Sentence The Fourhundredandeightysecond

Father Mungo Macaneny (or Archbishop Makarios as Maude still addressed him) had left under cover of darkness, “like a thief in the night,” hissed Maude, “I never have fully trusted those Maltesers.” but Daphne put her right, “Makarios was a Cypriot,” though Maude laughed back, “I would have sworn he was Irish,” which left Daphne distinctly queasy and she wondered if the chicken last night had been a bit iffy, perhaps it had been cooked in too much of a jiffy; but bowling down the A1 at something like 20mph above the limit, Father Mungo felt pleased that he had resisted the temptation of the chicken and said so to Lulu, whose roadster they was travelling in: Lulu was dead chuffed that she had been able to surprise the old galoot, or ambush really, when she thought about it; while Maude – rather striking or fetching when togged out in in her nether garments – had

him in some sort of submission position, he had blurted out that tomorrow, 14^th of August, was the date for the 2016 Wrestlers Reunion at The Bridge Inn somewhere in Kent and that he had wanted to make a sententious speech, full of pithy one-liners about old grapplers; “my Aunt Sadie works there,” she blurted out, “what a coincidence, she invited me down but I had no-one to go with, to share the fuel,” and Mungo's red eye fixed her, “whaurraboot Nora 'n' Dora?” he asked, quite naturally, as they were almost Siamese triplets, the three leaders of The Gullane Girl Gang, rarely, if ever, out of each other's sight, touch or hearing, but, “och,” she sighed, “it's their Mam's third waddin', an' they're floo'er gurrrls, but I've advertised on Gumdrop for a passenger . . . . .” and she left her words hanging in the air, enriched already by Father Macaneny's high-octane breath, “would ye consider an ould codger, then, hen?” he enquired and she held his wavering gaze, “. . . . . if I knew any,” she mumbled, but there's gey few hereaboots, Faither, dontcha fink?” and he swallowed hook, line and sinker; “come intae the Confessional, Lulu, we deserve a bit o' privacy,” and he poured it all out: how he had been the only openly sacerdotal grappler in the business, appearing almost every Saturday afternoon on ITV's World of Sport alongside Mick McManus, Jackie 'Mr TV' Pallo, 'Dazzler' Joe Cornelius, Kendo Nagasaki and all the others whose names became so well known that babies were being christened after them; and he wanted to raise his glass – or Maude's Hip Flask – to give a toast to 'absent friends' while being all too aware that in the fullness of time, the natural course of events, it would not be too long before he passed out of the spotlights and into the Great Dressing Room in the Sky himself, to join the company of those self-same Absent Friends and that, realistically, this might be his last chance to spend a day in the company of the diminishing number of – not quite so absent – friends as were still able to grapple with a pint glass or even a wee dram at night to ease the aches and pains first felt in the ring which they would all carry to the grave; and now, as Lulu's car roared through the night, he glanced to his left, to the East, where the first tentative lightening of the horizon promised that it won't be long till 'The Dawn Comes up like Thunder out of Burma, Cross The Bay' and that one line took him back to his first posting as a young Chaplain attached to the British Army garrisons stationed in Burma and the long conversations he had with his interpreter, Laila, a young girl from Rangoon as they travelled the 700 kilometres down the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay, with numerous stops for the ferry to unload and load crates and packing cases and he and Laila would usually find a quiet spot to while away the time until the whistle blew and those passengers who'd gone ashore would troop back on board for the next stage!