Bob Servant Read Online Free PDF Page B

fish with a pal and every time I’ll say, ‘Did I ever tell you when Frank fucked up the Merchant Navy for me here?’ Usually my pal will say, ‘Yeah, you have.’ Sometime the pal’s Frank and if it is then I make him listen to it all over again.
    We got there early and each pair was given a rowing boat and a map. There were all these buoys in the reservoir and you had to go between them in a certain route while Alf Whicker watched from the shore. We set off and it seemed we were doing OK. Frank did the navigating and I pulled away at the oars with my muscles and I have to say I was quietly confident at that point because none of the other boats seemed to be anywhere near us. Then we went round a buoy and Frank turned really quiet. He took out the emergency paddle and tied it to the side of the boat pointing outwards. I asked what he was doing and he stood up and passed me the map.
    â€˜I’ve been holding it upside down, Bob,’ he told me, and I saw that he had. I was angry but more confused and I asked again what he was doing. ‘I’ve let you down for the last time, Bob,’ he said. ‘I’m walking the plank.’
    Sometimes Frank does something so stupid that I genuinely don’t know what to say and that was probably the first such occasion. Before I had a chance to stop him he said, ‘Let them eat cake,’ stepped onto the paddle and upended the entire boat. The cold of the water was a bit of a shock but the truth of the matter is that we weren’t exactly in much danger. I think that’s what has always annoyed me the mostabout Frank walking the plank, the fact that we were about five yards from shore at the time. Back when it was popular, walking the plank was one of the most dangerous things you could do at sea but you’re not exactly going to get picked off by sharks five yards from shore. Not at Monikie.
    Anyway, Alf Whicker pulled us out, called us a disgrace and sent us packing. I’ve had some depressing bus journeys in my life but that one has to be right up there, seeing as I was dripping wet, kicked out the Merchant Navy and sitting next to Frank. I didn’t speak to him the whole way home and sent him to Coventry for a week which of course he misunderstood and his mum only just got to the train station in time.
    I still call him Frank The Plank to remind him but to be honest I think that’s lenient because what a start the Merchant Navy could have given me, both in my life and in becoming a Hero. It was my chance to see the world and Frank stole it from me. Don’t get me wrong – I went to Newcastle for Tommy Peanut’s Divorce Party, and there was a lot of talk in the nineties about Spain but it came to nothing after Frank lost his passport in a door-to-door confidence scam.
    But that’s not really seeing the world and even if I’d just gone round the world then came back to Dundee I’d have had a great reception. When Chappy Williams went to Canada to see his uncle people talked about him like he was Christopher Columbus and the guy only went because he got the tickets free with his Hoover. But that’s what it’s like in Dundee – people admire anyone from the city who goes on and grabs international glory because so few of us have cracked it. Off the top of my head I can only think of Brian Cox, Gorgeous George Galloway and that guy from Monifieth who throttled a waiter in Magaluf. 21 That’s a gang that I should have been part of and I would have been if it wasn’t for Frank The Plank.
    The world would have been my oyster. More to the point, I might have made some black pals.
    _________________________
    21 See
The Dundee Courier
, 4 May 1987 – ‘
Shifty Spaniard Tricks Monifieth Man Into So-called Strangling’.

9
Not Having Any Black Pals
    I’m going to put this one in here before I forget. I don’t have any black pals whatsoever, and, let me tell you this,