Day Eleven. I’m supposed to get pipers. You can’t get pipers for love nor money. In Scotland, maybe, but we’re in rural Northamptonshire, as I pointed out in the last episode. Out in the country, we have aristocracy but no bagpipers. From a swift survey, men without underwear are also rare (plenty who’ll happily appear in skirts, but they tend to wear G-strings and have little knowledge of Celtic music or its instrumental traditions), and although kinky clothing and bagpiping seem to be correlated, I don’t think that quite explains the root cause of the shortages. It’s just an odd glitch in the supply and demand intersection.
I figure it this way: bagpipes always seem like they’re out of tune to me, something like a DJ scratching over a vinyl recording of tom cats jamming their balls in the cat flap; therefore, I’d expect the demand for bagpipe players to be low. On the other hand, there’s not a lot to do in Scotland and bagpipes are supposed to be the national instrument up there, thus supply should be high, if only because of the slow osmosis south to the Mecca of London that all too recently brought us two Prime Ministers and Kenny Dalglish.
I suppose it’s marginally possible that UKIP has already had an impact on migrancy, but I think it’s more likely that I’ve discovered another commodity that doesn’t obey the usual laws of economics, like potatoes in Ireland and buses in the public transport network. (Potatoes, for you non-economists who didn’t listen to the ‘Economics for Dummies’ podcast as I did when trying to keep up with my offspring’s GCSE, are what is known as an ‘inferior good’; when people get thrown out of work and income goes down, everyone goes out and buys more potatoes. This doesn’t seem to be to do with them having more leisure time to go shopping. Buses, by contrast, fall into that rare category where the more people stand around demonstrating their willingness to buy tickets, the less buses show up.)
I’m advised by a friend (yes, I have them) that the only available pipers have long since been snapped up by the army, so – retreating to the quiet of the study at home – I call the Coldstream Guards. They have a band. I’ve seen them playing at Wembley Cup Finals and on Jules Holland’s Hootananny. It takes hours to get through (you should hear their ‘on hold’ music!), and when I do, the band is away, so I’m told, playing some ‘meet-the-troops’ gig in a war zone. (Not surprising really, the ‘Guards’, as they’re known to their friends, were formed during the rise of Oliver Cromwell and have been veterans of every war since, even the pointless ones.)
“It’s to do with oil,” their booking agent tells me on the phone.
“Oil?”
“It’s always to do with oil.”
Before I can plead my case further, the racket from downstairs suddenly gets intolerably loud.
“Excuse me,” I say, “I can’t quite hear you. I’m going to have to ask them to turn down the music.”
The party – you’ll remember it started a few episodes ago – is still in full swing. We’ve sent the Bratislava Dance troop dressed as milkmaids back to Soho, but the Lords have recently finished leaping, tied their show-jumping ponies up near the garden shed and are now trying to get off with the questionably-titled ‘Ladies’ who arrived a couple of days ago in response to my flash-mob request. (I’m not complaining that rather too many of these ‘Ladies’ turned up following my tweet, but if all of them had been laid end to end, no one would have been a bit surprised, especially after the Lords started flashing around their titles.)
“Will you guys keep it down,” I yell through the crack in the study door, while holding my hand over the receiver. “I’m trying to book the Coldstream Guards.”
“There’s a problem with the bathroom. Horatio had a curry last night,” someone shouts back in a terribly plummy accent. “He always gets travel sick on his ‘orse.”
“It’s starting to flood,” someone else informs me, rather too cheerily to be under the influence of mere alcohol.
“I’ll call you back,” I tell the Coldstream Guards’ booking office. “Good luck with the Arabs. I’m sure they’ll be shit-scared when you turn up with those pipes.”
“That’s what they were designed for,” says the agent. “Who’d ever think it would be confused for music.”
“I’ve been thinking the same about rap,” I tell her as I hang up.
The bathroom is indeed a mess and already fragrantly detectable at a considerable distance.
“It’s the only one, innit?” says a mousy lady who’s heading the queue outside.
“The only working one,” I admit.
“It’s not working now,” she points out helpfully. “There’s water coming under the door.”
Shame on me for attempting to hold a party with only one working bathroom, I think to myself. We’re down to one because the piping in the en-suite burst a few weeks ago during the cold snap and I haven’t got around to fixing it, what with Christmas arriving unexpectedly this year and all the hassle of arranging sixteen grands worth of seasonal gifts and entertainment. I hate doing plumbing, but…
…And then, I stop myself in mid-sentence.
“Wow, that’s it,” I yell.
Because I have realised something brilliant, something really really clever, and now I am pleased that I took all those courses in ‘Interpretational Pedantry’ back at the community college (now university) before they put all their fees up to £9,000 and raised their entrance qualifications to three GCSEs.
What I realise is this: the song says nothing about the pipers being musicians, or indeed that the pipes are something you might blow air into from an animal bladder held under your armpit to produce sounds. They just need to be pipers, and they have to be doing some piping. Hooray, I don’t have to sign up to all that God-awful caterwauling! Plumbers will meet the criteria of the song just as well.
So, quick as a flash, I’m back on the Internet, logging in to Handyman.com. I book eleven plumbers. Of course, I have to pay emergency rates and outbid some needy people who have returned from skiing holidays to find their bathroom in their living room, but it’s a small price in the overall scheme of things and my scheme to snare my true love.
I imagine the song now: “Dee Diddy Diddy, Twelve Drummers Drumming, Eleven Plumbers Plumbing, Ten Lords-a-Leaping… etc.”
My wanton lack of financial consideration here is well founded. I’m pleased to say the cash flow problems are a thing of the past. I am able to reinvigorate my credit card (inflexible since episode six) as the email has just arrived telling me my business plan (see episode nine) has been approved. All I need is twelve drummers and ten million more hits on the YouTube videos to pay back the investment (‘How To Do The Twelve Days of Christmas’ will soon be up there with ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’) .
“Fix for the toilet is on its way, Guys,” I shout out into the corridor. “Just hold it in for a while, yeah?”
The mousy lady looks at me with doubtful eyes, a bit like a five year old on a car journey. One more day to go.
If you haven’t done so yet, check out the rest of the series…
- The Partridge in the Pear Tree
- The Two Turtle Doves
- The Three French Hens
- The Four ‘Corley’ Birds
- The Five Gold Rings
- The Six Geese-A-Laying
- The Seven Swans-A-Swimming
- The Eight Maids-A-Milking
- The Nine Ladies Dancing
- The Ten Lords-A-Leaping
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