Simply Sue: Getting Stuck Into The Beastley Business
"It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't superglued myself to the pig.'' Sue Papworth's column is one long first-sentence-to-last chuckle.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t superglued myself to the pig.
Or, to be more accurate, to the pig’s spectacles. It broke them when it fell off the mantelpiece, though you’d probably guessed that already.
The Myopig is a pottery porker that sat on my overmantel for some time with a pair of pot specs on the end of its snout, peering short-sightedly in the general direction of the West Wing of Papworth Towers. A particularly violent blast of wind down the chimney knocked over the picture of an unfriendly troll that had its back to the pig, and they both crash landed in the hearth.
The pig came off worst.
Swift surgery renovated the pig, but I ended up perched on the kitchen stool in the bathroom, dangling the afflicted hand in a bowl of hot soapy water. I had quite a long time for meditation whilst waiting for the earthenware hornrims to dissolve away from my digits.
I’d like to say that I meditated profoundly upon the deeper mysteries of life, but actually, I mused on the Natural History of Kirkburton ¾ or at any rate the bit of it generally found on my mantelpiece and adjacent flat surfaces ¾ and it got me worried.
As well as the pot porker, there’s Gavin and Ronald, flexible creatures unknown to zoological science, the gift of an old friend who said they clearly belonged with me. Hmm. They are luminous, and live seething gently in a small box next to the Penguin of Paradise. (His everyday name is Plod, as he’s a very serious-looking bird who should have a loo brush sticking out of his head, but has been traumatised by having a spider plant grow out of his rear end instead.)
Basil and Rathbone are inseparable, having been given birth to simultaneously by one of those machines with a little crane in, in an arcade in Whitby. The thing spoke to me in Professor Stephen Hawking’s voice, so I had to put my 50p in, and B & R were the result. They could be a lizard Charles Darwin paid to go away, and the result of a friendship between a bald monkey and a labrador.
Hayley Hen (go on, drop your aitches) and her friend and advisor Dyspepsia are deeply miserable-looking birds, clearly from another galaxy altogether, found hiding from the FBI at the Tuesday Market.
By the time the glue dissolved, I was starting to understand the stunned look on the faces of visitors of a nervous disposition.
The pig hasn’t seen straight since.
