Dandruff Hits The Turtleneck Page 11

  Chapter Eleven

  A Doctor’s Report on the Local Butcher

  To find one’s goldfish dead in its bowl can be a traumatic experience, but to find one’s goldfish in front of one’s television smoking a clay pipe and humming along to Edward Elgar sounds more like someone’s cogs are on the move. The dreams of village butcher Reginald Slack were often of such ludicrous proportions that his wife, Ada, had taken to staying up into the early hours until, as she put it, ‘Reg has done.’

  Two nightmares which have lodged in Ada’s mind (not to mention poor Reg’s) needed, I felt, further examination. Ada vividly recalled the screams from a winter’s evening three years ago when Reg encountered a torpedo attack from a German U-boat, the captain of which was a one-eyed hippopotamus called Brian Clegg. Apparently, all missiles fired from Captain Clegg’s war vessel went straight up Reg’s rather surprised nostrils until his cranium could not, as it were, hold any more ammo, and he awoke with an alarming screech of ‘Stop, Cleggy, Stop!’

  After several weeks of fairly demanding therapy, we finally dislodged from Reg that a certain Mr. Clegg had been the Slack’s former milkman, who, it turned out, had a weakness for liquorice pomfrets while doing his rounds.

  Another famous occasion was when Reg dreamed that he was the captain of his local football team Nocturnal United, who miraculously had reached, and indeed won, the F. A. Cup final. On approaching the Royal Box for the collection of silverware, Reg noticed that the hands of all the spectators applauding his side’s well-deserved 2-0 victory were covered in tiny pink feathers. It was later established that as a child, Reg was often left for long snoozes and safe-keeping in his mother’s laundry basket, and on one poignant occasion he had become involved in a gurgling tangle with the fluffy toweling lid from the top of the toilet seat.

  Reg, from all reports, was quite an aggressive baby and was certainly teething at the time, so I feel it is a safe assumption that the young mite’s three front gnashers and shoddy polyester workmanship produced the ensuing pink wreckage...