Five times tree is one orchard
I AM, it seems, three trees short of an orchard.
You see, a couple of years ago, my mother turned up at the door of Tine Hise II with a couple of apple trees, as mothers do.
I planted them in the back garden, surrounded each with a neat circle of hardwood chips, and settled into a deckchair to wait until they were big enough to swing a hammock between.
I am still waiting.
In the meantime, though, we have had the annual benefit of enough apples every autumn to make a very nice crumble. With lemon ice cream, custard and a sprinkling of chocolate, naturally.
Not to mention the pleasure of saying on a fine summer's evening: "I'm just going out for a potter in the orchard, dear, then I'll think I'll give a few of the servants a damned good thrashing to work up an appetite for dinner."
Until Cate points out that we do not, in fact, have servants.
As if that wasn't bad enough, she discovered the other day that we don't even have an orchard, since the technical definition is apparently a minimum of five trees.
Faced with such a disaster, there was only one thing a man could do, and that's open a bottle of wine.
However, since it was only 11 in the morning, I decided to go to the gym instead. Then open a bottle of wine.
In fact, it turned out to be a serendipitous decision, for on emerging from the gym, awash with endorphins, I met my old mate David Malone, now a TV producer in Dublin.
"Here, you've gone and lost my daughter," he said.
"Good grief, I'll have a look down the back of the sofa the moment I go home. What does she look like?" I said.
"No, no, I don't mean that. She enjoyed The Road to Gobblers Knob so much that she decided to go to Mexico with a friend for their gap year.
"It was all going fabulously until a few weeks ago when they were out one night for a meal and she left her handbag behind with her passports in it. She'd got both a British and an Irish one, just for back-up, then carelessly left both in the same bag.
"Anyway, the next day she went to the British Embassy, got a severe ticking off from a clerk, had to wait half the day, and then only got an A4 sheet as an emergency passport entitling her to stay for another month.
"Fearing more of the same, the next day she went to the Irish Embassy, a lovely old house in the suburbs, and knocked nervously on the front door.
"It was opened by the Ambassador himself, who said she was very welcome, brought her in, produced tea and buns, and had a brand new passport for her in an hour.
"'There you go, my dear, that's you sorted,' he said, handing it over. 'Now, if I could just have your contact details in Mexico, that would be great.'
"'Is it for an inquiry into how I lost the passport in the first place?' she said, sure this was all too good to be true.
"'Not at all,' said the Ambassador. 'It's so we can invite you to the St Patrick's Day party'."
Splendid. I shook David’s hand, thanked him for cheering me up no end, and went home to spend the afternoon sitting in a deckchair in our two-fifths of an orchard filling in an Irish passport application form.
A grovelling apology
I have a humble apology to make to my old mate Rhonda Weir, who was the genius behind the invention of the Wildly Adventurous Gentlemen, or WAGs, the moniker for our rugged yet sensitive in a manly kind of way bunch of superannuated bikers.
Not Cate, as I mistakenly wrote on this very page a couple of weeks ago.
Rhonda, my brain obviously fell into a gap in the space-time continuum. I grovel at your feet in humble insignificance. My only hope is that time will heal the wound between us.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and join the Foreign Legion as a penance. Only six months of hard graft at Fort Zimmerframe will punish me sufficiently for this blunder.
Legless in Carolina
Devoted reader Naomi Patrick sends me the following clipping from a Belfast evening newspaper whose identity I cannot reveal in case anyone guesses it’s the Telegraph.
US authorities revoked the licences of a funeral home and its director after he admitted one of his employees cut the legs off a 6ft 7in man without the family’s permission so the corpse would fit in a coffin.
The state Board of Funeral Service voted unanimously to close Cave Funeral Home in Allendale, South Carolina.
In an agreement with the board, funeral director Michael Cave said employees never told James Hines’ family that his body might not fit in a standard coffin.
An unlicensed worker, Charles G. Cave, cut the legs with an electric saw without consulting relatives.
Mr Hines’ widow has said his legs had been cut off between the ankle and calf and put back in the coffin.
Evidence also has been turned over to criminal investigators. Under South Carolina law, destroying or desecrating human remains is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Mr Hines, 60, died in October 2004 of skin cancer, and his family picked out a standard-sized coffin at the funeral home. His wife, Ann Hines, said her husband’s body was only shown from the chest up at his funeral. And no one suggested a longer coffin.
Ann Hines said rumours about what happened to her husband’s body started spreading soon after he was buried.
Mr Hines, an albino black man with several modest hits in the 1970s as a soul and funk guitarist with J Hines and the Boys, was well-known in the town of 3,700 people.
He became a preacher later in his life, playing his guitar during services at the church he built and on a nearby Christian radio station until his death.
Brilliant. You couldn’t make it up.
Naturally, I e-mailed all my friends to say that when I do pop my clogs, they should bring a tape measure to the funeral and give the coffin a once-over.
If it’s too short, I’ll be legless. Again.
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Weather for Belfast
Monday 13 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 4 C to 9 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 6 C to 9 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
