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I had travelled to London for the weekend to hook up with my good mate Henry who was settled in Chelsea these days and shared a house with Dorothy, the eccentric daughter of an ex-ITV news reader.
We were meeting her and her friend in ‘The Lion’ on the High Street for a couple of glasses that evening. I had never met the friend, Margaret, before and all I knew about her was that Henry had slept with her. As my friend Henry’s quality control ranged from the exceptional to the ‘bugger, forgot to switch it on’, I had no idea what to expect from Margaret. As it turned out, Margaret was a rather short, hippyish, unremarkable woman in her late 30s.
The four of us sat around a table, drank wine and chatted pleasantly. Margaret told me that in her younger years she had done some television work. I feigned interest and asked if she had been in anything that I would have seen, assuming that she’d probably done nothing more glamorous than been a runner.
“Well,” she asked, “do you remember the children’s programme, Rainbow?”
“Of course,” I replied, “did you work on that?’
“Yes.” she stated triumphantly, "I was Bungle!"
“Really,” I enquired, "but wasn’t he like, seven foot tall and male?”
“Well, I was the stand-in actually, and I wore lifts,” she retorted.
The table was arranged around a pillar in such a way that whilst I could see Henry, Margaret could not. It took every ounce of composure I had not to burst out laughing when all I could see out of the corner of my eye was Henry doing a drunken little jig whilst soundlessly chanting the immortal line:
"I’ve shagged Bungle."
"I’ve shagged Bungle." Over and over again.
He’s not right, my mate Henry. |
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