Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
have begun something like this.
     
    SCENE ONE
    Interior: Norman’s kitchen workshop.
     
    Camera pans slowly across small and shabby room. We see bundles of newspapers and magazines. Cigarette boxes, cartons of soft drinks, all the usual stock of a modest corner shop. We see also a sink piled high with unwashed dishes and a work table. Here we find evidence of scientific endeavour, test tubes, retorts, a scientific journal open at a page about cloning, a box of Meccano.
    Camera pans towards a filthy stove (1950s grey enamel), where we see an old saucepan. Its contents are boiling over, a thick green liquid is bubbling out. We follow the course of this liquid as it drips slowly down to the floor (ancient lino). Here there is movement, as of things forming and moving.
    Camera pulls back rapidly, rising to view the room from above.
    And we see them. Dozens of them. Racing round and round the kitchen floor. Leaping over discarded cans and flotsam. Tiny horses, no bigger than mice. Galloping around and around and around.
    Music over: the Osmonds, “Crazy Horses”.
     
    Of course if it was a little B-movie it would need a title. It would have to be one of those
The Thing from Planet Z
or
The Beast from the Bottomless Hole
, or even
The Scotsman Who Lives on the Moon
sort of jobbies.
    Norman could no doubt have thought of one.
Invasion of the Tiny Horses,
perhaps, or
Night of the Stunted Stallions
. That sounded better.
    But as Norman wasn’t in his kitchen, he wasn’t going to get the chance.
    So knowing not the wonder of it all, Norman sat in the steel chair in the interrogation room in the Brentford nick and fretted and fretted and fretted.
    And in his kitchen workshop, the tiny horses galloped around and around and around and around.
    And around.
    The Alien Say
    (Or, How Elvis Presley failed to heed the voice of Interplanetary Parliament and so condemned Planet Earth to destruction.)
     
    To be sung in the voice of Early Elvis.
     
    The alien say that the truth will make me free.
    The alien say that he knows the inner me.
    But I don’t care what the alien say.
    All I wanna do is rock ’n’ roll all day.
    Wop bop a loo bop wham bam hip hooray.
     
    The alien say it’s a karmic symbiosis.
    Divinely inspired cerebral metamorphosis.
    But I don’t care what the alien think.
    All I wanna do is take drugs and drink.
    A wop bop a loo bop wham bam kitchen sink.
     
    (middle eight)
     
    The alien reckons that the future beckons
    And the end is drawing near.
    Throw away our bombs before the holocaust comes.
    His message was loud and clear.
     
    The alien say we’re destroying the eco-system.
    The alien say we should call upon cosmic wisdom.
    But I don’t care who the alien calls.
    All I wanna do is screw young girls.
    A wop bop a loo bop wham bam string of pearls.
     
    (another middle eight)
     
    The alien thinks that humanity stinks
    And we’ve blown it all to hell.
    The message is grave, but he can still save us
    And he chose
me
to tell.
     
    The alien say the galactic federation
    Has condemned this world to a swift annihilation.
    The alien said I should pass it on.
    But I forgot his message when I went to the John.
    Wop bop a loo bop –
Where’s the planet gone?
     
    Thank you, ma’am.

7
    Elvis should have called it quits way back in ’77 when he had his first heart attack. He was never quite the same man after that. He wandered around Gracelands, clutching at his head and talking to himself and telling those who would listen that he was having revelations. Clearly the King was two strings short of a Strat.
    His latest offering, a stream of semi-consciousness rambling over beefy drum and bass, pumped now out of Sandy’s behind-the-bar sound system, making any form of conversation in the Shrunken Head just that little bit more stressful.
    It was now almost nine of the night-time clock and Jim Pooley took another elbow to the ear.
    “Ouch,” went Jim and, “Mind out there.”
    “Stop making such a fuss,” Omally

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