Humour

The Chalk Outline

/ Doug Jacquier / 4 Comments

This little piece has made the long list in the Wilson’s Tales of the Borders competition in Berwick, UK.

The Chalk Outline
‘So, theories, Detective Constable.’
‘Hit and run, gov. By aliens.’
‘Based on what?’
‘Well, gov, the ambos said he was badly sunburnt.’
‘And the object in his hand?’
‘Sunscreen, gov.’
‘Sunscreen?’
‘Yes, gov. Clearly these were aliens originating from the
Sun. He’s legged it, hoping the sunscreen would save him.’
‘The Sun?’
‘Well, stands to reason, gov. If it was the Moon he wouldn’t
have panicked and run into the road.’
‘So, not a drunk in the middle of the road, whiskey bottle in
hand, flattened by a passing truck?’
‘No, gov. That’s what the aliens want us to believe.’

Rear Windows

/ Doug Jacquier / 25 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly Unicorn photo prompt Challenge.

‘So, how’s the leg coming on then?’

‘Another 4 weeks before I can walk on it. Driving me nuts stuck in here.’

‘You’ve got the TV and you can stream whatever you want.

‘Yes but it’s like Bruce Springsteen says. 57 channels and nothin’ on. And I’m sick of reading.’

‘You get visitors, like me.’

‘Look, no offence, mate, but you’re hardly riveting company without a pint in your hand.’

‘Hey. What’s with the chair drawn up to the window and the binoculars. You perving on the neighbours? Seen any good murders yet, Jimmy Stewart?’

‘No such luck. The odd domestic. Spotty teenager picking his nose. Mind you, I live in hope that the divorcee on the second floor will leave her bedroom blinds open one day.’

‘You can’t carry on like this. It just isn’t right. People have a right to their privacy.’

‘Privacy? They’re all screen addicts. The entire world knows what they had for dinner, who they’re practicing their horizontal folk dancing with, what they’ve been buying, what they, like, Like.’

‘Well, don’t be surprised if someone comes around and punches you in the nose or reports you to the Police.’

‘No, no chance of that happening. They get their revenge every day. Remember during Covid and everyone would get out and clap and bang saucepans for the health workers? Every night at six o’clock this lot stand at their windows, drop their kit and moon me. It’s a sea of rears in windows.’

Psychobabble

/ Doug Jacquier / 14 Comments

This piece was written in response to the weekly photo prompt posted by the Unicorn Challenge.

The house, closely modeled on the Bates Mansion, had gone to rack and ruin since old Ed started to lose his marbles and his self-control, leading to the snickering nick-name of Edmund Lackbladder. His faithful manservant, Bald Dick, did his perennial incompetent best, including crashing Ed’s pride and joy, his air-conditioned mower, into Ed’s personal lawn chair, dating from when he and his wife, Ernestine (nee Snortchortle), and their soccer-mad son, Whirling Eddie, used to soak up the rays on a Sunday afternoon.

In a desultory attempt at gardening, Dick gradually moved the furniture and the indoor plants outside to save them from becoming regular receptacles when Ed was caught short between rooms.

Young Eddie had long gone and fancied himself as an influencer and day trader, which is a middle-class euphemism for unemployed and unemployable. Ernestine had long gone to the Great Couturier in the sky, having suffered from recurring bouts of ennui and an infection contracted after having lip, breast and buttock implants, giving her the appearance of the Michelin man with bee sting lips.

Ed’s advanced Alzheimer’s was a health hazard for the female nurses that visited to check on him. To Ed, they were all Ernestine coming home from shopping and they were universally welcomed with heightened ardour and lowered trousers.

But most days, Ed sat skeletally in his mother’s rocking chair on the front porch, gazing at the flag he’d asked the nurses to raise, so he could remember the country where he lived.

WTF’s Balls of Fate

/ Doug Jacquier / 11 Comments

This piece was adapted from a much longer original version for the weekly Unicorn Challenge for up to 250 words from a photo prompt.

