THE OK GUY

Greg’s an Ok guy.
That is, if you like that sort of guy, otherwise he’s quite capable to come across as a major pain in the ass. Why am I so brutally, sadistically frank, I hear you ask… Well, that’s me, I’m afraid, and if you have something to sell that’s better than honesty, I’ll write you a cheque right now. Anyway, back to Greg…
See, Greg wouldn’t have such a hard time coping with life’s little hang-ups
if he were just a tiny bit more confident!

His main problem seems to lie in that vast field where women usually graze.
He desperately wants to jump that fence, and jump the whole shabang as well, for that matter, but he simply can’t.
His confidence legs are just not long enough.
In fact, you could safely state that he almost hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
Tell you what, I’ll get on with the yarn, and then you can blabber your miserable opinion.
Greg has always had a thing about little white socks.
He used to get quite worked up at school cause the girls wore them as part of their uniform.
Every morning, in class, the guy spent 90% of his time looking at girls’ feet and the remaining 10% figuring out a way to score.
Greg had NEVER had a date.
Eighteen years old and virgin in every possible sense of the word.
Bloody Hell, I am longwinded, aren’t I?

Anyway, one fateful Tuesday, yer man’s last ounce of common sense went on holiday and Greg completely lost the plot.
He did something not even geeks with permanent acne and computer screen burnt out eyeballs would do for love or money.
What he did altered his life to such an extent that should you meet him today, you’d probably think me a terrible liar for saying that he’s indeed the same person.
He somehow managed to hide in the school and after everyone had left the building, he made his way to the gym. That was where the girls changed into their uniforms each morning.
After raiding every single locker, he found himself in possession of some 600 pairs of little white socks and a frightening collection of underwear.
Now, he had to get out of the place, of course….
He chose a window at the back of the building, which looked onto the playing fields.
He opened it, careful not to make any noise, and was about to crawl out when a cruelly sharp 2-inch wooden splinter on the window ledge made friends with Greg’s most valuable assets.
Now, what usually happens when someone’s testicles meet a 2-inch splinter is not that difficult to imagine, and our man kept logic alive by means of a ponderous jump onto a row of metal garbage cans and a scream not even Meatloaf could manage.
Dazed by the pain, Greg staggered in the general direction of the basketball pitch, but was almost immediately apprehanded by none other than the headmaster himself.
The latter marched Greg straight to his office where Greg learnt five important things.
• 1. The Headmaster was very, very gay.
• 2. The Headmaster had every intention to prove that to Greg.
• 3. The Headmaster was going to call the police and subsequently expel Greg from school, unless Greg complied with one or two little experiments the Big Cheese had a mind to try out.
• 4. The Headmaster also liked little white socks, but not on girls, really…
• 5.The Headmaster was actually a very reasonable person, when things went exactly his way.
By the time our guy had grasped the value of Item Number 5, he had become an OK Guy.
By becoming the Headmaster’s steady boyfriend, Greg earned rights to a much improved lifestyle, as well as excellent academic grades.
Ok, he lost the cherry. So what? He drives a BMW and has enough pocket money to go to Cuba.
I must say, he’s still extremely shy around anyone belonging to the opposite sex, and every now and then he seems to walk a bit funny, but heck…. he’s an OK Guy in every gay club on the South Coast, and that proves you that there’s still hope for anyone, no matter how ugly!
The point is quite simple, really. Try hard enough and you’ll get somewhere.
You don’t have to bend over backward to get from A to B… forwards will do.

ARMAGEDDON, Southern England – Part 1

Bottle-On-Sea is a small, boring, oddly-positioned town on the English Riviera, about 25 miles from anything reasonable.
It is a thoroughly pointless place, with nothing worth seeing, visiting or even talking about.
It has no history.
Historians would be very hard put to find any date worth recording, save perhaps when Bottle’s only pub – The Brass Tackle – hosted the East Sussex Women Domino Championship, back in 1976.
There are no shops, except for a dodgy little supermarket right at the edge of town where the newest thing you can buy is guaranteed to have outlived the expiry date by at least three months.
Bottle’s public facilities are practically non-existent.
There is no park, no restaurant, no bar, no club, no cinema, no sports amenities and no stores.
The library only has 50 books and the Town Hall only opens (if there are any punters) one day a week, between 10 and 11am.
Being by the sea is no use, since the ‘beach’ is only 4 foot wide and the bay is used regularly by the nearby nuclear power station as a dumping ground for all sorts of nasty stuff.
Even seagulls are scared of the water.
There is no promenade, of course, to watch sea sunsets from, and anyway, Bottle’s sea front faces south.

There is no police station. The town’s Chief Constable, Mr Greens, operates out of a make-shift office in his garage and the Post Office is in fact the home of his next-door neighbour, Miss Platt.
There is a school, but it’s not functional, for reasons which will become obvious a little later on.
There is a Church, but it’s also empty because it’s Catholic and everyone in Bottle is one hundred percent C of E.
For you foreigners, that’s “Chuch Of England”.

