Day 59

Dear Diary,

I guess I can’t put it off any longer, my telling you about Missus Milly Da Fardle and her conflict of interest. I know you feel the same, Dear Diary, which is why you hid my pencil until I promised I’d get down to it right here and now.

So, here we go, and as they said in an old movie, ‘fasten your seat belts’ on account of the ride’s gonna get bumpier’n a camel’s two front teeth.

I suppose I’ve gotta recap first, or at least a little, on account of a few folks wot’ll end up reading this diary’ll either be drunk or stoned on something I’m not supposed to know about (wot with me being a classic Daimler CVD6 33-seat bus with custom-designed, handcrafted coachwork and not a rock ‘n’ roll singer). On the other hand, if you’re wot we call clean living and remember everything you’ve ever heard and don’t like hearing things over again twice, you might want to go outta the room or play a game of tennis or wash out your toilet for as long as it takes for those wot are sorely gifted in the memory department to catch up on where we were. Right? Right.

Anyway, Missus Milly Da Fardle was in cahoots with Mister Doctor Bernie Da Gnu and Misther Patchouli Da Fanny in selling off bodies wot comes into Misther Doctor Bernie Da Gnu’s ‘Wash ‘n’ Wake Funeral Parlour for a Beautiful Goodbye’. It seems they did a cost analysis and came to the conclusion that it were a waste of good resources simply to puts the corpi deliciousi into the ground and let ‘em rot and spend the rest of their lives looking ugly. And so they decided it’d be more profitable to sell on the bodies to The Gnu-Fanny Premium Deluxe Luxury Car Food Company, a company near and dear to their own hearts, seeing as how they owned it lock, stock and barrel. ‘Course they tried to wait until the funerals was over, in case somebody decided they wanted to have a personal goodbye with the dead person, but that depended on how long the remains had been dead and how much the worms’d already ate. They were nothing if not concerned that the resources should be maximised on account of cats are always hungry and if they don’t get a full tin of cat food they’ll go right on out and eat all the baby birdies they can find.

This all went along fine and dandy and no one ever found out about it, but then one day who should up and die but Missus Milly Da Fardle’s favourite Lithuanian sister-in-law, Bettinka Spalinka Da Fardle, widow of her brother Breezy Barry Da Fardle. When the body was brung into the secret stainless steel body-stuffing laboratory behind Misther Doctor Bernie Da Gnu’s ‘Wash ‘n’ Wake Funeral Parlour for a Beautiful Goodbye’, Missus Milly Da Fardle looked long and hard at it. The first thing she said was, “she’s not as fat as she used to be before she choked in the radish. How much money’ll she fetch?” Mister Doctor Bernie Da Gnu, who knew everything there was to know about money, as well as how many cans of cat food it takes to eat up every size of body, answered back, “give or take a hundert pounds, I’d say in her present condition, Bettinka Spalinka Da Fardle’d bring in two hundert and fifty pounds. And that’s even though the going rate for dead folks from Lithuania is depressed at the moment. Mind you, if’n we wait ‘till after the funeral and Father Brady O’ Flanaghan Murnaghan from the Church of The Immaculate Septum’s done orating to beat the band and has passed the wine around and everybody’s got drunk, her value’ll be down another twenty-five pounds. Plus the fact that her meat will’ve got rancid by then and no good for cats, wot are notoriously fussy about such things. In that case, it’ll have to be sold on to The Smelley-Fanny School Meals Company, and school meals pays a whole lot less.”

Well, Missus Milly Da Fardle took another hard look at her favourite sister-in-law and saw that her colour wasn’t as nice as it was when she was brought in, and that her meat seemed to’ve shrunk away from the bone, and she said, “To Hell with it, Mister Doctor Bernie Da Gnu, sell her on and quick. My house is in need of another conservatory and in any case I’ll not miss her none as soon as she’s outta my sight.”

And so it was that Missus Milly Da Fardle’s conflict of interest was solved and they all made some more money. You might like to know that, at the end of the year, The Island Businessmen’s Association voted Missus Milly Da Fardle ‘Person of The Year’ for wot they called ‘her great sacrifice’.

Now that we’ve finally done with Missus Milly Da Fardle’s conflict of interest, we could talk about things of a similar nature, such as how the bloated corpus delicious of Miss Cabbage’s old mother, Hubbard Cubbard Da Fezziwiggle, exploded outta her coffin right when it was passing Floozie Da Smelley’s Happy Family Petting Zoo and how a pack of hyenas ate it before they could scoop up the mess and get it delivered The Gnu-Fanny Premium Deluxe Luxury Cat Food Company. Or I could tell you about when Ol’ Ma Deirdre Durdle died but forgot to stay dead. But I won’t, at least not until I’ve talked about other stuff wot don’t involve dead people or dead people flavoured cat food. Not that that’ll be easy, on account of nothing much goes on wot doesn’t have to do with people wot are dead. The problem is, they’re more interesting when they’re dead, aren’t they, as well as being a whole lot nicer. I’ll hafta think about it over night.

Wot I really want to talk about, Dear Diary, is Floozie Da Smelley’s Special Away Day for her girlfriends, but I might just amuse you with a tale or two about Ol’ Jehosephat Da Fardle first. You’ll hafta wait and see. In the meantime, I’m gonna take me a nap. As I like to say, I’ll get back to you after I’ve endeth a coupl’a dreams and feel talkative again.