WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE WHEN YOU SHOULD BE AT UNCLE GORDON'S TEATABLE
WITH ALL THE OTHER GITS AND ALIENS AND FOREIGNERS ?
Click over to the Gazette if
you want to see anything new, and think yourself lucky I bothered to answer
the door. As it is, I took a sharp crack to the elbow falling out of bed just
now.
Oh, all right, go on and read this even if you've been here before or
you won't pass my First Annual Footnote Quiz, which I might get around to one
of these days, and I'll find out who was or wasn't paying attention.
To
pass the time in this saints-forgotten wilderness I have begun tinkering with
various software oddments I found in the cellars. Notice that on every one of
Uncle Gordon (Col. Rohde to you lot)'s pages I have hidden a music player. You
know about this already if you are a regular subscriber to Uncle G's rubbishy
tabloid, and I take credit for making the front page even more lurid this time
out, not that you'd notice.
As before, you should be hearing Beethoven's
something or other just now unless there was water damage to the disk. There
are a few tunes from Bach
as well, and I might mention he looks quite a lot like my great
grandfather on my mother's side. Beethoven
looks quite a lot like my mother herself, but with a
smaller nose. I haven't changed too much since last month because I have been
hiding from everyone after the debacle of my lovely Danger Park out in the swamp.
Pearls Before Swine Park I should have called it, for all the stick I
took from an ungrateful public, but there you are.
Just a reminder, don't bother to click on any footnote more than once, as
it's the same thing over and over, much like Bach and Reggae music and the
weather report around Swinehurst.
I thought about writing other footnotes
but the whole business got too tiring. Bad enough I have to insert updates
every so often just to remind Uncle G that I am not dead or in gaol.
The point is if you hate music you'll have to fiddle around with your own
control panels or whatever, and don't think I won't know about it if you
do.
I have also inserted actual photos of B and B, which I found in Uncle G's
off-limits cellars ( I have my ways and means). I had a snap of Mozart but our
cook snatched it away from me as recompense for some imaginary slight, quite
the anal retentive is our Cookie, so who knows where it may be by now. Not I.
You may have gathered that Uncle G thinks I'm just an idle gin-swilling
yobb and more to be pitied than censured, etc. etc.
Well, you tell me: if
you were stuck in this place, which makes Devil's Island look like Tivoli
Gardens, would you bother to stir your stumps unless the bed was on fire? All
right, bad example. I'm sure Uncle G told you all about the time I blacked out
while smoking one of the Cuban cigars his hounds dragged up from the strand.
How was I to know there were fireworks rockets in that crate of Havanas? Am I
to be held responsible for the carelessness of communistic warehouse
labourers? To this day Uncle G thinks I was only pretending to be asleep (he
believes everything Grogan tells him, but everyone else knows our cookie says
more than her prayers at times). Incidentally, I can't tell you how cross he
is when these music bits turn up in the Gazette. What do you expect from an
old party who thinks music begins and ends with John Phillip Sousa, Yeti
folksongs and perhaps a bit of that fellow Lester Lenin or whoever. That's
what comes of his hobbnobbing with the highhat crowd and reading the Bible
hours on end, which makes Uncle G quite terrifying at times (but not to me,
mind you).
Make no mistake, I'm quite unafraid of the old fellow, and I'd rather suck
on a hospital mop than drink that bloody awful tea first thing in the morning
, never mind the family fortune. I wasn't a bit surprised when fire (arson
suspected) destroyed several of our tea warehouses on St. Kilda last March, to
tell you the truth. Thank God I was here at the time, chatting up my
girlfriends on the Internet, or I'd have been blamed for that fire too. I
suppose when the damage at the Hong Kong warehouse is investigated there will
be but one name on my uncle's list of suspects, when everyone knows it's
spontaneous combustion set off by the creosote in the tea. Just ask my Mum,
who was in charge of the Swinehurst Fire Brigade, now disbanded owing to lack
of interest and taken over by the Yetis, like everything else around here,
crafty foreigners that they are. If you ask me, it is they who have poisoned
Uncle G's mind against the Geographic Society. They don't like anyone, except
perhaps space aliens or the odd pirate or those ghastly little anthropopagi
from Greenland, to come here, for fear that they will be photographed or put
in a zoological garden or some other fantastical nonsense. Who'd want to look
at a picture of Milton Ku, much less come upon that face unawares in the
public gardens! Nobody in the world, but there you are, the paranoid Yeti mind
knows not sweet reason.
Before you go I'd just like to add that if you have any old computer stuff
or neon signs you no longer need at home please pitch them into the ocean and
they will wash up on our beach ere long. Toss in a few bottles of Beefeater
while you're at it. Toss in anything but tea.
Speaking of which, it's back into the hall for you now, and down
the stairs, and down another hallway,and so on, just head towards the sound of
canes banging and teacups rattling, and if you lose your way the hounds will
find you, no worries.
Bingo
