Monthly Archives: July 2009

About the Real Birthplace of Trotter’s Flu

08 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Emmjay

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Rupert (they're not laughing now) Grint

Rupert (they're not laughing now) Grint

The Newsflash from the BBC was most alarming:

4/07/09 BBC

Harry Potter star ‘had swine flu’

Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint is recovering from a “mild bout” of swine flu, his publicist has said.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8134632.stm)

Well, we’re truly stuffed now! Obviously, we can’t even go to the movies any more and, unless we wear a burka, we certainly can’t go and see our most beloved film. Not now that its beloved star has succumbed to the ravages of this insidious malady! The Atomou household is most distressed at the moment and lives in tremulous trepidation. Lest we, too, get snatched by this ever-spreading contagion, we won’t even borrow videos until this cataclysm of sneezing and splattering ends and we won’t know when that happens until the white dove we’ve sent out of our ark returns alive, free of sneezes and with an olive branch in its beak.

We will play scrabble for a while longer.

But the world’s health authorities have it all wrong. The origin of the flu, I mean. And the appropriate medication. Sure, they’re right about it bouncing off pigs but they’re not right about Mexico. Nor the medication. Mexico wasn’t the birthplace of this pulmonary curse.

No, its birthplace was a place called Aeaea. Two letters put in sequence two and a half times. The first two vowels of the alphabet. If you say it out loud enough it’ll sound like you’re in unbearable pain; and that’s why it’s called that. Aeaea was an island. Might well still be an island but Roman writers reckoned it’s the modern Mount Circeo, or Cape Circaeum, in Italy, on the west coast. “Circeo,” they thought, “from Circe, the witch goddess who lived there.” They were probably right.

It was a sad island, inhabited by a sad goddess.

And the medication is a little root. Moly, the gods call it. It’s a black thing that has a milk-white flower emerge from bits of it.

Aeaea was the fifth place that Odysseus and his men visited on their way home from Troy. In the end, out of all of them only Odysseus will make it home. The rest will be either slaughtered, or eaten by Cyclops, or by beasts of the sea or drowned in the vast, salty, wine-red waters of Poseidon. That god, brother of Zeus, was furious with that lot of Greeks and with Odysseus in particular, who had, not only blinded one of Poseidon’s sons, his handsome giant, the one-eyed, the wheel-eyed, the Cyclops Polyphemus, but he had also boasted about it and taunted Polyphemus with unbearable insults. That was hubris! Unforgivable stuff for a mortal! So what if Polyphemus had killed and eaten six of Odysseus’ men? Divine creatures can do as they please.

So, Poseidon’s anger was implacable and it would take all of Athena’s charm and ten years of wandering by Odysseus to convince the other gods –while Poseidon was away feasting in Ethiopia- to grant Odysseus his home-return. Nothing is more valuable to a mortal than his home-return. The gaze at his homeland as he approaches it, after a long absence arouses the greatest delight in all mortals.

Athena loved the resourceful scallywag.

“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after sacking the holy citadel of Troy. Many the men whose cities he saw, whose ways he learned. Many the sorrows he suffered at sea, while trying to bring himself and his friends back alive. Yet despite his wishes he failed to save them, because of their own un-wisdom, foolishly eating the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.”[1]

So begins Homer’s “Odyssey.” Odysseus’ men, though brave and brutal on the battle field with hearts full of raging blood, away from the blood-soaked ground were simply stupid. Heads full of straw. So they were deprived of their home-return.

Odysseus and his men had already endured much hardship and adventure before they got to Aeaea. They had just left the island of the god of the Winds. What a billowing stuff up! Before that, they were on the island of the Cyclopes. Six of the men were grabbed by the giant, hurled against the wall of his cave like unwanted pups, and eaten. Some thrown onto the fire of his hearth, others boiled and yet others eaten raw.

Before that they were on the land of the lotus eaters. Odysseus nearly lost all his men and himself there because that fruit made the eaters happy and care free. Useless, in other words. Unwilling to move from under the tree.

And before that, the first port of call after Troy, they had a war with the Cicones. There, his men showed just how stupid they were and how the ten-year war in Troy had completely replaced the compassion in their hearts, with bellicose brutality.

Odysseus and his ship entered the Aeaea’s harbour slowly, carefully, anxiously. Their past adventures had sharpened their wariness. Who lived there? What sort of mortals, what sort of gods? All they could see from their ship was a thick forest. Odysseus decided to send down Eurylochus with a scouting party. These men walked up and into the dense forest and, after a while, found in the centre of a clearing, an enormous palace made out of cut stone. Lions and wolves roamed about around it but they seemed to be tame. As they say in the classics, little did they know! The animals were, of course, drugged with a powerful and sinister potion concocted by the owner of the palace.

