BASIL

Everyone in the town knew him and everyone in the town liked him. Well! He was the sort of bloke everyone would like. Basil had been ‘Something in the City’ during his long and successful business career but now following his early retirement (his company had been taken over by an American Conglomerate) he busied himself around the quiet old market town “Making himself useful” as he put it.

He was easygoing, cheerful, never known to utter a bad word about anyone. He would go out of his way to be helpful to anyone that needed him, it was no wonder everyone liked him. The charities in the town had no hesitation in calling upon him whenever a volunteer was needed, none were ever refused. No job was too small for him to tackle personally and no job was too big for him to be a part of. It was the latter that led him to become deeply involved with the local amateur dramatic society.

He was a good musician, played piano and guitar and could be persuaded to sing and dance when more accomplished performers were not available. Otherwise he helped with the scripts, scenery construction and movement and he produced all the publicity material for whatever show was being planned. His enthusiasm for whatever function he was asked to perform was boundless. To be fair he discharged the duties he was given with great credit but……..well it seems hardly fair to mention it really but it must be said that whenever he was involved something invariably went wrong…..nothing to do with him…no..really. It was never anything that he had done or left undone….things just seemed to happen.

Like the time he was pressed into service as assistant to Zelda at the annual County Day Ball………you must have heard about it….No?…….Well….. Zelda was a wealthy widow who in her younger days had been ‘The Glamorous Assistant’ to Conrad the Mystic Magician. They toured all the well-known halls with their act. Each year after a splendid meal and rather less splendid speeches, she would be prevailed upon to perform some of the magic used by Conrad the Mystic Magician to amaze his audiences.

Though of course she always professed to be ‘taken by surprise’ at the request of the function’s Chairman to “Entertain us for a few minutes” she nevertheless always managed to have the necessary equipment with her and usually gave an engaging twenty minutes or so. She always protested that she could no longer do the things she once could but of course it had all become a sort of ritual. This time she called for a volunteer to play the part of the absent Conrad……………..

Zelda loved the spotlight and resplendent in her sparkling Glamorous Assistant’s outfit (Which a few of the ladies present observed was ‘getting a little tight now’) positively dazzled everyone as the lights reflected off her to reach every corner of the now darkened room. She and Basil, dressed somewhat self-consciously in an ill-fitting Conrad the Mystic Magician outfit, took to the stage amid thunderous applause. They had an audience, well wined and dined and ready to be amazed, absolutely in the palm of their hands.

The wide stage with jet-black backdrop had only a silver table on it set in the centre, a powerful spotlight made it sparkle as brightly as Zelda’s dress, well not quite as brightly, Zelda had made sure of that. She wiggled her way around the table watched with great appreciation and anticipation by her audience and somewhat apprehensively by ‘Conrad’ who had never done anything like this before.

After demonstrating her ‘mind-reading’ abilities on a number of town dignitaries, ‘losing’ and then finding the Mayor’s gold watch and chain and couple of other impressive tricks, Zelda sent ‘Conrad’ to one side of the stage to return a second later triumphantly bearing a magnificent, shiny, high topper hat that he handed with great ceremony to Zelda. She held it aloft and twirled it around and around so allowing the inside to be seen by the audience.

Having satisfied both herself and them that the hat was indeed empty she set it down onto the table. So far, so good. She began producing all sorts of goodies from the apparently empty hat…..brightly coloured streamers of silk, playing cards, a couple of flying saucers which she launched out into the audience, and a badge with the name Conrad in electric blue letters on it, which when she reversed it bore the name of the Mayor’s wife. Great applause all round, gracious smiles from the Mayor’s Wife……..From the back of the stage ‘Conrad’ now produced a small snare drum upon which he began to beat a long, rattling, ever-increasing-in-volume, drum-roll. This was it seemed to be the ‘piece de resistance’.

Zelda shimmied her way around the table smiling the widest most confident smile imaginable arms fluttering tantalisingly around the shiny hat. Moving to the table she took hold of the brim with one hand and thrust the other into the depths of the shiny topper..…….everyone expected to see a soft fluffy white rabbit come out or a dove or something. How wrong can an expectation be? Very wrong! Far from producing the expected creature, what she actually produced was a shocked look that twisted her face with pain followed by a long drawn out scream.

Her hand, smeared with blood, jerked out of the hat and there hanging off the end of her right forefinger was a wriggling, white furry ferret!…….yes that’s right a ferret! What was worse the ferret, on making such a dramatic appearance, was at once seized by panic and an overwhelming desire to leave the stage as quickly as possible. It let go her finger and dropped to the floor, stopped for a moment to get it’s bearings and failing to recognise any refuge nearby raced to the front of the stage and leaped across the footlights onto the nearest convenient table which just happened to be the Mayor’s. The Lady Mayoress, terrified of the tiny creature screamed for someone “to get that horrid little brute out of here”

‘Conrad’ went into action. Stop any more of the ferrets escaping was his first thought and he made a movement towards the hat now moving dangerously from side to side on the edge of the table. Zelda with the same thought didn’t see him coming and moved in the same direction. They collided, bumped against the side of the table and just managed to stop it following the ferret onto the Mayor’s table.

They were not so lucky with the hat and now there were five ferrets looking for a way out of what was fast becoming a stampede in the hall. The ladies holding their long dresses off the floor lest the ferrets use them as hiding places exhorted their menfolk to do something….get rid of the little horrors. The men wishing to demonstrate their bravery made vain efforts to grab the ferrets as they passed. Tables were knocked over, wine and other debris from them spread rapidly all over the floor. But in all fairness it was a large hall and the white clothed tables provided ample cover for the ferrets to avoid recapture and disappear ….and they did.

