The above title should be sung to the tune of Cliff Richards' "Mistletoe and wine..."
I have previously - albeit in the dim and distant past of Academia (where the words dim and distant where used in a more personally descriptive manner!) - been tasked to make up a story out of 3/4 words, such as Scalectrix, Superglue & Port.
Such exercises were meant to test both our creativity and literary skills, and usually left me "wanting" on both counts. Had I known of the incident that was to occur later in my life, such exercises would have been "...a breeze"!
The incident which occurred approximately 20 years ago at Christmas time actually involved the aforementioned items.
I received a call from good friends of ours, on (as I remember it) Christmas Eve. It may not actually have been Christmas Eve, but if I said it had been 23 July, the story would lose a certain degree of impact. But actually I do think that: -
Well actually I may digress because what was certainly in the heads of our friends' sons, was a brand new Scalectrix set!'Twas The Night Before Christmas
(when the call was received)
and when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St.Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
What was the reason for their call you might ask?
Well, there had been a motor racing disaster that dwarfed the recent minor spat between McLaren and Ferarri, which in a similar way had also involved a misinterpretation of the instructions.
On our friends 'practice lap' - they had attempted to construct the track so that it was ready for their boys to play with on Christmas morning. A great "plan".
Unfortunately the instructions stated that to join the pieces of track together the tabs on the end of each section should be "...turned, twisted and snapped" into position. Having turned, twisted and snapped each tab on each section of track, our friends were lefts with forty unconnected sections of track and 160 seperate, twisted pieces of square plastic.
After some careful application of Superglue, we actually managed to re-fix the tabs back to the track and re-create the circuit so that - whilst not perfect, it was, in the short term, operational & so Christmas wouldn't be ruined.
What of the port? Well being a naive young (ish) thing, I hadn't actually drunk Port before, and therefore didn't realise that it wasn't drunk out of a tumbler - although I would have thought that my, more worldly wise host would have done. Most of the bottle of Port was consumed as we stuck the track back together.
I can attest that having left the house, the Port "kicked in" within the short time it took to get home...after which time I couldn't remember whether it was Christmas or Easter
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