Where Plod fights the wicked plot and zombie-dom |03 November 2021

Pirates and rogues (Chapter 1 Part II)

Now, by 400 A.D. the painted warriors in the north of Wumpland had at long last managed to scale Hadrian’s Wall. They had been delayed somewhat, by those shorter Picts who had perceived the wall as being on a 2:1 scale (a 20ft wall having been originally built by the Romans to keep those fearsome and formidable Picts out). The Romans had good reason for considering them to be most formidable adversaries, despite possessing battering rams, massively horned rams, catapults and vulgar blasphemies, all which could be physically or verbally thrown at the enemy. The real threat lay in the fact that the Picts also wore skirts, known as kilts, and rather grudgingly the Romans had to admire the balls of these tribal people who were so hardy that they too defied the raw elements, wearing their kilts au naturel in the true Scottish tradition. This was too much for the redoubtable Romans, which would have certainly resulted in brass monkeys for the invading Roman army intent on conquering; whose conkers would have been conquered instead, and the same for any of those daring native tribes of Wumpland. On one occasion the Romans witnessed the awesome tossing of fir trees to form kindling for their sacred camp fires. This was to be the last and final straw. The Romans just didn’t have the balls to take on the formidable Scots; their fleshy swords would have been painfully stretched beyond all means, with eyes out on stalks, and they were obliged to

turn the other cheek and run for their very lives. They would of course be foregoing the regional delicacies of oatmeal cakes, herrings and the reputable malt whisky.

Pill pirates, on the other hand, prudently wore joey glassen breeches (awesomely impressive in or out of weather worn trousers), and gave that notorious village North West of Bristol, its illustrious history of smuggling. They departed on quest after quest from the Creek, sailing out through the Bristol Channel armed with an assortment of blunderbusses, carbines, cutlasses, and quarter-staffs along with short handled poleaxes for cutting through the enemy’s rigging and ropes, fortified with rum as they fearlessly hoisted the Jolly Roger defying both the authorities and Davy Jones’ Locker, freely engaged in stealing about in the seven seas in every direction of the compass in the pursuit of bounty. Some ships and their crews disappeared entirely, vanishing forever into one of the two illusory seas; which one depended upon the predisposition of the master, his crew, and the hand that fate dealt.

J.W