Far away from the villages that nested in the valleys, the Muddlingthrew Hills raised their blue black silhouette against a soon to be rising sun. The sky was beginning to lighten from the east, provoking a few feathered early risers, keen to get the dawn chorus going, to raise themselves from their nests and find suitable perches to sing and warble. It was going to be a beautiful day. Spring flowers bedecked the country lanes in a profuse display of colour and buds were bursting with joy when touched by the warmth of the sun. Trees quietly stretched their upper branches towards the heavens and the last of the stars faded into the oncoming light. A pig grunted as it snuffled for roots, a buzzard soared high looking for its breakfast of inattentive small furry creatures, and a village inn’s dog, affectionally known as Trevor, sought out some ‘me time’ behind the brick outhouse in the pub’s yard to carry out some grooming of a personal nature involving his tongue and scrotum.
If Trevor was not quite so distracted performing his personal grooming, he may have heard the gentle swish swish of a broom and the squeal of a mouse as it bounced off the wall inside the public bar of ‘The Pecker’ as it was affectionally known by the more ribald of Much Sodding’s community. The mouse had shown an uncustomary lack of attention to its peripheral vision as it crossed the floor towards a tempting morsel of beer soaked pork scratching dropped the night before. Eager to gobble it up before the pub cat awoke, he failed to notice the efficiency and effectiveness of the floor cleaning technique being applied just as he darted forward. The next thing that went through his mind was his arse. This was due to rapid deceleration upon being flicked into the air and swept towards the granite lintel over the fire place. His skull stopped suddenly and popped open against the granite a few microseconds before his rear end, but that was enough for the kinetic energy stored therein to fulfil the laws of physics and to ruin the rest of his day.
The bearer of the broom continued as if nothing had happened sure in the knowledge that ‘Cat’ would soon awake and find an easy breakfast of mouse by the fireplace.
The broom had plenty of work to do. Last night was a normal night in the pub. The flagstone floor was almost a living history of the goings on. Archaeologists in the future could write whole books about the civilisation they were studying from the collected remains and artefacts found. Except they would not because the broom was adept at sweeping history into the bin.
A pork scratching would always feature prominently as a core feature of the detritus, along with tobacco ash, coins, a crushed crisp and a condom. A flattened woodlouse, crumbs of soil from the soles of labourer’s boots, cement dust and a lump of hardened snot complete with a nasal hair sticking out of it at a jaunty angle, flicked across the room with about as much attention to where it orbits, as given to the moons of Jupiter. Semi solid sticky stains from liquids various – both non human and human – spilled from the tankard through over exuberance while story telling or lack of bladder control, could trap micro dust, finger nails and very small spiders. These poor creatures would come across such dank black edged stains much as we would come across sticky black treacle 2 feet deep. The only difference is that we would avoid stepping in the gooey mess while the poor spider would place each of its eight feet straight in, only to find further progress could not be made. There it would stay, wondering “WTF?” until oblivion was meted out swiftly as a patron of ‘The Pecker’ went for a piss and put it out of its sticky misery under the heel of his boot.
None of this detail bothered Rosie.
She deftly swept the floor and mopped the stains in preparation for the coming day’s melee at the bar.
Rosie was described as ‘comely’ by the married men, ‘unavailable’ by the young singletons and ‘cuddly’ by a recent attendee to the village doctor complaining of a bloody nose and a sore scrotum brought on by the swift application of a knee. His mistake was to explore the degree of cuddliness of the object of his (cider sodden) affections by gently squeezing her tits accompanied by the loud vocal encouragement of his cider infused entourage.
(to be continued)
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