Slam Dunk Bill’s Big Hair, Weston-Super-Mare

Poem

Biscuit donkey chocolate eclair.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Traffic light pomegranate Yogi Bear
Weston-Super-Mare.
Slam dunk Bill’s big hair.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Almost bought a pair of trousers there.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Don’t look Timmy it’s rude to stare.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston Super, Weston Super, Weston-Super-Mare.

Guess where the villain has his secret lair.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Debonair kitchenware chemical warfare
Weston-Super-Mare.
Can I take your photo? Don’t you dare.
Weston-Super-Mare.
I lost my virginity there.
Where?
Bournemouth.
Who wants to be a millionaire?
Weston-Super-Mare.
Have you got a ticket pay your excess fare
Weston-Super-Mare.
Don’t move you’ve got something crawling in your hair.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston Super Weston Super Weston-Super-Mare.

Underwear everywhere ready to wear
Weston-Super-Mare
Thoroughfare deckchair devil may care
Weston-Super-Mare
Solitaire questionnaire update on your software
Weston-Super-Mare
Can I take your photo? Don’t you dare.
Weston Super Mare
My sheds in a state of disrepair
Weston super mare
Loose floorboard on the twenty third stair
Weston super mare
Elton John once sneezed on the mayor
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston Super Weston Super Weston-Super-Mare.
Weston super mare (oi!)
Weston super mare (oi!)
Weston Super Weston Super Weston-Super-Mare.


Tell Her I Said ‘Hello’

Poem

I was chatting to a friend.
Yes, I have friends.
And this one was called Adam.
And I said to this friend, this Adam,
I’m off to see Vanessa tomorrow,
Because she’s another friend,
And Adam said,
Tell her I said hello.

What am I, I thought,
Your hello outsourcing service?
Offering hellos by proxy
Retrieved with none of the actual feeling
Of a proper hello?
I thought, I didn’t actually say this
Because I’m not like that,
I thought, if you want to say hello
So badly,
Then bloody well say hello yourself.
But I was off to see Vanessa.
And Adam said,
Tell her I said hello.

But he didn’t actually say hello.
He just said,
Tell her I said hello.
He didn’t say,
Hello,
That was for Vanessa.
Or, hello, that’s what I’d say
If I saw Vanessa.
And you can tell her that
I’ve just said hello,
Which strictly speaking would have been lying,
But anyway I said I would.

Vanessa was in a real crabby mood.
Her latest money-making venture,
Selling fake moustaches to people
As they enter the sexual health clinic,
Had failed,
Because as a society we are more open now
About such things,
And anyway,
The police had told her to move along,
And we had a row,
And she told me that
I was about as usual as an
Air vent on a submarine,
And I told her that if intelligence
Skipped a generation
Then her kids would be geniuses
And she said
That I couldn’t possibly be as daft
As I looked,
And I said up yours,
Because I’d run out of insults,
And then I said,
By the way, Adam says hello.

I saw Adam the next day.
Did you say hello?, he asked.
I said hello, I said.
And next time you want to say hello, I said,
Don’t get me to say hello, I said.
Go to the person you want to say hello to,
And say hello, I said.
And he said,
Did she say hello?
And I said,
Actually, no, she didn’t.

A Ride on a Traction Engine

Poem

He said if I were lucky I could win
The main prize in the raffle,
A ride on a traction engine!
And though I was hoping more for the bottle of
Cheap red
Which would knock me as blotto as a
Hippopotamus,
I was one number out, and wouldn’t you know it,
I’d won
A ride on a traction engine.

And by the way, they said,
It’s compulsory.

I wanted to get it over with, I mean,
Wouldn’t you?
Flat caps always make me look like
A farmer with a penchant for porn,
Yet there I stood mid morning with mild mannered Matt
In a field near Yeovil,
Matt,
Whose passion for traction engines far outstripped
Any passion of my own save that I have long harboured
For Walls Viennettas.
Honestly, said Matt,
In his jaunty hat,
As we climbed into the cab,
This will be better than sex.

It went
Chugga chugga latty boom boom
Chugga chugga latty clank
Boom boom ranching boom boom ranching
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.

Just like sex.

Chugga chugga latty boom boom
Chugga chugga latty clank
Boom boom ranching boom boom ranching
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.

