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
