Suki Daps was struck by a melon whilst walking through a Bedford thoroughfare on a dullish Tuesday morning sometime in the late 80s. A police chopper surged and searched local clouds but the fruit’s origin remained obscure. Daps’ autobiography, So I Was Struck By A Mysterious Airborne Melon, was a Christmas best-seller in June 1995.
*
Corbett Yanker and his dog ‘Alan’ (named changed to protect the animal’s identity) claimed to meet an “indivisible man” during an otherwise unremarkable breakfastime walk over the Cotswold Straights. Yanker told A Week in Stuff that “the man was utterly solid and yielded not to blows nor kicks nor stick thwacking. He was crying when he ran off.”
*
Fraser Nelson, sometime editor of comfort rag the Spectator, once told friends over an omelette with eggs breakfast at London’s exclusive Twit’n’Bumble Club that he had been molested on several occasions by a spirit that liked getting into the bath with him. Also, it would often shove straw up his overalls while he polished his collection of ornamental steel leopards, so he said. He then started to add “another time I was sat naked in my trousers…” but the strange tale was interrupted by scribblest AN Wilson’s sudden appearance in the club’s dining tube, the man covered in snow, shivering, wan as a wishbone, shrieking, laughing hysterically and bleeding horribly.
*
Invited for a spell of relaxation, chat and country sports with then-prince Prince Andrew at this royalty complex in Ascot, Japanese dignitaries got more than they bargained for when they started bargaining with the now-contemptible regal spawn. Yamocho Hitachi later told the Tokyo Express: “The creep’s house is a zone of uncontainable evil. Suits of armour chased us down winding corridors, the wall-fixed stuffed heads of dead deer gargled and giggled, slippery hands gripped our ankles.” Cross-examined on Ghost TV in 1992, Andrew denied the incident, claiming to have been “supping sangria in Sicily with Sarah Silvermans, Susan Sarandons and Simon Schamas” on the date in question, despite the fact that no such date in question was ever mentioned. In a tit-for-tat diktat, Japan’s Imperial Centre for World Meetings slapped the prince with a four-week cafeteria ban.
*
Keen diceman Wincey Buggerpoll made a side living as an unofficial Jack the Ripper guide in, bizarrely, Birmingham’s east end. “The Ripper was clearly a well-travelled man – or should that be WOMAN,” Buggerpoll would tell the morbidly curious who found themselves morbidly bored in Birmingham, “and it’s more than merely thinkable that he – or SHE – spent time here, and perhaps even plied his – or HER – terrible trade in the vicinity also as well.” Anyhow, one night, Buggerpole, or, rather, his shredded corpse, turned up, terribly – as already suggested – shredded. Police chased shadows in a traditional ‘who-done-it’ adventure/escapade that yielded chiefly fuck all. So, who did it? Did you? You did it? Truly? Then, confess now to Birmingham Police at their/its website. Reward.
*
Ever been up to your neck in it because of a tea towel? Think again. Have you? Cronis Donga, a West Midlands-based anthropogenic climate change denier with a chip on his shoulder the size of a [redacted], would have to say ‘yes’ (if asked that question(about the tea towel(above))). In 1986, Donga was working as a patsy for the English Gas Institute, which he quite enjoyed and was also quite good at, sources reveal (when sought, found, asked). However, the male, 45 (then(he’s older(now))), suffered appallingly one night – and this is what happened. Walking from somewhere or other to somewhere another, Donga stooped to pluck an apparently discarded item from the byway he was using as a means to traverse the earth’s surface. It was a tea towel.
“It’s a tea towel,” thought Donga, before saying out loud “it’s a tea towel”. The cloth seemed clean, well-folded, creaseless, new, somehow sensual, exciting to touch. He bagged the thing and carried on. But this was only the beginning of his troubles, which hadn’t actually started yet. But then they started, the troubles. The troubles: according to Donga, a tamely rustling bush began to rustle relentlessly, before the twigs parted – and leapt outwards a fiery hell-beast of indescribable proportions (so he didn’t describe them). This thing, this outrage, thrashed in a swirling cloud of sulphurous vapours and plumed a noxious rain of debilitating stench. “Give me back my tea towel” demanded it (the thing, hell-beast, etc). So, Donga did, naturally. Then all was calm. “But he was never the same again,” said Donga’s girl-bride, Chloe, at their wedding in Cambodia the following spring when quizzed by Interpol child sex investigators.
*
The ghost of Karl Marx is said to haunt the Manchester Shipping Library where he penned some his most famous novels. Manifesting mostly on Christmas Eve, Marx’s birthday, the writer’s spirit rattles baubles and flicks tinsel in a playful yet plaintive way. So much so that the library’s commissioners banned Christmas decorations in 1998 in an attempt to kibosh the tinkering revenant’s deviancy. This act, in turn, led to a flurry of bitter newspaper headlines such as “Festive Celebrations Cancelled to Appease Dead Marxist”. With the library facing financial ruin and endless faxed death threats, the decision was overturned.
Mysterious EnGland 
Leave a comment