With his clumpy red hair, galloping acne, galumphing gait and skunk-terrifying body odour, Wilberforce Terrapin Featherstonehaugh’s dreams of becoming a major ball sports star were unlikely to ever reach fruition.

Until one day, in his basement, he found a crystal ball. He picked it up and the room plunged into darkness. A woman’s spectral voice said ‘I am Medusa and I’ve killed the lights so you won’t immediately turn into stone.’

Wilberforce stammered ‘Medusa?’

‘Yes, the genuine article. Think Cher in her prime with snakes instead of hair. I have been trapped in that ball for a hundred years and, out of gratitude, I am prepared to reward you. Tell me what thing or object over which you desire complete control for the and it shall be yours.’

Grumblebum thought long and hard for about thirty seconds and then shouted ’Balls!’

Medusa groaned. ‘You have to be kidding me. Not world peace, cancer, the internet? Why we bother with you lot passeth all godly understanding but …. balls it is.’

Back upstairs, he was watching the lottery draw as he day-dreamed about sports stardom when he suddenly thought ‘Of course! Balls!’ He could win the lottery anytime he liked and never have to worry about money again.

Some months later, head shaved, beard grown, and surgery to his sweat glands complete, William Thomas Fate (or WTF to his old friends) set out to search the world for a beautiful woman with hair that looked like writhing snakes.

Flight of the escargot

/ Doug Jacquier / 10 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly Unicorn Challenge to write up to 250 words in response to a photo prompt. Any resemblance to actual life in France or to the actual thought processes of snails is purely coincidental.

There I was, minding my own business, up a tree in Catalonian Barthelona, when this cherry-pickin’ monster rocks up and hurls me into a bin. I went into my shell for survival and when I was game enough to stick my head out again I discovered that, far from being a bowl, life had become a box of cherries. In a French market no less, with men shrugging as they blew Gauloise smoke into my eyes and women carrying over-laden baskets with baguettes sticking out as they gazed about with their bedroom eyes.

This is the land of the sauvage (and not the perfumed kind), I thought to myself. Over on the deli stalls sat jars of mardi foie gras gleaned from the livers of gullible force-fed geese. Beneath the tables there were a myriad of frog amputees frantically rolling their wheelchairs away in case some other part of their anatomy became a delicacy.

And of course I was only too well aware of their penchant for my own kind, calling it escargot to disguise its murderous origins. To make us edible, they starve us for days to eliminate our ability to make slime and then cook us up for the pleasure of bar patrons, who remove our corpses with toothpicks as they sip their Burgundy.

Which is why I am hurtling with as much pace as a snail can muster to find safety amongst the cabbages, leaving behind me as many snail trails as a honeymoon bed.

Bushwhacked poetry

/ Doug Jacquier / 12 Comments

Note: Aimed at an Australian audience, though I imagine similarly execrable hackneyed forms occur in other cultures and languages.

 

I love a well-worn cliché

Where the Snowy River reigns

We don’t need no quiche, ay,

On the Oodnagalabi Plains.

 

Some doggerel out of Gundagai

Old regrets we used to know

And stone the crows that fill the sky

Along the Malonglo.

 

Our patron saint, The Banjo,

Of Waltzing Matilda fame

Makes our very hearts glow

With his verses, both halt and lame.

 

Close behind is Henry Lawson

With his tales of outback life

Though goodness knows what Freud would’ve made

Of the snake and The Drover’s Wife.

 

The Bulletin let them have their say

And the bush bards told it true

Of characters met along the way

But no Afghan, black or Jew.

 

So Akubra on and pen in hand

Churn out some turgid lines

About some Never-Never land

And make sure the bastard rhymes.

Stable martial relations

/ Doug Jacquier / 13 Comments

My wife believes in flying saucers.

And cups. And dinner plates. Even the occasional saucepan sails through space towards my beleaguered semi-deaf head. I say ‘semi-deaf’ because my hearing declined significantly after I was run over by that B-double truck on Main St. But I digress.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that our marriage is unstable. Far from it. We live a mainly peaceful and amicable existence on our small farm. We grow a lot of our own food and the weather and the rabbits and the possums let us share in some of this bounty. We supplement our income by agisting horses, not that we make a lot of hay out of that.

