The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag

2

In the year 2002 my Uncle Brian brought down the British book publishing industry. He had nothing personal against it; he had no axe to grind, no cross to bear, no chicken to stuff. But he did have an awful lot of right-handed rubber gloves.

You see, my Uncle Brian had bought a consignment of rubber gloves for thirty-five quid from a bloke in a pub. Thirty-five thousand pairs. It seemed like the deal of a lifetime. One thousand pairs for a pound; you just couldn't fail to make money on a deal like that. But what my uncle didn't discover until some time later was that he had been done. He had seventy thousand rubber gloves all right, but that was the trouble, they were all right. All right-handers.

And the method he chose to sell on these seemingly useless articles at a handsome profit brought down the British book publishing industry.

Of course you will find no record of this on any database, and you can scan the pages of the History of the 20th Century on your home terminal until your eyes grow dim; Uncle Brian has no mention there. In fact the only place where you can learn of my Uncle Brian's part in changing the course of history is right here and right now.

And as all books will be destroyed in the great Health Purge of 2001 you must read here while you are able.

Uncle Brian was a tall-story-teller (I speak of him in the past tense as he is now long dead, cruelly cut down in his prime in a mysterious incident involving a grassy knoll and a high-powered rifle). I come from a long and distinguished line of tall-storytellers, and I would like to make it very clear from the outset that tall-story-telling is in no way to be confused with lying.

Lying is a wicked, shameless, ignominious thing. indulged in by crude evil folk, to the detriment of others and to the benefit of themselves. Tall-storytelling is, on the other hand, a noble art, performed by selfless individuals, designed to enrich our cultural heritage and add a little colour to an otherwise lacklustre world.

So there.

My father was a tall-story-teller, as my earliest memory of him set down now before you will confirm.

It was my first year at infant school, and the teacher had asked us to paint a picture of what our fathers did for a living. I painted mine and it so impressed the teacher that she stuck it up in the school hall (a big honour, that). And when open day came around a week later, she hastened over to my father to engage him in conversation.

'˜Mr Rankin,' she said. '˜I wonder if you might consider coming into the school and giving a talk to the children about your occupation?'

My dad, a carpenter by trade, asked why.

'˜Because,' said the teacher, '˜you are the first father we've ever had at this school who's a whaler.'

You see, several weeks prior to this my dad had given me a whale's tooth as a present, and had told me a marvellous tale about having prised it from the jaw of the slain creature during one of his many whaling voyages. He had never actually been to sea in his life; he was simply entertaining his young son with a tall tale well told.

Now any '˜normal' father, upon being faced with this teacher's question, might simply have owned up to the truth and laughed off the whole affair. But not my dad. He had a duty to his calling. He agreed, without a moment's hesitation, went home, fashioned for himself a makeshift harpoon to illustrate throwing techniques, and returned to school the following week to give his talk.

I was quite a hero throughout my second term at infant school.

And so it continued throughout my father's life. He rose, at length, to the not-so-giddy heights of general foreman, but wherever he went he spread wonder. And never more so, nor with greater panache, than when many years later he finally went to his grave.

His apotheosis as a tall-story-teller came at his funeral where he was paid a posthumous tribute to his supreme mastery of the craft. No-one really expects to leave their father's funeral with tears of laughter in their eyes. But I did. My dad had the last laugh, and he let us share it.

A slightly surreal incident at the start of the proceedings set the tone for what was to come. One of the pall bearers had a cold and pulled from his pocket an oversized red gingham handkerchief. Such an item wouldn't have meant much to anyone else, but it meant a lot to me.

The last time I had seen a handkerchief like that was nearly forty years before. My Aunty Edna, my dad's sister, always carried one in her handbag. It was scented with lavender and I loved the smell so much that whenever she came to visit I would pretend to have a cold so she would let me blow my nose on it. I would bury my face in that hanky and draw in the marvellous perfume.

The sight of the pall bearer's hanky stirred some long-forgotten childhood memories. But it wasn't just the handkerchief.