Eurylochus pricked his ears and peeled his eyes.

Still panting from the run back to the ship and trembling with fear, he tells Odysseus later.

“Someone inside, a woman or a goddess, was singing in a clear voice as she walked to and fro, in front of a huge tapestry. The men shouted and called to her, and she came to open the shining doors, and invited them to enter: and so they innocently followed her inside. But I, suspecting it was a trap, stayed behind. Then they all disappeared, and no one emerged again, though I sat a long time watching.”[2]

Odysseus flung his bow and a quiver full of arrows over one shoulder, strapped his great bronze, silver-embossed sword over the other and stepped ashore. He had almost reached the palace when he was stopped by Hermes, the messenger of the gods.

“Wretched man, where are you off to?” He asks Odysseus. “Wandering the hills of an unknown island all alone? Your friends are penned in Circe’s house, pigs in close-set sties… You must take a powerful herb with you, and go to Circe’s house, and it will ward off the day of evil. I will tell you all Circe’s fatal wiles…”

Then Hermes tore out a herb from the ground and handed it to Odysseus.

Odysseus obeyed the god. As well as the goddess with the lovely tresses, who was quite taken aback by this new phenomenon. She has never come across such obstinate recalcitrance. No other mortal had withstood the potency of her potion. But then she remembered. Hermes had warned her that Odysseus would arrive and that she had to look after him before she let him go. She calms down and tells him to, “Come, sheathe your sword, and let us two go to my bed, so we may learn to trust one another by twining in love.”

And so (cutting a long story short) after Circe gave back his men their human features, she and Odysseus went to her fine bed.

The Moly root worked.

Odysseus and his men were looked after for a whole year. The softest beds, the sweetest wine, the tastiest of morsels, the most beautiful minister’s of Aphrodite’s rites. When the year was up, when all the seasons rolled the one after the other, the men approached Odysseus and told him to remember Ithaca.

Odysseus remembers,

“My proud heart yielded to their words… but I went to Circe’s lovely bed, and clasped her knees, and the goddess listened as I spoke winged words: ‘Circe, keep the promise you gave and send me on my way, since my spirit is eager for home, and so too are my friends’, who weary me with their grief whenever you happen to be absent.”

To this the lovely goddess replied swiftly:

“Odysseus, man of many resources, scion of Zeus, son of Laertes, don’t stay here a moment longer against your will, but before you head for home you must make another journey.”

That journey, of course, was to Hades. Circe guided him through its portals and there Odysseus saw his mother, whom he tried to embrace three times but failed, where he saw Achilles who said he’d rather be a slave among the living than a king among the dead, where he saw the great general Agamemnon, who, the moment he arrived home, was slaughtered by his wife, Klytaimestra and her lover, Aigisthus and where he saw –the shock nearly killed him also- one of his mates, Elpenor, the youngest of them, who was alive only minutes earlier!

“…not one of the cleverest or bravest in battle. Heavy with wine he had climbed to the roof of Circe’s sacred house, seeking the cool night air, and had slept apart from his friends. Hearing the stir and noise of their departure, he leapt up suddenly, and forgetting the way down by the long ladder, he fell headlong from the roof. His neck was shattered where it joins the spine: his ghost descended, to the House of Hades.”

But that journey is another loooong story.

Not Mexico, then and not Tamiflu but Aeaea and Moly, taken with a shot of ouzo at the Pig’s Arms with all of the mortal mates one can get.

….. another fabulous piece from ……. Atomou

[1] Translation by Tony Kline http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey1.htm

[2] http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey10.htm

Ashes to Ashes

07 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in The Sports Bar

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England selectors contemplating the task

England selectors contemplating the task

“Tired of endless defeat, the MCC calls in the big guns to bolster the selection committee. We find them assembled in their private box above the SCG where they hope to get some pointers watching the colonials.

Nelson, dispirited that Hardy’s fate is to be 12th man again, has devolved into a brown study and will not be cheered. Elizabeth, on the other hand, enigmatically remembers Darnley’s powerful leg spin technique. Doctor Grace, proving that even death can’t keep a good man down, is padded up and practicing a few blocking strokes; while Bond thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to shoot the lot of them and start again.”

