The ‘Oy, Rodney’ Cover

Ms. Violet Crepuscular has taken time out from grinding out chapters of her epic romance novel, Oy, Rodney, to say a few words about that Lord of the Tube Socks cover that she’s been using for… well, years now.

“I chose it originally, dear reader, because the couple featured on the cover were an exact match for how I imagine my two principal characters, Lord Jeremy Coldsore and Lady Margo Cargo,” Violet writes. “Some readers have complained. Tish-tush to them! There are only a few trifling differences between my characters and the cover picture.

“For one thing, Lord Jeremy now has two left feet. This militates against his agility as a ballroom dancer. Other than that, the picture is an exact duplicate.

“The real Lady Margo, it must be admitted, is some thirty years older than the lass on the book cover–with an upholstered wooden leg, a glass eye, and a wig that sometimes is hard to keep straight. She is also missing the hand that was chewed off by a goat, years ago. But aside from these petty details, the cover character looks just like her, pretty much.”

At this point she is interrupted: Dr. Fantod, the life-coaching jumping spider from Rotnest Island, has absent-mindedly wandered into Oy Rodney, intending to provide good advice to whoever needs it. Violet is terrified of spiders and can’t control herself, and Dr. Fantod is lucky to escape uninjured as she flails at him wildly with a rolled-up newspaper. We are not told which newspaper.

Ms Crepuscular objects. “I will not have spiders creeping into my novel from some wretched little island in Australia!” she writes. But it appears she has altogether lost her train of thought. This is a grievous loss to her readers.