Open Writing

As Harry Kipling, the famous poulterer from Barnsley, wrote:

If you can keep your wits
When all around you have lost theirs
To the recession,
Then you must know that
Your ‘ship is coming in.’

Although the expression “My ship is coming in,’ or “When my ship comes in” hails back to the days when merchants sent out sailing vessels laden with fine worsted cloth from Huddersfield, fine cutlery from Sheffield, and cheap tin trays from the Black Country, it was still in vogue in my childhood home.

Not that all ships arriving from foreign parts bring good fortune. A fact that Madame Butterfly noticed when Lieutenant Pinkerton returns to, as she supposes, claim her for his bride, but with an obvious and firmly attached impediment in the form of Mrs Pinkerton.

Madame Butterfly’s disappointment was of such a degree that, like love and a cough, it could not be hid, and was the cause of her singing herself to death assisted by a cheap Japanese copy of one of Sheffield’s finest electroplated nickel-silver blades.

Felo-de-se with a cheap implement was frowned on by the medical profession because of the propensity for the fatal wound to encourage gangrene. When I was a lad such a deed was known as committing Harry Korris.

But even as I feel a paroxysm of empathetic sorrow for the songstress in her hour of distress, I am convinced that when my ship arrives at port, my fond hopes will be realised and I shall not find it necessary to sing a dirge or play about with cutlery, an activity that would, mother oftimes cautioned, “’Ave yer eye aht!”

However, since the necessity for premature departure from this mortal coil is not on the cards or in the dusty remains of a teabag, I am blathering on when I ought to be explaining the sources of my coming good fortune.

How they all decided I was a worthy cause I cannot begin to imagine. Yet it appears that word has gone around the world that I am not only impecunious, but also that I merit their consideration.

I must admit that what others refer to as paranoia, but I insist is my instinct for self-preservation, made me regard their solicitations as dubious. However my doubts were dispelled by the high social and professional standings of those eager to be my benefactors.

Not one of them claimed to be a farm labourer, a pothole repairer, lately released from prison, or a fugitive from a chain gang. Had they done so I would have been sceptical and treated them as cruel hoaxes.

But their ranks in society eased my concerns, and so I bought a ladder from eBay to gain an elevated view of the coast and of any ships headed to port that might well be the pleasing conveyance of my unexpected endowments.

I spent four hours on the top rung of the ladder yesterday, but the haze over Phoenix occluded my view of the Pacific Ocean, so whether it is now docked waiting for stevedores to ease my wealths – in case they all came by the same ship – from its hold, to load onto hardy pack mules and deliver it to my domicile.

I must explain how I arrived at my great expectations. For some time, I have been the recipient of offers from a variety of sources but each having the common theme of enriching me due to my reputation as an honest and moral person. The burden of their missives, delivered electronically, is that for a variety of reasons each of the writers has access to sums of money held in foreign banks whose owners have died without anyone to whom to bequeath to vast sums of US Dollars, and I have been named as beneficiary.

They mention en passant that the transactions have to be kept hush-hush, otherwise their governments will seize the money and all the actors in this too, too brief drama will end up without a sou.

Were that to happen I would lose nothing except a brief and beautiful dream of untold tax free wealth and the opportunity to get on terms with widows of oil magnates, chief cashiers of national banks, archimandrites, Viziers of foreign potentates, and plenipotentiaries with access to the millions, and hosts of other powerfully connected dignitaries who know where the money is buried.

I am unconcerned that Chief Executive Officers, and Chief Financial Officers, and those with multiple PhD’s find it difficult to spell simple words, and also provide mobile telephone numbers whose codes refer to certain African countries, in which Nigeria gets most hits, and that their return e-mail addresses are not those from which their messages are sent, and that most e-mail addresses have suffixes of foreign countries unconnected with the national banks or headquarters of major oil companies from which the mail is said to have originated. Why should these concern me when I am, almost daily, offered upwards of sixty percent of fortunes that are ‘just gathering dust’ in amounts ranging from $20,000,000.00 to $100,000,000.00?

Some will say that these offers are not to be taken at face value. What does that matter? If they promise sixty-percent but only send me forty percent, I am still getting the best of the bargain.

All I have to do is to fill in details of my bank accounts, credit cards, social security number, bank sort codes, passwords and the answers to secret login questions and the money is as good as mine.

Some say that money changes people. They can set their minds at rest because I am resolved that this prize – perhaps riding out the storm even as I speak - will not change me one bit, I promise!

Besides which, my friends, if you owe me anything you can keep it! I shall not need it more.



Copyright © 2009 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED