The news around was that Plank had got himself into big trouble the way we always said he would.
Richard Montague had been known around our circles and many others as 'Plank' as long as I can remember, and would even answer to the name fairly civil if you could ever catch him without his earphones in and mention that he was a blankety eejit (which is the main thing we used to say to Plank).
It was a good name, because it conveyed some measure of the great stubbornness of the mind that Plank always displayed when he used to try to explain things to us even though we didn't like explanations in general and Plank's explanations in specific.
Plank's explanations were generally delivered, uninvited, while we (me, Putley and JJ and sometimes Nashy, but not Plank, who we generally avoided quite a bit) were busy organising a trip down to the river or canal or to one of the lakes we used to show up at and, one time, when we'd just finished setting up at the Mere and Nashy already had the biggest carp in the entire lake on the line (although this was later disputed because Plank's sudden appearance and loud blathering came as a surprise and he "sort of dropped the rod sideways" and the next thing he knew he was all smashed up and the fish was gone).
Plank said he was the antichrist and he always came out with the same sort of nonsense that no one wanted to hear. He had four or five standard lines, like: "If you get a couple of nukes, then you're most likely certainly not going to be invaded and running a couple of nukes for a population of this size will cost you like, a tenner a year, right?"
Putley, whose dad was in the army and who was heading for the Royal Green Jackets himself like many generations before him as soon as he'd finished school (at the time we were both repeating the sixth form having failed the year before on conduct, attendance, appearance, and geography), said that Plank (who was already at college, although I've never met a thicker individual) didn't know the first thing about nukes or their cost and that anyway they were offensive and not defensive weapons and if you set one off in say, Mollington (where Skepper lived when he wasn't teaching one of his sarcastic French lessons), people as far away as Aberystwyth and maybe Penrith too would soon be feeling quite poorly, so if you wanted to repel invaders you'd need some helicopter gunships and transports and suchlike, and then some completely different sorts of missiles and all manner of other stuff (some of which Putley had already got in his bedroom), but Plank was never a man to listen to a reasonable argument and away he would drone.
We knew what he was going to say anyway, because he'd got most of it from Thunderbirds, which was always the same plot week after week so we stopped watching it when we were about three or four years old (Putley says he'd never watched except for five minutes once just before his first birthday, after which he immediately switched over to the sports channel).
Plank has an older brother who lives in the same big house down Mill lane and he gives Plank an office job some years later in this company he sets up, so it comes as no surprise to me to hear that this business collapses shortly afterwards and Plank is going around complaining a lot about all these pounds his brother steals from him then the next thing we know is he's disappeared completely, and none of us is too sad to see him go, if the truth be told.
So some while later this news comes around that Plank's really dropped a clanger, and there's a lot of shaking of heads and shrugging of shoulders going on in the bar at The Clock when the news is on the telly, with everybody jostling to say "I told you so" first.
Richard Montague had been known around our circles and many others as 'Plank' as long as I can remember, and would even answer to the name fairly civil if you could ever catch him without his earphones in and mention that he was a blankety eejit (which is the main thing we used to say to Plank).
It was a good name, because it conveyed some measure of the great stubbornness of the mind that Plank always displayed when he used to try to explain things to us even though we didn't like explanations in general and Plank's explanations in specific.
Plank's explanations were generally delivered, uninvited, while we (me, Putley and JJ and sometimes Nashy, but not Plank, who we generally avoided quite a bit) were busy organising a trip down to the river or canal or to one of the lakes we used to show up at and, one time, when we'd just finished setting up at the Mere and Nashy already had the biggest carp in the entire lake on the line (although this was later disputed because Plank's sudden appearance and loud blathering came as a surprise and he "sort of dropped the rod sideways" and the next thing he knew he was all smashed up and the fish was gone).
Plank said he was the antichrist and he always came out with the same sort of nonsense that no one wanted to hear. He had four or five standard lines, like: "If you get a couple of nukes, then you're most likely certainly not going to be invaded and running a couple of nukes for a population of this size will cost you like, a tenner a year, right?"
Putley, whose dad was in the army and who was heading for the Royal Green Jackets himself like many generations before him as soon as he'd finished school (at the time we were both repeating the sixth form having failed the year before on conduct, attendance, appearance, and geography), said that Plank (who was already at college, although I've never met a thicker individual) didn't know the first thing about nukes or their cost and that anyway they were offensive and not defensive weapons and if you set one off in say, Mollington (where Skepper lived when he wasn't teaching one of his sarcastic French lessons), people as far away as Aberystwyth and maybe Penrith too would soon be feeling quite poorly, so if you wanted to repel invaders you'd need some helicopter gunships and transports and suchlike, and then some completely different sorts of missiles and all manner of other stuff (some of which Putley had already got in his bedroom), but Plank was never a man to listen to a reasonable argument and away he would drone.
We knew what he was going to say anyway, because he'd got most of it from Thunderbirds, which was always the same plot week after week so we stopped watching it when we were about three or four years old (Putley says he'd never watched except for five minutes once just before his first birthday, after which he immediately switched over to the sports channel).
Plank has an older brother who lives in the same big house down Mill lane and he gives Plank an office job some years later in this company he sets up, so it comes as no surprise to me to hear that this business collapses shortly afterwards and Plank is going around complaining a lot about all these pounds his brother steals from him then the next thing we know is he's disappeared completely, and none of us is too sad to see him go, if the truth be told.
So some while later this news comes around that Plank's really dropped a clanger, and there's a lot of shaking of heads and shrugging of shoulders going on in the bar at The Clock when the news is on the telly, with everybody jostling to say "I told you so" first.
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