The Mizzenwood Times  business

Or is it Tim?

News of Mr. Bob Meander-Station�s return to public life with his latest business venture has been warmly welcomed by all of his many admirers in Mizzenwood. Mr. Meander-Station grew up in the town. He�s the son of a welder and he left school at fourteen to work for his father, but his ambitions always impelled him to greater things.

His initial business ventures ended in failure, but like all great business minds, he kept going and eventually succeeded. As he tells the story in his autobiography, his father once told him that possession was nine tenths of the law. Bob was never very good at maths, but he assumed that this meant he could steal things. He believed that his mother confirmed this when she said, �No Bob, stealing is wrong.� (She had also once told him that it�s not always easy to draw the distinction between right and wrong). So stealing was Bob�s first business venture.

Unfortunately, the police had a different interpretation of the law. He tried to explain the maths to them, but they didn�t understand. The judge sentenced him to 120 hours community service, and he decided that the sentence would be served by tap dancing. His wife was putting on a musical at the time, and this was the only way she could get people to perform in it. A shop lifter played the lead role. It was the judge himself who came up with the idea of sentencing people to parts in her musical. He told her that it could help in the offenders� rehabilitation, but in truth he saw it as a punishment. When all the roles had been filled, he sentenced people to watch it. The show ran for nearly a year and they had a full house every night. Those with the longest sentences were there for every performance.

So the young Bob had to learn how to tap dance. He expected it to be a greater punishment than prison, but he found that he really enjoyed it. He showed a natural talent for tap dancing. He spent all of his spare time practising for the musical, but the more he danced, the more he wanted to fight people. When he finished practising each evening, he�d be desperate to hit someone. He needed to channel the violence into some other activity, so he took up cookery, and that eased his desire to fight, but it made him want to shoot birds. He took up singing lessons and that quenched the desire to shoot birds, but it only led to a desire to make fun of short people. To take his mind off this compulsion, he started shooting birds, but this led to an almost overwhelming desire to call up radio phone-ins and use the words �it�s worse than Nazi Germany�, so he took up boxing, but this created a desire to make model boats, paint them green and give them stupid names, like 'Biddy Skits'. This led him to take up drinking, but he was spending a fortune on drink, and he was drinking more all the time. He felt that if he stopped drinking he�d start making model boats, painting them green and giving them stupid names.

The solution to his drink problem came one day when he had to go to a garden centre with his mother. He came up with the idea of making model boats and calling them after flowers, like Primrose or Daffodil. He tried this when he went home, and afterwards he didn�t have any desire to drink.

He refined this method over the following weeks. He found that he didn't have to make model boats at all - he could call anything after a flower. He did occasionally have a desire to call up radio phone-ins, but he found that he could get away with saying �it�s almost like Nazi Germany� instead of �it�s worse than Nazi Germany�.

Calling things after flowers proved to be such a successful method of giving up drink that Bob saw great business potential in it. It could be used to beat amost any addiction � things like drugs, smoking or food. This was the business opportunity he�d always been waiting for. He started a company marketing his programs to lose weight or give up smoking or fight alcoholism, and they proved to be hugely popular. He wrote a best-selling book too. His methods had an extraordinary success rate, and they made Mr. Meander-Station a millionaire. He became so confident in his methods that he once proclaimed that they�d even work on dogs. People didn�t think he was being serious, but to prove his point he organised an experiment to test his methods on dogs, and they worked. Bob became so confident that he said his products would even work on bricks.

This proved to be his downfall. Not because it didn�t work � his methods did work on the bricks. That was the problem. No one could say why the Meander-Station methods were working on the bricks, including Bob himself. After he first made the claim about the bricks, he realised he shouldn�t have said it, but he wasn�t worried. He knew that the tests would fail, but then he could say that his method works on everything except bricks. But it did work on the bricks. Daisy the brick never smoked or drank again, and she seemed happier too. People lost confidence in his methods. They started smoking and drinking again, even the dogs. Everyone except the bricks.

Mr. Meander-Station�s business collapsed. Later he came to believe that his biggest mistake lay in anthropomorphising the bricks by giving them names. Bob took up smoking and drinking, and he went back to the tap dancing, cooking, singing, shooting birds, drinking, boxing, making fun of short people and calling up radio phone-ins to use the words �it�s worse than Nazi Germany�. He used those words to describe the government�s latest anti-smoking campaign.

Bob lost his fortune very quickly. Within a few months he was living at home again, working with his father as a welder, but the loss of his money forced him to give up the dancing and all of his other addictions. This gave him an idea for a new method to beat just about any addiction: �Give up drink or lose weight and all you have to do is give me all your money.� But he found that someone had already taken a patent out on that idea.

