TheBanyanTree: Reunion blues

[Theta Brentnall]

Peter, if you ever track down your partners in crime and have that 
reunion, I would very much like to attend.  I can say with conviction 
that I would enjoy meeting all of them and I have a few secrets in my 
past that would qualify me as an honorary member of the class.

and the bit about the induction coil and the stainless steel 
urinal...that made me laugh as hard as the Apres Matisse on your 
sister's wall.

Theta

Peter Macinnis wrote:
> It's getting harder to hide, so I was hunted down the other day by an 
> invitation to a fifty-year school reunion.
>
> I would sooner gnaw my arms off with wooden teeth.  Reunions are full 
> of people who have achieved nothing since they left school, clowns who 
> are drunkenly hell-bent on recalling their mighty defeat of the 
> Tooleybuc Ferrets in the 1958 open-weight jonojouk competition, when 
> Slug took a dummy crumpet from Johnno and managed a complex five-point 
> underthrown poltroon by a cleverly feinted Immelman turnip in injury 
> time.
>
> If that line of narrative founders in a sea of yawns, they have 
> another strategy. To a man (I went to a boys' school), they have 
> transformed into golfing bores, eager to recount the hole-in-one they 
> almost got, five years ago, using a triple-barrelled yak-horn niblet 
> with a titanium shaft and a bespoke shrunken head with a degree of 
> difficulty 3.5 on the Richter scale of impossible things to believe 
> before breakfast.
>
> The ones I would like to meet up with, like me, aren't there.  We were
> the ones who inverted the on-off switch on the PA system so the whole
> school heard the deputy principal swearing in front of an open mike that
> he thought was closed.  We were the ones who set the time-fused
> fireworks in the toilets on assembly days.  We were the ones who
> weakened the bladders of the jonojouk balls and inflated them with
> laughing gas and spiked the water bottles with . . .
>
> No, some things (the thing with the induction coil and the stainless 
> steel urinal, the Bathurst burrs, the fulminate in the locks, the 
> rotten-egg gas that left the dressing-room a no-go zone for two weeks 
> and the trick with the flour and the candle among them) are best left 
> hidden.  The people I would like to reminisce with know as I do that 
> it might be unwise to risk being overheard.  Besides, as solid 
> citizens, lawyers, teachers, ministers of religion and the like, 
> strong right arms upholding the morality of society with every fibre 
> of our being, it is our sworn duty not to let such anarchic ideas loose.
>
> Besides, we might want to screw those jonojouk-jock bastards one last
> time.
>
> peter
>
>