Funny

By Paul Griffin

If you are a fan of classic dry English humour then you will probably like this offering from new Author Paul Griffin. It features a collection of short stories based on real life, real people events. Some of them hilarious, some bemusing and a few simply baffling. The book starts with a collection of miscellaneous tales. Then moves on to stories that evolved around Paul's time as a partner in a recording studio in South London and features some of the bizarre characters he encountered. The final part of the book introduces a persona called Colonel Rage. Outrageous 'Colonel Rage' is a retired British Army Colonel. He lives in the suburbs with Mrs Rage. He has strong views on a variety of subjects from Obesity and Evolution to Queues. The Colonel is very anti modern life and you may find him offensive or intriguing but hopefully very amusing.
All in all 'Funny' is meant to be what it says on the tin 'Funny'. A perfect book to lift your spirits, or keep you company on a journey. Paul has his own unique writing style but his humour is very much influenced by British writers/ comedians Spike Milligan, Ricky Gervais , Tony Hancock & Peter Cook. Forget our mad world for a while and "Enter the even Crazier World of Funny"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Griffin
• Release date: Mar 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311991492

Paul Griffin

People have always told me I should be a Comic Writer. So I thought I would give it a go. It's all very easy to make the suggestion, but a different thing actually doing it. You need something to be funny about. Fortunately being of a certain age I have a lot of experiences and people I have known to draw on for material. Some of it is hilarious, and some of it interesting and some just baffling. My normal work involves music production/composition and more lately making music videos, so writing is something of a new venture for me. Hopefully successful but certainly a lot of fun.....................

Book preview

'Funny'

by

Paul Griffin

Copyright Paul Griffin 2015

Vision Books (UK)

Distributed by Smashwords

Table of Contents

Miscellaneous Stories

Funerals

Admiral Nelson

High Anxiety

Unlucky Melvin

The Day I Met Darth Vader

Mr Wing and His Jeeps

Reverend Ben and His Waifs and Strays

The Old School Days

The Cloud Burst

A Matter of Time

Interesting People

The Spring Roll

The Roller

The Trumpet Player

The Paint Factory

Poor Budgie

Studio Stories

The Newsagents

The Keyboard Player

The Tapas Bar

Mikes Van

The Singer

The Wicker Man

Colonel Rage

On Obesity

On Technology

On Urban Cowboys

On Christmas

On Space Travel

On Evolution

On Queues

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Funerals (Miscellaneous Stories)

The Funeral Director mentioned in this story really did exist- I may have exaggerated to make it funny, but worryingly not much.....

The loss of a loved one is awful, we all have been unfortunate enough to go through it. But have you ever wondered how mysteriously a life long Atheist becomes a Christian after death. I have been to several funerals where I know the deceased had no faith but the ones organising the funeral are asked do you want a Christian burial? and simply say yes. They start choosing hymns, hiring virtuoso singers to sing Ave Maria or whatever, book a 'rent a Pastor' to do the honours and basically hope for the best. 'Well if Jesus Christ is real he has to let him in now.' Why? No, he doesn't have to do anything, and probably doesn't.

My own Father's funeral also had its interesting moments namely the Funeral Director. He came to visit us to arrange things, he appeared very calm friendly and competent, but he did look very peculiar. In conversation he told us he was fifty years old but bizarrely his face only looked twenty five. As he spoke his mouth moved but none of his other facial muscles did, they seemed to be paralysed, his skin had a strange unnatural glow almost like it had been made up with cosmetics.

His face may have looked twenty five but his hands looked ninety five. Also his eyes looked like they were made of glass, I swear they never moved either, and his voice hard to describe but age wise seventy five monotone almost robotic. At such a difficult time we didn't like to ask too many questions but he actually looked like he had been embalmed, and for good measure a taxidermist had added the finishing touches. You like professionals to show commitment, and a willingness to demonstrate their services but really!

