The Dribble Bowl

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

My dribble bowl has tremendous sentimental value, and I inherited it from a long line of semi-aquatic fruitcake ancestors. We're all born with magnificent tusks and webbed hands and feet-cum-flippers - before the surgeons tidy us up, that is.

Except of course for cousin Jody, who was ungraciously flung into a large tank by a bunch of burly psychiatric nurses to spend the rest of her miserable days living with a collection of dumb fishes at the Sealife centre in Birmingham. Her crime? She somewhat resembled a haddock. That happened in the summer of 2010 shortly after her fifteenth birthday because, the NHS claimed, they couldn't do a fat lot for her. She spends most of her time with just her eyes sticking out of the crushed coral substrate, but occasionally she plays her face up, flaps around on the surface and screams out demands for chocolate, sausage and chips, her Iphone and laptop (but not necessarily in that order). Mind you, she's a lot less trouble since she shacked up with Gordon, the hermit crab.

The stuck-up side of my extensive family have gills and tentacles as well as flippers, the jammy swines. They frown upon anyone who can't breathe underwater, and when you call on them unexpectedly there's a frantic banging and clattering before they open the front door as they hide their fancy china tea service in case us clumsy scum-bags break anything and replace it with disposable plastic tableware.

Our clan originates, I've been told to keep it quiet, in a village referred to in the Doomsday book as Milton Bear, which may or may not now be Milton Keynes. There's a huge intellectual battle concerning that controversy going on as we speak, and even I aren't fool enough to publicise the argument concerning whether or not our famous forebear, Sir Ted Grizzly, was a closet walrus/octopus/human hybrid (as opposed to a bear hybrid, which for some reason was deemed perfectly acceptable at the time). I've promised not to breathe a word of this dark secret to a soul, because my kin-folk find the whole mess extremely embarrassing. Shit, too late.....

OK, so we have a dash of unusual blood coursing through our veins. What's wrong with that? Erm, pass me that bucket of bloaters, love, would you? No, I don't want you to gouge out their eyes first.

Apparently between the year 963 when the Church of England found out that a particularly hot lady walrus called Brenda had bedded literally hundreds of rampant blokes (and an octopus called Simon) somewhere on the west coast and the mid fifteenth century when that transgression was finally whitewashed over there was a massive sea creatures who craftily have sex with humans pogrom in rural Britain, but they never mention it in the history books for fear of ridicule.

Tony Robinson's Time Team have been granted permission to exhume Sir Ted's remains in the spring to do a DNA test, so then, I guess, we'll know the horrible truth. He's already rooted around at the spot where, according to local tradition Brenda was burned at the stake, but all he found was a few crushed coke cans, a partially melted fifty pence piece and a hundred and seventy eight used condoms.

My dribble bowl is a Bronze Age relic, it's rumoured, and it's said that during the Middle Ages it was venerated as the Holy Grail, but I reckon that's a crock of shit. Anybody can see that it's a cheapo, mass produced early twentieth century white enamelled jobby with a tiny 'Walrus only' stamp on the bottom and a number of rusty chips along the rim. It's practically unbreakable, though, so when I've got a ginormous cob on and I run out of rattles to chuck out of my pram I chuck that instead. Trouble is, when I'm wearing my best straitjacket and I'm incarcerated in the rubber room I can't eat my home-grown cobs. Waah! I wants my mummy, I wants salt encrusted titty this minute!