Incinerate them all, pig after pig, village after village...
Usually when one starts a fire it drags all the local misfits out to poke their nose in where they think it belongs. Surprisingly this time it didn't despite the fact the smoke that was coming off it was like the Chernobyl radiation cloud. We were burning hawthorn and as I say, it was my job to drag the wretched stuff to the fire. The aptly name hawTHORN tore my arms to shreds so they ended up looking like Niklas Kvarforth from Shining's arms:
Suicide is painless...
But personal injury and smoke billowing about like the dust clouds thrown up in Tunguska in 1905 are not what this blog is about. I'm going to tell you about the nutters that came on site as we worked. The first we didn't really have much contact with as he was busy with his work, so without a name to call him we christened him the Kimberworth Commando:
Don't tell em your name, Pike!
You will note his attire. Combat gear, head to foot. This day was the first warm one we've had for a while so he was without his black beret which he otherwise proudly sported. It turns out he wasn't actually in the proper military at all, but had been a member of the TAs. Yes, the Kimmy Commando had been a weekend warrior, cannon fodder on minefield clearance duty. Yet he still clung desperately to this sense of worth as he emptied the bins for the pub. Darren reckoned he had every box set of Dad's Army in his backroom. We were also graced on the site with the presence of David, the ex-miner, ex-taxi-driver, ex-bread maker, ex-airline pilot, ex-public speaker, blue collar green Eco warrior with his own chainsaw:
'I've got my own saw, do you need any help?'
Darren had been filling our heads with stark warnings about gypsies coming on site and eyeing up the tools. He had spotted cars full of gypsies coming into the pub car park, waiting for us to drop our guard. To Darren, every truck that went past was packed full of Romanies slowing down to survey the site for things they could rob. Apparently they were everywhere, so it comes as no surprise to learn that as David approached I thought 'this is it, my number's up!' He was going to slit my throat, rape me to death, steal the chainsaws and eat my babies. But no, he only wanted to know what we were doing with the logs and if he could have them for his Aga. Now, from a previous POST, I had always assumed that only the very posh had Agas. David proved me wrong. He had had one for twenty years and he was as working class as they come.
Agas, now available for the poor!David turned out to be a really nice guy except for one problem. He talked. And he talked. And he talked. And he talked. It was a fucking wonder his jaw didn't fall off. There was no pause in it either, it was just one continuous stream of consciousness. He told us everything in mind numbingly minute detail, we learned all about his stray cat, all about his solo flights and all about how many times he went and picked up 'our Gert' from work. We assumed his wife, 'our Gert', worked both a day shift and a night shift just to get some respite from his continual flow of verbal diarrhea. Having said that he did occasionally come up with a little gem of information, but after four days of listening to him continually whitter on most of it was lost on me. If you can, imagine a stream, nay, a torrent of Human Effluence cascading over you, with the occasional tiny nugget of gold sticking out and that was what listening to David was like.