Or maybe it�s Jim. Jim?�

It was about this time that Bob met Rachel. He asked her out, and on their first date he took her to the cinema. They went to see a documentary film about kites. A critic had called it a touching family drama, but that critic had been lost in the hills when he was young and he was raised by kites. (The people who operated the kites didn�t really like him and they wanted to keep their distance). In his autobiography, Bob tells us that as he sat in the cinema watching the film about kites, he wished he�d taken her to a porn film, but when they left the cinema she said she really liked the kite documentary. He took her home and they agreed to meet again, but as he walked home he wondered if he�d like to go out with someone who liked films about kites. He was still sorry he didn�t take her to the porn film (there are a lot of details in Bob�s memoirs that we really could have done without). If she had liked the porn film, he probably wouldn�t have been walking home alone. Although there was a fair amount of nudity in the film about kites (it�s true � it�s well worth waiting for the second half). So maybe it was the nudity she liked about the film.

Bob really wanted to see her again. The next time they met, he bought her a kite. At about this time, Rachel was having a few problems with a woman who worked in a shop, Strange-let Ostrich. Rachel met her in the shop every morning when she went to get the newspaper. They had been in school together, and Rachel used to go out with someone who Strange-let liked. When he left Rachel to live in America, he said he�d write to her every week, but Rachel only ever got one letter. Strange-let found out about this and she made fun of Rachel every morning when they met in the shop. The things she used to say weren�t very funny, but the only response Rachel could think of was saying �very funny� in a sarcastic voice. But then one day she said �very funny� and Strange-let said, �That�s all you can say, isn�t it. �Very funny�.� Rachel tried to think of something else to say but she couldn�t, so she just walked away.

The next time she went into the shop was on a Monday morning, and Strange-let said to her, �How did you spend your weekend? Counting your letter boxes?�

Rachel couldn�t think of anything witty to say to that, and she couldn�t say �very funny�, so she said, �Yes I was,� without any sarcasm. Strange-let found it hilarious. She mentioned it again the next day, and Rachel still pretended that she was serious about the letter boxes. This became a daily occurrence, and Rachel realised that the only way out of this was to get more than one letter box. More than two � she worked out that she�d need at least four before she could legitimately count them. So she went shopping for letter boxes. She found a lot of them that she really liked, and she ended up getting ten. One day when Strange-let asked her about the letter boxes, Rachel said to her, �If you don�t believe me, why don�t you come around and see.�

Strange-let was shocked when she saw Rachel�s front door, but Rachel suddenly realised that it must look extremely pathetic to spend your time counting your letter boxes, and to have enough letter boxes to count. But Strange-let never noticed this. She never made fun of Rachel again.

Rachel loved her letter boxes, and she went shopping for more. It started to become an addiction. When the front door was full of them, she started fitting them to the back door, and then to some of the doors in the house.

On one July day, Rachel had a feeling that a September afternoon was just around the corner, so she kept looking out the window for any signs of it, but then her sister told her that there was a letter for her. She went to the letter boxes at the front door, but there wasn�t any letter there. She went around to all of the other letter boxes and couldn�t find any letter. She went back to the window and when she looked out it was an afternoon in September. Her sister was laughing at her. �The postman didn�t even come.�

When Rachel was young she was given a puppy called �Yesterday and Sing�. He always made her sad because his name seemed to imply that her singing days were in the past. She spent her time being sad rather than singing. She had nothing to sing about, and she always thought the puppy looked very sad. Everyone else thought he looked really happy � they were delighted because the puppy made her stop singing.

She remembered Yesterday and Sing as she looked out the window at the September afternoon. Everything seemed so sad then too. It was the passing of another season, another autumn. She could feel time slipping away, the past fading into memory, nothing in the future but lonely days like this, with no letters despite all the letter boxes. Nothing could cheer her up, not even when Bob bought her another kite. They used to fly it in the clear blue sky, and it did cheer her up a little when he called it �Future and Blue�, but thinking of the past always made her sad again. She gave up buying letter boxes because they always reminded her of the past, and she started to feel much better after that. Flying Future and Blue with Bob made her think of the future.

Rachel is now Bob�s wife, and it was the way she gave up letter boxes that gave Bob the idea for his latest business venture � it�s another method to beat addiction. The most important part of the method is a change of season. This might involve a few months in a drunken haze, although this is not recommended if you�re trying to give up drink. It could also involve staying in bed for a few months. Or you might just get lucky with the timing of the seasons, like Rachel. The next step is to buy a kite. Bob hopes that this will revive his career, and everyone in Mizzenwood will be wishing him well in his latest venture.
-Rick �It�s Rick! That�s it, Rick! Rick� Meer.