Friday, April the 30th, 2004

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Pod News

We recently mentioned the futuristic pod on the outskirts of Bodger's Spinney which was once home to Claude Sopwith (see 13th April). Readers with an interest in architecture will be pleased to hear that the pod is being renovated to return it to its original lima bean shape. Given that lima beans are a key ingredient of the (originally Narragansett) dish succotash, one must applaud the local planning decision to reopen the pod as a restaurant when the current work is completed. Digby Thew has already been appointed as the head chef of the putative eaterie. He is well-known as the culinary maverick whose portrait has appeared on thousands upon thousands of bookmarks produced by the Blister Lane Bookmark, Bookcase, Bicycle Pump & Other Things Beginning With B Manufacturing Company, whose gravel-voiced CEO, T B Culc, has kindly given his permission for the reproduction below.

Interviewed about his new job by the Weekly Shackle, Mr Thew said: “As a tot, I always wanted to work in a pod. In fact my father built one for me out of driftwood, but he was a cack-handed man, and it collapsed within hours. I was trapped in the ruins for three days while the emergency services struggled to free me. Wellwishers passed sausages and dandelion & burdock to me through a specially-constructed plastic funnel. There were plans to make a feature film about the episode, but alas they came to naught when the producer was arrested while scouting locations disguised as a zealot. In an act of baffling derring-do, he jumped out of the police car delivering him into custody while it was careering along a country lane at unimaginable speed, landed in a hedgerow bright with pinks and foxgloves and cuckoopint, bashed his head on a discarded metal farmyard implement, and suffered permanent memory loss. He ended up working as a blanket-darner in Uttoxeter.”