scared. He pointed at a broken bit of plastic tube lying on the floor, then flinched slightly as Red fixed him once more with her steely gaze. “What... what is it?” said Red, struggling to keep her voice calm.

“Ahem. Well... er... “ stammered Bumchin “It be... the outer bin of the biro we keeps in ye toilet, so we can do seafaring crosswords, and nautical Sudoko puzzles. I likes nautical Sudoko puzzles.” He added, forgetting what a serious predicament he was currently in.

“Let me guess.” Said Red. “That’ll be the loo pen, won’t it.”

“Yarrr. That it be.” Said Bumchin forlornly.

“It would appear I have to EVERYTHING myself around here!” Shouted Red, before stomping off the ships tool chest, and finding the correct Loo Pin to reattach the broken toilet securely. Five minutes later, the toilet was working properly again. Well, as properly as a stinky toilet used by 100 sailors could be, anyway.

Red emerged from the toilet to a round of applause from the grateful crew. Bumchin rushed hurriedly towards the open door, but Red put up her hand and smiled at the desperate pirate: “Remember the special pirate curry we had last night? I’d leave it five minutes if I were you...”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...