Gentle Games

This week I had intended to - rather pretentiously - write a heartfelt discourse on the circle of life. What with people getting married and relatives having babies over the weekend it was all making my lower lip slightly too wobbly for comfort.

Fortunately, my laptop's decision to unceremoniously die leaving me without easy access to either word processing resources or the glorious world wide web, as nobody calls it anymore, has saved us all from a barrage of over-sentimentality.

However, such is my dedication to David Marston Writes that I'm sitting at public access computers at work writing this and hoping no-one's looking over my shoulder.

Therefore, without further ado, I present a short little ditty in the style of Craig Taylor's much missed 1,000,000 Tiny Plays About Britain:

At the sweaty halfway point of a bank holiday three men sit amongst the aftermath of a garden barbecue somewhere in Southern England's suburbia. For the sake of argument their names are Chunks, Hunks and Spunks.

Hunks: We could play cricket.

Spunks: It's a bit of a bumpy lawn.

Chunks: We don't own any stumps.

Hunks: I meant French cricket.

Chunks: Or a bat.

Spunks: There's not room, is there? It's too narrow, really. You wouldn't want to make a diving catch. You might end up speared on a fence post.

Hunks: Were you really planning on making a diving catch?

Chunks: I'm not completely convinced a lack of space is the principle obstacle here.

Hunks: What about badminton?

Spunks: I think we're going to encounter similar problems of there being more things in the way than clear runs.

Hunks: Boules?

Spunks: Ah, mais oui. C'est bien.

Chunks: Ou es le gare?

Hunks: Ca va?

Spunks: On y va.

Chunks: Le baton!

Hunks: Ca va bien.

Spunks: On y va!

Chunks: Le chat sur la table.

Hunks: Je ne comprends pas.

Spunks: On y va!

Several cliche filled minutes later.

Spunks: Boules? Could do, could do.

Chunks: We don't have a boules set?

Hunks: But do we have any onions?

Chunks: Onions?

Hunks: They're French enough.

Spunks: We'd need to wear stripey jumpers and berets.

Hunks: It's a bit hot.

Chunks: What about the jack? We'd need something more clearly different than just a small onion.

Hunks: A garlic?

Chunks: How about this moldy old lemon?

And as the onions gently sailed through the air slowly shedding their skin thasnks to the grssy abrasions, sending up occasional puffs of citrus juice upon collision with the jack and leaving increasingly pungent smells on the fingers of the three men the sunshine continued slowly turning the world into a calm and pleasant place.

As PG Wodehouse's Wooster was keen on misquoting: God was in his Heaven and all seemed to be right with the world.