Office Head 5 – The Search for Snuff

I spent a few hours on my veranda last night, puffing at my magic pipe, contemplating terrorising pike with my fierce swimming. After a few minutes I was BORED STIFF!

I saw a thick piece of cheese walking past the wall at the bottom of my garden. I called out to it to try and catch its attention. This didn’t work.

I then remembered that most cheeses are deaf (except Brie, which you can smell a mile away, apparently), and they communicate by blowing snuff at each other.

I remembered that I had an old box of snuff in my pantry, left to me by a depressed pilot in his will… well no, actually, I stole it from a tiny moist steam iron which wafted its sleepy way past my lounge window a couple of years ago.

So much snuff!

The snuff was in a pouch around it’s neck, I enticed it into my house by waving a burnt sparkplug under its beak until it couldn’t resist the temptation to enter my living room. I convinced it that sparkplugs were much more valuable than snuff, I think I ripped the steam iron off, actually – I still feel guilty about it.

The steam iron relinquished the snuff after umming and aahing, tapping its little claw against the outside of its denim catsuit, puffing steam out of its baseplate and so on. I realised afterwards that I didn’t really want the snuff after all, and hid it in a nook in my pantry.

So, two years on I had finally found a use for the snuff. I loaded it into a straw, with the intention of puffing it up the garden, to attract the attention of the thick piece of cheese.

AAACHOOO!!

After the first sneeze, which was quite explosive, a piece of liver shot out of my nostril.

AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! (etc.)

Three hours later, I had finally stopped sneezing, and my vision had returned.

The thick piece of cheese was patiently sat near my feet. It saw that I was in a position to communicate with it, so it blew some more snuff at me.

Removing Enlodged Snuff can be Painful

AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! (etc.)

By about three o’clock in the morning, my eyesight had returned, and there was a waist-high heap of liver at my feet.

I popped my eyeballs back in, looked around, and saw a note scrawled on a piece of J-Cloth.

It said, “If you can’t handle talking to cheese, don’t bleedin’ bother next time.”

I think he was right, don’t you?

A Tiny Penguin

I recently noticed that there are some tiny wax penguins living at the bottom of my garden. Now you might be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with that?”.. Or maybe not.

The point is, these penguins are not only small and made of wax, but they also possess the necks and heads of giraffes, which makes them very ungainly, and inevitably quite attractive to predators. They would have made quite a tasty snack for any passing buffalo or sharks if I hadn’t erected a string vest fence around the perimeter of their habitation area. Apparently, their mating call gave Judy Garland the idea for The Wizard of Oz – but I’m not really convinced.

If you think you’re missing out then don’t worry, because several film crews from the BBC and BSkyB are popping down over the next couple of weeks to capture their bizarre lifestyle for posterity.

If you keep your eye out, you may see the Pengraffes orbiting Lancaster and Morecambe between 11:43 and 11:44 each working day.

When practising my fish-haunting swimming in Windermere this weekend, I didn’t look where I was going, collided with a Cockney windsurfer, and sank to the bottom of the lake.

The late Barbara the Mallard

I was rescued my a kindly old mallard, called Barbara, who pulled me to the bank and administered beak-to-mouth resuscitation! He then charged me fifty quid for wiping some slivers of liver off my vest. Cheeky get!! I couldn’t afford to pay him so I bludgeoned him to death with a Twiglet and ate his liver with Favvah Beans and a fresh Chianti.

FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF!

What was Office Head?

Put simply, Office Head was a column I wrote in the staff magazine when I was employed by Reebok in the mid 90s.

It was a fictional journal, set in an alternate reality where inanimate objects talk, and things are never as they seem.

You can read the story of Office Head here.