Millom in the Dock Read Online Free Page A

hands. Where they
pooped, blackberry bushes would grow abundantly and the birds which
managed to escape with full stomachs, the bovine clutches would in
turn keep the natural rotation going. To this day some M cows still
love blackberries and their milk is really nice I’m told. Unless
they have discovered something they find nicer, like grass perhaps?
But I don’t believe so.
    It is necessary
to again mention here that the birds were not squeezed all that
hard which ensured safe release. Well you can’t just chuck a dead
blackbird away after you’ve squeezed all the berry mush from it as
ignorant people do abundantly with plastic bottles … think of the
environment. In fact the birds muchly enjoyed being hoof-hugged by
a cow, you could tell by the way they squawked, it has been written
in M folklore.
    It is a good
job Sir Paul McCartney wasn’t in M around that time as “blackbird
squawking in the dead of night” just doesn’t have the same ring to
it does it M’lud, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, dear reader.
‘Night time?’ You ask. Well some cows i.e. creative ones with
insomnia were also nocturnal feeders, which kills boredom and gives
the brain a natural sugar boost in those long dark hours you see
(tell me about it). Chickens back then had six inch, toucan-like
serrated beaks and preyed on mice and rabbits. These they caught by
hovering above hedges and grassy knolls, dropping on their prey and
killing it with their deadly talons and then dining using that beak
as cutlery. It all started to go wrong for these birds and beasts
when Arthur Ferguson began teaching himself sheep wrestling, a
predecessor to Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, started in M
you see … boring place. Zzzzz. Let’s not forget Bovine Bashing, a
predecessor to the now ‘feared’ M Rugby League Club, never mind
wimps such as The England Squad.
     

     
    The King and
I. He offered me a Knight hood, it had a bobble on top.
     
    ***
     
    For capturing
the chickens he left an old wig on the floor and waited behind a
nearby bush, armed only with a strawberry net, both of which he had
brought in his Aladdin’s Cave of a handcart. Mind you, this hunting
method made an awful mess of the hairpiece, which people who saw
him hunting thought he wore afterwards, and for good reason. You
see he just rubs his head a lot when working out discounts, giving
him that shiny bit. So please, should you ever get to meet him,
don’t whatever you do say “could I please have the chrome dome
discount?” you see it isn’t big, it isn’t hard or even clever and
you will definitely blow away any chance of actually getting the
huge discount … which he managed eventually to decide on, not to
mention come to terms with massive mental and scalp pain. This then
was the beginning of Ferguson’s (almost the entire length of)
Wellington Street shop. He did very well selling full body sheep
wool overalls to the miners as it was freezing down’t pit. This is
the origin of the M expression “Woollybacks”.
    For the wives
he did a nice range of black and white handbags. Sometimes he would
do a brown or brown and white designer range for the posher mining
folk from such middle class mud tracks as Lowther Road. He also
spent time domesticating the animals by strapping splints to their
agile legs and, also to the cows’ tails. That is the reason why
cows and sheep all walk rather stiffly now. It is a mystery how a
gentle man like Arthur managed to tame the sheep, being the
ferocious predators that they were. Up t’t North where all this
happened, sheep farmers put rowdy sheepdogs in pens with ‘I take no
shit from sheep dogs and rams. I reckon, if he had been around and
not causing grief upstairs, Sharpo would have been the man to put
in a pen with one of these ferocious sheep. There would have
been , as Sharpo would put it, blood, snot
and wool flying, but you would receive a tamed, slightly
traumatised sheep ... and so cheap at a groat a time. Can’t you