Here we go, said Matt,
And it juddered, and shook, and rattled
And lurched forward and
Soon we were chugging across the field
Boom boom wadda wadda boom boom wadda wadda
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.

And Matt yelled,
What do you think?
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.
And I yelled
I think my filling just came out
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.
And Matt said
When was the last time you were jostled
And battered and oscillated in such a manner?
And I thought of my Steven
In the days when we used to do it
Like turning on and off a tap
But now we haven’t done it in quite some time
And I touched his leg the other night and he said,
As if I were a dog about to eat a cigarette packet,
No!
And to be honest
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.
I’m thinking of dumping the bastard.

But isn’t that just like me?
Boom boom ranching boom boom ranching
And Matt’s busy manhandling various
Gears columns cogs wheels vents
And we get to the end of the field and he
Turns that fucker around and we
Come all the way back again.

Chugga chugga latty boom boom
Chugga chugga latty boom
Boom boom ranching boom boom ranching
Pop quizzy bang quizzy bang quizzy pop.
Ca-chur
Ca-chur
Ca-chur
Ka-ping!
Oh, blast, said Matt,
And we shuddered to a halt.

It’s blown a gasket, Matt said,
Brian will have to come over with his tool box,
And I clambered down from the cab
And I wiped the grime from my borrowed dungarees
And I grinned in a way that I hadn’t since
Last October’s orgasm
When I’d shouted,
One hundred and eighttyyyy!
And Steven had said,
Will you keep it quiet up there?

An Ode To Simon Reeve

Poem

I stepped into a tropical bar.
Simon Reeve was there in a slow dance,
And I lost myself to his floppy fringe
Whose sweat-soaked flappy fronds would
Tickle my blushing cheeks,
Whose stubble scraped at the twilit skies
Like a cat’s claws on anaglypta,
Whose come-to-bed eyes betrayed none
Of the entitlement of his classical features
But a yearning for a sweetness so virile
That he could have been a treacle tart
And I ached, how I ached,
To be the custard.

Backpack merely decorative,
Naive tone a faux Theroux,
Poor man’s Palin,
Cargo-trousered doyen of sand dunes
And jungle trains,
No armchair droner he,
Riven with Reevisms, river crossings,
Barrier reef rovings,
Now gyrating for my pleasure in the aptly named
Club Flamingo.

Simon Reeve whose dimpled smile
Hauls in the night like a Titicatan net-lobber,
Whose unblemished skin betrays the
Goodness of various restorative unguents,
Whose manly chin is jutted like the
Bulbous bow of a speeding Shinkansen
And probably twice as purposeful,
Whose sensitive eyebrows are seldom parabolic,
Yet neither do they quiver intense for
Reevsie is an empathic soul,
Whose backpack is admittedly superfluous,
Whose torso is Michaelangeloian in its
Sculpted accommodation of his lean yet
Muscular frame on whose bounty I would
Willingly consume a quadruple-decker cheeseburger
Dipping a chip in a reservoir of mayonnaise
Stored for convenience sake in his belly button.

Action man for aunties.
Secret poet banging sand out his boots.
Earnest and eager though neither over with either.
Mortal enemy of Professor Brian Cox.
No world-weary Whicker he, but a clamorous compassion
And the kind of face
That would make even Vladimir Putin
Contemplate a five minute fumble
In the broom cupboard.

Simon Reeve, whose tousled locks hold
Within their definitely un-dyed verdantness
A vitality that would put Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to shame,
Whose rich deep Colombian coffee coloured eyes
Might penetrate x-ray-like beneath layers so effectively
As to pass right through the earth’s core every time
He bends down to pat a puppy.
Whose nostrils hardly flare.
Whose afterthought goatee clings on like
A countryside hilltop copse stunted
By the choking emissions from a nearby pig farm
Yet in whose branches barn owls berate the night
With their haunted warbling,
Whose luscious lips have tempted many a plastic surgeon
To bemoan the artifice of their own creations
And now before is delicate tongue-moistened plumpness,
Whose sturdy shoulders in their perfect powerful paralleogramatic
Precision
Would easily raise a live rhinoceros clear out
Of the Serengeti mud hole
Into which it had stumbled probably distracted
By the beauty of Simon Reeve’s face in the first place.

