Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (8 page)

So, knowing that what I was doing was environmentally sound, it was with a great sense of righteousness that I marched down through the garden one day and lifted the lid to the compost bin, unzipped my trousers and hoisted my vast member
7
into the opening – as you do.

I began to pee, watching proudly as the stream of urine headed towards the detritus of Fran’s worthy culinary activities. All the evidence was there of how healthily we had eaten since our arrival here. Lemon skins, pea pods, apple cores, corn husks and the rejected bits from numerous salads, all basked beneath the warm flow of liquid gold that I was providing for the ease of their decomposition. I looked up at the cherished view that encompassed the horizon and I allowed myself to slip into a pleasant reverie. Just how well had we done in moving here?

What happened next was quite extraordinary, and it pains me even now to recount it. I do so only to help other males who are reading this and may have access to the potentially dangerous combination of a penis and a compost heap. The odds against what happened next may be staggeringly high, but they could happen again. So be warned.

As I gazed into the reassuring and life-affirming distance, my gentle reflections were interrupted with a breathtaking rudeness.

‘AAAAAH!’ I screamed.

Suddenly there was an excruciating pain in the end of my penis. I looked down to see a wasp had settled on the end of my right-honourable member, and off it now flew, no doubt with the wasp equivalent of a smug grin on its face.

‘JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY!’ I cried out. ‘THE BUGGER HAS STUNG ME!’

I panicked. I turned and charged back towards the house, wincing with pain and belting out expletives as I went. Any neighbours gardening within a square-mile radius would have stopped and wondered, ‘Now what was that noise, and what could have caused it?’ They wouldn’t have guessed the terrible truth. Hearing these disturbing sounds, Fran appeared from the kitchen.

‘What is it?’

‘A WASP HAS STUNG THE END OF MY KNOB!’

I didn’t wait for a response, feeling fairly sure that Fran wouldn’t have been able to find the right words to provide adequate comfort, and I dashed passed her and up the stairs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’M GOING TO RUN A BATH! AAAH!’

Everything I said and did for the next few minutes was accompanied by an ‘AAAH!’ as my penis throbbed in response to the spiteful wasp’s venom. Pain, unwanted and excruciating pain, was accompanied by an equally unwelcome cohort – fear. As the bath filled, my mind raced with all the hideous possibilities that might result from this incident. Would I ever be able to pee again without it hurting? Would erections be heady things of the past? Would my knob simply fall off? Then there was the swelling. I could virtually see this happening before my own eyes as I sat, rigid, wincing, fear-stricken, in the tepid bath water. Erotic thoughts or feelings of desire couldn’t have been further from my mind, and yet my penis was swelling. I had a swelling penis for all the wrong reasons. Surely the worst kind of swelling penis.

Fran popped her head into the bathroom.

‘How is it?’ she asked, timidly.

‘Look,’ I said, pointing to it, ‘it’s swelling up.’

‘Oh dear. Should we go to casualty?’

‘Not yet. Let’s see what happens. Maybe research it online and see if there’s anything I should be doing.’

‘OK.’

The odd thing is that I couldn’t quite disconnect the comic side of my brain. Bizarrely, it occurred to me that a trip to casualty would give me a chance to weave an old joke into a natural situation.

TONY: ‘I’ve been stung by a wasp, have you got anything for it?’

DOCTOR: ‘Whereabouts is it?’

TONY: ‘I don’t know, it could be miles away by now.’

Not worth a twenty-minute drive and a two-hour wait staring at people who had fallen off things.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the kitchen, greatly relieved that the pain was now easing off. Fran’s internet search had revealed little, other than the fact that some ancient cultures had used wasp stings for penis enlargement. Surely a foolish quick fix? It had certainly worked for me, but it hardly encouraged amorous thoughts. It was an excellent way of creating a big, pointless penis at short notice, so I guess I could take solace in that useful information gained.

It wasn’t until several days later that the soreness and last vestiges of the swelling disappeared completely. My body was back to normal. Not a temple maybe, but akin to a small church, at least in so far as it had a fully functioning organ.

Amen to that.

4

Harnessing Skills

One morning, when I popped round to Ken’s to ask for his help with something, I eased into the question slowly and began by telling him about my problems with the slugs.

‘Our son Andrew entered a snail in a snail race once,’ he said, going off on a rather surprising tangent, ‘and he had the idea of removing its shell to lighten its load.’

Ken then waited, his eyes imploring me to enquire further.

‘And how did it perform?’ I asked.

‘It was sluggish.’

Ken beamed broadly, pleased at having had the occasion to work this joke into a conversation. The opportunity probably didn’t come up that often.

‘I walked into that,’ I conceded. ‘Very good.’

Ken beamed all the more. I had a go at changing his cheerful demeanour.

‘I don’t suppose you could help me shift my grand piano?’ I asked.

‘Where to?’

‘Just from one room to another. Should be fairly straightforward, although we may have to remove the legs.’

Instead of this question puncturing his high spirits, Ken responded as jovially as ever.

‘No problem. Shall I pop over this afternoon?’

‘Yes, please.’

Well done, Ken. So far, he was following instructions to the letter from the text book
How To Be the Perfect Neighbour
.

