Chez Piddens
Alice wakes with a start.
Miss Havisham’s wedding cake!
What? Hey? What?
Wake up, Wes!
Is that a good idea? Will I suffer?
Not enough, is my guess. I’ll idea you! Wake up. Fix those bloody barge boards! They look like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.
They’re decorative?
No. They’re decayed, rotted, neglected, crumbling, mouldering and starkly indicative of a psyche in tragic decline.
Lick of paint and they’ll come good.
Lick of…? Their last chance to “come good” lapsed twenty years ago. You need to tear them down and replace them before they come adrift and scone an innocent child to concussive collapse.
Big Job, Allie. Up on the roof, working at height. Climbing ladders. Step by step, one by one.
Needs planning.
Fine. Start planning today, because you’re doing the job next weekend.
What? Sorry, no can do. Got to say the nay no, I’m afraid-o.
I’m not taking No, Wes.
But I’m off and away. Men’s Bonding Weekend with the Minches. It’s on the calendar.
Oh no, it’s not.
I’m sure I… anyway, it’s always on the second weekend in August. It’s traditional.
Traditional.
The father-son bond is a precious thing. It needs to be grown, cemented, re-relevanced and constantly curated.
Your sons are grown, giant, men, Bucko! Get them up here to help you curate some barge boards.
Oh, that would never do. We must stick to the traditional activities in a suitable locale.
What? Playing guitars and cooking gargantuan feasts at a swank B&B?
Yes, that is the traditional course of our bonding observance.
A marathon bludge.
A traditional marathon bonding bludge. Yes.
Ay ay ay! Must I live and endure in a perverse world where humans can get away with anything, as long as it’s “traditional”?
It’s hard to know.
Burn a witch? Tradition. Stone an adulterer? Tradition. Invade Ukraine? Tradition. Prance around with your pants around the ankles if you hear Eagle Rock? Tradition.
My Pop had a tradition.
Pop? What? What?
Every Sunday he’d have a glass of schnapps and let the budgie out of its cage for a bit of a fly.
Schnapps?
I know. Unusual. Maybe he picked it up in France to keep warm in the trenches. Possibly hurled the empty bottles at Jerry.
Jerry?
The Germans. War is hell. It’s traditional.
Did the budgie have a name?
He mainly went by “Budgie”, or “You Bugger”.
What?
Well, every Sunday Pop drank the schnapps, and let the Budgie out. And every Sunday the budgie flew around everywhere and wouldn’t come back. That’s when Pop called him, “You Bugger”.
Right.
We’d all join in the chase and try to get the budgie back, but it never worked.
Never?
Never. Budgie only came back when Budgie was good and ready.
So why did everybody race around trying to fetch it back?
Tradition.
A lesson to us all
Bullgoose