All Our Geese are Swans
(Richard Burton)
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All our geese are swans.?
Now this was said to me fairly recently.?
Because I have a boat in which I cruise the rivers and inland waterways
and on it I take my children and my wife, whose name escapes me for the
moment.? It's . . . I've been working
rather hard, Polly, my wife, Polly.
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And we were on this boat with our children and my wife said
to me,"You know, going up and down these canals is lovely wild life, but
one thing I'd really like to have available is a water otter, or, as they're
called, geezers."
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Because we had no means of heating our water at all on the
boat. We actually used to boil our water in a gumboot on the stove. It's really
very primitive.? My wife would get up and
make the breakfast and scrub the boat down and fill the engine up with oil and
run it and warm it up and cast off.
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And I would supervise from my bunk.? Very often the duty of supervising was so
onerous I used to fall asleep and feel fatigued.
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And I said I really didn't think we needed an otter because
just using the gumboot would be done.
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But then my son came up to me and he said,
"Daddy."? His name's Jamie and
he looks after himself; he's very fit; not a gray hair. And he's five and a
half.? And he said, "Daddy.? Let's buy mommy a geezer and make her work
easier instead of spending your money on silly things like food and
clothing."
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And I sort of playfully hit him around the ear with a boat
hook and passed over the awkward situation.
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Then later that night, my little daughter, who's a slim
well-preserved three, she came up sadly, and she sort of rubbed, as I was lying
on my bunk, I'd been very exhausted watching my wife cast off. And she ran her
fingers through my hair, leaving in it a half-eaten toffee, and she said,
"Daddy.? We want the geezer."
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So I knew my goose was cooked and a geezer had to be bought.
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So the following day I went into the town and sought out a
geezer shop or as they call them in France, a geezerie, and I said to the man
there, "I want a geezer for my boat; I don't know much about
geezers."
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It was an interesting chap; sort of gray hair, sort of laugh
lines under his eyes, Denis Norden had been in earlier and sort of made some
jokes and written them on the chap. And he said, "We can thoroughly
recommend our geezers, sir, actually."
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So I said, "How does one tell a good geezer from a bad
geezer?"
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He said, "You tell it by the sound it makes.? A geezer should start out with a shhhhhhhhh
and then go sort of ahhhhhhhhhh, like a water falls And end up with a crisp
pssss. Now cheap geezers, pssh wssh donk donk donk bang.
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And he said, "Now, Our geezers shhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhh
pssssssssst."
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Frank Muir 580618a