And I,
Simon Reeve,
I am that rhinoceros
And this ain’t no mud hole,
It’s the Club Flamingo
And our song has now ended
And our dance has now ended
And you’ve picked up your backpack
Which definitely doesn’t contain
Just a couple of pillows to make it look full for the cameras,
And off you go.

Torquay 2, The Other Team 2 – A Poem About Torquay United FC

Torquay, 2 – The Other Team, 2

Three hundred or so low guttural individual voices
Combine into a cohesive whole, a chorus of
Feral anticipation as these custard coloured titans
Skip on to the pitch, the first among them kind of
Punches limply through a paper hoop
Emblazoned with their team sponsor’s logo,
J. Arthur Bowyer’s Synchro-Boost Houseplant Compost,
Three half-hearted palm slaps and then the paper gives way,
These athletic specimens of masculinity and matching socks,
Shiny blue polyester shorts a-gleam under the spotlights,
Back slaps and star jumps, half-hearted jogging,
While the opposing team, who must have had an
Awfully long bus ride, kind of slouch on to the field,
Mooching along the sides of the pitch like slugs around lettuce.

I’d brought a book to read assuming there would be seats.
Instead I was pressed up against the lanky frame of an
Ever so friendly thought unusually potty-mouthed
Scrote of a lad whose replica custard coloured shirt
Had last year’s sponsor, McClintock’s Polystyrene Coving Ltd.,
And who suggested at top column that the home team
Might like to consider breaking the fucking legs of the opposition.
Someone then tried to start a chant going,
‘Oh we do like to beat them beside the seaside!
We’re gonna beat you by two or three!’
But it kind of got drowned out
To a chant of ‘Put them all in intensive care!
Put them all in intensive care!
Put them all in intensive care!
Captain Ollie’s got great hair!’

I have come with a friend who’s there for the football
But also to show me the football and he
Made a kind of grimace when I said I’d brought a book.
The home team did some warm up exercises.
‘They’re dancing!’ I said, ‘it’s all a bit camp, isn’t it?’
Number 32 is just my type, bleach blond hair, stubble,
Long legs and snake hips.
‘Coooo-eeeee! Over here! Yoooo-hooooo!’
My pal said, ‘He’s on loan from Bournemouth’.
I said, ‘That’s okay, I’d give him back in one piece’.

The stadium announcer extols the virtues of both teams
And attests to the veracity of
J. Arthur Bowyer’s Synchro-Boost Houseplant Compost,
And the game begins, number 32’s elegant fingers splayed
As he dribbles the ball, like he’s a ballet dancer,
Or a gymnast balancing on a beam, though even
The home team audience yells that he’s a useless
Time wasting tossbag who gets the ball and does fuck all,
Go back to Bournemouth you useless waste of space.
He’s got lovely eyes.

The ground rumbles and thuds as they race from one end
To the other, kicking up clods of grass and winning
The applause of the audience who shout encouragement,
These lads in custard who aim at the goal at the other end,
Someone misses a sitter, someone else scuffs it,
And then the ball goes in the corner and two opposing players
Prance and dance around it like Torville and Dean.
My eyes kind of wander off to the other side
Where twenty or so or the away team supporters chirrup
And you can just make out the faded lettering of
Last years sponsor showing through under a new coat of paint,
McClintock’s Polystyrene Coving Ltd. Is Better Than Any Competition.
Only the word ‘tit’ is still showing.

My pal has already told me in advance
The skill of number 10, whose speciality is
Less the sublime and precocious nature of his craft,
More his knack for falling over at just the right moment,
Now he goes down like a sack of spuds and the
Audience erupts, apparently this is a good thing,
He’s allowed to aim a ball at the keeper and boom,
In it goes, I almost spill my cup of tea
As I’m jostled and the lad next to me flings
His arms around my neck, jumps up and down, the
Tea oscillates as I breathe in his Lynx Africa antiperspirant,
I must say I enjoy it a lot.
And now I want number 10 to fall over again.

