Gossip, Tony and The Cleaver

I got a phone call from my pal Tony asking if he can drop into the bar on his way back from saying goodbye to the troops in Iraqistan. The problem is that we are just too busy. And his helicopter wouldn't fit on the roof now we have got the TV dish up there. It was different before when Tone used to pop over from Downing Street of an evening and see Marl and me when we were in the first few months after buying the bar.

We had more free-time in those days, because we hadn't yet started our Gossip Express side-line. How the Gossip-Express business works is like this - Something happens somewhere in Benidorm. Someone in Marl's employ hears whatever it is, and then rings Marl up to tell her all about it. Marl takes the information she has just been given and multiplies the facts by a Gossip Factor. She then gets on the phone to her network of Gossipers, and spreads the news... The business element comes from the original subjects of the story coming to Marl and paying her cash to change the story back into something more akin to the so-called truth... and so therefore saving a reputation or two.

An example of this was when a certain bar owner in the New Town had not been seen for a few days and his wife was spotted shortly after his disappearance sporting two lovely big black eyes. This was reported as-is to Marl, who decided that the story needed to be mulitplied by a high Gossip Factor to make it reach her sky-high standards of gossip. Within 24 hours, the whole of eastern Spain knew that the bar owner had beaten his wife to death with a meat-mallet and was in jail in Granada, where he had been caught following a fierce gun battle with the Policia Nacional, following a tip-off that he had gone there with his 15-year-old girlfriend (who was pregnant).

Marl was particularly proud of that one, and she was pleased as punch when the wife came to see Marl to 'put the record straight'. Apparently, a large sum of money changed hands and now the whole of eastern Spain believes the (far-fetched, and quite frankly, ridiculous) story that the bar owner had gone to Scotland to bury his brother who had died suddenly, and his wife stayed in Spain to recover from the cosmetic facial surgery that she had just had the morning that the brother died. Marl's version was clearly the truth, and I am sure that her recent trip abroad had nothing at all to do with the sudden return to Benidorm of Jock 'The Castlemilk Cleaver' McManus ...