A PINT IN THE MORNING

A silly story concerning characters from my novel "Spellbound" (Lulu.com)

SWANSPOTTLE TALES

1. A PINT IN THE MORNING

It was a balmy spring day in the slumbering village of Swanspottle somewhere in England, and Thomas, the landlord of the Crown and Anchor was busy swilling out the public bar with bleach and disinfectant because someone had told him the public health people were coming to do an inspection. He hated it when this happened because he knew full well that his standards of hygiene could be higher.

They could, in fact, be a great deal higher though it was difficult indeed to imagine they could slip any lower.

“Time for a pint, Thomas?” came a voice from the door, which Thomas had left open in order to ease the passage into the good clean world of the stink left by the previous night's drinkers, and he looked up.

“What? At this time o' the morning?” he replied grouchily, noticing that it was the local borderline alcoholic who might have even become a convinced alcoholic had not Thomas, out of consideration for his cash register, taken the trouble to consistently dilute the man's beer over the years. The time of the morning was eight o'clock, though Thomas, being Greek, wasn't averse to opening up at any time when he thought a profit might be made. Licensing laws and the like meant very little to him when they stood in the way of him filling his till.

“Any time of the morning will do for me,” muttered Tom Coppley, the aforementioned borderline alcoholic, wobbling his heavy stomach in the direction of the bar.

“If you've got the cash I've got the beer, but don't get in my way because the public health are doing the rounds and I don't want them to question my license!” snorted Thomas the Greek unsociably.

“You'll have no trouble from me!” scoffed Tom Coppley and he reached for the bleach bottle on the bar, mistaking it, no doubt, for a freshly pulled creaming pint of well-diluted beer. Then he took one mighty swig from it, a great huge sucking swig, and the bleach wormed its way into his stomach, no doubt demolishing a fair number of bacterial visitors on the way.

This might not have caused Tom Coppley too much grief, because he was used to noxious fluids served at the bar of the Crown and Anchor, but he did chance to catch an eyeful of the label as he lowered it from his lips back to the bar, and he did manage to see the portrait of a skull and crossbones, which he interpreted as a warning that poison might be about.

So he grabbed hold of the bottle again and stared at the label “BLEACH”, he read, squinting at the illegible font.

“Bleach!” he squawked, and proceeded to spontaneously vomit.

When Tom Coppley vomited it was unpleasant, to say the least. Copious quantities of noxious fluids interspersed with even more noxious semi-digested toast and marmalade (his breakfast) came shooting out and splattered everywhere.

“You foetid b*****d!” roared Thomas the Greek in a most unGreek way. “Get out of my blasted pub or I'll not be responsible!”

Then he rushed to the lean-to shed outside the back door of the bar, grabbed hold of a hose-pipe which was always connected to a water supply on account of the frequency with which he had to use it when the bar got in a mess and drove Tom Coppley back through the door, turning the pressure up as high as it would go.

Tom Coppley, huge stomach and dribbling face, ran back to he street for all he was worth, and Thomas the Greek turned his attention on the foul and stinking mess left by the sad fat fool. The pressurised jet of water swept the room clean as he aimed it into the cesspit which was the contents of Tom Coppley's huge stomach, and on its way it swept all manner of debris before it: the residue of many a night's vomit (Tom Coppley heaved and honked on an almost daily basis after his tenth pint of ultra-diluted ale), Eunace McMudd (one of three sisters who drank in the bar waiting to sexually entrap clergymen) had inadvertently dropped her panties and forgotten to pick them up, and they were swept out on the torrent of hosepipe water, a well-used condom left by another McMudd sister " and Constable Lockemup's second-best truncheon.

All were swept up by the anger of Thomas's hosepipe, and after a good half hour of venting his wrath against the fat Coppley man he had swept every unwanted morsel, every semi-digested green thing, every piece of evidence that might be construed as unclean, and of the door and down the drain in the car-park, and the bar was spotless.

And in walked the public health inspectors, relishing what promised to be a good persecution of the landlord of a filthy pub only to find that, despite gleaming drops of water clinging to the furniture, it was as spotless as spotless can be. There was no trace of germ nor bacteria nor anything that could in any way risk the public's health though there was a great deal of wetness. They had to admit the truth and award really high points for cleanliness to the Crown and Anchor, and they left with smiles adorning their troubled faces.

Which goes to show that a pile of vomit can, under the right circumstances, prove beneficial to all.