Friday, July the 15th, 2005
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News that London is to host the 2012 Olympic Games has created something of a kerfuffle in the Haemoglobin Towers annexe. Mrs Gubbins is insisting that she wants to be captain of Team Hooting Yard and to take part in the volleyball, widdershins, and indoor puck-related contests, even though she will be well over ninety by the time of the Games. She has already designed a blazer for the team, with special pockets, though she has not explained what is to be kept in them, nor indeed why they are special. Nor has she seen fit to tell the rest of the staff why she wants them to rub orange peel into their scalps each morning for the next seven years. My guess is that she has been reading the discredited sports scientist Plodgat, whose teachings had such disastrous consequences for the Duggleby brothers in the 1924 Games.
We have set up a shadow organising committee without telling Mrs Gubbins, laughing off that “I have my spies everywhere” comment she is forever muttering from her toothless gums. This despite the fact that we know she does have spies, seemingly hundreds of them. How she keeps them on her payroll is anybody's guess, though perhaps the series of burglaries over at the Bodger's Spinney Retail Park And Adventure Playground has something to do with it. Every now and then La Gubbins makes a series of strange chopping movements with her hand. I'm not sure why I mention that.
Team Hooting Yard—the Gubbins one or the shadow one, or both—will of course be competing in every single event come 2012. We have already commandeered that strip of grass near the Blister Lane Bypass as a training ground, built a little fence, and have plenty of buckets of water on hand. You may want to memorise our team song, which goes like this:
Hooting Yard, Hooting Yard / Ha-ha and gazebo / We will vanquish all our foes / Where have all the flowers gone? / Hooting, Hooting Yard!