Wafts is a Beachcomber type column where you can expect the unexpected...

What’s this? Why, lubbers, it’s a sea shanty, cribbed and condensed from the voicemail signatures of a thousand ship-to-shore radios, harvested over a half century of illicit eavesdropping. My shanty’s about the problems encountered playing harmonica during bouts of hyperfluid, staggering seasickness. It also tells of the ruffle-haired Head Boy of the Ocean, a mythic individual blessed with Neptune’s ability to shuffle vast bodies of water to indicate mood, crossed with a school prefect’s predilection for spiteful obnoxiousness.

And what am I advertising for sale at a reduced price? Well, Fortune certainly grins at you this month in the shape of a Reconstituted Fisherman’s Love Seat as popularised by Britain’s stalwart fishing fleet. Yes, the rumour has some foundation in truth - the seat does resemble a kinked cod. Send your euros and I will ship the seats in their deflated state for you to stuff with scraggy nets, or household equivalent.

A LITTLE ABOUT THE SEATS
Fishing is either a solitary pastime or a job that’s the empire of guys allergic to buddying-up close enough to leave compression marks. But love seats have become part of the perks on the best deep sea trawlers where no one minds foisting their rumps on them as the nets are winched and, well, unwinched.

Seafarers have a small titanium prop rod that can be retrieved from their navels with a little careful probing, and then their entire upper body cavity can be braced open to allow sea water to drain away in the event of falling overboard, or if caught unawares in an overwhelming wave. The love seat is an optimum height and depth to carry out this life-saving procedure. The latest lifeboats are equipped with a fleet of them.

Because of the noise on a working trawler, all conversations are pre-recorded and the fishermen lip sync as best they can with their faces encased in ice on the Bering Straits. This means a day in a recording studio prior to sailing and the addition of a good quality p.a. (wireless on the best kitted trawlers). Sitting for a moment on a love seat, these doughty sailors are able to fold their beards over their mouths while they recover their timing.

SUITABLE JOBS FOR POETS
* Cleaning accumulations of pocket fudge from the grooves in coins using an unpicked paperclip as gouge.
* Using the detritus to draft-proof windows.
* Counting polysyllabic words on listed ingredients in ready-meals.
* Matching the edges of sugar crystals to each other create a perfectly unbroken surface.
* Adding additional perforations to teabags for those who wish to read tea leaves and want briefer indications of future events. A kind of twitter tea leaf-litter.

WAFT POET OF THE MONTH, ALFRED LORD TENNYSON
THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT HIM
Even as a child, Alf had hair so wispy his scalp glittered through. His mother paid the local blacksmith to solder on extra curls, locks bought from impoverished but luxuriant-haired local families. Hairdressing Historians consider Alf to be the first person to wear hair extensions. How did the blacksmith cobble the lot together? Well, working mostly with horses, he created miniature horse shoes to grip the ur-extensions which he then nailed to Alf’s listless straggles.
Ur-extenions - oh ha ha ha.
Alf owned a Russian piano. It did not respond to ‘shahnahnahnah’ and ‘doobydoowaa.’ It was a fusspot and only played permutations of ‘whew!’ and ‘furriskey! And ‘dah dah?’

Alf also wore the first nursing bra. It was a perfect whale-bone and bombazine hooley of his own design.
He wore it to Lincoln market where he’d parade about with a drawn sword and a bugle to draw the crowds, before unhooking his cups and offering succour to hussars returned from battles he had failed to commemorate in verse. These veterans were denuded of limbs and faculties and reduced to beggardom. It was, according to newspaper accounts at the time, a singularly moving sight, the grinning wordsmith seated on the steps of the town’s whipping post with a half dozen veterans gathered up in his long arms, and crooning as he muffled them against his fluttering bosom.