Off to sea we go

This is it. I don’t know how long we’ll be. I only hope we reach land before eat each other.

Adieu.

The gentleman (boat) outfitter

Within half an hour of bootcamp, the rabble had shaved their heads, donned their all-white gym kits, and were ‘yes’, ‘please’ and ‘thank-you marm’-ing like a pack of pampered poodles - that is, the sort that talk and dress in sportswear - anything to avoid upsetting the precarious temper of their sadistic instructor, who at this point was yet to break a sweat.

So far so good - the human resources would be shipshape and Bristol fashion - but what about the hardware? Given that our compass came from a Kinder Egg, I was not convinced that a life at sea would be excessively generous in length. Consulting my Yellow Pages I thus found my solution in a man as honest as the day is long - that day being the Alaskan winter solstice.

Having sufficiently procrastinated round the gentle shores of Albion, however, I was in a vein to throw caution to the wind. It was time for climes more briny. I let him take me for my ducats, taking him captive in return; the brig would make an ideal server room and, thanks to my boundless generosity, he would be free to move wherever he liked therein.

VP, Solutions
Honest John Silver
Likes: misadventure
Dislikes: Miss Selfridge

The drill bit

It took a few seconds for the grizzly oaf to notice the burning sensation on his tongue, a few seconds more to process the pain, and a further few seconds to register his disapproval. This gave us a full quarter-minute to drop everything and dash pell-mell dockward before the mini Etna erupted, wreaking all wreakable havoc from here to the horizon. For neither the first nor surely the last time we cut and run, leaving some of the slower mates to swim a full two leagues through the ebbing tide in order to repatriate themselves.

Looking at the haggard, bedraggled and otherwise sorry-looking crewmen, it dawned on me that we were, as a unit, out of shape. This was insupportable. I therefore pulled rank and informed this bunch of one-eyed chancers that pillaging privileges were postponed till they could all bench-press a hogshead o’rum and play keep-ups with the cannonballs. To this end they would be checking in with Cast-Iron Carys, locally known as the Driller Killer on account of the number of people she had extinguished through circuit training. Rumour had it that she once had a man trampolined to death - whatever that may have entailed.


Drill Instructor
Cast-Iron Carys
Likes: Sitting on the dock of the bay
Dislikes: Watching the ships roll in

The Italian Job

Following her usual liquid breakfast, the haberdasher tended to make a virtue out of necessity by stealing a power nap whenever her legs put their support on hold. Locating her under the calamity of fabric was the easy part: the sound of brass bands brawling was a constant emanation from her rear end. Her B-flat was enough to choke a swineherd.

The application of coffee seemed apposite, and after liberally coating her chops with three pitchers of the hot stuff we were rewarded with enthusiastic hugs and warm belches. Addressing our great indoors, she avowed, would be her pleasure, not least because it would get her loutish partner out from under her feet – quite literally in fact, as the lumpy rug on which we stood was concurrently serving as the sot’s duvet.

Though easier to rouse, Vincenzo was much harder to control, being as he was unable to articulate anything more complex than hunger, cold turkey or the irrepressible urge to roister. Fortunately we were prepared, and at the first sign of life filled his mitts with grog and his gob with snouts. Unfortunately, not all of said gaspers were inserted correctly, and the burning baccy inside his mouth failed to deliver the desired palliation.

Demolition Man
Vincenzo “The Choker” Croaker
Likes: nights on the tiles
Dislikes: knights in white satin

The sum of all fears

That the mates’ quarters were cramped, briny and dank, I would never deny - although for preference I would describe them as charmingly bijou, and oozing with character and atmospheric lighting (indeed, sans dank, what is a pirate ship but a boutique ferry?) This opinion, however, was not universally held, and the crewmen were increasingly clamouring for doilies, horse brasses and crocheted toilet-roll cosies. In short, the first mate informed me, if we didn’t get our mitts on some homely fabrics and sympathetic soft furnishings toot suite, the ensuing squall would down us faster than a signal-flare duel in the gunpowder room.

