EthicalDative

Sugar Shack, JMN, photo.

Mimsy and Chance Lafarge went to Cloudburst for the weekend to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Drove up in two cars with Dandi and Mitch Oddbocker and Shay and Rafe Bickford. Planned to split up on Saturday so Mimsy, Dandi, and Shay could do girl stuff, and Chance, Mitch, and Rafe could do guy stuff. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.

On Sunday the guys would play golf. The girls would shop and go to a club called The Stirrup to see the male strippers. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.

Friday night Mimsy gets a call from the Finger Hut back home. Her youngest son Cisco, it turns out, has phoned in an order for sixteen deluxe pork finger baskets. It was to feed the junior varsity, he told them. Mimsy said, “You didn’t fill the order, did you?” Posie the manager said, “Yes, I did, but the credit card number Cisco gave me is invalid.”

Mimsy said a cuss word to herself, she told me, wondering why they didn’t run the dang card before they cooked the food. Anyway, she paid with her card, then called Shyanne to go pick up her brother’s food and tell the team to eat it on the patio, not inside.

Well, Shyanne drove into town and got the food, but bless her heart, she didn’t close the tailgate of her doolie before she drove back. All those dinners blew out on the highway without her knowing it. For near a hundred dollars nobody but the varmints got fed.

Mimsy and Chance read Cisco the riot act when they got back. The “credit card number” he gave the Finger Hut was the serial number on his Gameboy, which happens to have sixteen digits. Cisco claimed it had been Rodeo Peavey’s idea, as if that mattered. These young’uns! If they had half a brain between ’em they’d be dangerous.

(Stag Country, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Tagg’s Island, Sir Alfred Munnings, 1919. Philip Wilson Publishers, 1978.

Cressida’s fiancé Rupert plays midfield for the Tottenham Hotspurs. Her friend Hermione, only daughter of Sir Hubert Dalgleish, fancies Orlando, an enigmatic striker for the Northampton Avengers. Tut tut. Le coeur a ses raisons, etc., wouldn’t you say, if only you knew French?

A soupçon of tension thus invades the heiresses’ amity; they cheer respectively for bitter rivals on the football pitch.

Cressida learns from Rupert, quite casually, that Orlando is the subject of certain rumours involving the daughter of Archibald McClackmannanham, whose company will build the new bridge over the Firth of Forth. Rupert has reported Sir Alistair Chichester to have muttered audibly to Sir Hubert over a tot of Sheep Dip in the Thane of Thoth that McClackmannanham was a “bloody arriviste” egged on by “his cohort of toadies.” Such is the disdain of old wealth for new wealth.

Cressida imparts this intelligence with delicate reluctance to Hermione, who receives it with a sharp intake of breath and a prolonged glance through the French doors giving out upon the manicured grounds of Pelfe Chase, her family’s ancestral manor.

Your assignment is as follows: Pretend you have the sensibilities of gentlefolk. On a scale of One (“Undetectable”) to Ten (“Seismic”), where must Cressida’s sympathy for her friend register? On the same scale, how horrid must poor Hermione now feel?

(Social Math — UK, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)