Fancy a Pint in the Pink Lion?

The pristine interior walls of this pretty pub have been painted a dainty shade of pale prune, the windows are dressed with dainty lacy pinky curtains, the seats are comfortable, set at just the right height for dainty bums to perch upon with decorum. Placed tenderly in the middle of each table are little earthenware pots in which grow poinsettias, sitting atop freshly laundered doilies Made in England.

The landlord likes to hold court and discuss his latest wheeze for making a bob or two. He’s one of the lads really but his good lady wife doesn’t approve. She is blessed with vision; the pub is decorated according to her taste. She likes everything to be so-so, so decent people may sow the seeds of friendship.

The landlords keep a dog in case of trouble. From time to time the mongrel wakes up and yaps. His main problem is that he’s not big enough to see over the top of the bar so he has to keep jumping up and down so that people can be afraid of his choppers. Seen from the patrons’ side of the bar the scene is comical, as the little dog’s head appears over the bar, gnashes its teeth and then disappears out of sight again.

Over in one corner of the room sits an ethereal-looking American lady with honey bees dancing round her head.  Here and there, huddles of hopefuls hold hands and coo-coo nice things in each other’s ear. Elsewhere, people with notepads and pocket organizers are crowding round a shove-halfpenny board, listening glazy-eyed to a man in a pinstripe suit and a flower-pot on his head saying ‘See this half-penny? This is the very coin that made me a millionaire’. Others sit lonely alone listening to John Denver songs playing softly in the background. The landlady smiles.

On busy nights one of the main attractions in the Pink Lion is an inflatable doll dressed up as a cook and mounted on a big coil spring. In one hand it holds a rolling pin and in the other a huge handbag containing everything a lady could possibly need plus two kilos of organic potatoes and a spanner.

When wound up, the contraption starts flailing around with its handbag and lashing out with the rolling pin and goes bouncing boing-boing-boing all over the room, knocking over tables and frightening the bees until it runs out of steam. The landlady claps her hands and laughs.

But it has not always been like this. Back in the days before the landlady read about the expelliaramus spell in a Harry Potter book, the Pink Lion was more boisterous than it is today. A rowdy crowd would sit laughing and joking at the bar, occasionally arguing loudly with each other and making rude noises. The landlady’s smile became a little pinched. 

The shove ha’penny man had complained that a funny smell emanating from one of the ringleaders of the rowdy crowd, a certain Pong, was damaging his business because it seemed to interact with the chloroform aerosol he had been using to create just the right atmosphere at his millionaire’s table. The noise from the pongsters was upsetting the bee lady’s cosmic vibrations and what’s more her husband couldn’t concentrate properly on counting the money he’d raked in from his latest blackmoony scheme.

The pong coming from Pong and his mates got steadily worse over time. Used to taking the blame for unwanted smells, the dog looked up with doleful eyes as if to say “don’t look at me like that, it’s not me this time”. Not only that, people with equally strange-sounding names, like Jizz, Lids, Rads, Molls and Alf actually seemed to like Pong. The landlady couldn’t understand why. She found him utterly repulsive, and was getting fed up with removing the brown stains he left everywhere on her pink tufted carpet. 

Then one day she started having terrible hallucinations. People were drawing graffiti penises on her pale prune-coloured walls, mould started growing on the poinsettias, an odd-looking German man stood on his head schmutzelgrinning and recited strange sentences back to front, one of the pongmen took a dried camel dick out of his pocket and started gnawing at it, another kept asking her if ten times ten equals a hundred thousand and a mad Irishman drove his Toyota Prius right over her bed of cotton buds and asked for his money back.

Worse still, a pink lobster with a silly grin on its face tried to sell her an insurance policy and a length of pink rope appeared from nowhere above her head with a leering Scotsman filming the action on one end and a horrible half Iraqi with hairy legs and a terrible taste in music dangling at the other. 

Then somebody shouted “poo” and she went spare. “Fuck this for a fucking game of fucking soldiers” she screamed to herself, looking around wild eyed and consumed with guilt lest that old bag the bee lady had plucked her thoughts from the ether. “Get those beastly people out of my sight, NOW!” she raged, spraying spittle over the dog, who licked it up ingratiatingly and wagged its tail, “I never want to see them again, ever”.

“And just you come back in here”, she bellowed after her husband as he tried to slope out the door, ”I’ve been meaning to talk to you about these ice cubes. Whatever did you put in them? They’re all full of funny white stuff. I was sucking one and it went all gooey in my mouth and the taste was simply awful.” 

[This parody was inspired by unfair expulsions from social/business networking site Ecademy]