No, the problem is my wife’s frustration with what she sees as an irredeemable flaw in my character, namely that her pearls of wisdom, not to mention her specific instructions, don’t seem to arrive at my ears as often as she would like and those that do arrive are somehow transformed into only a fair facsimile of what she believes she originally uttered.

I’m not convinced. For example, we were recently discussing the parlous state of our bank account and she said all of our problems would be solved if we had a million ducks. I pointed out that we didn’t have the borrowing capacity to fund the purchase a million ducks nor the space to raise them without us drowning in a swamp of duck doings. Half the dinner service my parents gave us when we got married was sacrificed on that field of battle.

When she eventually calmed down, she said living with me was like a never-ending game of Chinese whispers. I said it wasn’t fair that she whispered to me in Chinese when she knew I had a hearing deficit. The electric frypan has never been the same since.

Eventually, to keep the peace (or should I say ‘pieces’ of our remaining serviceable crockery), I agreed to have my hearing tested, if only to convince my wife of the error of her whispering ways. A very pleasant young audiologist took me through a series of challenges and she seemed very pleased when I indicated that I could detect a range usually only achievable by dogs and children at a great distance when dinner’s ready. She seemed very confused however when I related a recipe back to her that she seemed somehow to have confused with the Lord’s Prayer. University standards these days; what can you say?

She recommended hearing aids, for what seemed to her the very reasonable price of handing over our firstborn grandchild and the deed to the farm. I said I’d sleep on it and went home to my wife with what I believed were some very creditable lies I’d prepared. There went the rest of the wedding dinner service.

So I succumbed to pieces of electronic gadgetry being inserted in my aural orifices and awaited the auditory miracles I had been promised. Alas and alack, they seemed to be tuned to the same frequency as the local FM radio station and I heard more about ‘lerv’ than the glorious sounds of birdlife or my wife’s dulcet tones.

The Grand Inquisitrix was not fooled by my ecstatic claims of the joys of restored contact with the temporal world and that damned audiologist (seemed like such a nice lass originally) adjusted my devices to ‘give you back all the wonderful things you’ve been missing’.

This cornucopia of delights included the agony of our grand-daughter’s primary school choir singing, the avalanche of clichés possessed by football commentators and learning the gruesome details of whatever Third World country was currently at war/starving/suffering an epidemic. To say I was unconvinced that I had been delivered of a serious affliction is like saying that a man with chronic headaches was unconvinced of the need for his decapitation to cure the problem.

So, whenever I thought I could safely do so, I stuffed these harbingers of horror in my pocket and only retrieved them when my wife hove into view. And that worked fine. For a while.

I’d been out in the barn carrying out some repairs, with my ear trumpets in my pocket, when a sudden tap on the shoulder from my wife startled me. She gave strict instructions as to what to do with the horses that had just arrived on a double float. I assured her I would follow her instructions to the letter and that I was clear about what she was saying.

What I was clear about was that she appeared to be entering the early stages of dementia. I mean who in their right mind would want to staple horses together?

A compromise of sorts emerged with the idea of her sending me text messages when it was something important, the theory being that then there would be no room for argument about either party’s deafness or senility.

An admirable plan indeed, were it not for my wife’s propensity to be, shall we say, creative in her spelling. The early warning signs were there when she asked me to buy some naval oranges and I confused the greengrocer no end when I insisted on the ones only sailors eat. And imagine my shock when she said she was going over to her sister’s to help her with her dying.

The plan finally collapsed under the weight of the fiasco of her finding me and the local priest in the barn after she’d told me to exorcise the horses.

So now we just make sure we’re standing close enough to ensure clear communication, although this has led to dancing and who knows where that might end?

 

Mt. Gambier stand-up – my first paid gig

/ Doug Jacquier / Leave a comment

Good evening. Great to be back in Mt Gambier.

