A story - L O N G....

tac foley · 17-01-2019 11:53am #1

I know that a good few of my posts seem to be longer than they need to be, some of them far longer than they should be - indeed, not needed at all, but that's just the seanchí in me, or so I'm told.

However, this little story is worth spending a couple of minutes reading, and might make you chuckle; G*d knows, something to make us smile these days is worth gold and rubies, as a distant relative of mine once said in a song.

Here it is - names have been changed, obviously, and anonymity maintained as a result.

OK, folks, grab your coffee, pull up a chair, and pin back your ears, it's pretty long, but, in my opinion, well worth reading. And more to the point, it really happened, a while back, not far from a beautiful old medieval town in S****shire...

But first, let me introduce a few of the persona to you.

First is the hero, W*****, a fine Welshman, local gun dealer, man-about town, bon viveur, Rotary Club and renowned shooter of both game and clays. He had one other pastime, but I'll leave that till later, as it is not yet pertinent.

Second is not really one person, but the group of what we over here call 'rough shooters'. These are a bunch of keen shotgunners who roam around their patch, taking opportune game that is in season and feral pigeons that are pests here, and always shootable. It's a good way to meet new people, since membership is either by invitation, or, like W*****, because there are distinct advantages to having a shoot member who is also a dealer, if you get my drift. W***** was an old hand in this particular bunch, well-known and often a PITA, as old-established shoot members can be.

W***** had a number of eye-catching tricks that he used to demonstrate to anybody who hadn't seen them before, and most of us who had, but they were usually interesting, well, at least once, like the time he set off both barrels of a Rhodda of Calcutta .577 Snider Howdah pistol at the same time - that, of course, is another story for another time. His most spectacular trick, and one that never failed to get anybody's attention, was usually shown during a break in the rural ambulation, about 11 o'clock a.m. We'd all be sat down on a handy tussock or whatever, drinking our coffee and eating our sammidges, telling lies, just like one does. At some point in the break, W***** would set his eagle eye on a the latest noob to the group, and sidling over to him or her, would engage them in conversation that went something like this...

W***** [W] - 'Hello there, NAME, I couldn't help but notice that you seem to be using ACME Megathunder Maxi-Gleep cartridges. How are you finding them?

Noob [N] - 'Well, not too bad, but they tend to leave the gun pretty dirty when I've done. They seem to be pretty loose patterning, too, with holes that let the birds through, although that might just be me, haha.'

W - 'As you may have noticed, I'm using the latest from Fratelli Bratelli Vermicelli, and they are just SO clean-burning, AND tight, that I've taken on the task of selling them in my local dealership. Of course, you being a member here will get a great rate for bulk buying, OK?'

N - 'Clean-burning, eh? I'd like to see that!'

W - 'Nothing could be easier! Here, watch this! [You THINK that you know what's coming next, right? Wrong. Wait.]

At that juncture, W***** whipped out one of these cartridges from his bag, and using his trusty Gerber, hacked it open, commenting as he did so on the precision of the wad column, the finely graded shot, and lastly, the beauty of the powder, made, he assured us, by the famous Italian propellant company of Flagranti Delecto of Tuscany. Opening his hand, he carefully poured the powder onto the palm of his hand, and reaching into his pocket, produced a Zippo, lit it up and applied the flame to the little pile of powder. There was an almost instantaneous 'WHOOOOSH' as the powder disappeared in a mere wisp of smoke, leaving his hand virtually unmarked in the process. Amazing. N was amazed, and so were some of us, again. Needless to say, his sales improved as a result of this spectacular demonstration.

The year moved on, and so did the shoot, and as always happens, there were a couple of new faces by the time July happened, and we were off, on a fine Saturday morning that promised to be VERY warm.

It was, and we were all pretty happy to sit down, count the many pigeons that had fallen to our unerring marksmanship, and have a break.