Streets criss-cross one another with Pythagorean symmetry and houses are uncannily identical, down to the last petunia in the front gardens. Hence finding anything is quite impossible and getting lost is an absolute piece of cake.
All in all, the cemetery seems to be the only place likely to be regarded by everyone as a reasonable gathering place.

The people of Bottle are as dull, unremarkable and pointless as their town.
They are unsociable to the nth degree and boring beyond belief.
All, that is, except one: Mr J Crotch, of 24 Cuckoo Road.
Mr Jockling Crotch is a bit of an oddity on several counts.
To start with, he’s a foreigner from north of the border, which makes sense really, since no self-respecting Englishman would move to Bottle unless under mortal threat.
No one knows how he got here in the first place, nor where he comes from, but since this is not a town renowned for being friendly, not many give a hoot.
Nevertheless, Mr Crotch is possibly the most important person in town for a really queer reason: he is the only inhabitant below pensionable age.
Everyone else is over 60!

This annoying little detail makes Mr Crotch the sole holder of EVERY job in Bottle-On-Sea.
He is the town’s postman, fireman, dustman, plumber, electrician, doctor, dentist, undertaker, taxi driver, psychologist, taxidermist, beat policeman, coastguard, mechanic, builder, demolition expert, accountant, insurance broker, driving instructor, roof thatcher and Protestant priest.

Seeing that after practicing so many professions his salary must be somewhere between astronomical and stratospheric, and allowing for the fact that there is no easy way of spending any money in Bottle, Mr Crotch is viewed as someone ‘quite well off’ and, as such, not a person to mess around with.
There are many other obvious reasons for keeping on Mr Crotch’s right side, but I won’t insult your intelligence by listing them.
Let’s just say that, should Mr Crotch decide to have a couple of hours nap at the wrong time, all sorts of terrible things might happen, such as floods, forest fires, virulent infections, roof collapses or stress-related acne. Not to mention the trouble provoked by the sudden absence of basic facilities such as functional telephone lines (yes, he’s the telephone operator as well) or garden pest control.
Jockling Crotch is the sole reason why Bottle-On-Sea still exists and prospers.

However, a dark cloud is looming on the horizon, a terrible cloud, harbinger of a fate so dreadful that it almost doesn’t bear to be put into English words.
On October 13th 2008, only a few months from now, Jockling Crotch – the pillar of Bottle-On-Sea, saviour of a great multitude for two whole decades – turns 60 and is planning to retire.

That’s it. No more work. No more responsibilities.
Now that, in my country, would be jotted down as a pretty large calamity, especially
since the guy is the only one who knows about it and has no intention whatsoever to tell anyone about it until the last minute, maybe even the day after.

Hallelujah.
Ten out of ten for timing.
Seventy-five out of ten for surprise element.
Two hundred and fifty out of ten for sublime callousness, total disregard for public welfare and evil countenance.

For yes, our man is quite evil.
Beyond the benevolent, ‘always ready to serve’ façade, lays a mind twisted with gruesome plans for the blissfully unaware citizens of Bottle-On-Sea.
He’s got a host of things planned for the Big Day, none of which is remotely pleasant.
He’s looking forward to watching a whole town go to the dogs.

At this point, you’ll be thinking ‘oh dear, it’s a foregone conclusion.
I might as well read Cosmopolitan’, and who am I to butt in, but if you were to stop reading now you’d probably regret it.
For starters, you’d never get to know what THE END really looks like.
And then, there’s one small but vital detail which is likely to spice up the situation quite a bit.

You see, someone KNOWS about all this.
Someone has been watching the proceedings from the very beginning and is monitoring the whole thing very closely.
I can hear you thinking ‘oh, my god… it’s GOD! THANK GOD!’
Wrong…
God has nothing to do with Bottle-On-Sea.
He doesn’t even like the place and he’s unlikely to fit such a drab little hole into his holiday schedule.
Who would, anyway?

No, the person who knows about all this is called Marvin.
He’s a postman from a quaint little village in Essex called Broddle who has studied programming at night school for the past three years and is a bit of a wizard with computers.
His wife, Linda, is a really good cook, but that’s totally immaterial.

Marvin is the ‘goodie’, the big hero.
He’s not Tom Cruise, or Sean Connery, and he’s unlikely to feature into anyone’s secret fantasies, but he’s got something no one else has.
He’s one hundred percent, twenty-four hours, seven-days-a-week LUCKY.
Everything he does turns out right in the end, and no matter what deadly peril he finds himself in, something great always happens and he gets out of any situation unharmed.
He’s invincible, indestructible and almost totally fearless.
The only thing he doesn’t like is rabbits, especially the white, fluffy ones.
He had one when he was a kid and one day the rabbit bit him in the nether regions for no reason at all, hence the little phobia.