While I am ever-keen to respond to my crew’s needs and, aye, whims, I have to confess that from time to time, getting their collective head around the, shall we say, big picture issues, is no trivial endeavour. Nevertheless, I am not an ogre, and knowing how to react appropriately to such bottom-up rumblings is naturally a matter of professional pride. Thus, after having all hands soundly flogged for their impudence, I led the bridge crew to Windy Miller’s Boudoir of the Great Inside, where the eponymous master craftsmadam and haberdasher (by appointment) plied her trade.

Apron-maker to the Queen (pearly)
Windy Miller
Likes: nylon
Dislikes: lambs

A night in the museum

Already bilious and impatient by nature, Mrs Kray optimised her ill humour and indigestion through an indelicate balance of blood sausage and bloody marys. Never happier than when she was miserable, she huffed and grunted a path through the museum, vexating oaths at both children and the elderly.

At the behest of her boss she had been loitering around the Elgin Marbles for the past few months, vainly attempting to calculate how many wheelbarrows she would need to relocate said artefacts but losing count at each spicy belch or whenever she ran out of fingers.

Keeping a watchful eye was her self-appointed superior – Mrs Patrician – a grim-faced doom-bringer with a yen for shooting animals outside kindergartens and basking in the infants’ trauma. By way of encouragement, she chivvied her servant with steel-capped kicks up the backside and the odd swat of birch when less inclined to exert herself.

On behalf of the double-act, Mrs Patrician impolitely declined to join our crew, suggesting that while terra firma remained home to so much loot in need of repatriation, the prospect of sharing cramped, briny and dank quarters with several dozen stinking brigands, though exceedingly appealing on paper, simply made no business sense.

Marksma’am
Mrs Patrician
Likes: Jimmy Nail

Dislikes: Jimmy Carter

West End Girls

Oh, London Town's a fine town, and London sights are rare, and London’s scum is busy scum, and festers everywhere.

For the truly wicked, of course, there’s no peace, and while the mates indulged themselves with golf sales and penny operettas, it was business as usual for Captain Yours Truly – after all, bands of merrie mariners don’t just grow themselves.

But London crooks are cunning crooks with gallant plans to hatch, and bonnily clink your pockets there, with all that gold to snatch.

Indeed, with such rich pickings on dry land, would these vice-mongers even consider a life on the ocean waves?

Busily goes the London world, and craftily grows the mind, and at every turn in London Town, vile brigands one will find.

But chance favours the prepared: using elementary physics can improve the odds of locating likely seadogs yet further, for as mass dictates gravitational pull, so buccanerial clustering depends on booty magnitude.

For London’s swag is rare swag, and property of our Queen, and London’s plunder is out on show and waiting to be seen.

Ah yes, where greater a loot-yard than the British Museum, and who better to start with than Ronnie Kray (Mrs; no relation)?

Qualified Member of the Engine Department

Ronnie Kray
Likes: hanging, drawing and quartering
Dislikes: Magic FM

The great escape (part 2)

Miss Basher awoke blinking, disoriented and still quite quite drunk. By 9 AM her breath could still concuss a whale, although this in itself was nothing remarkable. What *was* unusual was the choker round her neck, which she was quite sure she’d not seen prior. That a cast-iron chain was attached to this collar, she was even more certain, was out of the ordinary. And that she was attached by this chain to a brigand she knew not was undoubtedly a deviation from the norm.

Perfidious Pete introduced himself, explaining how he had won her in a bet; the news was ill received. But as he so reasonably conjectured, anyone sufficiently witless to wager their freedom on the turn of a card had only themself to blame – especially if they played with known cheats and liars. He gave her a handful of toenails to chew on and bade her to button it.

Evening came and night passed, and that was the last day of our incarceration - finally we were given leave to haul anchor. In desperate need of some bona fide shore leave, we thus made like any other band of drunks and philistines, and hit the West End.


Quartermaster
Perfidious Pete, The Norfolk Welsher
Likes: cruelty to choirboys
Dislikes: left-handed ticks

The great escape (part 1)

Ahoy my fellow rascals and curs!

Blessed be our stout hearts and obstinacy – the pestilence has been overcome! Praise be to Fate too, who, by her grace, has let the entire crew survive, albeit in a somewhat piecemeal manner, judging by the wholesale loss of limbs to gangrene and bad debts.

