MacBless

Act 1 Scene 1:  A Clearing in a Bog

1st Witch:  When shall we three meet again, in sleety showres sote or pishing doon rain?

2nd W:  Spikkin aboot, y'all sumph?  Stir the pot, stir th'effin pot.  Or smoke it, wotevvah.

3rd W:  By the pingin of m' iPad 2, somefink Baldy this way's due!

"Howdy now, y'all crones!, said Tristram Mump, bursting into the soggy clearing like a porn-star on corned beef entering the inner sanctum of a west-coast vegetarian speakeasy with a wardrobe malfunction of the fudamental particles.

1st Witch (aside): It's him!  Saw'm on the telly.  Ugly bastard in the flabby flesh, inne?

2nd W:  Mark him, Gladys, yon Salmond man dine with a lang speen or he be poached rudderless ere St Swithin's Day dawns o'er St Swithin Street, not a stone's throw from Union Strasse as the GPS flieth.

3rd W:  Ay, and Swinney's goose be already cooked, no golden eggs neither or I'm a trannie.

Meantime Mump was leaning on a Cauldron, which given the price of diesel was unsurprisingly on the chilly side, wearing a mean, bored, cynical, existentialistic, world-weary, hypovuncular, vacuo-paternalistic, unduly plottocratic expression on his rubicund facies sans Gallois:  not a pretty sight.

His Ginger Tom of a supra-patical rug was rugose, plethoricish, bathetic, hebephrenical, plurihypopotentialistic, kryptoprurient and evidently in need of a good combing.  It smelled of frangipani, Pakistani and incontinent old manni, and had anyone held it up to the light a number of lacunae would have been evident even to the naked eye of a semi-recumbent odalisque's samovar-attendant squinting from below a tartan turban against the trend of current opinion (but isn't everyone?), each translucent hirstute space occupied by a died-in-the-wool tick or other rodent small beastie whose sole passion and raison d'etre is human skin, whether black, white or tartan - or, as in this case, lightly attached to and coterminous with a mass of loathsomely putrescent git-plasma.

"Where was we?"  asked Mump, his pterygoid processes already aching with the effort of making conversation with a broad cross-section of the real people of Scatland.

1st Witch:  All Hail MacMump, thou shall be Laird hereafter... ha ha ha.

2nd W:  All Hail MacThump,  Nae wee mon born o' wumman shall stick a haggis up yer kilt the noo.

3rd W:  All Hail MacChump,  an qhuen did youse graduate fae Charme Schule?

The Witches, tutti:  Oh and by the way, yer gowff coorse and, ahem, housing complexe, will fairly prosper... until the gweed fowk o Scatland grow wise, give up the Thdrink and cease from electing gowks, ne'erdeeweels and vacuous cu...sumphs, or until a Forest of aff-shore Wind Machinies appears east of the links, whichever is the sooner.

"Suits me," sez Mump, as the ravens began dropping stone dead from the gloomy sky, such was the lack of respirable atmosphere in them days.  Aye, we hardly ken we're living noo in this age of jollity and Scandinavian fillums.

1st W:  Have a brussel sprout, yer grace?

Mump:  Naa, they make me fart like buggery, confuses the hell out of my acolytes who try to make verbose sense out of my proctogaseous remarks.

"Och me," murmured Cøcø, rousing from the fireside with a Gargantuan Bøner, "That Inspector Lund, och me, och me..."

Exeunt omnes, singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in B flat minor and dragging the Sardinian Engine with difficulty and hempen ropes, thereby exemplifying and illustrating a form of Zeugma as a sop to the more discerning among the audience, or at least those of that ilk who had so far resisted the charms of Morpheus, a pusher of this parish.

© Donnie Ross 2011

The Sardinian Engine

Vinlandian Krillionaire Tristram Mump sat glumly on an upturned fishbox, the legendary legend ‘Fraserburgh Box Pool’ stamped on one end barely visible through a glairy layer of the glistery guts of long-dead mackerel, clutching the tufted remnants of a comatose ginger tom to his hairless pate, moaning to himself in fragments of a fractured Ancient Assyrian dialect known only to a few fellow initiates and rubbing a calloused, broken-nailed, cigarette-tar-stained hairy hand over his contused and lacerated facial skin.

“Look here,” expostulated Achilles Parrot, whose hand it was, “Kindly get your physiognomie offa my hand, you maroon-visaged Yanqui frotteur-de-la-face!”

Across the narrow oily subterranean passageway from the VKTM, George Clooney and his inebriate reprobate colleague Dr. Moebius T. Flugelpik worked feverishly with spanners of their own devising on the Sardinian Engine, a device so astonishingly complex, so preternaturally arcane and so unutterably oleaginous that only a lifetime of severe training could prepare even the most talented engineer for what whirligigs, mechano-elastic gyres and senior thermo-zimbalistics – nay, what outré and extraordinary thingies that dis yon - lay under the silver-inlaid & cloisonneé-enamelled manifold and rocker cover.

With a gracile torrent of high-precision abuse directed in a high voice at Flugelpik’s glabella, Clooney threw down his spanner, wiping the sardine-oil off his girlish hands with an irregularly quadrilateral silk tie-dyed mouchoir.

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Will Tristram Mump and his band of reprobates succeed in using the Sardinian Engine to fracture Space Time into a million highly expensive bits?  Will they then succeed in selling the pieces back to God at a tidy profit?

Is it called The Sardinian Engine because it originated in Archimedes’ franchise in Sardinia, or because it’s lubricated using Sardine Oil?  Will the damned thing even start on a freezing morning?

To find out, watch this FLOOGLE Mystery space!

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2011