Seasonal Shorts. Scene One - Back in the Pub

With the 'welfare rights lit' cast stood down for a while, I thought I could safely leave them to their own devices while I made the final tweaks to Limited Capability and took the first steps to producing the Claimant Commitment paperback, prior to some New Year cruising with the redoubtable Daphne Randall.  However, there are some characters who won't just sit quietly and the usual suspects were determined to set up a scenario which could only end with a series of short stories...


  ‘What’s she up to now?’
  Like his colleagues from the Solent Welfare Rights Project, the Walker family, assorted tradespersons of the Construction Co-operative and a miscellaneous collection of civil servants, local councillors and narrowboaters, Toby Novak was in the Lord Nelson public house - specifically, the parallel universe version to which he and his fellow characters retired between novels.
  ‘She’s just completed the last extensive set of corrections to Limited Capability,’ Hilary Carrington informed him. ’One of her proof reading team was really rather thorough when it came to matters of good grammar.’
  ‘Not too thorough, I hope,’ replied Toby. ’Otherwise the readers won’t know Williams comes from Portsmouth until they get to the football gags.’
  ‘Pot and kettle, Novak!’ teased Tricia. ‘If the author wrote either of us phonetically, no-one north of the M4 would understand a word!’
  ‘As I understand it,’ Vaughan James interjected. ‘The author left the dialogue largely untouched but adopted many of the suggested improvements to sentence structure.’
  ‘Rightly so,’ said Tom Appleby. ‘I can’t complain about how our author’s treated me over the years, casting me as the romantic hero and pairing me up with this gorgeous lady…’ He paused to kiss the merlot-flavoured lips of his beloved Hilary. ‘However, there are occasional chunks of her prose that read like they’ve been translated rather too literally from the original Latin!’
  ‘Supporting my theory that she’s really Professor Mary Beard!’ said Toby.
  ‘That’s crap! If that was right, she would have made the romantic lead a classicist not a medievalist,’ Sally Archer suggested logically. ‘If Tom still is the romantic lead, of course. I think that role has passed to the next generation!’ She waved at a slim young man sitting a couple of tables away, who was talking to the pub manager’s burly husband and sketching something on a white paper tablecloth. He shyly blew her a kiss in return.
  ‘So Limited Capability is really finished this time?’ Tom asked.
  ‘Absolutely, my darling,’ Hilary assured him. ‘The “Director’s Cut” is a handful of pages shorter than the original, I believe, thanks to some judicious editing - although, I’m relieved to say, you‘ve lost nothing as a result! She’s looking for proof-readers for a paperback of Claimant Commitment now.’
  ‘She’ll have no friends left, at this rate,’ sighed Tom. ‘Mind you, you have to admire her persistence.  She might not have beaten Channel 5 with her counter-propaganda yet but she must be ahead of them on word-count!’
  ‘She’s not the only one writing a sort of “welfare rights lit”,’ Sally said cheerfully. ’There was something in the Guardian a few weeks ago about a young playwright who won a prize for her anti-austerity piece looking at benefit cuts and, before that, there was the Jobcentre lady who wrote a play about sanctions. There was even a comic on The Now Show last weekend talking about the Work Capability Assessment…’
  ‘Always a barrel of laughs.’ Toby’s tone was heavy with irony.
  ‘Ken Loach is making a film about sanctions too,’ Sally continued. ’That’s really cool. Except it’s supposed to be his last, so we won’t have the chance to be in one now.’
  Sally seemed bitterly disappointed.
  ‘I know I sound like I ought to be in a Ken Loach movie,’ said Tom. ’But I’m not sure that’s what I’d choose, given the option. The last thing I need is to be typecast as a grim northerner - again!’
  He shot a sharp glance at Toby.
  ‘What sort of movie role would you fancy then, mate?’ asked his colleague, with a broad grin.
  Tom could tell that Toby was seeking to cause mischief. ‘A nice light romantic comedy,’ he lied. ‘What about you?’
  ‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ said Toby. 
  While he was thinking, Terry Walker offered his opinion. ‘I’d like to be in a western,’ he said. ‘Something like the Magnificent Seven, with a bunch of good guys turning up to save the townsfolk from a bunch of bandits. I’d be one of the good guys, of course, though I’d probably get killed before the end and someone else would get the girl.’
  ‘You’re such an old misery!’ his wife laughed. ‘You ought to stick to romcoms, like George.’
  ‘Tom,’ said Tom. ‘And, I have to confess, I wasn’t being entirely honest about the romantic comedy. I’d prefer a different genre altogether - and I think we have just the cast for it!’


To be continued…