Much Ado About Something

We we're spending the day at Borough Market down in London Bridge when it kicked off. It always seems that this is the case, but there are a lot of legs in the world ergo much kicking is to follow.

It all started when Ewan accidentally shortchanged this Guy by thirty-three pence. A simple mistake after you've just suffered from a stroke and a bout of NHS. Seriously you should see Ewan, he looks like Droopy after a face transplant, and it's so funny. It's great because we keep getting sympathy tips and free chocolate baskets. Anyway, we recount this Guy out his change but he isn't having any of it, so I popped it all in my back pocket for later. I figured I'd spend it on a doughnut to relax my fat muscles before the gig. This just sends the Guy into a spiral of rage. Not only does he now want the change back but he also starts highlighting the cholesterol distress a jam doughnut could have on my stomach. No one needs that especially before a show.

Now at the time I wasn't sure if this Guy was Shakespeare or just a lookalike but he had the outfit on so it could've gone either way. So when he pulled out his rapier and threatened to gut me I joked that we could use him in the van. Since Ewan came out of hospital his slashing has been about as accurate as a drunk pissing on his dignity. Had I been sure of his identity I would have offered him the utmost respect but it turns out this Guy was nothing more than an Impostor.

As I stared at this fool prancing around the fruit stand and Ewan watched him shuffling around by the pies he mutters the word 'Duel'. I'm in a pickle, I haven't picked up a sword since my Aunt Betty's funeral but a crowd was gathering and the performer in me was asking to be freed. What I did was to procure the Imposter's gloves and then slap him with them, which I took to be the customary declaration of a duel. Turns out a simple 'All right', would have done. Now everyone is watching and it gets all quiet. The Impostor raises his sword and is like, 'The fool accepts, let the setting sun proclaim our battle and wash the stalls with accompanying light.' I'm like, 'Cool, six at the Globe, bingo'. It's so on now.

I shoot off to buy myself that doughnut and flog some of Ewan's stroke medicine when I realise that something is amiss. Then it hits me, a stray shard of ice from the fishing counter but it's enough to jolt a thought from my inner workings. The duel is going to clash with my gig that I have lined up at the annual Shakespeare Lookalike Contest. Blast, another pickle. I felt like a man standing in a world full of soup with nothing but a fork, and all the soup is shit.

While musing on this dilemma I get thinking about the big man, Jeremy Beadle, and wonder what he would do in this situation. That's right, he'd play a prank but lacking a joke shop and the mental capacity for such a task I decided to just wing it with some magic. No slight of hand as that wasn't part of Jeremy's teachings, I figured I'd just go for a general atmospheric exuding and see if things would sort themselves out.

So the sun starts to set, Ewan is passed out on the floor of the van and I head off to the gig. I've got all my cassettes and floppy disks and I'm the mood to rock. It was incredible. The sight of five hundred Shakespeare wannabes dancing to my mash up of Fun House and the title track from 'The Road To Eldorado', is a sight that will always be with me because I had my Polaroid handy.

As I'm finishing up my set with the Beadle Mix the Impostor swings onto the stage brandishing his sabre. He does a few cartwheels and gets all acrobatic and shit before bowing low enough for a hefty boot in the face. That's when I went all Zorro on him and chopped off his confidence. This got him all teary eyed so I ended things by smashing a first edition of Midsummer Nights Dream across his brow. The sun set mesmerizingly on my victory applause that was later confirmed as being heard as far abroad as Peckham.

As I was packing up my gear I was greeted by the Lookalike King who granted me the title of Honorary Bard and said I had done them a great service in defeating the Impostor as he had been stealing all the buttons off peoples shoes. He also set me up with a gig at the Annual Coleen Nolan Lookalike Debacle as his wife chairs the quiche committee for them. Should be an easy gig, instead of playing music I'm just going to set up a table loaded with Gin and take things easy with a good book.

How Ewan Dented His Van And His Soul

I'll start from the beginning because the end scares the pants off me.

We were driving to Port Isaac (Portwenn for the fans) so Ewan could kiss Martin Clunes when it all went down. I was asleep in the back of the butchers van when I was woken up by this massive crash. I stumble past the beef burgers to see Ewan sat behind the wheel all jittery and high. Turns out he was trying to make a finger painting and ended up sniffing all the poster paint. While indulging in this sick act he claimed to have knocked down a six foot tall Hedgehog.

So we get out of the van and traipse around the back. I've got this big meat clever in one hand and a pack of matches in the other just in case the hedgehog is real and Ewan hasn't spilled all his brain cells onto his collage.

We get near the back and this muffled groaning comes from down the road so we peak round the bumper and see this old geezer laying the road. Halo off one side, robe covered in shit. It's clear we've run over a Saint but I'm just glad I don't have to face pummel a giant hedgehog. So things are looking up.

We edge over to this Saint and tried everything to get him breathing again. Ewan's finger painting worked for a few minutes but all this guy's guts were hanging out so there wasn't much we could do. I managed to capture his last words on tape which I won't repeat now. I'll save them until I get back to the studio and cook them in with a good beat and some vintage jazz.

After we buried the Saint in the adjacent field we ran into Bill Oddie and his Springwatch crew. They gave us a bit of lip for not wearing wellingtons after dark but after I sucker punched some humour into Oddie they did a bunk off into the woods. I think their sound guy tripped over Ewan's makeshift headstone so he was a bit sad about that. Still, we gave the guy a good send off. Ewan left him the finger painting and the good thing is that because he was a Saint we were automatically forgiven so it all worked out. These things do.

The only problem was that when we got back to the truck we found a massive dent in the front grill. Now, it;s hard to talk about what happened next and I'm still not over it. All of a sudden I feel this gun like object in my back and turn around to see this six foot tall Hedgehog pointing an M16 at my forehead. He demanded we give him my cape because he liked the stitching and any badger meat we had in the van.

I've never been so scarred in my entire life. I tired the matches on him but my hyperventilating kept blowing them out. Then out of nowhere, halo askew, comes the Saint. He proceeds to beat the shit out of the Hedgehog. I mean he went to town on that guy. There was blood and spikes everywhere. Turns out the Hedgehog stole the door off his greenhouse and he wasn't having any of it. He'd been tracking the bitch for six months and finally had him cornered when Ewan twatted them both in the back.

In my eighty years I've never seen anything like this, and I hope I never do again. The look that Saint gave us the before he padded off into the woods was nothing short of sinister. He hiked off saying he had to go sort out Bill Oddie for pinching all the rivets in his submarine.

After he had gone I just passed out and when I came to it was morning. It was as if the nights occurrences had never happened. Pretty spooky, but when I turned on my tape recorder the words, 'Twats, twats, twats', were still clearly audible.