It was an accident waiting to happen, although it hadn’t happened yet.

The kerbstone had shattered and it just needed one person who wasn’t looking where they were going. But everyone seemed to be looking where they were going. Especially the postman, who would comment on the kerbstone whenever he avoided it.

The severed foot of a small bird lay in the gutter near the kerbstone amongst the leaves and an old Mars Bar wrapper. June from the hairdressers squealed and pulled a stupid face when she saw it. She was so distracted that she nearly didn’t look where she was going, but she did and avoided the accident waiting to happen. The accident was getting bored waiting to happen so the council turned up and replaced the kerbstone. The accident moved on and found somewhere else to wait to happen. Eventually it happened in Preston.

The bloke who fixed the kerbstone had three nipples. His doctor had told him to lose some weight. So he would lose bits of weight by burying them around the town and deliberately forgetting where they were. Sometimes people would find them and leave them on his doorstep. Or they’d knock and say ‘did you lose this?’ Whenever this happened he would get upset and binge on lemons and Marmite. He was called Damien but everyone called him Francis because it was easier to remember.

Francis drove a red council van with writing on the side about how good the council was. Reminding people how lucky they were to have a council with their own vans. At night a caped crusader used the van. The caped crusader wore a mask and a pair of blue swimming trunks over some grey sweatpants. He draped a Parker over his shoulders and buttoned it around his neck. This was his cape.

He would save people from themselves and once stopped a hurricane from the Bahamas from lifting the felt roof off a prostitute’s shed. She was really grateful and offered him some discount vouchers. But the offer only applied on Wednesdays between three and six.

The prostitute was called Victoria after Queen Victoria, who apparently was a wet nurse to a family of Huguenots in Bradford before the industrial revolution. Then she found out she was really German. In the olden days all Germans were treated as members of the Royal Family. She married a German bloke and they had loads of kids who all ran the world until they fell out and had a massive war.

The caped crusader called himself ‘Council Van Man’. The local press were always wondering who he was but no one else gave a shit. Tony from the Ironmongers thought it might be his lodger from Bury St Edmunds. Tony had noticed that his lodger always wore blue swimming trunks over his sweatpants. But Tony just put that down to the fact that his lodger was a professional hit man called Gavin. Governments and organised crime syndicates hired Gavin and he would go around hitting people for money, normally just a slap across the face. This would usually stop them doing whatever it was that they were doing that annoyed people so much.  Gavin was once asked to kill someone but he soiled his pants and that’s why he wears his trunks over his sweatpants now and stays close to the toilet.

Gavin hasn’t been out of his room though since he burnt his eyebrows off with some curling tongues. He woke up one morning to find a leprechaun curling one down in his sock drawer. The leprechaun granted him three wishes but Gavin said he only wanted two. Then he momentarily forgot what to wish for and the leprechaun pissed in his face and escaped through a crack in the skirting board.

Tony nailed the skirting board up. He’s got a lifetime payback guarantee now and it makes him feel dizzy. It gets so bad some times he can’t play the trombone. But that’s ok, he could never play it before anyway. Now at least he doesn’t have to worry about his loved ones when he’s gone. They can bury him now and have a great time afterwards.

Tony was the first bloke to wear shorts this year. He opened his curtains one morning and was greeted with clear blue skies. So he declared the start of summer. His dog felt embarrassed, ‘a bloke in shorts picking my shit up and putting it into a little plastic bag?’

But it didn’t matter to Tony. He was full of the events of the night before when a space ship landed on his garage roof and a strange being introduced him to Fred Elliot who used to be the butcher in Coronation Street. None of the neighbours had witnessed this incident, but they all knew who Fred Elliot was. All except the woman at number eight. She’d been at number eight for many years and just never had the inclination to go to number nine. She was happy when she moved from number seven as it was next to number six and that meant trouble. She would sometimes wonder what it would be like to be at number ten. Christmases seemed to be a lot of fun there.

She was called Sunny Delight, which is Indian for Sunny Delight. The day she was born her dad, a sword swallower from Doncaster, choked on a rapier and his glamorous assistant poured Sunny Delight down his throat, which released the rapier, although he broke his dentures. It was the first drink that the glamorous assistant picked up off the table. Had she reached left instead of right then the woman at number eight may well have been called Cold Ovaltine. In fact that was her middle name, amazing.

So Sunny Delight Cold Ovaltine had been married briefly to Bernard, a dildo maintenance engineer from Bristol. Bernard had his regular customers but it didn’t bring a lot of money in since he had lost the contract with Anne Summers. To make up the money he would moonlight as a soap opera character called Ged Quigley who used to sell drugs on Coronation Street to Steve MacDonald and that was Sunny Delight’s link with Fred Elliot, but she didn’t know that. The scriptwriters wrote Ged out of the programme so Bernard had to scrape a living together as a guide dog for a blind steeplejack in Blackburn. This had tragic consequences when Bernard was flattened by the collapse of a two hundred foot mill chimney during a turf war with Fred Dibnah. 

Sunny Delight held a memorial service for Bernard and the entire cast of Coronation Street failed to turn up. All except for the two actors who play those two Police Officers who appear in all the soaps at the end of some of the episodes and say something like ‘Good evening, we’re the Police, I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news, can we come in?’ – queue the music and credits. Sometimes an actress who would play a woman Police Officer would join them. She didn’t have any lines; she just looked sympathetic and put her arm around someone when they cried.

The blind steeplejack was going to attend the service but he lost his way there and ended up in a theatre in Oxford listening to a play about someone who had tie dyed a Bishop’s cassock without the permission of the Catholic Church. It was one of those Da Vinci code kind of plays where we find out all about what Jesus and his chums really go up to.