Kimberworth Chainsaw Massacre

Over on his Dreamland Chronicles blog, Logan Josh was writing about nutters he has met through work, now far from making this a mutual cock sucking session I suggest you read it. As it happens I have also been working for the past week in the company of nutters. My father is a tree surgeon/landscape gardener and I have been helping him and his sometime work partner Darren on a rather large job which consisted of seemingly cutting down primary rain forest on the outskirts of Rotherham. My main task was dragging the trees onto a fire and burning them on site.

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.

D Day + 23741

Today is the 65th Anniversary of the D Day landings. As we were driving to work John and I were listening to BBC York. Some Old Dear had called in to tell the presenters about her D Day Memories, althought most of them seemed to take place in 1947, three years after the Normandy Landings. Anyway, John suggested that I ring up tell the presenters about my Grandfather's memories of D Day. It would go something like this:

'Yes Granddad used to tell me all about his times on the Normandy Beaches, he said he had a great time. He remembers it like it was yesterday, he told me that once those landing craft dropped their ramps, it was like a turkey shoot. Men were dropping like flies, but he kept going. The bodies were piling up and the place was like an abattoir. Finally they got on the beach and the killing continued. Yes, Granddad shot a lot of Americans from his MG42 machine gun post that day. He spent a lot of time in Argentina after the war...'

Granddad mans his post...

We have the daughter of the house owner and her partner here at the moment, they are back in York for a wedding at the weekend. They live in London, she is a Doctor and he is in 'finance'. They have that confident, affable demeanor that the rich carry around with them. He is cleaner cut than I ever manage to be, even two minutes after shaving. They are so rich that last night they put the dishwasher on after only loading two plates, two cups and two sets of cutlery into it. John and I usually load the machine over a week and are very careful when we set the thing working, due to cost of washing up tablets and liquid, not to mention the waste of water. Anything smaller than a full load we wash by hand. It also inspired a converstion in John and I about what level of richness you have to be to be able to afford an Aga. There is an Aga in this house and we figured an Aga serves as a yardstick to measure richness. If you have one, you are rich, if you 'have always wanted an Aga' you are poor. That's the law, right there.

Champagne? Check. Oysters? Check. Aga? Negative = NOT RICH