All Hands To The Pumps!

Poor Geo. is at his wits end and utterly unable to function at any recognisably human level. Not since E's rapid, vapid decline when Mr Doherty took up with that nice Miss Moss have I seen a person so broken in love. As that Gilbert has his George, so this Geo. has - or seemingly had - his Patrick. Funny how one doesn't notice two people glued to each other until one half is torn away leaving the remaining portion just a fragment.

Hardly knowing where or how to start, I have probed a little into any possible significance of the vanishing microwave to see if that might lend a clue as the turn of events. A certain something did emerge though quite its import I'm as yet uncertain. Patrick it appears positively hated the microwave - Geo.'s idea to speed things up in the kitchen - and took it as a slight on his culinary skills; not an unfair point from a man whose steak and ale pie is the stuff of local legend.

Geo. does the beer and front of house; Patrick, more retiring, the kitchen and the meals. It has been - one almost hates to use the past tense - a near ideal partnership, despite Geo.'s inbred inability to keep his pumps as clean as either God or the drinking public would wish. Now, of course, that Geo. is a man in only name there is no chance he will attend to this pressing duty and so - how oddly prescient of H - there I was in the cellar trying to figure out what needs to be done in what order to preserve parish health.

Actually, I had thought I'd made a decent job of it - a swift phone call to Bernard who runs the Bone [Dog and Bone more formally] to check for instruction had vastly helped - that is until Peggy, who came in at lunchtime to manage the post-homily rush [quite why my sermons - kept as ever short and sharp - should drive up such a thirst I fail to understand!], informed me that as the Guinness tap was pouring lager and the lager pump Firebreath I'd better return pronto and reconnect the right line to the right barrel!

'Pronto' is in fact literary shorthand for a volley of verbals the like and content of which I would not have credited Peggy from knowing let alone using. It seems we are all getting rather jumpy as Geo. sinks lower and lower.

H suggests a conflab with Mildred and Maurice, and much as I dread that particular pairing - with only little less fervour than the distaste they have for each other [some ancient family feud too complex for this moment to explain] - I believe H is right to summons the most intuitively sensitive and utterly nosy minds in the village in order to try and find a way forward.

Something must be done. This is something. We shall, therefore, do it.