Still, the loss of legs has been offset by the growth in hands: despite the internment, our ranks have swollen nonetheless. Mostly we suspect a lackadaisical approach to quarantine, although one crewman has suggested binary fission; a little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing.

The first to violate our sanctuary was “Basher” Barrah. How she had breached the security was anyone’s guess – indeed, she certainly had no idea, having simply found herself onboard, slumped over a grog keg she’d sniffed out and drained the night prior.

Brutal yet dextrous, with beadwork as fine as her swordplay, she missed no opportunity to show off her jewellery made from the bones, teeth and toenails of those foolish enough to cross her. Yet her portfolio of skills extended beyond mere violence and craftwork - she was also adept in homicidal vegetarianism, shouting at foreigners, and, crucially, five ways to kill a man with pantyhose.

Refrigeration Engineer

“Basher” Barrah
Likes: American Idol
Dislikes: American quilts

Until the ides of March

All crew incapacitated due to scurvy and Norovirus. Port Authority has put us all in quarantine, expressly forbidding communication till Spring.

Next update: 15 March.

Better late than never

Madame Jo-Jo ran a tight ship. Certainly, few drill instructors could shout shriller or for that matter with any less patience, for she took great pride in suffering neither fools nor jessies gladly. The ceaseless threat of shame and woe ensured that no swab fell behind, for those who so much as considered lagging were cut to the quick by her vicious sarcasm, save when her mouth was full of grog, and her ornamental kedge anchor would impact them instead. To be sure, her tutelage left all but the most gifted cur black and blue in mind, body and spirit. Vis-à-vis our own crew, the vocal exercises alone resulted in numerous counts of bleeding gums, one crushed larynx, and at least a dozen broken toes.

Imagine then her lack of amusement when the door was blown from its hinges, and in blustered an excitable wench with smoking cannon who apologised for running “a tad late”, and asked whether any after-dinner mints remained uneaten. Her error soon apparent, she improvised instead, curtsying to Madame Jo-Jo and, blowing the trumpet of her own intellectual prowess, offered to conjugate any verbs that our teacher might have lying around, y’know, spare like.



Flag Lieutenant
“Salty” Meg Schifffarht
Likes: myths
Dislikes: legends

Perhaps tonight, Josephine

Slumping further into her chair, our host regressed into incoherent muttering, followed by incoherent dribbling, and eventually rather lucid snoring. Feeling short-changed by events, certain foolhardy swabs attempted to rouse her, prodding her in an increasingly firm manner, with increasingly sharp implements. If one were to assess the upshot of this tactic by the extent to which the slumbering Scot was stirred to action, then the stratagem certainly passed muster. For indeed, when she awoke to find a cutlass hanging out of her bicep, she leapt to her feet and let rip with such a flurry of steel that the aforementioned malefactors were in no time negotiating call-out charges with the local hook-and-peg prosthesis vendor.

Subsequently, with all pertinent extremities suitably hacked, she tossed back her locks, smiled for her audience, and slipped back unconscious with peerless elegance. The extinguished lights of our exalted host signalled an apposite end to the evening, and we bid adieu to avoid being co-opted into the dish-washing detail.

Before hauling anchor, however, it became clear that some of the greenhorns were still having problems rolling their ‘arrghs’. To address this development need, we made a quick diversion to Madame Jo-Jo’s College of Advanced Nefariation.


Personal Trainer
Madame Jo-Jo
Likes: pie charts
Dislikes: second-class mail

Flower of Scotland

Three desserts and no coffees later, the swabs dived as one for the rum and baccy. Their commander, however, remained aloof, preferring to attend to her postprandial oral hygiene by scraping her tongue free from the film of deep-fried sorbet, a claymore being her instrument of choice. This was, of course, “Sink ‘em all” Sinclair, a whimsically ruthless heathen from the darkest, most northern Highlands, where your average wee bairn is not allowed solid food until it can pluck out a man’s eye.

An unusually refined brigand (she liked *both* types of wine), she was also one of her country’s healthiest criminals, devoutly consuming five vegetable portions each day through a balanced diet of crisps and fermented grape juice.

