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Spring Approaches Once Again
Off to Steamboat Springs in Colorado to celebrate St. Patrick's Day as a guest of my old chum Slanche and his good lady. Monaghan's Bar is the recommended venue so we saunter down to join the revellers in their green polystyrene hats, eating green polystyrene pizzas and imbibing green polystyrene-flavoured porter. A band is playing Irish tunes in the Country and Western style, while a somewhat overfed character in horn-rimmed spectacles, a rather too tight pair of pants and a green ten gallon hat bawls out seditious Irish ballads. Without warning a group of debauchees of ferocious demeanour and alarming appearance, clad in cowboy garb and firing six-guns ride in on children's' hobby horses. Their leader, a gaunt and malodorous individual grabs the microphone and roars out something along the following lines: Alfie Packer, Alfie Packer At this point he pulls out what appears to be a stick of dynamite, adroitly lights the fuse and hurls it into the revellers. The place empties instantly. The cowboys then throw down their hobby horses and take their places obediently at the vacated tables. "The subject tonight", intones the leader, "is Alfie Packer, the cannibal cowboy, who lived in these parts some time ago. He developed a penchant for human flesh and when the day of reckoning finally came, the judge admonished him for having eaten five of the only eight democrats of the County. He was duly hanged, and the remaining democrats lived on, at least for a time. You have forty minutes." All then raise their cowboy hats and take out pencils and paper, while easing bloated skins of wine to their lips. The Five Litre Poets are in Town! Unfortunately even by their own execrable standards, nothing worthy of this column seems to be forthcoming and so we withdraw discretely into the night. Outside, the successors to the Fenian bogmen had formed orderly lines to be taken back to their hotels and condominiums, wondering if life in the Wild West, let alone St.Patrick's Day, is all that their dude travel agents have cracked it up to be.
A belated honour has been offered to Codric. It has been intimated that he can become a Freeman of the City of London in recognition of his past and future services to that august institution. These have comprised mainly of eating many a lavish dinner and quaffing many a fine wine at many an ancient Livery Company, while assuming a catatonic state during many a platitudinous address from those seeking even greater honours. With his sheep at the ready so that he may drive them across London Bridge, something he has always desired, he is informed that this ancient privilege has been withdrawn. The only thing left, he is told, is the privilege of being hanged with a silken rope rather than the traditional coarse hemp, should it be deemed necessary to remove him from the scene. As he has assumed that in such a contingency he would, in the fine tradition of the Ottoman Cricket Society, take his leave by being strangled with a silken bowstring, he has reluctantly had to decline the lesser honour. Thus he trudges sullenly back to his Gloucestershire estates, followed at a respectful distance by his ever faithful sheep.
My colleagues in the Cloak and Dagger department have had their laptops taken away and their implanted wireless devices surgically removed, so it looks as if something big is afoot in the British Government in Exile. Indeed Govex mandarins are rumoured to be foregoing their customary visits to the massage parlours and other places of discipline and correction in preparation for some even more irregular shenanigans that will no doubt test their highly honed minds and expense accounts to the full. Some say that they are expecting the bugle call at any moment, while others look upon things as just another exercise in exploring futility to the limit. My own view is that this time it is the Real Thing and that we will soon see some momentous and ludicrous developments. Watch this space and remember that Walls have Ears, and Pigs have Wings!
Meanwhile my egg-head colleagues in our Beyond Man project team, even they can barely tell the time of day let alone find a needle in a sewing case, tell me that plans are advancing for the evacuation of this little old Earth of ours. We are to become Extra-Terrestrial Persons ! I am just recovering from last month's shock announcement that I was about to become a W-Person and now I was adjust myself to an even greater exercise in self-improvement. Where will all this end? I expect they have an answer for that one too, however not one that is likely to be within the grasp of my non-wired terrestrial intellect. Well toodle-oo for the time being. Spring is in the air and the West Indians are coming. The Zimbabweans too, if Mr. Mugabe lets them visit our sinful Isles. But I mustn't get political - leave that to the Govex chaps, eh what?
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St.Patrick's Day in the Wild West 
Codric honoured in his own time!
When the balloon goes up
When our time is up