No, chopper as in motorcycle - And Greeks.

In the good old days (for new readers, the 'Good Old Days' was a time, in the past, some 20 or so years ago, where my life involved more beer, more motorcycles and more morally challenged young ladies) there was a Greek restaurant around the corner from our local.  We used to go there on Saturday and Sunday nights, mainly because they used to serve alcohol until about three in the morning and they had a very novel 'Buy two drinks, get one free' deal going on most of the time.

It was called the Village Taverna and run by a chap whom we called called 'Gleekos', which may have actually been his name, but it's more likely one of those playfully racist names that the English gave to people of differing racial backgrounds at the time. He used to wander between his restaurant, the pub and the betting shop bellowing a hearty 'Hey You!' and wave at anyone who acknowledged him.

I think it's a Spanish Tapas bar now, which is a pity - Their Mezzes used to be legendary, well, we used to like them, but I've never actually been there sober, so they could have been made out of cardboard and fish-paste for all I know.   Anyway - To the stories.

-oOo-

Because he was a generous type, had lots of experience with drunks (His wife used to throw them out for him, he was only little) and was one of the few Greek Tavernas that still did plate-smashing, he was very popular with stag parties.  You would often wander past, look through the windows and see crowds of apes in football shirts hooning plates at each other, whilst Gleekos ran around like Woody Woodpecker with his hair on fire, shouting 'No dee surfing playt! - We god da spesh playt for dee smashinge!'

On this particular night, we left the pub and decided to go for a quick stifado and a couple of bottles of retsina.  As we pushed through the little door into the restaurant, it was obvious that there had been a stag night going on.  Gleekos had pushed three tables together and there were slumped bodies all over them.  The man himself was sat on a stool by the bar, rocking backwards and forwards saying 'My byootifull playt, I say no smashinge the surfing playt, they smashinge innit?, iz like they no hears me or sutin.'

We found a table, ordered some drinks and started to take the mickey out of the drunks.  Now, in the dim and distant past, the restaurant had probably been a private house for some 19th Century mid-range toff and the upstairs (where the toilets were) was a bit of a maze. This is something you need to bear in mind for the next bit.

So we were sat there, happily drinking, enjoying a bit of houmous and pitta and suchlike (which we got free because we spent so much money there) when it started to rain.  You know when you're sat there, on a park bench, admiring the view, and you feel the first few drips of rain and you think 'If it gets any harder, I might go home'?  Well, the same was happening to us, but we were in a Greek restaurant, at just before midnight, on a Saturday, indoors.

It took us a few minutes to actually register that we were getting wet, and we called Gleekos across saying 'It's raining mate!'

He lifted his palms to the ceiling, agreed that it was indeed raining and then traced the water to a ceiling fan that was quickly spinning, and flinging water off the ends of the blades.

(Worked it out yet?)

So, he explodes in panic 'Ah godda leak, innit?' and runs upstairs to see if someone had left a tap on.  He came down minutes later, holding a drunk dude by the scuff of his neck, jibbering away at him in Greek and clipping him around the ear.  Turns out that the poor drunk chap had been looking for the gents, couldn't find it, and just decided to relieve himself in a corner.

It had gone through the floorboards, onto the ground floor ceiling and had found its way to the fan housing, which it then dripped down and onto the blades...

-oOo-

This story is completely second hand, told to me by my good friend Jock.

This is him, accepting a trophy for 'Best Chop' at the HAMC's 2006 Bulldog Bash, unfortunately for everyone who knew him, he died shortly afterwards.  I've included the picture to give you some idea of scale in the story that follows.

Jock belonged to a group of like-minded motorcycle enthusiasts called the National Chopper Club.  They would meet socially, very regularly and... How shall we put it? Knew how to have a good time.  He knew Gleekos, as all of us did, which made his restaurant an obvious choice for one of their many robust social gatherings.  It started out very sensibly, there was food and beer, then food and wine, then ouzo and wine, then ouzo, then Mr Sensible picked up his bowler hat, umbrella and briefcase, and left the building.

Sometime during the evening, two middle aged couples had come into the taverna and had chosen to sit as far as was humanly possible from the NCC lads.  All fine and dandy so far, you might think, and it was, until Gleekos started playing 'Zorba's Dance' on the stereo, brought out the 'spesh' smashing plates and it all went a bit 'Anthony Quinn'

(Bit of trivia for you here, Anthony Quinn, who played Zorba in the 1964 film, was actually Mexican... Born in Chihuahua - You've learned something - Thank me later)

So, spurred on by the thought of smashing plates and general pratting about, our heroes decided to have a bit of a dance.  Despite Gleekos' best efforts, it quickly degenerated from a traditional Greek-Cypriot folk dance, to something more like a Bad-Manners inspired can-can.

