AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (25) A Wrong Turn Somewhere (Short Stories) Somewhere near Birmingham a driver takes a wrong turn and loses everything. [492 words] [Mystical] Amnesty (Short Stories) A gun amnesty in a rough borough of London goes idiotically wrong. [561 words] [Comedy] Arnie (Short Stories) A little labourer has a terminator approach to his work. [646 words] [Humor] Back To The Garden (Short Stories) Depressing the extent to which everything is being dumbed down these days. Poor state education? Is that all it is? [527 words] [Mind] Changing To Go Out (Short Stories) In the aftermath of the genetic bomb, a simple night at the pictures with the missus is no easy task. [444 words] [Humor] God's Trainees (Short Stories) Him upstairs is thinking of retiring, all he needs to do is train up some suitable replacements. Easier said than done. They just don't make deities the way the used to. [1,570 words] [Humor] Mementoes Of Treasured Occasions (Short Stories) A struggling photographer finds a rich new source of business. [496 words] [Humor] Providing For Sarah (Short Stories) A desolate man finds comfort in an imaginary (?) companion. But who will care for her when he's gone? [883 words] [Mind] Sex Life Of The Amoeba (Short Stories) A serious paper on cellular mytosis in a well known eukarytic organism. The dirty little... [1,108 words] [Humor] Soup (Short Stories) A soup manufacturer ends life on Earth. [514 words] [Comedy] The Adventures Of Archie 1 - The Great Escape (Short Stories) A sort of Alice in Wonderland meets Canterbury Tales sort of thing but sillier than the former and even more boring than the latter. In episode 1 our elderly rabbit hero escapes his hutch and disappe... [473 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 2 - The Little Demon's Tale (Short Stories) A hell spawned satanic creature identifies too much with men and falls to their level. [901 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 3 - The Spider Catcher's Tale. (Short Stories) Archie escapes from the paralysing purple and find himself in a world where an avoidable infestation has eaten all the perspective. There he meets the spider catcher and learns why ballroom dancing i... [1,313 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 4a - The Great Regurgitato (Short Stories) Achie learns of the greats of bodily functions and meets the greatest of them all. [781 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 4b - The Great Regurgitato's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [823 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 5a - The Army Surplus Salesman (Short Stories) Archie learns the truth they try and keep from us, that being disembowelled is fun, meets a descendant of the Piltdown man and travels to the army surplus fair to find Little Boy is no bargain. [913 words] The Adventures Of Archie 6 - A Peaceful Solution (Short Stories) Following a Little Boy explosion Archie find himself on a desolate plain and meets two tribes who are too stupid to realise that war and bloodshed are by far the most efficient means of resolving disp... [1,271 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 7 - The Puzzleman's Tale (Short Stories) Archie finds he is not alone in the valley. He shares it with a man in a very strange prison. You have to endure a little homily on man's inhumanity to decorating materials first. [2,988 words] [Humor] The Adventuresof Archie 5b - The Army Surplus Salesman's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [1,116 words] The Fly And... (Short Stories) That Geoff Goldblum had it easy! One fly?? I should have been so lucky! [483 words] [Humor] The Horrid Tale Of Evil Worm (Short Stories) A rare accident in the vegetable patch transforms a humble earthworm into a satanic being. [1,158 words] The Several Voyages Of Fat Tony (Short Stories) Foul deeds on the dead sea coast get their richly deserved comeuppance. [1,377 words] The Two Bills (Short Stories) William Shakespeare fails to get to grips with Microsoft Word. [777 words] Vomiting On Tony (Short Stories) The Mad Messiah (AKA Tony Blair) gets what he thoroughly deserves. [499 words] [Humor] Your Little God Is Pooh And Creepy Too (Short Stories) Only the innocent find salvation. In the run up to the revelation the kids of St Crispin's Middle School are introduced to their own little salvations. PS I know Buddha was not a god, it's creative l... [1,442 words] [Humor]
A Capital Fart Xoggoth
It was the beginning of the thirtieth year of world recession and of the many great ideas advanced for cheering the population up, it was the one selected by the UN secretary general, Richard Reid. (Formerly the 'shoe bomber', I told you our boy would make good).
An international farting competition between the world's capital cities.
No, not another boring human farting contest, it was the city itself that had to produce the loudest and most realistic fart. There were certain rules; no electronics or purpose built sound devices, a maximum budget of £10k and, most importantly, the sound had to be produced by employing a well-known landmark.
Kuala Lumpur was a hot favourite with their idea for a big greased rubber sheet between the Petronas towers. It was reckoned that when the central orifice was opened with the wind blowing off the Klang river it would top 120 dB and sound like the emission of the finest gaseous products that the curries of the region could have engendered from a million synchronised bottoms.
The contest was wholeheartedly supported by London's dribblingly demented nonagenarian mayor Ken Livingstone. A great contrast from his killjoy attitude during the millennium celebrations but then Alzheimer’s had greatly improved his character; everybody said so. London was the first to come up with the tube method, much to the vexation of several other cities including Moscow, New York and Paris who wished they had thought of it first.
The underground was largely in mothballs, there having been almost no employment in the city or anywhere else for decades, not paying enough to justify the cost of a ticket anyhow. An army of half starved volunteers worked round the clock for the glory of their city (and the free bread and soup) to convert it into a huge metropolitan farting machine. They blocked and sealed all the tube's entrances with wood, mattresses, plastic sheeting and anything else they could get their hands on. They made huge sealing discs of similar materials to fix to the front of the trains to make, as near as possible, an airtight seal to the tunnels walls.
The requisite orifice was to be the Post Office Tower, which had similarly stood empty for decades. They cut through the basement wall to connect it to Goodge street tube station, blew out all the famous rotating restaurant windows and removed the lifts and the top and bottom doors from both lift shafts. Finally, they partially blocked these passages again with mattresses dipped in old engine oil for that realistic sphincter vibrating mucusy sound.
It was ready. Four trains joined together departed from each of the farthest flung corners of the network, from Amersham and Cockfosters and Upminster and twelve others, and travelled towards the centre at full speed. As they passed certain points others started off from different places on a similar radius. It was a masterpiece of scheduling and organisation that London Underground and its alter egos had only dreamed of when they were supposed to be supplying a service.
The pressure gauges at Goodge Street showed little at first, then began to rise faster and faster as all the rushing trains, one in every tunnel, passed into zone 2. Would it hold? Air began whistling from inadequately sealed entrances. As the trains roared into zone 1, the current meters topping out as they struggled against the backpressure, the huge makeshift doors to the Post Office Tower were flung open. The enormous release of air roared up the lift shafts and the emergency stair wells over the oiled mattresses.
The colossal fart broke all the windows within a radius of 2 miles, killed all the pigeons in Trafalgar Square stone dead (some said that was the senile Livingstone's secret agenda all along) and was heard as far away as Reading. The sound slowly changed, bubbling realistically and dropping in tone until...
A huge fountain, thousands of nauseating tons of it, a tidal wave of black water and mud and asbestos dust and vomit and old newspapers and spit and sweet wrappers and fag ends and chewing gum and discarded shoes and old McDonalds takeaways and dead rats and missed bits of suiciders and every conceivable sort of litter and detritus and filth from a hundred years of history burst from the PO Tower windows and rained down burying the abandoned and boarded-up shops in a radius from Tottenham Court Road to Saint Pauls.
Old London had followed through.
Submit Your Review for A Capital Fart
Required fields are marked with (*). Your e-mail address will not be displayed.