Wouldn’t you know it, he does, never fails to disappoint,
Fortune smiles twice in the low setting sun,
Achilles in his death throes, Icarus mid melt,
Our hero is downfallen and rolling in the mud like a hippo,
The ref’s cheek bones inflate as his blows his whistle.
Boom, scores! The audience is enraptured once again,
Another clingy embrace of Lynx Africa,
I’m a cuppa carrying eucalyptus and he’s my own personal koala,
Number 32 looks down wistfully as if jealous, I hope,
Oh, I hope, of me and my new found tame delinquent
Who sips a surreptitious beer from a paper bag and
Chinks against my half spilled Darjeeling, cheers!
Caught up in the joy of the moment I attempt to start a chant
Based on the third movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
But it doesn’t take hold.

Really, I’m only here for my pal who’s brought me along.
This is his culture and I’m an interloper.
But I want to show that I understand life
Beyond the cliche, broaden my mind and experience
Every nuance of our shared cultural history.
‘We’re winning ‘, he says during the interval
As we queue for pies sold from a shed
Next to the unoccupied press box.
‘Well, they are’, I point out, ‘We’re just watching’.
I’m taking him to a drag show next weekend.

And then the announcer wants us all to sing happy birthday
For Little Liam, whose favourite player is number ten.
And Little Jimmy, whose favourite player is number ten,
And Little Jack, whose favourite player is number ten,
And he reminds us that we can all vote for the
J. Arthur Bowyer’s Synchro-Boost Houseplant Compost
Man of the Match, which is usually won by number ten.
‘I’d like to vote for number 32’, I say, perhaps too loudly,
And everyone around me laughs and says how funny,
They love my sense of irony.

Two more goals soon after the interval.
Perhaps the audience has tired itself out,
I’m the only one who seems excited, and my new friend
In the McClintock shirt hardly seems inclined at all
To repeat his usual celebratory hijinx, no doubt
Enervated by his enthusiasm and the two litre bottle of cider
Stuffed down the front of his trackie bottoms,
And when the ref calls a halt to the show I pat
My pal on the back and ask whether four nil in some kind
Of club record.
It was two all, he says, they switched ends.
They did what?
Why didn’t the announcer explain this
Before I got excited over nothing?

Oh, this communal kickabout, this colossal crowd clapping
This unified oneness this matey definitely not homoerotic bonding,
This celebration of the hunter’s skill this
All-encompassing rough and tumble this slippery sport a spurt on the turf
With spurious curiosities this worship of the physical
This proof of prayer this spectacle this weird excuse
To suddenly bellow ‘Nice tackle!’ and no one bats an eyelid
This playing out of certain urges but would they ever let me
Join in? No, probably not, and number ten has got mud all over him.

What did you think?, my pal asks
As we file like clocked-off factory workers
Into the adjacent streets, not that he’s interested really,
Immediately he then adds, shall we get some chips?

I think of number 32
Isolated
In the dressing room.

‘Roswell was an Insurance Job’ : A Message from a Space Alien for the Human Race



Greetings puny earth people.
I come in peace.
Take me to you leader!
Actually, maybe not,
I’ve seen him in action.
Take me to the most
Significant person,
According to your Earth transmissions
Take me to Rylan!

I am Zignor,
Of the planet Pupaluvious 5,
Which orbits a star
Which until recently was called
PUV 621R
But
Thanks to someone on your planet
Buying its name as a fiftieth birthday present
It’s now called
Barry Jenkins.
All hail Barry Jenkins!
May death come quickly to his enemies.

I arrived just after lunch
And I shall now attempt
What appears to be your common greeting
As it was the first thing said to me
When I arrived.
‘You can’t park that there, mate’.

I have come to spread a
Message of peace
And if anyone says I haven’t then I’ll
Punch their lights out.
I saw your planet from
Across the vast emptiness of space
While lying in a field on Pupaluvious 5
And my first thought was,
Oh, I’d love to go there
And my second thought was
Someone’s nicked my tent.

Pupaluvious 5 has eight moons.
You’ve only got the one.
Half of it was in shade tonight.
I suppose
It’s just a phase it’s going through.

Your puny planet is
Ripe for alien invasion.
We just don’t want to.
It’s a sleepy backwater
With terrible parking.
It’s kind of the solar system’s equivalent to
Newton Abbot.
And every time we visit
We feel we have to have a damn good shower.
As I say,
It’s the solar system’s equivalent to
Newton Abbot.
It smells a bit.
Newton Abbot.

