Rod phones to remind me that he's off to Hawai'i with Sharon next week.
Rod is the band's sound engineer, Sharon is one third of the best three girl backing-vocal group on this or any other planet. They are off to Hawai'i to get married on a beach in Honolulu at sunset, sometime early next month.
Bastards! What's wrong with Britain in November? What's wrong with horizontal sleet? What's wrong with sub-zero howling gales? Eh?
I'm just grumpy because they invited me and I stupidly decided to stay home (I'm on a saving frenzy, ready to extend the house next year and form a proper library before my thousands of stupid books reach critical mass and collapse into a black hole, sucking in all life on the planet).
So, copious and effusive congratulations overflow in Rod and Sharon's general direction.
We'll be having one hell of a party when they return. A little virgin sacrifice, some dancing with goats, hog wrestling, dwarf tossing … you know the kind of thing … Live and very loud music, quaffage on a Niagara scale, some serious cake abuse and maybe even some balloons.
Norfolk will be laid waste to an extent not seen since the Vikings got a bit frisky twelve hundred years ago.
Cue one of those swirly effect things as I invite you, dear reader, to pop back in time with me to the very first of Rod's parties …
Rod and Sharon are not Norfolk natives. They have the usual complement of fingers and un-webbed toes. Yet for some reason - probably a shared interest in evolutionary anthropology and a twisted sense of humour - they live in the remote countryside, just outside the village of –––––.
––––– is one of those tiny coastal villages cut off from the land by marshes for thousands of years. You remember the village in Hitchcock's "The Birds"? I get that same sense of creeping dread, of some nameless abomination stalking me as I crest the low ridge and stare nervously down at the wide, bleak sweep of coastline with the tiny and very isolated little community clinging to the dunes. The kind of place where they'd never marry a first cousin if a sister was available.
"Deliverance" is a walk in the park compared to rural Norfolk.
This is waaay back in the mists of time; the last flaring embers of a dying millennium …
Claire (another third of Sharon's vocal group) is turning eighteen and Rod decides to organise a surprise party in ––––– village hall. It's quite a feat of map-reading to even find the place, so I'm relieved to see Rod's car parked outside a long, low building.
Entering the hall alone and unsuspecting, I walk in to a scene which has provided more than a few sleepless nights in the intervening years. Before I get a chance to scream, something that might, in pre-Cambrian times, have been classed as female lurches toward me with a look that shouts "NEW GENETIC MATERIAL"!
It's "Dawn Of The Dead" with party dresses on!
In a desperate bid to keep our honour intact, Rod and I barricade ourselves in the kitchen and stay there for the rest of the night (this is one hundred percent true)!
The gene pool in ––––– is not Olympic sized … not even paddling pool sized … maybe not even a gene puddle … more of a genetic damp patch.
As for evolution: when you've struggled out of the sea and up into the dunes, why bother going any further?
These people never even made it up into the trees in the first place …
Rod and Sharon have since settled in there surprisingly well. They seem to be looked on as some kind of alien exotica by the Morloks (remember "The Time Machine")? I've even been back there myself on occasion. Whenever I get the slightest tingling of a nascent desire to produce offspring, a trip to the pub in ––––– is all it takes to kill it stone dead.
I have kept the name of ––––– a secret as I don't want to end up being burned inside a giant wicker man the next time I'm down that way …
But back to the present (cue: swirly thing) …
I have in front of me a glass of stupidly expensive, cask strength Islay malt whisky. Here's to Rod and Sharon. May they live ludicrously happily ever after.
7 comments:
Cheers. I envy your vocabulary--what is the whicker man thing from? I've read that before somewhere, and now it will bother me until I can place it.
The Wicker Man is a truly great movie from the seventies with Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward (crazy name, crazy guy) and Britt Ekland. See it!
Witchcraft v. Christianity. Scary, yet hilarious. For some reason Britt shows her boobs but uses a stunt bottom for the nudie dance scene (!)
Do not EVER see, however, the new remake with (I think) Nicholas Cage. It would leave even Old Knudson at a loss for swearwords.
The only film worthy of the title Wicker Man (what is it with Nicholas Cage and his compulsion to be in really, really bad remakes?) is about the scariest thing I've ever seen. I can't imagine what that gene pool must look like, but think that Hungry Horse, Montana, and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont have done a fine job making up for lost inbred time.
Say, aren't you an escaped Vermont girl, young Sassy?
Vermont? Montana? Norfolk? All beautiful places, yet filled with scary backwoods pig-fondlers. It must mean something …
And the scariest thing in the Wicker Man was the folk music.
Well, if we're going to compare inbred territories, then I'll have to jump in with middle Ohio--Walmart on a Tuesday night, I don't know, around 10:30 or so. If it isn't Amish day, it's inbred day.
I most certainly am not a Vermont escapee. I am from New Hampshire, where the gene pool is lovely and large. Heee heee. There are some funky places in New Hampshire too.
Opps! Sorry, Sassy. I thought that's what the nostalgia post was about.
New Hampshire? Hang on a mo … That's kind of right next door to Vermont, isn't it? And Cape Ann's not too far away, either.
You better build yourself a big fence. Don't let 'em come swimming in your nice posh gene pool!
And Robyn: Isn't Walmart specifically designed to lure the inbreds in? To keep them out of neighbourhoods where folk walk upright? What the heck were you doing in a Walmart anyway?
(They're called Asda over here, and they sell dirt cheap stuff made from fat, sugar, radiation and chemical additives).
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