Warrigal Mischief

A Rugby League Player Not Charged by Police Today

07 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in The Sports Bar

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Possibly Traquin Tough

Possibly Tarquin Tough

In a shock announcement , Tarquin Tough, the new head of the NRL said that no player has been apprehended and charged by police today for:

  • Drunken and disorderly behaviour;
  • Possession of drugs (pharmaceutical or recreational);
  • Possession of a firearm, licensed or unlicensed;
  • Assault (common or sexual or aggravated);
  • Grievous bodily harm;
  • Possession of child pornography;
  • Rape (actual or attempted);
  • Murder;
  • Manslaughter;
  • Or showing up late for training.

Mr Tough said that several players were facing the judiciary for unspecified misdemeanours like sponsorship violations and the League was likely to impose heavy fines just to impress on fans how poor they are in comparison with their idols – the ridiculously overpaid buffoons with poor self discipline and bad attitudes towards women.

He then mumbled something about a minor ram raid on an ATM, and a holday home on the Gold Coast.

Football journos are currently checking to see whether the season is on, or off or whether it’s April 1. Bat Masterson of the Daily Telepathy was quoted as saying “Give them a fair go, it’s not even lunchtime yet”.

Politics in the Pub – Reuben Brand from the Middle East

06 Monday Jul 2009

Posted by in Politics in the Pig's Arms, Reuben Brand

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Reuben Brand - Pakistan, March 2009
Reuben Brand – Pakistan, March 2009

All good cyber pubs need a foreign correspondent to keep the patrons well-informed and up to date. Our man in the Middle East is Reuben Brand.

Reuben’s following article, “Pakistan’s dirty laundry” was first published in Online Opinion – Australia’s leading journal for social and political debate:

And you can see his portfolio at

http://www.reubenbrand.com/?cat=13

The ongoing war with the Taliban has nothing to do with freedom and democracy: it is a distraction. Look beyond the curtain and you will find a lot of dirty laundry.

The war for civilisation, the war on terror, the war for oil, natural resources, control, freedom, whatever you want to call it, it is here and it has made itself quite comfortable in the minds, media and lounge rooms of the world.

Pakistan is now public enemy number one and the US are making no attempts at hiding the fact that they want to bring this nuclear armed Islamic Republic to its knees. The war with the belligerent Taliban has become a joke, a proxy, and a distraction. And of course, as always, it is the innocent civilians caught, quite literally, in the crossfire who suffer most.

Thanks to US pressure, and the basic ultimatum of “either you fix the problem, or we’ll do it for you – Iraq style,” more than two million people are now refugees, baking in the oppressive summer heat in makeshift camps. With no proper amenities, little to no medical services and living in appalling conditions, it won’t take long before serious disease and sickness sets in. Not such happy campers.

So what exactly is this indigenous Pakistani Taliban that we are so obsessed about? The reality is they are nothing more than an excuse, used by both East and West to justify more violence. Sure they have committed some heinous and barbaric crimes, but at this point in “the war” they are now seen as means to an end. Nothing more than pawns in a larger chess match for control.

“We are not fanatics! We want what everyone wants. We want to be able to live our lives in peace!” said Omar, a local Pathan businessman, as we sit in his office in the heart of Peshawar.

“The Americans continuously terrorise us with their constant drone attacks in the tribal agencies, the Taliban don’t make it any easier for us to live in peace and the media portray us all as terrorists! We are not terrorists!” he said with frustrated passion.

Another man then spoke up, telling me in broken English that most of what the West see are the actions of common criminals: “most of these men are not even Taliban,” he said, “they are criminals and miscreants who are bought by external agencies like the CIA and India’s RAW agents to further destabilise Pakistan”.

Later that evening Omar kindly offered to take me into the centre of the Swat Valley, a Taliban stronghold. I assured him that my fair Aussie complexion and somewhat pathetic excuse for a beard was no match for the trained eyes of Taliban spies.

“I like my head firmly attached to my body” I said jokingly. He laughed, “You will be perfectly safe when you’re with me. You don’t have to worry about security, this is our insurance plan” he said, handing me his Kalashnikov. “I drive into some very remote parts of the tribal belt and sometimes into Afghanistan as part of my job, so I need this (weapon) for my protection,” he explained.

Later we heard a huge explosion as we sat drinking sweet buffalo milk tea – a music shop had been blown up, it was just up the road from his office – the media reported it the next day as an act of terrorism and, of course, the Taliban were responsible. But Omar believed it was nothing more than the jealousy of a competitor who wanted to generate more business for himself. Who needs an expensive media campaign when all you need to do is blow up the competition and blame it on the Taliban?