I suppose on your planet
I’m known as an ET.
Oh look, I heard someone say just now,
An ET.
Someone else said,
What’s ET short for?
And he replied,
Because he’s got little legs.

I offered to take him
To see Jupiter.
He replied that if he wanted
To see a gas filled giant,
We’d visit his Uncle Darren.

But here I am,
I come in peace.
Here I am
Don’t call the police.
I’ve travelled far
In an interdimensional zone
On a spaceship made for one
I was very alone
I tried telepathy on Donald Trump.
All I got was
The engaged tone.

I leave you now, my interstellar friends.
Once again, sorry about those
EarthLink satellites I hit on the way down.
Roswell was an insurance job.
Let me finish with this saying
From my home world,
‘Flooga zappy looppa-looga’,
Which roughly translate as
‘Geoff, your
Tentacles are showing’.
Doreen,
Beam me up, Doreen!

Yo-Yo : Ruminations of an Accidental Poet – Collected Essays

Yo-Yo: Ruminations of an Accidental Poet, published by Puddlehopper, is now available to purchase! Telling stories from fifteen years as a performance poet. Festivals, fringes, fleeting appearances on TV, filming, faffing around with props, flopping at slams, it has it all! Essays from Write Out Loud, Chortle, Litro Magazine and and Torquay Museum’s lecture series, and some written specifically for this collection. Plus one new poem! Details on how to order this book will be revealed shortly.

Here’s the blurb:

In 2008 Robert Garnham thought he’d give performance poetry a try, having never heard of it before. What followed was to be fifteen years of crazy poetry adventures in all sorts of different venues. These collected essays describe, with humour and warmth, gigs in every part of the UK (and further afield), shenanigans at music festivals, angst at the Edinburgh Fringe and every conceivable type of poetic misadventure.

‘As Robert Garnham has been a huge influence on me as a comedy spoken word artist, I read this collection of essays with great anticipation. It didn’t disappoint! A wonderfully entertaining read’. (CLIVE OSEMAN).

You can order the book from this link:

https://robertgarnham.bigcartel.com/product/yo-yo-ruminations-of-an-accidental-poet

Bouncer

Robert has the chance to be on prime time TV! What could possibly go wrong? A comedy poetry show about not becoming famous.

Join performance poet Robert Garnham for his new solo show, Bouncer. When Robert is asked to perform on the UK’s biggest TV talent show, he dreams of fame and fortune and never having to leaflet in Edinburgh again! But of course, these things never go the way you want them to go . . . An hour of storytelling, poetry and comedy about fame, and hope, and dreaming.

‘Playful, warm . . Funny and always surprising’. (Write Out Loud)

‘Wise’. (Word NYC).

‘Clever and entertaining’. (Barnstaple Theatrefest).

‘There’s warmth in his whimsy, it’s sturdy not flimsy’. (Matt Harvey)

‘Witticism, wordplay and wistful romanticism’. (Dandy Darkly)

On a cold, January evening, I caught a train from Devon to London. I was looking for some sense of magic in the air, a barely-perceptible tingle as if fortune were tickling my conscience and smoothing the way to a stardust future. But the train was cold, and dinner was a chicken tikka pasty I’d bought from the convenience store next to the station.

The countryside was hidden in darkness. Beyond the reflection of my own face I could make out tiny villages, clusters of lights in the middle of nowhere, lonely cow barns lit up against the frost, and I thought, do any of these people also dream of everlasting fame?

If you enjoy this video, feel free to pop something into my tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/robertgarnham

Bouncer

If you would like to see a short documentary / video diary about the process to learn Bouncer, this can be found here:

Sad news from the scone society

Dear fellow scone enthusiasts.