It was at this point that Jock noticed that one of the women was clapping along - and he did no more than wander over, grab hold of her, and drag her into the pile of broken crockery that had previously been the dance-floor - More dancing ensued, with the mature, but still attractive lady teaching the bikers how to dance.  After the tune was over, Jock escorted her back to her table, politely pulled out her chair for her and thanked her for the dance.

Her husband, who had gone quite purple and sweaty remarked, 'You've done well to get her dancing.' With a fixed, rictus grin.

To which Jock replied, 'Ah don' know whut yer grinning aboot flower, after ah've had a pish, you're next.'

By the time he came back, both couples had, probably not surprisingly, made their excuses and left.

When Jock awoke the next morning, in his own bed, he wasn't alone...

You're assuming that his dance partner had returned aren't you?

Well, I'm afraid she hadn't.  Jock was sharing his bed with a 4 foot square mirror, that had previously been screwed to the wall of the taverna.  Up until the last time I spoke to him, he still had no idea of how or why it'd gone home with him, or why he'd particularly felt the need to take it to bed.  Feel free to fill in the blanks yourselves - You probably won't be that far from the truth, however perverse you are.



I must extend a thank you to Briz at Custom Cycle Developments (Custom Harley Davidson frames and bespoke parts a specialty - Reasonable rates) who provided the above picture of Jock, although he freely admits that he can't remember where he got it in the first place - So, if you actually took it, my apologies, feel free to get in touch and I'll put in a credit for you.

They came out of the Sun, all Dakka!-Dakka!-Dakka!

Last year, we had a note from the MicroDandy's school, saying that they were doing a project about what Britain was like after the Second World War... Rationing, National Service, stuff like that.  His first thought was to talk to his Grandfather about his experiences, what with him being alive at the time and everything - But because he is almost clinically lazy, the task of listening to his Grandfather's stories fell to me.

So one night, I trudged around to his house, notepad in hand, and asked; 'Dad, what did you do in (the years just after) the War? - The stories he told had to be quite heavily edited for their intended young audience, but I'll tell you pretty much what he told me.

(Note: Yes, this is my Pigeon Exploding Father, just so as you know what to expect.)

-oOo-

Our story starts in 1947 when he was conscripted into National Service (Which we should definitely still have in my opinion), and sent for eight weeks training at RAF Innsworth in Gloucester.

 It was here that he learned to shoot;

'We were all on the range one afternoon, taking pot shots at these targets with Browning 9mils, bloody horrible things they were, used to grab the skin between your thumb and first finger when the hammer came down, really heavy trigger too... Rubbish... Anyway, there was this clot who comes onto the range with a Sten Gun, waving it about, coming the big I Am.  Fired a couple of shots down the range and it jammed, no lubrication you see, you had to keep 'em clean, and he obviously hadn't been.  So he took the magazine out, banged it against his boot, stuck it back in and pulled the slide back, which is something you don't normally have to do, I think this might have confused him.  He fired a couple more rounds holding the barrel, not the magazine like they tell you to and, it got hot, so he moved his hand back and his fingers got caught in the ejector mechanism - took the ends of his fingers clean off, started running about the place screaming and crying and p*ssing blood everywhere.  We couldn't stop laughing long enough to help him.'

He learned to throw grenades;

'Grenadier training was a waste of bloody time, we spent days throwing de-activated Mills bombs into pits then covering our heads and counting to seven, just to make sure we could throw 'em forty feet so as not to blow ourselves up. I wouldn't have trusted half the blokes there to throw a teabag in the bin, nevermind chuck something that could blow their bloody heads off!'

How to use a parachute;

'I didn't get to jump off any of those fancy towers that you see in the documentaries.  My parachute training consisted of sitting on a bench in the back of an open truck with fifteen other blokes, driving at forty miles an hour across a bumpy field with a great bloody ape of a Sergeant kicking us all off the back at ten yard intervals.  You learned how to land properly pretty bloody quickly!'