Given her seniority and notoriety, we were surely in for a classic night of after-dinner speaking. A minute or two of her hawking and hem-hemming built up an air of anticipation so tense you could have cut it with an oar. With both tongue and throat cleared, she took a long tug on the bottle marked “RED”, wiped her chin on her sleeve and giggled coquettishly before collapsing back in her chair, whistling the dance of the sugar plum fairy.



Cheerleader
“Sink ‘em all” Sinclair
Likes: Bohemian rhapsody
Dislikes: the rhumba

Rich pickings

Now, I enjoy slaughter and pillaging as much as the next pirate, but I would still argue that one can have too much of a good thing. Of course, not everyone would agree. For example, Miss Ivy’s idea of respite was to charter a slow boat from China and idle away the months conducting wanton villainy with rancour aforethought. Bereft of compass – magnetic or moral – she wreaked havoc with such gay abandon that the respective brethren of the coast could suffer her mischief no longer and banned her from six of the seven seas.

Nonetheless, her life aquatic was presently academic: there was but one exit from the room, and it was presently occupied by Commodore Filthy, a silvery old tar with more chatter than a parrot’s union rep.

The other hearties were playing a waiting game, for as sure as night follows day, the first to pass within two yards of the old boy would be sucked into the vortex of his relentless monologue. Once hooked, resistance was futile, for this ancient mariner was supernaturally compelled to share his epic story, albeit juiced up with the odd giant squid, a well-oiled Amazon or two and an exceptionally large number of nymphs.

Voice of Reason

“Filthy” Rich Argenti
Likes: megamixes
Dislikes: radio edits

Meaner than a dockyard croc

Sated with tallow, the wretched professor crawled back into his coop, hoping that some fitful kip might encourage the calories to burn more slowly. His dreams perchance to sleep were sadly not to fruit, as the object of his disprized love was taking bets on how long the arrant knave could suffer their slings and arrows before emitting some feeble grunt or snarl of anger.

Chief among the abusers was “Poison” Ivy Harding, a vile streak of malice with a pedigree so cruel that even the most oblique reference to her would make hardened curs suck their teeth and change the subject.

As an apprentice with East India Company separatists, her probationary period had been prematurely curtailed when, on being taken off village-razing detail, she stowed aboard the company flagship, hogtied the Governor-General, and sunk said vessel with all hands.

Voyaging further towards the rising sun, she hungrily devoured the teachings of the Far East’s most seasoned sea-rats, learning everything the Orient had to offer vis-à-vis cruelty to man and beast. All good things must come to an end, however, and when she saw that her mentors could teach her no more, she thanked them all with arsenic and confiscated their assets.



Apothecary
“Poison” Ivy Harding
Likes: rap sheets
Dislikes: rap music

Achtung baby

Accompanying the wily she-devil was a wee lad she had picked up while despoiling the German hinterlands. More plaything than toy-boy, the fellow showed little evidence of wanderlust, largely due to the tight rein she kept on his choke collar (on the occasions he had leave from his cage).

That she had not previously discarded said shackled Saxon was surely due to her exceptional capacity for schadenfreude. Intellectual prowess being her pet hate, the matter of the young buck becoming a distinguished professor prior to the age of majority both got her goat and cooked her goose.

Seeing that he was wise of words but not of the world, that night she began her cruel seduction. And lo, by the time Dawn came with rosy fingers, the giant siren had the young academic, quite literally, in the palm of her hand.

Henceforth, via assorted vile schemes of insidious villainy she began crushing the stripling by slowly rotting his mind, body and soul. Within a week, the starry-eyed boy was a waif on a string.

Time had however mellowed her, and in her more tender moments, she would tease him with Teutonic coochie coos and let him suck the grease from her fingers.



Wiper
Professor Plum
Likes: in the ballroom
Dislikes: in the secret passage

Afeared in Provence

As the starters arrived, so the other mademoiselle stirred from her drunken snooze. Seven-foot high – while seated – she arched over the table to advise her yard-high counterpart of the ongoing dockside unrest. More specifically, said the statuesque rogue, a young ruffian was – as we spoke – slandering the venomous gnome, accusing her of debility, cowardice, treachery – only one of which was technically true. At this, the poison dwarf slammed down her tankard and stomped off to wreak havoc, pausing only to pick her teeth with the hatchet she kept for such ends. Her mischief made, the aforementioned giantess permitted herself a smug snort of satisfaction before digging into the munchkin’s hors d’oeuvres.