It was the Polo mint.

As he pulled out the handkerchief, a Polo mint popped from his pocket. It flew through the air and fell to the church floor, spiralling slowly forward until it came to rest beneath my dad's coffin.

And there it remained throughout the service.

But the curious incident of the oversized red gingham handkerchief and the Polo mint was nothing, nothing in the face of what was to come.

'˜The vicar was one of those young, earnest, eager fellows, with the shining face of a freshly bathed infant. Why do they scrub their faces up like that? Is it the '˜cleanliness is next to godliness' angle? I don't know, but, all aglow and full of beans, he climbed into the pulpit, gathered his robes about him and began a discourse upon my dad.

'˜I have only been in this parish for nine months,' said the vicar, '˜and so I only knew Mr Rankin during the final stages of his long illness. But it became clear to me, through my many talks with him, that Mr Rankin was no ordinary man. He had lived the kind of life that most of us only read about. He had walked alone across the Kalahari Desert, sailed alone around Cape Horn, conquered some of the world's highest peaks, and been decorated twice for deeds of outstanding valour during the Second World War.'

My gaze, which had become fixed upon the Polo mint, rose rapidly upon hearing all this, and a look of horror must certainly have appeared upon my face. My immediate thoughts were that the vicar was talking about the wrong man. It was bloody typical, wasn't it, one old dying man looking just the same as another to a new vicar with his mind on other things, young housewives of the parish, probably! I was almost on the point of rising from my pew to take issue with the erring cleric when I heard the first titters of laughter.

The church was packed, my dad had a great many friends, and the laughter came in little muffled outbursts from his old cronies. And as the vicar continued with tales of my father's daring escapades, world wanderings and uncanny knack for always being in the right place at the right time when history was being made, the laughter spread.

But never so far as the pulpit.

My father had spent the last nine months of his life priming up the vicar.

As I say, I left the church with tears in my eyes.

But the best was yet to come, and it was almost as if my dad had planned it. In fact, looking back, I feel certain that he did.

Would you care to come back to the house for a cup of tea?' I asked the vicar. '˜Evidently you were very close to my dad at the end, and I'd like, at the very least, for us to have a chat.'

The vicar agreed and we returned to my dad's place.

And we hadn't been there for ten minutes when it came.

The vicar pointed to the large swordfish saw that hung above the fireplace. '˜Now, that can tell a tale or two, can't it?' he said to me.

I glanced up at it. As far as I knew the thing had been utterly mute ever since my dad had purchased it in a Hastings antique market. But then it might have confided a tale or two to him in private, I couldn't be certain.

'˜Would you like to refresh my memory?'

'˜Indeed,' said the man of the cloth, sipping tea. '˜Your father told me about the time he was fishing for sailfish alone off the Florida Keys, and a sudden storm blew his boat far out to sea. He lost all contact with land and during this storm, which was, according to your father, nothing less than the infamous Hurricane Flora of 1966, his oars were blown overboard.

'˜Your father thought that his time had surely come and, being the pious man he was, he offered himself to God's tender mercy. There was a flash of lightning and at that very moment a swordfish burst its saw - that very one hanging there - up through the bottom of the boat. Using the skills he had learned while working as a circus strongman, your father snapped off the saw, thrust his foot into the hole and, using the saw for a paddle, rowed back to land.'

To say that I was speechless would be to say, well, I was speechless.

After the vicar left, my mum took me quietly to one side. '˜I think it would probably be for the best if none of this was ever spoken of again, don't you, dear?' she said.

I nodded thoughtfully. '˜Trust me, Mum,' I told her. '˜I won't mention it to another living soul.'

And I have, of course, remained true to my promise.

My Uncle Brian, my dad's younger brother, was not a carpenter or a general foreman. He was a fox farmer. I never even knew that fox farms existed before he told me about them. Apparently, without fox farms the entire British economy would have ground to a halt a long time before it actually did in the year 2002, with the fall of the British book publishing industry and pretty much everything else. But during the 1980s and 1990s, fox farming at secret government establishments kept it buoyant. You see, there weren't enough foxes to hunt and so fox farms had to breed even more.