And hand-to-hand combat;

'We shared the base with a load of bloody Rock Apes (Note: this is a derogatory term for members of the Royal Air Force Regiment, although this term wasn't in use at the time, my father never misses an opportunity to be offensive to people he considers inferior as new insults become available.) who did the guarding duties, general rule was, if you wanted to join the RAF they asked you three questions - Can you breathe through your nose? Can you spell your own name? Do you know who your Father was? - If you answered yes, you got into the RAF, if you said no, you got put in The Regiment.  I said this to one on the main gate one night as we were coming back to barracks, he didn't take kindly to it, I got some lumps that night...'

After this training was complete, he got transferred to Flensburg in Northern Germany, promoted to Sergeant, and joined Transport Command as a Radio Operator.  He spent the next few years flying all over the world. Cyprus, Hong Kong, Iraq, Libya, Malta and Malaysia were all popular destinations for him and his crew.

He also did a number of 36 hour shifts during the Berlin Airlift (Of which there is ample information on t'Internet, so I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores of it here.) And tells many similar stories about flying cargos of coal and food and mail into Berlin, refuelling then turning around and flying back to base, but these two stick in my mind.

'We were coming in to land behind this Dakota (an American transport aircraft), we were packed in about 200 yards behind him and still about 500 feet up.  We'd just cleared the fence at Tempelhof airport when he lost control and dropped onto the deck, We'd already commited to landing and the pilot was just about to grab a handful of throttle and yank the stick back when a couple of bulldozers appeared from the side of the runway and pushed the wreckage out of the way, we just cleared it - I needed to requisition a new pair of trousers when we got back to base that afternoon.'

And;

'We'd just landed and taxied over to the hard-standing where the groundcrew were going to unload us when this Penguin (an officer with no flying experience) waddles over with a clipboard and says "Right lads, need you to stay on board while they juice you, you're taking fragile cargo back so try not to shake it about too much."  Then this truck backs up right to the cargo doors, some sheets go up and we feel the plane shaking about.  We get the all clear and take off back home.  When we landed, all these ambulances turned up and all these kids got out of the back of the plane and were whisked away.  Turns out we were transporting German evacuees.'

And as you can imagine, he had a fair old repertoire of things going wrong.

'We had a heavy landing with this York at RAF Uetersen, so heavy in fact that one of the tyres blew and we swerved off the runway and into the weeds, never had an entire aircrew simultaneously s*it themselves before, it smelled like the Elsan (Chemical toilet) had exploded!'

'There was this CO at one of the airbases we were visiting who was keeping his hours up (If you wanted to still call yourself aircrew, you had to do a certain amount of flying time every year.) when we needed to get something signed, he was just doing laps of the airfield, about 200 feet up in an Oxford, or maybe an Anson.  So we got a cuppa and went and sat outside NAAFI to wait for him to finish.  He was coming in to land when he got hit with a crosswind, our pilot had commented on it as we came in the previous day, but it caught his plane and flipped it on its side.  The tip of one of hit wings just clipped the ground and he cartwheeled across the runway and bust into flames, poor bugger never stood a chance...'

But his favourite story, about his favourite plane, which he never tired of telling, and never tired of embellishing  as old soldiers often do, was this one.

'Towards the end of my time, the RAF had done a deal with the Post Office.  The P.O. were taking surplus Mosquito fighter-bombers, painting them red, and using them to carry mail.  Our crew got the job of flying loads of them from Germany back to the UK, then cadging a lift back and doing it all over again.  All this flying over The Channel got very boring after a while, and to make it more exciting the pilot would see how low he could fly, or how fast, or see how long he could fly on a knife edge (with the plane tipped at 90 degrees to the surface of the water) or any combination of the three.  There was this one time when the navigator spotted a fishing boat on the horizon right in front of us, so the pilot dropped us down to the deck and throttled up to about 300Mph, at the last moment, we popped up, flipped onto a knife edge and flew in between the derricks on the deck.  Then we buggered off sharpish, hoping they were too busy s*itting themselves and hadn't seen our squadron markings.'

-oOo-

Just thought I'd let you know about some of the wonderful things that people have type into Google and managed to find the Blog this month:

How much does Les Invalides weigh? - I presume they meant 'L'Hotel National des Invalides' Which is a set of museums in Paris, why anyone would want to know how much they weigh is beyond me I'm afraid

Post a comment on Vital Organs Blog - Nope, no idea...

And the ever popular Swing away Merrill - This is now the all-time most popular search, with seven incidents.

OK team, that's it for today, maybe there'll be more Steampunk in the mix tomorrow