By way of humour to raise our spirits perhaps, he also told what he thought was an amusing story of an extremely unfortunate accident when one of them slipped coming out of the church, the coffin hit the ground and the lid came off! Apart from the fact the Director insisted on driving the lead car, and me praying to God to stop him telling one of his morale boosting stories, or having to do an emergency stop and his head falling off, they did an excellent professional job. We did learn a few years later that he had died, though it took quite a while to make the diagnosis we understand.

Admiral Nelson (Alias Pete the guitarist)

'Pete's Drug Habit Finally Takes Its Toll

'For those not familiar with British naval history which includes me, Nelson was a British naval commander and national hero, famous for his naval victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars.'

Back in the day I was in a Rock Band playing the bass, we were all about 17 or 18, were we any good, yes we were. Did we ever get anywhere no we didn't. We did a lot of gigs in some quite big venues, but we had no clue how to make a career of it, which is a shame; Some of the old demo's still sound great (I mean really old) the 1970's. However we did have some of the rock star trappings, for example we had a band yoga teacher, he would come and advise us on diet and yoga postures. At that time the Macrobiotic diet was a favourite, a strange Japanese diet where you eat mainly whole grains, no white sugar, pulses, seaweed similar in fact to a vegan diet. To start the diet it was recommended you eat only brown rice and water for ten days to detoxify the system, I never tried the detox part, but I knew a few that did, did they feel better, no not really. Though the ten day brown rice diet was recommended, it was not suggested you carry on drinking six pints of beer a night and smoking thirty cigarettes a day whilst on it.

Back to the yoga man, did he look healthy? yes he did incredibly healthy, his eyes shone clear and bright, his skin was perfect and he was generally physically in tip top condition. One day while with us at a rehearsal he sneezed, we were in a bit of a panic was our health guru getting sick, no he was OK. He explained that he must have had one slice of date cake too many the night before, causing the temporary imbalance and the sneeze. Am I making fun of this kind of lifestyle, no definitely not, I took up yoga and a lot of elements of the diet and did feel very well on it. You're wondering how am I today aren't you? So are the doctors!

Pete the guitarist.

The lead guitarist Pete was an exceptional player, he played in a fluid very creative blues style and was everyone agreed an excellent guitarist. He was as good as any other name player around at the time. Pete lived the rock guitarist life style to the full, women sex, drugs and rock and roll big time. We all drank more alcohol then we should, but Pete also took everything and anything else that was available, uppers, downers, LSD, cannabis, quite often in a lethal combination, I personally had no interest in any of this stuff thank fully.

Eventually it all took its toll and he completely lost his mind, it started with the hallucinations and progressed on from there. The actual diagnosis was Paranoid Schizophrenia, he was in a shocking state. He would chain smoke roll ups (hand made cigarettes) all day long 24 grams a day which is about fifty cigarettes, to give him credit he did reduce his other drug consumption, apart from a weakness for home grown weed. Most people smoke it, Pete used to like to eat it. I remember clearly visiting him at home one lunch time, on the menu that day was cannabis soup, not made from the leaves I might add with a few potatoes thrown in but the whole plant roots and all boiled in a big saucepan. The resulting liquid looked awful, obviously he wasn't using a cook book and personally I would have thought cleaning the mud off the roots might have been a good idea, however he seemed to enjoy it.

Pete becomes Nelson?

As you can imagine none of this was helping his condition improve. One day for some reason he decided he had become Admiral Horatio Nelson, for weeks on end he insisted that's who he was. We were all still great friends with Pete, (what was left of him) and tried our very best to accommodate him. Eventually though this began to get on all our nerves, particularly of one friend called Joe. Joe had a plan to snap him out of this, he would take him to the National Gallery in London and show Pete a portrait of Nelson to prove he wasn't him. Did any of us look at a reference book to see what Nelson actually looked like, well no was the answer!

Off they went, just Pete and Joe. They found the room where the portrait was and approached the picture. As they did to Joe's trepidation it was becoming clear there was a similarity. As they both stood a few feet away, to Joe's horror Pete was the spitting image of Nelson! The same nose, eyes, skin colour,