Pirates ahoy

Cap’n Morgan and her rum-drenchedcrew of yo-ho-hoing buccaneering wenches purchased a yar brig, called The Golden Salamander, for a bag of doubloons and a parrot’s fart and ensured all was shipshape and Bristol fashion amidships and below decks.

We were certainly the scurviest lot of bilge rats and landlubbers that ever hornswaggled a mate or hoisted a Jolly Roger. Old salts such as Charles “Honolulu” Porter, sporting a full set of pins and a hula skirt, Phil “Sea Dog” Barnet and David “Diabolito” Canadas (scourge of Seven Seas multivitamins) cut a fine jib as they sauntered o’er the gangplank and began to buckle their squashes.

Long John Lubac brought aboard the grub, to wit, some haunches of beef rib to roast on the fire, and master of ceremonies, Eric “Ze Grand Frenchie” Narioo, the meanest pirate to cut a new potato with his cutlass, created his benchmark dish of sliced chorizo and smoked salmon and avocado, learned from years plundering the Spanish Main. Quartermaster Wregg chose the grog, the scurviest concoction of fermented grape juice that e’er graced the inside of a beaker except for the evil sambuca, guaranteed to rot the gaskins of the most experienced sailor.

We weighed anchor and tacked upriver towards Chiswick. After the ale had set in, Pauly “Parrot” Jackson took charge and piped a medley of lively shanties. The lily-livered, yellow-bellied poltroons then made merry on fizzy wine from the Kingdom of Venice and before long these bilge-sucking blackguards, swashbucklers and rogues were loaded to the gunwales whilst we plied them with bloody viands, taters and salmagundis. Liquor was poured, mainbraces were further spliced and the boat sailed on to the mythical land of HellSeaBee, where a pirate booty of millions of bottles of wine is said to be kept in hundreds of carboard chests.

More carousing, noshing and sloshing: Will “Billy Bones” Johnston and Nini “Bonny” Champalou danced a merry jig as the wine flowed as fast as a Thames rip tide.

Eventually, the good privateer Salamander docked at Butler’s Wharf and decanted her cargo of weatherbeaten tars onto dry land to find taverns and barter with the natives for liquid sustenance. A yar time had been had by all and, judging by the determination in the faces of those assembled on the shore, a yar-yar time was still to come.