So the Taliban have become scapegoats. One such incident came as no surprise as only a few days ago a friend told me about a mulvi (religious leader) from his village, who had been discovered as a Hindu agent working for India. The man had been posing as a religious leader; he taught Islamic scripture and led the prayers in the local mosque; but it wasn’t until the inquisitive minds of the local children began to probe that his elaborate ruse became undone.

They saw him dancing and listening to pop music in the mosque. On telling their parents they were quickly scolded and called liars, but as time passed and the so called mulvi began asking for food enough for 20-plus men each night, the villagers became suspicious.

When asked who the food was for he would reply “guests” but no one was seen entering or leaving the mosque, until one morning the villagers found a group of Taliban fighters’ asleep inside. So again, it begs the question: who are the indigenous Taliban if some of them are not even Pakistani? These faux Taliban fighters’ are an excuse; they are the perfect playing field for the political motives of external agencies bent on further destabilising an already unstable country.

(Cultural note to self: When posing as a religious leader in a village in Pakistan do not be so stupid as to have a Bollywood dance-off in the mosque!)

So why destabilise this third world country? What does it have that the rest of the world so desperately craves? It sure isn’t its open sewers and copious piles of garbage. You don’t think it has something to do with Pakistan being the geographic doorway to Asia and the Middle East do you? Unlike Iraq, Pakistan has nukes. Unlike Afghanistan it has Osama bin Laden. And of course, it has an oil and gas route that the US wants for its Trans-Afghan pipeline. Did I mention the nukes? Lucky Pakistan.

If left to its own devices Pakistan has the potential to become a very powerful and prosperous country. Agriculture would blossom in its extremely fertile soil; it has its own oil reserves, nuclear capabilities, strategic trade routes, and natural resources galore. But who are we kidding? The first world lives on the back of the third world. They carry us. Perish the thought of living in a world without sweatshops and soccer balls, fake Reeboks, child labour and bootleg DVDs. Without the third world we would have no first world.

To make matters worse, there are also whispers for the need to break Pakistan up into smaller nation states. If you take away the sovereignty of a country and it makes it a lot easier to control.

A good friend of mine recently had a gun held to his head and was robbed of all his personal possessions in Lahore, one of Pakistan’s major cities. A senior government official later told me that “when the crime rate dramatically increases in certain areas, it is usually a sign that the Taliban are on the move … They send out gangs of thieves to steal what they can as a means of funding their operations.”

Just like my friend in Lahore, Pakistan also regularly falls victim to the rule of the gun. But you have to ask yourself; what is the difference between a military dictatorship which oppresses its citizens and rapes the country via greed, power and fear, to that of another militant force that comes under the guise of religion? Both regimes share fundamentally flawed objectives. Pakistan cannot afford either if it wants to survive.

The sad reality now is that democracy has become a beggar in Pakistan: it lives, starving, in the minds of many while greed and corruption remain fat and opulent. The fanatical religious factions and corrupt politicians, who routinely bend to the will of external influence, are dividing the country and tearing shreds off any hope of Pakistan moving forwards.

Keep an entire country occupied with an internal threat and you’re well on your way to imposing pseudo democracy. Or maybe with President Zardari’s track record he has better credentials as a dictator. Either way, fear is a great medium for control.

Kerobokan Gets Father O’Way

04 Saturday Jul 2009

Posted by in Mark, Politics in the Pig's Arms

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Sandy O'Way and Friend

Sandy O’Way and Friend

Well, Father O’Way here, I mean look firstly she told me she was sixteen, sorry not my child, I was outta town that night anyway, I was just trying to show her the Heimlich Manoeuvre honest, boy so many questions. So the Bish banishes me to Indonesia, over a little fling with the housekeeper and bit of dope left in my boogie board bag, I mean it was only a few kilos. Filling in for 2 weeks at Kerobokan Prison as resident Chaplain with my little Shappy, I mean, this was going to be hell, pardon the pun.

Shappy said most people sleep on the floor of their cell. Hers sleeps 6 and is a tight fit. I asked why they didn’t use bunk beds. “It’s very tight in there.” said Shappy, pointing to her sarong, hmmm I thought, I love a tight fit. Shappy said she couldn’t give me any info on what was going on. I said, “But people are interested in your mental state and your cleavage oops I mean conditions?” She said she was holding up okay and when I told her that the guards and the media were saying she wasn’t accepting visitors, she said don’t believe everything you read in the press, especially anything on the bulletin board at the Pig’s Arms. Shappy said there’s no tennis court at Kerobokan as reported in the newspaper, I mean fecking hell, no tennis court!