Allow me to explain.

As most folk will know, blood sports have, in recent times, become something of an issue and one which has deepened the divide between the rural and the urban communities.

There has always been a divide, but this is to be expected. Country folk have long considered themselves to be a cut above the simple townie. Country folk feel themselves to be closer to nature, more in tune with its natural rhythms and custodians of the land for generations yet to come. Townies, in their opinion, are a bunch of glue-sniffing football hooligans, packed like lab rats into high-rise blocks, stunted both mentally and physically by a diet of McDonald's burgers and traffic fumes. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Townies, however, lean to a different opinion. They consider themselves a cut above the simple bumpkin. Townies feel themselves to be better educated and more sophisticated, having greater access to the arts and information technology. They look upon country folk as a bunch of ignorant, inbred sheep-shaggers who get off on cruelty and blood-letting. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Both sides are, of course, way off the mark, although it could be argued that sheep-shagging is an almost exclusively rural recreation.

So it comes as little surprise to find that the countryman and the townie disagree over the matter of blood sports.

In the summer of 1997 almost half a million concerned country folk marched peacefully upon London to heighten the awareness of the public at large regarding the threat to rural England posed by a proposed Bill to abolish the blood sport of fox-hunting.

What the dim-witted townie failed to understand, the country folk patiently explained, was that without foxhunting there would be no English countryside. Consider, they said, all those people whose livelihoods depend directly upon foxhunting. The saddlers, the grooms, the ostlers, the stable lads and lasses. The riding instructors, the vets, the manufacturers of horse pills and tackle and donkey nuts and stirrup cups. The blacksmiths and the blacksmiths' apprentices, the horse-breeders, the makers of horse boxes and those who worked in the factories that produce those stickers you see in the rear windows of Range Rovers that say '˜I ♥ greys'.

And that was only the horses. What about the dogs? What about those packs of beautiful cuddly foxhounds? They'd all have to be destroyed. Destroyed! Dogs destroyed! A national shame! And with their destruction would go the livelihoods of the Masters of Foxhounds, their apprentices and assistants, the whippers-in, the manufacturers of dog collars and dog biscuits and dog food, more vets and so on and so forth.

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hard-working honest country folk would be doomed to lives of dole-queue misery only previously reserved for town-dwellers.

Catastrophe!

And worse, far worse, what about the land itself? England depended upon its farmland. Its farmland and its produce. The land! Dear Lord, the land!

To put it plainly, there would be no more land. Without the efforts of the gallant foxhunters to keep the evil vermin that was the fox at bay, the English countryside would be no more. The fox, that hellish chimera of wolf, jackal, tiger and ghoul/demon! werewolf, would multiply, growing in unstoppable numbers, forming mighty packs and wreaking havoc across the land. Snatching infants from their cots, devouring entire herds of sheep and cattle in a hideous feeding frenzy, before moving on to destroy the towns and cities.

To ban foxhunting was to do little less than herald in the End Times and welcome the arrival of the Anti-Christ.

Blimey!

This all came as a bit of a revelation to the townie. For one thing, the townie had always believed that the greatest threat to a fanner's crops came not from the meat-eating fox but from the strictly vegetarian rabbit, which was, by a curious coincidence, the all-but-staple diet of the fox. And surely only one and a half per cent of the British populace actually lived in the country, and the countryside only contributed three per cent to the Gross National Product. And surely most farmers had guns? After all they were always pointing them at townies who inadvertently picnicked upon their land. Couldn't they simply shoot the foxes?

It was indeed a bit of a revelation, and one that served to pave over that aforementioned divide which had for so long, er, divided the rural community from its urban brother. Foxhunting provided full employment for the country folk, and spared the town-dweller from the rabid attentions of the demonic fox pack.

Harmony.

So where did the fox farms come into this? Well, as I thought I'd explained, there weren't enough foxes to hunt.