I recall looking over my shoulder, where W***** was at it again with the latest Noob. Same deal, same sell, same demonstration, except that just after W***** had poured the powder onto to his hand in front of the fascinate Noob, he couldn't find his lighter. 'Ron', he called over to the driver [we had a LWB Land-Rover belonging to Ron's missus, who was a breeder of heavy horses in her spare time when she wasn't laying paving stones], 'fetch us your lighter, will'ya?' Sadly, the Landy was a distant green blob on the horizon, about ten minutes there and back, and in the interim, W***** was regaling the Noob with all kinds of anecdotes, mainly about the shooting ineptitudes of his fellows, ie, us. So what happened next didn't overly upset us.

Ron toddled back, and with a grump handed over another lighter, this one a cheap BIC. W***** took it off him with a grimace, the way that one would if somebody had handed you a fresh doo-doo, lit it up and applied it to the little pile of powder.

There was an odd sound, rather like hearing a distant gasoline fire going 'whoomp', from the powder, almost, but not quite, eclipsed by the sound coming from W*****...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

W***** was writhing on the ground in obvious agony, whimpering and wailing all at once in his travails, and clutching his hand to his chest in a most pathetic manner. We rushed over, slowly-like, to see what might have caused this unmanly display, simply a repetition of something we'd all seen before. Well, not quite true, that.

We'd all seen the usual puff of smoke and the beaming W*****, but his time something quite different happen to him that we had NEVER seen before. He had a neat hole, about the size of a one-cent piece, right through his hand in the centre of the palm. Yes, our W***** had made himself nothing less than a shaped charge, just like the the one in a Bazooka that can penetrate 18" of armour plate.... the powder had absorbed the sweat on his hot little handy, and made a cone - JUST the same shape that Mr Monroe used when he invented the shaped charge all those years ago. And W***** had set it off, just like the real deal, by lighting it at the pointy end.

To move on, Ron and three of us managed to drag W***** over to the Landy, and I say it took three of us, mainly because we were all falling about like loons, laffin' our heads off. Holding up our hands to our faces, pretending to look through a hole, and calling peepo, seemed to be favourite for a while. But eventually we quietened down some and drove the ten miles or so into town and the local hospital ER, where we handed over W***** to the puzzled ER docs. A couple of us stayed to explain what had happened to the them, and one of them actually had a bit of a cackle about it, and who can blame her?

Suffice it to say that W***** spent a few days in hospital while they sorted out a suitable skin graft, which takes me to the culmination of the yarn, if you are still with me. All of this, however, came out sometime later, and not from W*****, but his long-suffering wife at the Christmas dinner party. It seems that they had a hard time finding a suitable site from which to remove the grafting, but eventually found one on his left calf, where the skin seemed to be inordinately smooth, almost baby-smooth, in fact. This was used, with initial great success, and after a couple of weeks the medics pronounced W***** 'fixed' although he had a LOT of painful operations and physiotherapy to restore at least some of the lost ability that the 'blast' had taken from him. Imagine a two-centimetre-sized hole in the middle of YOUR palm, right?

A few weeks passed us by, and W***** reappeared on the shoot, although we had obviously seen him in his store as well. He seemed a mite subdued, like anybody who had publicly blown a hole through their own hand might be expected to be, and there was no repeat performance. There was, however, the usual joshing, especially when W***** was caught surrepticiously but frantically scratching the plam of his hand. All sorts of ribald comments followed this, I can recall. I may have even made some myself...

Finally, at Christmas, it all came out. And yet again W***** was the 'Man of the Match' when it came to providing the laffs, and laff we did. Our other Welsh shooter, E****, actually swallowed a small dental bridge in the process. Y'see, W*****'s graft HAD taken, and very well. The scar was very clean, but, not to put too fine a point on it, a tad hairy.

Y'see, nobody at the hospital had though to ask why W*****'s legs were sooooooooooooo smooth - smooth enough to be used on a part of the body where there are, usually, no hairs.

Remember I told you that W***** had one other passion?

Well, W***** was a very serious cyclist, and shaved his legs at least twice a week to improve his 'aerodynamic form'.

The rest of his body was, as with most North-Walians, very hairy indeed. The graft, having taken, was simply doing what new skin, complete with hair follicles, does.

And it grew hair.