Marvin is about 5 foot seven and has no hair whatsoever.
He’s the most hairless thing on the planet.
He has a pair of abnormally large blue eyes which always look red in photographs, and weighs between 140 and 160 pounds.
That’s about 75 kilos in metric, but you don’t really need to know that unless you’re going to the Continent on holiday, or something.
He has small feet, size 6 I believe, and a tattoo of Madonna on the right shoulder, which he got done on his 18th birthday and regretted ever since.
All in all, Marvin appears quite ordinary, perhaps bordering on the boring side a bit.
Being a postman, he knows an awful lot of people, but has very few close friends.
However, don’t worry too much, because he’s about to become as popular as fish and chips.

This is where the ‘real’ story begins, in fact. So, let’s recap.
In the red corner we’ve got Marvelous Marvin.
In the blue corner, wearing striped corduroys and a Marks & Spencer tweed shirt, there’s Evil Crotchety Crotch.
In the middle, nobody, cause in this kind of fight there are no rules and the loser is not likely to be seen again afterwards.
The funniest thing, though, is that neither of the protagonists know that they are about to meet in a deadly duel.

TO BE CONTINUED

PIGS FLY

Yes, they most definitely do, and there’s zip all you can do to convince me otherwise.

Come to think of it, you shouldn’t attempt to convince me at all.
See, I’m a sensitive soul, who takes umbrage easily, and God only knows what I would do if you picked an argument with me on this one.
You may, on the other hand, try to understand the nature of my statement.
How? I sense you ask…
Simple.

Given the notion that there is usually a damn good reason for just about anything, it may perhaps spring to your clouded mind to investigate the roots of the matter first.
If done correctly, this course of action may well produce surprising results.
You never know. But, I repeat, it must be done correctly.
Well, how then?
All right.
Let’s start with the basics.
I’ll set up a little scenario to help you grasp matters more easily, ok?
To start with, I’ll give us both names.
Let’s see… I’ll be MARTIN!
Yes, that’s good, ‘cause it’s not too fancy and not too common either.
Unless, of course, you’re from East Sussex, where Martins are fifty to a penny.
You won’t believe how many bleeding Martins I know down there.
One day I might introduce you to a few of them and then you’ll understand what it’s like to be confused.
Anyway, I’m Martin too, now.
I’ll call you… Trevor.
And we’ll assume that you’re from South London.
Camberwell maybe, or Peckham, if you like. You choose.

Ok… Hello Trevor.

At this point you say ‘hello’ back (because it’s the polite thing to do) and then sit back patiently, so I can explain to you what’s going to happen next.
I’m going to write a dialog between you and me.

You read it, then think a bit, and if you’re not a complete dodo you might see the light.
Not a big, huge, piss off neon light.
Perhaps not even a 40 watts light bulb, but at least you won’t feel as if you’re in a coal cellar with a balaclava on the wrong way round.
Ok, ready? Here we go.

Martin – PIGS FLY!
Trevor – Begging your pardon, sir… I didn’t quite catch that. Could you please repeat?
Martin – Pigs fly.
Trevor – I see…. Really?
Martin – They do.
Trevor – That’s interesting.
Martin – Is it?
Trevor – Well, it is…. I suppose…
Martin – Why?
Trevor – Er…. Dunno, really.
Martin – You don’t know? Do you usually say things for no reason?
Trevor – No, really…. Well, I just said it was an interesting concept ….I don’t know. I think I made a mistake….
Martin – A mistake? What mistake?
Trevor – No, really. I was just being polite.
Martin – So if I were to tell you that you were a brainless git you’d be telling me that it was an interesting fact just because it’s polite to acknowledge a statement, right?
Trevor – Well… I don’t know about that…
Martin – Let’s try! You’re a BRAINLESS GIT
Trevor – Pardon?
Martin – You’ve heard. You’re a brainless git.
Trevor – Why?
Martin – Because I think you are.
Trevor – That’s not a nice thing to say!
Martin – Nevertheless, it is my honest opinion. Come to think of it,I also happen to believe that you are an utter imbecile, acomplete fool, the champion of moronity.
Trevor – I say! That’s very RUDE! How can you be so rude to me? I did nothing!
Martin – Exactly! You did bugger all to question my statement and focused on feeling sorry for yourself instead.
Trevor – I did?
Martin – You did.
Trevor – But you started on me!
Martin – Did I? When?
Trevor – When I told you that the notion of pigs flying was interesting.
Martin – Interesting to whom?
Trevor – To me, of course!
Martin – Who gives a damn about you?

At this point, Trevor (that’s you) takes a hyper jump to Coventry and sits on a lonely bench to ponder about the unfairness of life.
He ponders and ponders, until all aspects of his ridiculous existence have been thoroughly out-pondered. Then he completely breaks down.
He screams dementedly at the top of his voice, searching for the most vitriolic insults.
He doesn’t care about the throng of people that, attracted by the sudden noise have gathered in a curious circle around him.
He doesn’t see them, actually.

All he can see is thousands of pigs, streaking across the sky, doing cartwheels just above the cathedral.
And all he can hear is Martin’s voice – calm, collected and painfully clear.
“Told you so…..”