Tag: pet crayfish

‘Oy, Rodney’ Readers Getting Restless

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Introducing Chapter CDXXX of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular shares a letter she received from reader Cedric Durst of Ponco City, Bulgaria.

“Dear Mr. Crepuscular, so where’s this planet-threatening catastrophe you promised in your last chapter–that stupid business about the whelk and the crayfish not seeing eye to eye? You are playing games with us! Someone ought to censor you.”

“This is what you have to put up with, as an artist–arrant philistinism,” Ms. (not Mr.) Crepuscular replies. “You write about the obstacles to true love, and along comes some barbarian who wants to talk about aquariums! I am cut to the quick.”

Setting up the end of the world is no easy task. Now she’s getting bombarded with complaints from the Philistine community, such as it is. This distraction has made her narrative disjointed. There’s nothing for it but to move on to Chapter CDXXXI.

Lady Margo Cargo is mad at everyone for paying insufficient heed to the feelings of her pet crayfish, Oswin, while her fiancee, Lord Jeremy Coldsore, is equally miffed that his pet whelk, Stuart, has been slighted. Constable Chumley arrests them both.

“I say!” says Jeremy. “You can’t arrest me–I’m the justice of the peace! I’m your boss.”

The constable shrugs. “Menner yon third grockies, m’lord,” he replies sententiously. Locking the cell, he makes a grand show of throwing away the key and then moves on to The Lying Tart for a quick pint.

“This is your fault, Jeremy!” growls Lady Margo.

And there we must leave them while Violet answers the rest of her mail.

Whelk & Crayfish: Incompatible?

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Crusty's Trombone Lessons ('Oy, Rodney') – Lee Duigon

“The curse of true love never did run smooth,” philosophizes Violet Crepuscular, introducing Chapter CDXXIX of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. “Here Cupid  must deal with a recalcitrant crayfish and a whelk with a chip on its shoulder!”

Resuming his courtship of Lady Margo Cargo, Lord Jeremy Coldsore is dismayed to find his pet Whelk, Stuart, and her pet crayfish, Oswin, just don’t get along. This could prove to be an obstacle to their marriage.

When Stuart and Oswin are put in the same aquarium, they sulk. “This is terrible!” expostulates Lady Margo. “How can you and I live together in wedded bliss, if our pets are going to detest each other?”

Her crusty old butler, Crusty, offers a novel solution. “Normal people,” he says, “would just leave the two bugs in separate aquariums.” Lady Margo removes her upholstered wooden leg and clouts him with it. “You have no romance in your soul, Crusty!” she aviates.

This is an astonishingly feeble chapter, even for Violet Crepuscular. Has her well of invention finally run dry?

“I am not the kind of writer whose well of invention runs dry!” she confides to the reader. “What I’m doing, actually, is setting the stage for a well-nigh indescribable catastrophe which puts the planet itself at risk!

“Remember what Constable Chumley always says: ‘Yair flivvick ma’ wye when yair groptie fain cry!’ It is the guiding principle that guides me from one chapter to the next.”

Who can argue with that?

‘Oy, Rodney’ Continued…

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Willis Twombley, the American adventurer, has shot another one of Lord Jeremy Coldsore’s creditors. This was a Mr. Hornswoggle, whom Twombley caught fumbling around in the cellar in what was once the fifth Baron Coldsore’s torture chamber, estimating the resale value of the thumbscrews.

“If’n I can pick off all these leeches, Germy, your problems will be over,” Twombley says, as he and Jeremy hide the body in an unused cedar chest.

“I truly wish you wouldn’t, old boy. Once we are married to Lady Margo, her wealth will make my creditors disappear. I don’t fancy a date with the hangman.”

This is Chapter CXXIV, by the way. The author, Violet Crepuscular, has tried to slip it into the text without a number. She apologizes later.

Meanwhile, Lady Margo is distracted by the erratic behavior of Oswin, her pet crayfish. “He has been acting like a hamster lately,” she confides in Mother Fong, the wise woman who lives in the woods and is believed to practice witchcraft. She is a dues-paying member of Amalgamated Wise Women of the Woods, AWWW, an organization which some people persist in thinking has something to do with cute puppy and kitten videos. Mother Fong examines Oswin, at the cost of several painful nips.

“I like this not,” she says. “It fears me that Rodney has returned to our peaceful English shire.”

“Rodney!” Margo cries. “Do you mean Black Rodney? But he died when I was just a little girl, and he was already an old man then!”

Mother Fong mutters cryptically. “Dinna ye know Black Rodney fuddered in the forbidden arts of Evil Hobart? Forsooth, ’tis rofin time I mithered off to Floridy!” She packs her toads and roots, and nothing more is heard of her. We have Ms. Crepuscular’s promise that we have seen the last of her.

For the time being, Lady Margo has no alternative but to install a hamster wheel in Oswin’s aquarium.

‘Oy, Rodney’ Gets Mushy

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I am tempted to pass over Chapters CXX and CXXI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney because they are intolerably mushy. Ms. Crepuscular acknowledges that. “You may find these next two chapters intolerably mushy,” she warns.

Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire, is prepared to marry Lord Jeremy Coldsore and the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad. Twombley has convinced her that he and Lord Jeremy are one and the same person.  But the wedding was disrupted and has not yet been rescheduled: Lady Margo thinks she might have a touch of leprosy.

“It’s only wind, you silly old bat,” says her crusty old butler, Crusty.

Then the mush creeps in as Lord Jeremy renews his wooing, this time in person.

“Madam, as soon as the vicar gets over his conniptions, we must be wed,” says Jeremy. They are having rock-hard biscuits baked by Lady Margo’s lunatic aunt. In the opulent comfort of Lady Margo’s parlor, her pet crayfish, Oswin, sulks in his aquarium.

“I love you so much, I could plotz,” says Jeremy. “Your ears are like prize cabbages.”

“Eh?” Those ears do not always function as they should.

“Your hair–” a wig, actually–“is as soft as yogurt,” Jeremy continues. This goes on for the whole two chapters.

Meanwhile, the whole village is startled out of sleep one midnight by horrible groans and shrieks issuing from under the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard. A crowd of peasants armed with scythes and torches descends upon the scene, but then goes home because no one dares lift up the pool and look under it. Constable Chumley reassures them: “‘Tis only yair fickling rawstie,” he explains. This gives them something to think about for the rest of the night.