To be fair, the job was no more complicated than I’d made out. Having changed my mind about which room I preferred to play the piano in, I now wanted it moved into our living room from the ‘adjacent studio/office’ (as it had been described in the estate agent’s particulars). I’d allowed one hour to complete the job before I would need to leave for a meeting with a local councillor about buses. I’d noticed that the ones that came in and out of our village were nearly always empty, and I wondered why. Later that afternoon I would have some answers.

I was well prepared for the job. I’d watched my piano being moved several times before by teams of two men, and I was pretty sure I could remember the procedure. Admittedly, Ken and I didn’t have a special grand piano removal trolley, but I had a plan to overcome that. The wooden floor was shiny and flat between the two rooms, so I figured we could drag the piano between them on cushions and sheets. All we needed to do was remove the three legs.

Ken arrived, beaming with enthusiasm, and we set about our task. Disappointingly, we went off-script almost immediately. Instead of engaging in piano removal, we found ourselves scratching our heads, Stan Laurel-style. We just couldn’t fathom how to remove the legs without the help of a third person. In the end, Ken went back to his house to fetch a car jack – but unfortunately for me, he didn’t do this until we’d already tipped up the piano and removed one of the legs. This meant that I had to take the weight of one corner of the piano until Ken made it back.

‘How are you getting on, darling?’ said Fran, as she popped her head in.

‘Oh, not so bad,’ I said. ‘Just waiting on Ken, who’s fetching something.’

‘Great. I’m just nipping out to yoga. See you later. Good luck.’

It seemed an awfully long time before Ken re-entered carrying the new equipment, but it may have been only a few minutes. As I looked at Ken readying the jack, I couldn’t see a place on the piano where it was going to have any real effect. Then it dawned on me.

‘I remember now,’ I said. ‘We lower this corner, where we’ve removed the leg, down onto the cushions. Then we tip the piano to remove the other two legs.’

‘So we don’t need the jack?’

‘I don’t think so.’

It was galling to think that I had supported the piano for all that time without any sensible reason. Ken, who had now supplied the room with gear more normally seen alongside beaten-up cars in greasy garage forecourts than around pianos in Parisian conservatoires, lined up the cushions and then joined me on the corner of the piano, and we began to lower it down. The further down we got, the greater the weight. As we neared the floor, it became apparent the cushions weren’t aligned properly.

‘I’ve got the weight,’ said Ken. ‘Quickly, move the cushions into place.’

I jumped into action, whilst my retired neighbour held a fair proportion of the entire weight of this 800-pound piano – roughly the equivalent of me, four and a half times. As I observed the strain on his entire body, a horrible thought struck me. What if he had a coronary? Being responsible for the death of the man next door wouldn’t be the best way to establish myself in the locality. I would also have a piano stuck at this dreadful angle and it would be very difficult to play. Worse still, every time I played it, I’d be reminded of my dead neighbour.

Fortunately I was able to slide the cushions quickly into the correct position and Ken and I were able to complete the lowering without incident. The end of the piano keyboard was now resting on the cushions, with one leg successfully removed.

‘There!’ I declared.

The problem was that this had taken us twenty-five minutes instead of two, and we’d need to speed up this process if I was going to make my appointment.

‘Now what?’ asked Ken.

We both continued to look at the piano – no longer a musical instrument, but instead a giant puzzle. Bewilderment reigned. Utterly. Dictatorially. It had all seemed so straightforward when I’d watched other people doing it.

‘I think I know,’ offered Ken, his tone of voice suggesting that he’d had a brainwave. ‘From this position I think we need to lay the cushions in a line and then hoist the piano so it’s lying along them on its side. Then we’ll be able to remove the other two legs.’

‘That’s it!’ I said, with great relief. ‘Let’s do it!’

This is where we learned that not having the correct equipment was indeed a huge disadvantage. Normally, at this stage the piano would rest on its side on a specially designed piano trolley, not cushions just lifted off a sofa. Unfortunately for us, these cushions slipped and moved on the smooth and shiny wooden floor, and we soon had an 800-pound piano resting half on and half off them. The piano didn’t balance as it would have done on a flat trolley either, so I had to hold it in position whilst Ken circled it, assessing whether it would get damaged if we dragged it through from room to room as it was.

‘Before we remove the other legs,’ he finally declared, ‘I think we need to get more cushions under it.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘I think we can get the jack under it enough to wedge a few more cushions in.’

And so, a further fifteen minutes were lost making use of the car jack and getting the piano in the best position for dragging it along the floor. The first leg came off easily enough. The second one started to prove a problem. Ken twisted hard. Nothing. Something may have gone wrong with the thread. He tried again. Still nothing. He took a deep breath and exerted the kind of pressure that a builder exerts when the whole job depends on it. He started to turn blue. Panicky thoughts about coronaries returned. Ken let out a huge gasp of breath.

‘Bugger!’

The leg hadn’t shifted. We both looked at it.

Stalemate.

I let a reasonable amount of time pass,
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before asking the obvious question.

‘What are we going to do?’

Ken repeated the Stan Laurel head-scratch.

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe I could shift it using an oil filter band.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s a tool I use for removing oil filters on tractors.’

Oh my. In our novel approach to piano removal we’d now moved from cars to tractors. We were getting further and further away from the Paris conservatoire.