What Night Was It?

T'was the night before Christmas, and all through the night
The author, Shaun Finnie, had stayed up to write

He stared at his screen in the gathering gloom
And churned through the words for a deadline did loom

Just a thousand to go then his work would be seen
In a national monthly glossy magazine

He focussed intently so didn't quite hear
The noise from above (he's just got one good ear)

The clatter of runners and thunder of hoofs
Left tracks in the snow that lay deep on the roofs

But Shaun was engrossed in his literary script
So he wasn't aware of the old man who slipped

into the room, then with a "Ho!" and two more
Said, "You don't have a chimney. I kicked in the door"

"But what are you doing awake at this hour,
"When good boys and girls snore at forty pig power?"

Now Shaun wasn't stupid. He'd soon worked it out.
There was only one man with a triple-ho'd shout

And he was a master at meeting deadlines
He'd done it each Christmas for several lifetimes

"Oh Santa, please help me," the stressed out Shaun asked
"I'm so far behind in the work I've been tasked

"I'll never achieve all the things I should do
"I'm so far behind so I thought I'd ask you.

"How do you manage, in only one night
"To give each kid presents and judge them just right?"

"It's easy," said Santa, his eyes filled with twinkles
"I felt a bit old and got too many wrinkles

"So now I plan early and just delegate
"I have helpers worldwide. I just sit back and wait

"I can't do it all, not a man of my age
"So I employ an army on minimum wage

"They do all the work but the credit's all mine
"They're all sworn to uphold the traditional line"

This set Shaun to thinking he could do the same
And use foreign employees to achieve his aim

A workforce with English as their second language
Who cares if the work they come out with is garbage?

He'd meet all his deadlines and hit all his wordcounts
He'd soon see a rise in his bank balance amounts

But greed's an emotion from which we all suffer
And Santa disliked what he saw in the other

"You can't go outsourcing your tasks while you shirk
"Using  cheap staff's no way out of hard work"

So Shaun didn't get any gifts from the sack
And the things his Beloved had bought were sent back

For Santa had placed him on his naughty list
But here's where the story takes on a new twist

For Shaun sent the writing to Indian chaps
And now they type stories and blogs while he naps

Who cares if the qualities not quite as good
And if Shaun doesnt pay them as much as he should

Because nobody cares about gramma no more
And spellcheckers only find what they look for

Nobody puts in the hours that it takes
To make sure that the work isn't full of misteaks

At least the delivery deadlines met, right?
"Happy Christmass to all, and too all a good nite!"

© Shaun Finnie 2013 (after Clement Clark Moore and possibly others)

I am Falling, I am Falling

Hard work never killed anybody, my grandmother used to say. I'm not going to disagree with my beloved granny but this week, it certainly came close.

My Beloved's father has been building a barge over the last couple of years and this week the time has finally came to launch it. It's now in the water and pretty soon we'll be off on its inaugural voyage. But there are a few things to be done first, as you'd imagine, like converting the inside of it from a building site to a habitable living space. I really hope that no health and safety inspectors come visiting for a while.

I'm astounded at how he's built it single-handedly without any plans. He just got some sheet metal and started welding. Fabulous. It's even more impressive when you learn that he's seventy-three and just does this as a hobby. If I'm half as capable as that at his age I'll be happy. Actually, I'd like to have been half as capable as him at any age in my life. With my sedentary, chained to a laptop lifestyle, I don't come close. He's incredibly fit - note that I didn't add "for his age"; he's just incredibly fit whereas I'm more…  well let's say I'm cuddly and leave it there.

Older readers might recall an advert from the 1970's that went "Weebles wobble but they don't fall down". For those too young to remember, Weebles were little egg-shaped toys by Hasbro. They were weighted in the bottom so that, while they may have appeared unsteady on their feet, they were difficult - if not impossible - to knock over. That's what I'm like moving around the boat. Some people don’t like shimmying around the thin walkways or wobbling along decks that are constantly moving below their feet but I'm fine with it. It must be something to do with my low centre of gravity. Just like those Weebles toys.

Which is why I felt such a total plank the other day when, for the first time ever, I stumbled on deck.

It was my own fault. I'd tried to squeeze myself past a mate on one of the thinnest parts of the deck. He pressed himself against the hull and was hogging almost all of the handrail so I sort of tried to hop around him. It was, I realise both now and at the time, a very foolish thing to do. I would normally never have bothered but I was cold, it was late in the day and (most importantly) I was bursting for the loo.

I was almost around him when I felt something tugging at my foot. A capstan that had been there all along must have suddenly grown a little as it grasped my ankle and pulled me off balance. I stumbled. I fell. I scrabbled and clawed at my  pal's back. He grasped the handrail even tighter, clenching his entire body in case I actually managed to cling on to him.

He needn't have bothered. I missed completely, grabbing at the air behind him. For a moment I hung in mid-air, one leg and at least half of my bodyweight leaning over the port side of the ship. I could hear the water lapping against the hull below me like a siren beckoning me down to the murky depths. Not that canals are very deep. The odds are that I'd be able to stand up in it and the water wouldn't come to much above my chest, but that wasn't the point. I had no desire to get completely soaked on a freezing December day, not least of all because I didn't have a change of clothes with me.

I looked down to the muddy water, fully aware of what fish had done in it for centuries. I looked up at my mate, still clenched solid in terror. I did the only thing that I could. I dived for the safety of the deck.

Unlike those Weebles I did indeed fall down, but by some miracle I stayed dry. I made a perfect one-point landing that rang around the metal hull with a satisfying echoey 'boing'. The aforementioned spikey capstan hit me flush in the trumpet causing me to let forth with a very unmanly shriek of pain and surprise.

The boat rocked.

I rolled around the deck like a very unhappy beached whale who'd just had a metal capstan forced into his blowhole. This way and that I thrashed, trying to find something that I could hold onto that would stop me from wobbling over the side.

The boat rocked in the other direction.

The seventy-three year old boat builder came running from where he had been sawing wood on the top deck to see his son-in-law (in all but name) impaled on his best capstan. And he still wants me to help him with its maiden voyage.

I hope he doesn't have a gangplank.

© Shaun Finnie 2013