I asked her about the lack of daylight, she said she has gotten used to the fluorescent light being on the whole time, “Christ, oops sorry Father, not even a fecking energy saver”. The press likes to exaggerate everything and one source said she had not seen the light of day for 6 months. When I saw her she looked tanned, more tanned than me. She has an ample breast line, curvy waist, long legs and a million dollar smile. “Father, Father”, she yelped, “No hands please, but lower Father, much much lower”.

We bribe the guard with a Pig’s Arms t-shirt to let us go downtown, I mean, who wouldn’t want a Pigs Arm’s t-shirt. We walk to the Hotel Intan Bali and stop for a bevy at the Kakatua Lobby Bar. Shappy says the beers are crap here. I tell her I have a six pack of Trotters, she looks at me “Father, I’d do anything for a Trotters, I mean anything”. So we go down the beach and we have a photo taken of us in the sand as we knock back a few ales. I ask Shappy if there was one message to give people back home, something that would show that she was innocent. After a long pause she replied “Yes Father, can someone mind my hydro!”

from the Pig’s Arms’ correspondent in Bali, well, Hung

Biking to Timbuktu

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in The Other Side of the Carpark

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The Mighty Ducati 900ss

The Mighty Ducati 900ss

If there’s something more captivating than cuddling up to a quietly ticking Ducati 900SS on a coldish night in the Brindabellas and disappearing a flask of that fine product from Bundaberg (not the molasses, Merv, the distilled afterthought), then I’m yet to discover it.

Bike touring on a big twin is something delightful and an adventure that I can heartily recommend to readers, non-readers – and would be readers – of that old Robert M Pirsig classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. As Mr P says, it gives one the opportunity to travel in the landscape, as opposed to seeing it flash past in the climate controlled six-speaker sound system four wheeled tin cocoon.

In summer one can savour the searing blast of a run across the Hay Plains at a fair clip in an open-face helmet and strain the occasional hopper through the moustache in a headlong rush to the next schooner of life saving chilled foamy liquid – carefully balancing a couple of hundred kilos of fine Italian metalwork, exquisite engineering and completely unpredictable electrics with the need to stay under the legal limit but be relaxed and wet enough to slip through the drought.

The point is to ride a machine that has a fair chance of allowing you to kill or main yourself, and an equal chance of not starting in the first place – leaving you to watch people you used to think were your mates disappear in a haze of smoke and raucous laughter down your street on only their back wheels, leaving you to fulfil the role of designated gooseberry – whose job it is to call Emergency Services when only Tommos Blue Heeler returns on Sunday night.

Unless you ride a classic bike, you miss out on the adrenalin rush associated with listening through the roar of bevel drive camshafts and mechanically-closed valves for those tiny telltale sounds that suggest a bearing is on the way out at 6,000 revs and you will be tasting the tarmac before you get to Bulahdelah. Go ahead. Nobody is going to notice you watching the temperature gauge and getting ready to go for the clutch.

Riding a big old bike and maybe sailing to Hobart are the last two ways you can scare yourself shirtless and experience the thrills and let’s face it pure terror of getting from Time to Timbuktu.

So how come it is those two dilettante fairies on SBS – Ewan Macgregor and Charlie Boorman can turn a major event like riding from John O’Groats to Capetown into the biggest and most boring festival of todger bothering on the small screen ?

Did you catch any of that tripe ? I watched just the first episode and saw them struggle mightily with really fascinating things like getting a visa for their Yank friend to go through Libya. Next time I’m going to ride through Libya, I’m going to enlist a couple of drop dead gorgeous ladies native to that turf to help ease my application through their customs formalities. Yeah, right.

That, and Charlie’s dear wife being hospitalised just before kick off with some semi-fatal chest infection (in true scout fashion the old trout insisted that he go and she promised to pull through and cough a few encouraging bon mots down the sat line). Give me strength.

From Chuck and Ew, I learnt quite a lot about international long distance bike travel. Apparently these last thirty years, I’ve been doing it all wrong. Instead of freezing crossing from Strachan to Hobart and getting snowed on in February (saved only by an open fire, a steak, a kilo of chocolate and several rums at the Derwent Bridge pub), I was supposed to be rescued by my backup crew and take a warm bath in the mobile home that was supposed to be following us a few dozen metres behind,

Just in case, you understand.

