BEAUTY AND THE BANJO

At the crack of half past eleven in the morning, I gracefully spaltred out of my bed and glided on tip-toe to my bedroom winda. I opened wide the casement and stood there, framed like a painting by Goya, Rembrant, or Charlie Dickens. My tangled, sweaty, matted mass of red hare clung to my big red face. Too any observer lurking in the flora or fauna, I wood appear to be a faiere sprite or an elf of astonshing grace and beauty.

I flared my nostrils, like a horse and drew deep breaths of klean, cunt'ry air into my ample bisums.

"Morning has broken" I trilled, as I divested myself of heavy woollen negelant, two simmets and a pear of drawers that had scene better daze.

There I stood- nude as a scaldie. An hangel of conseit. A goddess. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever. I glanced-demurly into the cracked mirror and softly mummered.

"Ah beauty. Why have you taken up abode in my 'umble body?. Oh nature" I sighed. "Why have you lavished so much beauty on me? Surely beauty should be scattered like manure among all female woman kind. And yet, I alone am consigned to tread the world fair steeped in beauty, grace and heavenly helegance.

I glanced coyly over my shoulder, admiring my two sturdy, freckled buttocks. "Perfection! I cried.

I was so beautiful, I could knot tear my eyes away from the henchanting refraction that gazed out of the mirror at me.

"Oh pouting,sultry, smokey-eyed Gorgon of Clougher" I cried. "Stand knot you there with the morning son glinting of your womanly charms.

"Conceal your grate beauty" I cried. "With drawers, simmets and your mammies good green frock with the yella butterflies on it.

Think of the poor week men" I cried.

"If perchance a man on a bicycle was to gleek in and sea your Greek goddess statesque contours and protrudences he wood fall off his bicycle and insidiously and insensibility, cut the whole face off himself".

I looked once more at the symmetrical beauty radiating from the cracked mirror and yelled.

"Dos moi pou sto kal ten gen kineso".

Which as any savant of Archimedes knows is....

"Give me where to stand and I will move the earth".

I then spent the rest of the morning, flicking dust from here to there with the tale feather of a gander.

I launched alone on a heel from a pan loaf spread literally with poor man's caviar-mashed tadpoles. The pollywog is knot too everyone's taste, but to my disseminating palate they tasted simply devine.

After lunch I enjoyed some ME time. I sat outside my abode on an old tractor tire, a plinking and a plunking at my banjo. I have a vast raparee of songs and I went through them all. "Boil them cabbage down-boy" "The red flannel drawers. The tune the old cow died from and a mellon-golly fugue deposed by Handel, when his girlfriend Hilga Mary Strumsteinner gave him the big heave ho. Apparently Handel had been tickling the ivories of one Ghislaine Felicity Stuttweiner. Serve him rite. The dirty auld brute.

THEN! I saw him! Wee Bon Jovi. The lite of my life. The lump of a cub that gives me a raison de-etra.

"COOEE BON JOVI" I shrieked. "COOEE WEE SUN".

The cub was slowly making his way through the bog in a laz-a-daisy-cal way. Which told me better than mere words could, that the cub needed a replenishment of nourishment.

"I'm fair done" roared the fruit of my lions as he got stuck into numerous buttered heels from pan loaves.

"First day back at skool after the Summer holly-daze Bon Jovi" I said.

"What did youse get stuck into today? Black matter? Particle radition or the real and presant danger that magnetic North and magnetic South mite reverse. Sending the world into some hanlin'".

"We spent all day on religion" said Bon Jovi. "And I now say unto thee, there is no Limbo, no purgatory and wait for it-no hell. The new curate said so. He said, Limbo, Purgatory and hell are finetto! Kaput! None existant!. So there!"

I blanched, recoiled and fell against the dresser. "I warned the church" I yelled. "I warned them knot too make boys from council estates priests. But wood they listen to me?"

"It wood appear knot" grinned Bon Jovi.

"But Bon Jovi" I cried "If there is no purgatory and no hell, what is to stop people doing what they like?"

"Nothing!" roared Bon Jovi, as he hit me a wild crack on the forehead with a grate big hard onion.

Bring back the devil, I say, he wasn't a bad auld soul.