The Mysterious Appearance of Flapjack The Duck
Kevin, of course, should never have been in Paris in the first place. But Janet, the press officer (you remember - she’s the one who offered me the tickets) wanted me to go with a photographer. To take pictures of whoever it was I was supposed to be interviewing. Ha! As though you can just pluck a photographer out of thin air! However, without a photographer there would be no tickets. The only person who came readily to hand was Kevin so, thinking quickly (as is my wont), I told Janet that he was a photographer. Well, how difficult can it be to take photos, anyway? People do it all the time. I’ve even done it myself. You just point the camera in the right direction, press the button and hope for the best.Not that it mattered in the end on account of the fact that we never got to see the concert and do the interviews and what-have-you thanks to the record company’s French representative inconsiderately positioning himself in the path of a teetering taxidermed pachyderm. So instead of being ensconced in a luxury suite eating fish-paste sandwiches and interviewing Meat Loaf (or Alice Cooper or whoever it was whose concert we’d missed) we found ourselves huddled beneath the dripping arches of a French bridge while a none-too-friendly gendarme twitched his fingers over the trigger of his gun.
The gendarme looked at us and said…. well, I’m not quite sure what he said, as a matter of fact; his enunciation left much to be desired. I think the gist of is was that he wished us to accompany him to the station. But then, at that very moment, an eerie wailing sound echoed across the surface of the river:
“Oscoo! Oscoo!” it wailed.
“Mon Dieu! Sacré Bleu! Zut Alors!” exclaimed the gendarme.
Then he shouted something at us which I think meant, “Stay put till I come back” and off he ran, obviously with the gallant intention of rescuing some poor forlorn Mademoiselle who was at that very moment drowning in the murky waters of the Seine.
Now just in case your French is a bit rusty I probably ought to explain that “Oscoo! Oscoo!” is the French for “Help!” Kevin informed me of this just after the gendarme had scarpered, though of course I knew that already. But Kevin was obviously proud of his little bit of French so I just nodded and said “Ah?” as though it was all news to me. Then we scarpered in the opposite direction from that in which the gendarme had scarpered a few moments before.
Later, back in the bar of our squalid little hotel, I began to see the funny side of it all. Oh how we would chuckle over this as we sat in a pub back in dear old Kentish Town, I thought! I wasn’t exactly in a chuckling mood at that very moment, however, due to the throbbing in my head resulting from a wine bottle having been battered over my skull just an hour or so before (see previous entry).
But you are probably wondering whatever became of the drowning Mademoiselle? Ah, now that’s the funny thing. There never was one. Which brings me on to Flapjack The Duck. Do you know Flapjack The Duck? A cuddly yellow sort of feathery thing with big blue eyes and an orange beak. See him on the telly a lot on Saturday mornings, if you happen to be up at that time. Pops up from behind a sort of a desk affair and has a chat with that blond chap with the peculiar accent and a vacant expression. “Quack-quack! What a quacker!” That’s one of Flapjack’s catchphrases. Has them rolling in the aisles apparently.
Well, anyway, as I was saying, had it not been for Flapjack The Duck, I should probably at this very moment be languishing in a dank cell deep within the bowels of a Parisian police station. Instead of which I am sitting here in my bijou apartmentette in London’s fashionable Kentish Town.
You see what happened was this….
Oh blooming heck! Is that the time? I’m supposed to be meeting Kevin down the Black Cap in ten minutes. I’ll have to rush. So anyway, I’ll explain all about Flapjack tomorrow…
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