Spring Awakening

To: Marjorie Bathsheba Catheter Jodrell-Bentley

Subject: RE: Is all well?

Dearest Bats,

I am so sorry for the long delay in my correspondence. Rest assured that my tardiness is not through reluctance, but through the fact that both my hands became badly sprained when trying to haul Miss Halliwell off the awnings of the Barrow Boy and Banker. Sadly she put up quite a struggle and I have not had full use of my fingers again until relatively recently.

To be brutally frank I honestly had not been aware how much of a hip action she can manage when she wriggles. The image of her “interacting” with the traffic cone while the paramedics ministered to my injuries will, I fear, haunt me until my final breath.

And also one suspects, to the final breaths of the road-worker she wrested it from.

Judging by the news reports your members also put on a particularly memorable turn. I take it Mrs McCalder is the member whose antics were described by police as that of “a small tartan fountain leaping about and swearing about chewing gum and dogs’ leavings”?

I hope the, perhaps inevitable, fallout of our New Years’ dinner has not put you off the idea we both floated of organising a gathering in the spring?

Clammy.

Words of Wisdom

Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.

— Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Top Tip!

  • Alternative Medicine

    Miss Havelock considers that as far as alternative medicines go, Gin is most efficacious as a local anaesthetic and sterilising agent when taken internally. If applied in sufficient quantity you won’t feel a thing for hours (or, for the adventurous, the whole of 1974).