Sod had a busy day ahead of him. He had a wedding to ruin. A breakdown of an orchestra on the M1 to orchestrate. And the one he was looking forward to the most he had a funeral to spoil. He’d never been trusted with a funeral before. He had thought about it all night and settled on the coffin disappearing.
Sod had been trying to take over the family business from his father for twenty years. His father wanted to retire but knew it would be unwise. Sod was probably in the wrong job but rather like the King, the job was his whether he was good at it or not.
The wedding
The wedding is going to be in the garden of a posh hotel on the shore of a manmade lake. It would be easy enough to arrange for the wedding car to run over a nail and get an untimely puncture. For the vicar to have food poisoning. Even to paint the bench by the lake and stripe the bride’s designer dress with thick racing green slats when she posed for the photos. But Sod had decided he would hire a jet ski, noisily race around the lake and ruin the wedding vows. His father could have conjured thunder and lightning, a wind strong enough to topple the marquee and turn it into a huge pantomime horse with hives. Sod was still trying to master the art of manipulating the weather. A few drops of rain and a puff of wind was all he had managed so far. In fairness to Sod he had considered other options; they were felt tip penned around the walls of his bedroom forming a mural that could keep an asylum of psychologists arguing for years. As was often the case with Sod what to do came down to; he fancied a go at the jet skiing.
The orchestra
Sod is good at frying electrics and electronics even when he didn’t intend to. Every time he tried to make it rain every microwave in a half mile radius would spark furiously. He settled on the orchestra breaking down just short of Newport Pagnell because he thought that sounded like an awful place to break down. Sod overdid the frying, flames danced from the engine of the coach sending the orchestra scrambling for their instruments and the hard shoulder. The sight of the Northern Symphonia on the side of the M1 caused a concertina of minor bumps which brought the motorway to a standstill. Sod hoped his father would be impressed. Surely his name must’ve been uttered by every car stuck in the jam.
A vanishing coffin
Next on his to do list, a vanishing coffin. Sod was good at mislaying things even when he wasn’t supposed to. He once left a sleigh in Hull. Sod was running late having become stuck in his own traffic jam. The coffin is being loaded into the hearse as he arrives at the funeral parlour. He reasons his only option is to steal the hearse. Hiding a coffin requires forethought. Forethought wasn’t his forte. He sped along in the stolen hearse looking for coffin shaped hiding places.
Sod cusses himself. His father always told him “plan, plan and plan again”. With planning he realised he could have gone to the funeral parlour first when it was empty, then he could have let Mrs Harper out of the parlour and her coffin and put her into the case for the double bass. Let the bassist dispose of her body. Then again, he comforts himself, he would have had to hide a double bass and that was definitely a more awkward shape than a coffin.
In the end Mrs Harper stayed in her coffin. He sneaked her into a garden party and covered her with a pink paper table cloth, sausage rolls and cheese and tinned pineapple chunks on toothpicks. Sod’s father sighed the sigh of an English teacher marking a pile of essays on a Shakespeare play that no one had bothered to read. His well-earned retirement was further away than ever.
Running late
Sod is running even later now. Garden parties suitable for hiding a coffin aren’t that easy to locate in Wolverhampton. He hurries to pick up the jet ski so he can ruin the vows. He will need to rush if he is going to make it. Sod heads full throttle down the lake and fails to notice the ramp in the middle of it. In the background of the wedding photos if you look closely you will see an upside down man and a jet ski flying through the air in different directions.
Sod has to swim to the shore and then call his father to pick him up. His father says nothing – he just shakes his head and puts a raincoat on the passenger seat. Sod can’t think of a better reason why he is wet and needs a lift home so he says nothing as well.
His father stops at a McDonalds drive through on the way back so Sod can order a hot coffee and warm himself up. They still haven’t spoken but the hot coffee says everything that needs to be said for now.
As they arrive home Sod breaks the silence “I’m sorry father”.
His father looks at Sod, puts his hand on his shoulder and squeezes gently “I’m going to ask your cousin Murphy to come and give you a hand. This job has become far too big for just one person. There’s just too much to do. And I’m getting old I can’t do as much as I used to do”.
Sod drips into the house wishing that just once something would happen the way he had envisaged it and failing to see the irony in the fact that something always went wrong.
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