It took quite some time for order to be restored and the ferrets to be recaptured, well four of them were, one simply vanished never to be seen again. No one ever discovered why Zelda had chosen to use ferrets instead of the more traditional doves or rabbits and to this day she has refused to discuss the evening in any way, shape or form, except to say that she had no reason to believe that the ferrets, supposed to be tame, would react in the way they did. But you will understand now about the tendency for things to go wrong when Basil was about even though none of the things that went so wrong were anything to do with him. Indeed all agreed he had acted quickly in his attempts to stop any more ferrets escaping. He couldn’t have done more. Though everyone talked about it for ages afterwards no blame was ever attached to Basil.

There were other events where things just seemed to go wrong but the most astonishing incident happened several months later. Basil was asked to provide the music for the annual general meeting of one of the local political parties…….nothing great, just a tinkling piano during the dinner, the old songs, you know the sort of thing……maybe a few country songs with his guitar afterwards, nice easy going stuff……… No problem he had said. Well there shouldn’t have been and on the night there wasn’t, everyone said what a success the evening had been. The only slight hitch was when a string on his guitar snapped and he didn’t have a spare. It didn’t matter all that much, he simply reverted to the piano and completed his repertoire of country songs from there. Everyone loved it and agreed how good at that sort of thing he was.
Tired and anxious to get home he packed all his gear into the back of his car and drove off.

Unfortunately when packing his car he had left his guitar in it’s case by the side of the political party’s main door. He realised it the following morning when he went to the car to get the guitar for re-stringing. He wasn’t unduly worried, the club was in a side street and it was unlikely to have been stolen during the night. He would have breakfast and drive over to collect it later.
He was already too late! The cleaner on arriving early to open the club ready for the mid-day drinks session had seen the case and jumped entirely to the wrong conclusion. She had called the police and told them about this suspicious case with a wire hanging out of the side, leaning against the party’s front door. What should she do? Could they help.

Help arrived very quickly. In this day and age unexplained packages in front of a political party’s building can only be bad news…….well its true isn’t it? The Police arrived and viewed the suspicious item from a safe distance……yes it looked serious…..there was the aerial sticking out of the side…..a quick look around to see if any suspicious characters were hanging around…call the bomb squad. They did and cordoned off the area.
At ten o’clock Basil arrived at the car park and was shocked by the scene that greeted him. All around the area in front of the hall were armed police, opposite the hall was an armoured car with a spiteful looking machine gun protruding from it’s front shield, on several rooftops opposite snipers could just be seen lurking behind the old Elizabethan style chimneys. Soldiers wearing flak-jackets moved purposefully around the edges of the car park inspecting the bushes and flower beds. There was overall a distinct feeling of martial activity. He felt as if he had wandered onto the set of a James Bond movie.

He soon discovered that he had not! His car door was opened by a burly bomb squad sergeant. “You can’t stop here sir,” he said. “There’s an incident in progress, a real emergency, no one’s allowed into this area until we’ve cleared it”
“Oh! What’s happened,” asked Basil.
“There’s suspicious package outside the front door of the party headquarters”
Basil began to get out of his car. “I think I can help you with that,” he began but stopped abruptly when the sergeant grabbed him and threw him to the ground behind his own car to be joined by two more equally burly soldiers one on each side of him. Their arms locked across his back. “Do as the Sarge says and keep your ‘ead down mate and don’t move,” growled one of them. Basil, now convinced that there was far more going on than he had imagined did precisely as he had been told. He kept his head well down.

Things went rapidly from bad to worse. The small robot like machine that had been creeping across the car park finally arrived alongside the suspicious package and reached out it’s long metal arm. Grabbing hold of the case it lifted it gently and slowly carried it to the centre of the car park then gingerly lowered it into a circle of sand bags.

Having completed it’s task the robot made it’s way back to the shelter of the armoured car parked on the far side opposite where Basil, now thoroughly convinced that there really was a serious incident taking place, was taking shelter. There was a pause that seemed to Basil to last for an hour but was in reality just half a minute. Then a sharp explosion that echoed all around the area and made the ears of all those without ear-guards ring for several minutes afterwards.

The soldiers had removed the sand bags and Basil, peering from under his car, could just see a pile of rubble in the middle of the car park, pieces of wood and burned leather stuck up at crazy angles from the car-park floor and small strands of wire waved forlornly in the slight breeze. He turned to the sergeant his face red with anger and said furiously ‘That’s my case you’ve just blown up. I had my best guitar in there. What the hell did you blow it up for?’

It took three hours in the local police station for Basil to convince the Police and Army officers that he was not a terrorist, nor intent on wasting both police and army time and resources. The matter was only settled when his wife and the club chairman arrived at the police station and vouched for him. The insurance company greeted his claim for a new guitar with undisguised scepticism and insisted on copies of the police reports of incident. They finally accepted that his guitar really did meet it’s end in the way he described and agreed to fund a replacement.

You will note of course that once again there is no way that anyone could say that the incident was Basil’s fault. It could have happened to anyone………but it didn’t, it happened to Basil. Perhaps the old adage that ‘accidents will happen’ should be amended to read ‘accidents will happen….but they are more likely to happen if Basil is about.’

END