It was thus in this manner that we first met Aurélie la Vagabonde, daughter of Gargantua and bane of Marseille. Her feral nature and remarkable guile were the result of a childhood sans role models – as an infant she had been abandoned by wolves and forced to live by her wits alone. While other youngsters were playing hopscotch and kiss-chase, this colossus-to-be would exercise her deviousness and depravity by conning foxes, just to watch the vermin scowl. Like an inferior vin de table, she hadn’t improved with age.


Cherry-picker
Aurélie la Vagabonde
Likes: John Lewis
Dislikes: John Le Carré

French nickers

Engaging as it is to make small-talk with the self-anointed, we figured it prudent to avoid sticking out our necks unnecessarily, and curtsied our well wishes to the hoighty toighty decapitator, moving on with requisite haste.

Next in line to her throne stood a pair of Gallic boat-snatchers, dichotomous in size, but equally rotten to the core. Being so unusually petite, the smaller of the two compensated for her deficient stature with a vicious streak so malign that, given the choice, most men would rather be dragged through briar in a sack of wasps than ask her for the time of day. Her razor-sharp tongue, for example, was the stuff of legend. Indeed, short-lived was the felon who thought he might profit from her reduced reach, for the appendage in question had been replaced with barbed-wire plaits, and she could lick a man to shreds in minutes.

For the time being, however, she chomped distractedly on some brimstone amuses-bouche of her own design. Fearing a tongue-lashing, we pretended to wolf some down before commenting favourably on their acrid flavour and steering the conversation towards such idle banter as the shipping forecast and recent murders and coastal pillaging.


Keelhauler
Bridget the Midget
Likes: the smell of napalm in the morning
Dislikes: the sound of milkmen in the morning

Dutch Courage

The Mediterranean brigand plumped our cushions, beckoned us over and, with inappropriate zeal, begged to relieve us of our coats. Her entreaties fell on deaf ears, however, as her penchant for doublets preceded her and we were fully cognisant of the perfidious manner by which her incomparable collection of jerkins had been amassed. Firmly, but politely, I thus informed her that she’d not be getting her paws on our blousons, boleros and blazers unless she was peeling them from our cold dead bodies. She shrugged in her gallic manner and trotted back to the waterfront to swindle the lame beggars.

Stepping up next was the infamous Royal Dutch, a mariner from the Low Country, well versed in the extensive licentiousness of her homeland. A keen learner, she had studied trafficking at Eindhoven, graduating summa cum laude by her sixteenth birthday. However, her learnèd approach to freebooting was not universally appreciated and it was variously suggested that she was an uppity madam with airs above her station. That said, her critics were generally disinclined to stick their heads above the parapet, largely on account of her habit of removing them with her broadsword and using them for bunting.

Vice Squad

K.L.M. “Royal Dutch” Van Dieman
Likes: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Dislikes: The Waltons

All bound for Mu-Mu land

Outmanned and outgunned we might not have been, but hell hath no fury like a blood-lusty broad with two-foot of freshly sharpened sabre. Thus, discretion being the better part of valour, we tactically withdrew through the fire exit, hotly pursued by the psychotic hatchet-lass. No sooner were our feet back on our trusty planks, we cut and run, abandoning the whirling dervish to her splenetic jig. Even as the quayside was barely visible through our looksticks, there she was, frothing at the mouth and hurling oaths with such frenzy that even the most blackhearted of our own curs did cower.

The mainsail hoist and billowing well, we left these dark lands and progressed with good speed to rendezvous with the brethren court of the East Anglian coast. A jolly bunch of seadogs, uncommonly educated to boot, these hearties represented the crème de la crème of seaborne do-badders and skullduggerers.

Welcoming us to the roundtable came Mu the Merciless, a Catalan rogue whose cruel passion for serving the black flag was matched only by her heinous taste in shanties. Indeed, many an unfortunate soul had buried themselves at sea in order to avoid the prolonged aural assault of her caterwauling.

Soothsayer
Mu the Merciless
Likes: Martini and lemonade
Dislikes: The Mercury Prize