Dandruff Hits The Turtleneck Page 15

  Chapter Fifteen

  Introducing Stribley Wainwright

  Harold Garstang’s shortlist for the friendly soiree at ‘The Field of Corncrakes’ was coming along nicely, but there is one character I admit to having totally overlooked, and wouldn’t you know it, Garstang has remembered the old oddity and pulled the rabbit from the top hat. Stribley Wainwright is the editor of The Daily Tumbril, a local newspaper that is so left-field and controversial, it even ignores its own title by being published every fortnight. To say Stribley is his own man is the understatement since God was a lad. I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to his age, but even a conservative shy at the coconut would land me on the top side of eighty years young. The man is a true legend and, more importantly, a true gent and a cascading fount of knowledge, both factual and downright spiritual. Sporting an everyday armour of Kirkdale Tweed and trusted brown Oxford brogues, Stribley arrives in his office each morning not much more than an hour after the cockerel has ceased coughing and crowing, and he oversees everything on the rag until late afternoon when he slips off to the local in his village, ‘The Cowboy’s Ears,’ to catch up on the latest gossip over a dram or two with the lads. There, in a tidy nutshell, you have Stribley Wainwright. An example to us all.

  Just the effort he must put into tying his Dickie Bow is enough to make me want to flag down the nearest passing reflexologist to double-check if I’m still alive. In fact, when I see a yawning queue of school kids of a morning, wondering where their next ounce of energy is coming from, I feel like handpicking half-a-dozen of them, marching them into Stribley’s office and letting the old lad loose on them with an hour’s worth of verbal square bashing and inspiration.

  He has always been proud of the fact that his newspaper refuses to jump on any headline bandwagon the broadsheets and red tops go with; his theory being that if every paper in the land is suffocating you with the same old story about a celebrity wedding or an earthquake ten-thousand miles away, how in the name of Spongero is a man supposed to keep up with vital issues such as cats up drainpipes or giant marrows exploding in greenhouses?

  His most controversial editing decision came in the early seventies when he nodded off in his armchair while watching a cup final. The match was so boring that Stribley found himself in deepest slumber land and dreaming he was on a beach in the Bahamas with a gaggle of scantily clad synchronized swimmers. He was just about to approach one of the ladies when the referee blew the half time whistle, startling Stribley back to consciousness and causing him to spill two inches of best malt whiskey straight down his new moleskin trousers.

  From that day to this, there has been no sports coverage in The Daily Tumbril and his female readership has increased ten-fold. Knows what he’s doing when it comes to the ladies, does our Stribley…