Pam’s done a great job to put on this show and to get some terrific sponsors and mine’s one of the local chiropractors. And some of the audience here have really dressed for a big occasion. There’s a young lass up the back with a cleavage that would shame the Grand Canyon. Bingo. 30 blokes just got whiplash and my sponsor just went – ka-ching.

In fact my Dad grew up here but of course it was a much smaller place then. It was so small that Bobby Helpmann was the only gay in the village.

My mum and Dad are still alive and going strong well into their 90’s. They say the first person to live to 150 has already been born. Let’s just join our hands in prayer that it’s not one of the Kardashians.

Of course I’m semi-retired these days. I got run over by a truck. I’m alright but the truck was write-off.

These days I’m a business consultant. You give me your watch and I tell you the time, for a 100 bucks an hour. At those prices I’ll even unblock your drains.

I fact I met with one of my clients here this afternoon. You probably know the Reverend Kevin McGillicuddy, better known as Kev the Rev. He was a mechanic before he found his calling so he’s set up the Church of the Sacred Combustion Engine. His followers call themselves Rev heads.

He wanted to know how to get people to focus on the real story of Christmas and fill the collection plate at the same time. So I said, Kev, you’ve got to modernise the story, use words your congregation can relate to.

Forget the virgin birth. You need to talk about divine IVF. You need to say her boyfriend was a chippie called Joe, who did the right thing and was there at the birth. The women will love that.

You have to say all the motels were booked out so they had to doss down in an old shearing shed.

The Wise Men need to turn up in utes, with a slab of Four X Gold, some frankfurts and a mirror ball.

And if you really want to bring the house down, have all the angels dressed in CFS gear. Believe me, your cup will runneth over.

Retirement and dogs – My first ever stand-up routine

/ Doug Jacquier / Leave a comment

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Now I know you’ll be shocked that I’m thinking of retiring.  No, no, no, I hear you cry. Not this ageless hipster? Not this suburban Superman?

But alas, I am Superman no more.

These days I’m slower than a startled snail. Unable to leap small frogs. Less powerful than a Labor voter.

But worst of all – I haven’t saved enough money to retire on. I’m Not-Enough-Super Man.

So I’ve been trying out some new business ideas down in the back shed.  

In one corner I’m farting about in my chemistry lab. So far I’m only Breaking Bad Wind.

In another corner I’ve set up a 3-D printer and my neighbours are lining up for Do-It-Yourself hip replacements.

But my most exciting venture is a true example of bleeding edge business thinking, that leverages Pandora out of her box, and runs her up the flagpole, to see who salutes her paradigm shift.

It’s my new line in Boutique Meats for the Barbie.

I’m not talking any old load of tripe of course. I’m talking artisanal snags. Bespoke burgers. Connoisseur skewers.

But here’s the real stroke of triple-bottom-line genius. I’m sourcing all my meat from pests and pets.

So (big drum roll). Goodbye possums and hello possages!

Goodbye stray cats! Hello Moggy burgers!

Farewell fur kids that bark all night. Hello Shoosh Kebabs!

No, I wouldn’t really do that to a dog.

In fact we were burgled the other night and I said to my wife, Sue, I said, ‘Shit, Sue, we need a dog’. 

So I got some mates together and had a GreatDane the country looking for the right dog.

o   One the way we had a flat so I said, I’ll get the spare, you get the jack, Russell.

o   It was a hot day so I said open the window so we can get some air, Dale. It’s getting a bit Staffy in here.

o   We seemed to go for miles so I said ‘we must be near the border, Collie’

o   Finally we saw a farmer with some sheep so I stopped and said ‘Ciao’. He said I don’t speak Italian, I’m a German shepherd.

o   I said ‘that dog rounding up the sheep that’s got hair like seaweed, what breed is that? And he said ‘kelpie’.

o   What about the one that’s chasing that car. ‘Oh, that’s a Holden retriever’

o   In the end we settled for one that would be good with the grandkids – a baby Setter.