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