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Five Rings Too Many
A foul night of gales and rain, with the ghosts of my creditors scrabbling vainly at the casements.
Shortly before two – as I’m sliding my First Folio into its slipcase before cracking a can of Special Brew and settling down to The Adult Channel – comes a wild knocking at the outer gates. An aged man, almost certainly named Jabez, has hobbled up from the village with a storm-lantern to break the news that Britain (the country in which I live, he tells me) has been chosen to ‘host’ an event known as the ‘Olympic Games’.
What is this to me? I dismiss him with a meat pie and a leathern pouch containing three-farthings and retire to my gunroom to ponder his strange tale.
If this beastly charade does have to occur, we must obviously do all we can to fill it with horrible, previously unknown ‘traditional British sports’ that make everyone else feel ill. Now that bear-baiting is technically illegal and Robert Kilroy-Silk has been dealt with, we may be reduced to inflating pigeons with a bicycle pump, filling them with malt whisky and punting them off the battlements into the world’s biggest charcoal brazier, while old buffers on stilts intone ‘Nine lungs for the boiling!’, ‘Chew Magna at a pumphrey!’, and similar drivel.
I may even have to revive a terrible ‘country dance’ I was taught long ago by a creep from MI5. He said originally we were going to use it on Japan if the A-bomb didn’t work.
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