Fara's Way (Part 312)...

The story so far...

Dappled, demur and ever so slightly ditzy, our heroine Fara Titzgerald has washed up back at Ditherer's Rest, the old family seat secreted safe among the emerald folds, deep in the heart of England's rural shires. Awash with the vapors and still experiencing several daily bouts of her 'nerves', Fara whiles away the days and weeks in the timeless serenity of the old Conservatory, half shrouded in ancient ivy fronds, numbed in equal measure by Lord Ditherer's exotic tales of his part in the Great Poor Law reforms of 1832 and his plentiful topping up of her tumbler of 12 year-old Bugati Brake Fluid. Can Tara ever escape the traumatic memories of the Brocaded Kipper Tea Rooms that so scandalised the sleepy hamlet of Orbison Rippling? Will Demetrius Drabbe return, as promised, to reveal her terrible, terrible secret? What exactly *did* Lord Ditherer do during the Great Poor Law Reforms of 1832? And is there any of that 12 year-old Bugati Brake Fluid going? I'm *quate* *parched* Ay am...

Now, read on...

Floating in and out of a pleasurable haze of mechanical oil fumes and the nostalgic minutiae of an ancient class war, the terrible scene at the old Brocaded Kipper Tea Rooms when, you'll recall, she gave short shrift to the ambivalently tendered hand of her erstwhile suitor Demetrius Drabbe, the minor poet and underwater ventriloquist, couldn't be further from this peaceful idyll. There, he'd behaved in such a beastly fashion that she'd had no alternative but to hotfot it immediately back to the bosom of her family, barely giving Demetrius time to towel himself down and remove an unwieldy ruddy-cheeked, redheaded puppet from his fist before giving chase. Oh what an awful sight it must have been! - her fleeing sobbing and distraught, pursued the length and breadth of the normally tranquil main thoroughfare of the sleepy hamlet of Orbison Rippling by a sodden bard waving a snorkled ginger mannequin-clad fist at anyone who cared to listen and telling them he'd only tried to do the decent thing and what were they staring at, had they never seen a cuckolded underwater ventriloquist in sodden pursuit of a scandalous flibberty-gibbet, eh?

But then Fara's quiet repose was interupted by the gentle coughing of Grindly, the butler. Shaking off several fronds of ivy, Fara reached out a palsied hand toward the proferred silver salvour and felt the familiar nap of ancient Drabbe family stationery. "I do wish he'd stop writing on baize", thought Fara as she absent mindedly clawed open the felty green envelope and removed a similar patch of cloth into which a series of characters had been elegantly gouged in ornate copperplate script. "So dashed hard to read and, what's more, that snooker table will soon be all but unplayable if he keeps inundating me with correspondence like this...cue ball's all but impossible to keep straight as it is without any further deterioration of the playing surface..." "Brthhfdggkknng mnkjjjjdnhhshbbsb likoijjjjj..." jabbered Lord D., having fallen asleep with a mouthful of 12 year-old Bugati Brake Fluid. "That perishing poet still giving you the heeby-jeebies is he?" He spluttered, raining a spray of highly flammable liquid across the room. "Damn and blast his eyes, I don't know about you, but I'd tell him where to stick his patiently parlayed rhymes - and that goes for that monstrous ginger dwarf he insists on ramming his fist into in a paddling pool at the drop of a hat. Come on, let's hear it - what tripe and utter codswallop is he bombarding you with this time??"

Lord D. may have been an unspeakable brute with a level of evenly applied misanthropy not seen since the days of Genghis Khan, thought Fara, but he's a canny old egg when it comes to affairs of the human heart. Lord D. was right on the money - Demetrius had indeed sent more verse; another lengthy scrawl of an eponymous epic love poem he had dedicated to her. In a reedy, quavering voice, she read out aloud from the flapping green parchment:

Should you care to make your way up to the Ritz,
There a tender hearted lover sits,
Dreaming of the day he'll get his mitts
On the secret, shaded under-bits
Of the lovely, lovely Fara Titz...

The poem went on at some length in this vein and Lord D. was soon snoring in his habitual bisonic fashion. Oh well, thought Fara, all the more Bugati for me, I suppose, and she was soon floating high above her troubles on a cloud of joyous exhaust fumes dreaming of greased up stevedores with lashings of Yoplait. Yes, she thought - everything's going to be alright....!!

Next week on Fara's Way:

Will Fara escape the clutches of Landy Silage and Randy Lairweather-Foe, the visiting American professors of trends in Pro-Am golfing wear? Can Lord Ditherer remember where he left the family hair looms. What will the future hold for Curbly Allanish, the local Jack the Lad when a detailed account of his indiscretions with Tara in the hayloft are read out loud during the annual Harvest festival service? And will Fara's remarkable resemblance to the celebrity socialite and anorexic Tara Farrar-Pompidou prove costlier than anyone could possibly have imagined? Find out next week on Fara's Way...