In case some of the extras from the remake of Deliverance wanted to get us to interact with the local gene pool – like it or not. Sorry, I’m hopeless at doing pig impressions.

I think I need a few million dollars worth of film crew, support vehicles, the finest touring machines, a spare parts catalogue larger than California, several managers, my personal field surgeon, masseuse and a charismatic mate just like Charlie with eyes like two piss-holes in the snow. The advantage is that nobody could tell that Charlie has just ridden non-stop through the deserts of Sudan (Go Ian Drury ! – I always wanted to squeeze him into a piece.) because Charlie always looks like that. The purlieu of the mega wealthy – ultimate scruff – and the ability to hire someone far less attractive than oneself as a sidekick. That’s IT ! I have gone through life totally without a Charlie-esque sidekick ! Although Merv would argue that I AM a Charlie-esque sidekick – or he might have said dropkick. I’m not sure.

Through Ewan and Charlie’s august travel doco I also learnt how to cultivate a look somewhere between puzzled incomprehension and stifled frustration – possibly caused by having dental work inferior to my handsome, unfazed movie star colleague. Or possibly because I have no actual idea what’s going on now, or what’s going to happen next – neither of which do I care to donate ordure over which of whatever. Of.

Hang on. Can you wait on a bit ? I’m practising diagnosing a mechanical problem by staring blankly at the silent engine cases and getting ready for my jovial and patronising exchanges with local tribesmen. This one insists on giving me his spear ……..a fair trade for a travel doco this bad……

Emmjay

Home Birthing in the Inner West

01 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Ladies Lounge

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Porpoise-built Home Birth

Porpoise-built Home Birth

(Gerard Oosterman)

Home birthing.

In the same street but opposite, lived a man and a woman. She an artist, he an artist by exterior only. You know the type, totally esoteric in giving answers to even the simplest question. Unable to straight talk and everything imbued with a deep meaning but totally away from comprehension. He was on his third marriage and happily ignored his kids from previous encounters but always ready to criticise the terrible ‘middle classes’. His latest wife was pregnant and ready to ‘unpack’ the baby. Both were ardent believers in the alternative world of Bach remedies and early morning Chakras aligning themselves to magic columns and circles. The birth was going to be a ‘home under water birth’ in the garden and after baby just born but still attached to umbilical cord, would be kept under water for the first five minutes of his or her life. This was all part of the essential but incomprehensible deeper involvement of mysticism and very Sufism related multiple and opposite meanings.

The whole street would be kept informed and noise be kept to a minimum. The husband had rigged up an old cast iron bath with an empty 40 gallon drum elevated on bricks with a wood fire underneath next to the bath, and our old above ground pool pump would be circulating warm water from drum to the bath. The time had arrived and being mid winter the fire under the drum was kept up with a never ending supply of old timber remnants from renovations that seemed to be going on all year around everywhere.

Majestically and totally very hirsute, the huge form of the wife appeared. We had front stall looks from the upper storey of our house direct into their garden across the road. She plunged into the bath, ready for the delivery of this sub-marine baby. The moaning started and the husband was flat out stoking the fire and holding the wife submerged. The pump was revving at fever pitch circulating the water that was getting so hot at one stage that the wife had to get out letting things cool down a bit. In the meantime, the husband in an act of supreme solidarity, (his astral travel the night before had taken him to powerful and hitherto unknown regions) stripped off and stepped in the bath behind his wife. Both squatted down and he held her from behind, shouting ‘push, push’, you bitch, push!

She now had much less space and was holding her legs up in the air above the bath but also sometimes against the rim to help the pushing and straining. The screaming increased in intensity and volume, the timbre of her voice not unlike a badly tuned hurdy gurdy being played in a tiled underground rail tunnel in Moscow. Our kids and their friends were hanging out of the windows and still no sign of the underwater miracle. The dogs were howling and barking in tune with the screaming wife. This went on for a few hours with both getting in and out of the bath, adjusting the temperature and fire. Some of the neighbours were shrugging their shoulders and others voicing disapproval. Not a baby in sight and the crowds started dissipating. Out of the blue, a siren was getting closer and closer. An ambulance appeared, a stretcher was produced and the poor woman dripping and with skin like a plucked chicken was without further ado strapped in and carried to the ambulance. The husband still starkers standing on the road near the ambulance, with hanging testicles like walnuts in a sock, was muttering incantations, but the baby was delivered at the hospital, a little girl.

Up until this day no one ever found out who called the ambulance. I am still wondering myself!