It pains me to write this letter, but circumstance has forced my hand. For many years, the Brixham Town Scone Society website has been a valuable tool for members to connect, ask advice, share cooking tips, and buy and sell both equipment and ingredients. There have been no complaints and many of us have both enjoyed, and taken advantage of, this wealth of scone-cooking know-how just a click of the mouse away.
However, lately it has come to the attention of this committee that the Classified section of the website has been coming under some abuse from certain members whose interests lay beyond mixing methods and how to create a really cracking milk glaze.
The problem first came to light when it was pointed out to me that a lot of our newer subscribers to the website, who filled in the online form, listed the classified section as their main motivation for doing so, yet almost all of them answered the question ‘How many hours a week do you spend cooking scones?’ with the response, ‘None’, and in a lot of cases, ‘I do not like scones’. This was somewhat perplexing and an investigation was launched in case there were some confusion in the title of our website, (Scones A-Plenty.com), or indeed if there were some new boy band or comic perhaps titled ‘Scone Man’, that was leading to this sudden influx in new members.
However, after a terrible mix-up (no pun intended) the other day in which one of our senior committee members, Maureen Hepplethwaite, found herself not at a scone cookery demonstration as she had been expecting, but at a swinger’s sex party, it was decided that action was needed.
The first thing we noticed was the number of young men offering a variety of different shaped spatulas for sale in the classifieds. While these are great implements in the mixing process, it is probably more common in the scone community to use wooden spoons, so I think it’s fair to say that this raised a few eyebrows among the committee. Most of these spatulas were advertised as being new, ‘or in new condition’, while some were being offered in a slightly battered state.
At this stage, alarm-bells didn’t actually start ringing. The admin behind running a pro-scone website means that some matters don’t actually get attended to until there’s some kind of emergency. The Great Flour Shortage of 2005 was one such calamity, and equally fraught was the resignation of our chairman in 2009 when he announced that frankly, he preferred muffins.
We then noticed the alarming number of society members offering scones of varying states of completion, some of which were ‘ready to pick up now’, others were, ‘come and collect’, while many were ‘lacking one final ingredient’. ‘Already in the mixing bowl’, apparently, (and according to Reginald, who does not proclaim to be an expert on such matters), means that the ‘seller’ is willing to conduct the process in their own home. ‘On the baking tray’, apparently means that they are willing to travel. And it’s anyone’s guess what ‘ready to be consumed with fresh fresh salad’, means. Suspicions were raised further when Phil Burton (member since 1988), advertised that he had a home-made ready mix featuring fresh sultana pieces and fruity chunks only to receive an email which read, ‘You’re a dirty boy, oh my, you’re a dirty boy!’, followed by someone's phone number.
Dear society members, this will just not do. To get to the root of the problem, we have employed a code-breaker whose previous area of expertise was the Egyptian hieroglyphs and also the mating call of the common sparrow. And it was no surprise to learn that the codes adopted by many of the users of our classified pages were also a base form of mating call in themselves . Once she had explained what many of the codes and terminologies were, I, as your brave Chairman, decided to pose online as one of these lovelorn scone-bakers with an advertisement composed specifically to entrap the guilty.
Spatula for sale (or rent). Slightly rusty yet ergonomically designed to offer maximum stirring. Mixture in bowl yet also functions on the tray. Fellow mixer must have GSOH. No salad please. Jam and cream to spread as desired. Satisfaction guaranteed. Stirs in an anti-clockwise or circular motion.
Alas, the only reply to my classified ad was from another society member who offered me a ‘lasagne’. ‘I don’t get it’, I said to the code-breaker.
‘Nor do I’, she replied.
And just to be safe, I haven’t eaten a lasagne since.
Dear society member, it is time to put an end to this, and the decision was recently taken at a committee level to put an end to the classified section of our website. We understand that this may very well reduce the number of people who have joined our society, (over twenty thousand new members in the last six weeks, a figure which still manages to perplex us), but we believe that this is the safest method to rid our wholesome community of undesirable attention.
Like many of you, I started out as a young man with a head full of ideas and dreams intent on devoting my life to the construction and consumption of the humble scone. Starstruck by such scone-bakers as Ethel P. Anderson and Audrey ‘Iron Knuckles’ McGinty, I saw the society as a means to connect with like minded souls whose purpose and heart were in a similar vein to my own. It has been nothing short of tragic to see our fine institution highjacked by those whose thoughts remain as base as their own animalistic instincts. I see this as an opportunity to root out these wrongdoers and make our society safe again!
The moment I’ve finished writing this email, I shall be visiting the committee where no doubt we shall be indulging in the wholesome pursuit of the perfect scone. And yes, fellow committee members, thanks for asking, I shall definitely be bringing my own spatula.

Yours
The chairman.