I only need one shot, baby

Missing Thursday football today for a joint birthday party for Ruby (this is how I spelt her name on her birthday card - ЯUdy) and Aisha from my school. I do not like events, dear boy, impinging on my regular schedule (change is bad) but you have to reconsider when 2 girls at once are asking you out. In fact, I've been worrying about my chances of reproductive success within the Piddler group. If Ben and Bobert take the plunge and get hitched in a civil ceremony and take themselves out of the running and the gene pool, that will leave Johnny and myself competing for rights over Beth, Erin and Poppy. These odds are better, but you just can't trust women so I feel I have to broaden my horizons a little and attend todays' party.

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PUDDLE NEWSLETTER

       

FOR SALE		QUALIFIED MEDICAL DOCTOR REQUIRED
GRANDMOTHER £3
OWN TEETH, GSOH		FOR TRIP BACK IN TIME
VGC, GOOD KNITTER		MUST HAVE SENSE OF ADVENTURE
SALE DUE TO UPGRADE		SWORD SKILLS AN ADVANTAGE
BUYER COLLECTS		GOOD HEALTH PLAN, SHARE OF SPOILS
BOX 163		BOX 163

                                                      

TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD

Norman Goatblower plays Gordon Glassblower, the tragic anti-hero in this piquant yet harrowing tale about an alcoholic pigeon-fancier who is driven to hallucinations and suicide by the incessant cooing of his pigeons, with whom he lives after being thrown out by his wife for his part in a Namibian refrigerator sting. In one of his darker moments he is befriended by a trolley collector from Tesco (played by the irrepressible Tyrone Bangs-Knutt) who gains Gordon’s trust and smuggles him in a supply of spirits and mixers in the hope of one day inheriting the pigeon collection. The obligatory car chase is inexplicably missing from this dire satire, which is a rehash of the 1958 Australian classic The Beerhunter. Don’t take the Mother-in-law to see this one unless she particularly enjoys seeing a drunk bloke trying to dodge a hail of pigeon droppings while complaining about his life and the missed opportunity to elope to Venezuela with Doris the school dinner lady. Carpentry fans will enjoy the loft scene in this straight-to-Betamax grainbuster, which is most likely to reach an audience as an in-flight movie on Ghanaian Airlines, the opening credits alone being worth the effort to get up and leave the room. Bollywood producers expressed an interest in the flock of pigeons, but visas proved difficult to obtain and the hapless birds were eventually eaten by some Vietnamese asylum seekers. Laughs are few and far between in this laborious journey through the seedier parts of Scunthorpe. In fact there were only two laughs in it – the cartoons before the main feature and 3 minutes into it when a fat woman in front of me fell over a corpse in her hurry to leave the building. Dennis the trolley boy was a source of some relief, if only due to some dubious continuity which saw him wearing three different pairs of trousers in one pivotal car park scene. Three different endings were filmed for this epidural of an epic, and I believe we saw all of them in a directionless hotch-potch of deleted scenes, Pythonesque animation and excitable voice-overs in an impenetrable Shetland accent. I would indeed pay 4½ Turkish Lira to see this film again because I would then be able to read a book in an empty cinema. The all-too-brief appearance by Gordon’s wife brought at least a little plate-throwing action along with her beration for his aberration, but, as she exited stage right, so did all hope of salvation for this lead-lined coffin of a movie.

                                                     7/10 xxx Not suitable for children under 3

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Well, the party was ace. It was in a long low building in a pub garden and it was full of girls. In fact once Erin had arrived I estimate that the girls outnumbered the boys by nearly 2 to 1 which is why many of them and I kept absconding into the pub garden to climb the flagpole, benches and tent thing (and to get told off by the landlady). The magician/childrens' entertainer/DJ (and his oriental sidekick) had us all laughing and dancing and jumping; he also had us heckling when he brought on a blatantly plastic dinosaur, balanced it on his leg and chatted with it.

 Still, he only had one arm free during the whole dino performance so maybe it did eat one arm after all. Incidentally, his accent wandered both up and down the country, and up and down the sliding scale of social class. I escaped during Abba but returned for the pass-the-parcel: I escaped for the macarena, YMCA and the limbo but returned for the food, the hokey-cokey and the magic show. Bud and ErinsDad escaped briefly as well and I saw them cradling pints of beer. After 2 groovy hours of partying we came home, I missed my friends at football but met Pops on the pavement. Good news, everybody! Her parents have released her to come to Paultons' park with us.