Monday, May the 10th, 2004

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Pang Hill News

Whatwhatwhat? Has Pang Hill Orphanage burned to the ground again? They must cease the use of blubber-candles forthwith. I know such lighting is cheap, but three conflagrations in as many months is evidence of sheer stupidity. At least the tinies were ushered to safety, scampering around the duckpond in their tunics while Mister Von Stroheim tried to gather them together for counting. Why on earth did he think that asking them to sing “Conquistador” by Procol Harum would becalm them? Alas, it had the usual effect, and instead of a placid duckpond-edge's-worth of orphans neatly lined up, he had to deal with tears and wailing and breast-beating and religious fervour and mischief and duck-taunting and drenchings and jiggery-pokery and panic and hopelessness and fisticuffs and spillages and mitten-loss. The reporter from the Weekly Shackle observed only one child filling a pail with duckpond water and carrying it over to the orphanage to combat the flames. Such a heroic tot! I shall make sure he is given a new pair of socks. It was not his fault that the bottom of the pail was half eaten away with rust, and that by the time he had crossed the prize-winning Condoleezza Rice Flower Garden and was within yards of the inferno, there were only a few meagre droplets of duckpond water left, and a fat lot of use they were, as “brilliant orange flames licked and curled around the charred cinders of what had once been Pang Hill's finest orphanage”. Surely the flames would have died down by the time there were cinders to be seen? But that bit is a quotation from the reporter, a man who knows his onions, or so I have been told. Apparently the dispatches he sent from the Bodger's Spinney Beehive Building Competition were so well-written that he was offered a job on the Daily Agony In The Garden, but he turned it down, unwilling to leave Pang Hill, whose snowdrops, cow parsley and phlox soothed his nerves, he said, and he was fearful that if he did not daily look upon them he would be bedizened and turn into a splinterbrain. As for the craven Mister Von Stroheim, I'm going to have his guts for garters when I lay my hands on him.

Source : The Bilgewater Elegies by Dobson (out of print)