It was the town-dwellers' fault. Their love of motor cars and motorways. You see, ten times as many foxes are killed by motor cars than are killed by foxhunts, which explains why country folk always protest so much about new motorways.

It's all so simple when it's explained, isn't it?

So my Uncle Brian worked on a fox farm. It was one of the new ones. A fox factory farm. My uncle was employed as a genetic engineer. The aim was to breed the super-fox. A vegetarian fox that was a really slow runner, as so many foxhunters are old and fat, just like their hounds.

My Uncle Brian enjoyed the work. Playing God and tampering with the laws of nature had always appealed to him. But he became unemployed in 1997 with the change of government, and this in turn led him to lose the thirty-five quid which in its turn came to bring down the British book publishing industry.

Allow me to explain.

What happened was this. The new Labour government was very keen to save money. Having the nation's interests ever at heart they decided to cut back on government spending, and one way they found of achieving this was by amalgamating certain top secret departments and restructuring them so that they would run at a profit. Lumping them all together, as it were, sharing jobs. Fox farming, which was Very Top Secret, got amalgamated with UFO back-engineering, which was Above Top Secret. UFO back-engineering is when a government acquires a grounded flying saucer and then takes it apart in order to see what makes it run. This has not as yet been successfully achieved, which explains why we do not at present swish around in flying saucers and commute between the planets. But we're trying.

So UFO back-engineering got amalgamated with fox farm genetic engineering, and a chap called Hartly was put in charge with the remit to make the enterprise run at a profit.

Hartly was a bright young spark and almost immediately he saw a financial opportunity. Fox pelts. As townies were now convinced of the good of foxhunting and the evil of foxes, surely they would be prepared to purchase fox fur coats just like the good old days? Hartly set about the genetic engineering of the angora fox. It was a brilliant idea, but where he slipped up was in using genetic material taken from a UFO.

As all those who have access to Above Top Secret information will know, UFOs are mostly organic. Which explains why they don't show up on radar. The UFO genetic material used for the creation of the angora fox did not result in the creation of the angora fox. It resulted in the creation of the stealth fox.

Now, whereas the Stealth Bomber does not show up on radar, the stealth fox didn't show up anywhere. It could blend in with its surroundings to a degree that made it virtually invisible. It was there all right, if you took the trouble to look hard enough for it (after all everything has to be somewhere and nothing can ever be anywhere other than where it is), but escaping notice was what the stealth fox did best.

That and escaping from secret government research establishments. Naturally.

Using the cunning for which it is famed, this new order of fox sought out its old adversary - the foxhound. It began to blend in with the packs, and in fact so convincingly did it do this that the pack took it for one of its own. In no time the stealth fox was cross-breeding with the foxhounds, producing a stealth fox/dog hybrid indistinguishable from the ordinary foxhound. Within a couple of years many packs of foxhounds consisted of nothing but stealth fox/dog hybrids.

This cross-breeding produced a larger, more powerful strain of stealth fox, roughly the size of a Great Dane (or small horse). The next step was inevitable.

The large stealth fox/dog hybrids began to blend in with the horses in the hunt, and soon the first stealth fox/dog/horse hybrid appeared.

Now the next step up the evolutionary ladder taken by the stealth fox may well be considered by those of a prudish disposition to be too distasteful to chronicle. But in the noble quest for truth, it must be told.

Those of you who have ever viewed the now legendary porno vid Down on the Farm will recall the episode of the lusty stable lass and the frisky stallion.

Enough said.

The stealth fox/dog/horse/human hybrid was born.

And it was one of these very stealth fox/dog/horse/ human hybrids who, several years later in the guise of a bloke in a bar, did my uncle out of thirty-five quid, which in turn led my uncle to bring down the British book publishing industry.

And how this came about, and what it all has to do with a voodoo handbag, a Holy Guardian Sprout and a threat to mankind from the denizens of cyberspace, will soon become blindingly obvious.

Although not, perhaps, in the most obvious way.