Tuppence attempts to contact Uncle Funkle using the power of his own mind...

...while in the sweat lodge.

'One tap for yes, two for no...' droned Tuppence. 'Are you there Uncle Funkle....will you talk to me? Can you bring me some sweets? Not Werther's Originals or Pan Drops.'
'We've got to get him out of there Val, ' I said. 'I know you said the longer the better but it's been weeks and weeks.  It's affecting his brain.'
'Nonsense,' snapped Val,' It's the fever itself that's affecting his brain.  Nothing to do with the sweat lodge and being on his own all the time and surviving on a diet of goji berry tea and nettle and dandelion ermmmmmm......nettle and dandelion......ummmmmmm.......'
'Stew?' I suggested.
'No.  Definitely not that. It's much too...basic a name.  Besides, it's raw.'
'Salad then.'
'No. Too blunt.  Too ordinary.  Too suburban.  Smacks of clumsily-cut under-ripe tomatoes, limp lettuce, and own-brand salad cream out of a bottle.  If my online customers thought I was selling 'salad' they'd desert me in droves - and they'd be right.  The bastards.'
'What if you used Kraft thousand island and added some bacon sprinkles?'
'Don't be disingenuous.  You know perfectly well what type of stuff I sell. It's all high-end organic health foods aimed at the discerning and eco-conscious middle-earner.'
'Oh well.  Who cares what you call it.  It's basically weeds, and he needs more than that to keep body and soul together.  He needs a square meal Val.  He needs sausage and chips and some bakewell tart and custard.  Followed by a pot of tea and some banana cake, and then an egg and bacon sandwich for supper.'   And so do I, I thought.  My stomach was beginning to rumble.  It was over an hour since breakfast and I'd only had mushrooms on toast, three rashers of smoked back, two rounds of black pudding and a pickled egg.  Preceded by a large bowl of Ricicles and followed by five oatcakes thickly-spread with butter and three fruit marmalade.
'Tuppy, he's got Brain Fever.  You can't let him out mid-cure, and you can't start feeding him sausages.  It could be fatal.  Look at him Tuppy.  He's raving.'
We both bent down and stared through the flap.
'Uncle Funkle....are you there, Uncle Funkle....' Tuppence continued, leaning back in his chair with half-closed eyes. 'Help me Uncle Funkle...I need to escape...even if it is only to somewhere else inside my Own Head...'
Is he raving?  I wondered.  Or is he just bored out of his mind?  It was impossible to tell without talking to him directly, and I wasn't going to risk that in case he really did have Brain Fever.   Either way I had to Do Something before matters took a turn for the worse.
Or did I?  Why should I act?  Why was Tuppence MY responsibility?  Why couldn't someone else do the difficult bits for me?
Perhaps I should just turn my back, and leave him to Val and her weeds health foods.
But I knew I couldn't abandon him.  I'd have to have a sit down, and a think, and make a decision.  I'd have to let him out, basically.  But how would he react?  He was unpredictable at the best of times.
And who on earth was Uncle Funkle?  and why did he circumnavigate the Wintry Isles?  I was about to find out.

more later

*Paperback edition of similar stories now available on Amazon.*

'

I haven't forgotten about Tuppence, by the way.  He's fine.  The sweat lodge did him a power of good....

More on all that,  later............

Fart fart fart &c.., oh - and higher selves...

'FART FART FART OWF DE AUTOBAN.  FART FART FART OWF DE AUTOBAN. FART FART FART OWF.....'
'No, he's not cured yet.  Put him back in, and give him an extra knee rug,'  I shouted to Geoffrey, through the hole in the wall.  I shouted because I was on the settee, with my feet up, picking my nose and reading the letters page of the 'Daily Bugle', and Geoffrey was Outside, by the Ersatz Sweat Lodge, which we'd built by the Old Midden, from a kit we'd bought from Val Nark's eco-health-shop.
'Right-oh.'
'And turn the dial up to 'red'.'
'Okey-doke.'
'And make sure you close the door properly this time.  We don't want any heat to leak out, like it did before.'  Not to mention his tiresome singing, I thought to myself.  But I didn't say it out loud. Which is unusual for me.
'Like it did before, when it was YOUR turn to close it by the way.  Anything else?'
'Pick up a barrel of best brandy, three pounds of baccy, some tea-bags and a bag of jellybabies when you're passing the tunnels.  Oh, and a pint of milk.  Make that two.  And a tin of Campbell's meatballs - I feel like having something different for tea.  I'm going to curry them.'
Anyway.  As you'll have gathered, if you've been following things recently,  Tuppence has been suffering from an intractable fever and pickled onion flavr Monster Munch addiction after his stay in gaol; on the advice of Val Nark we built an Ersatz sweat lodge for him to stay in till he's cured.
So far there's been no change in his condition, except that he keeps singing any Kraftwerk song which includes the word FAHRT,  phonetically, in a heavy and terrible German accent.
We're not sure how long the cure is supposed to take - there was nothing in the instructions and Val was a bit vague time-scale-wise. 'Just till he's better, for God's sake!" she barked.  "Now go away and use your common sense.  I WOULD say consult your 'higher selves' using hazel rod divining twigs, but I know you've not got those.   Higher selves, that is, not the twigs.   The twigs are available to buy in my shop, prices starting from £10.99 per individual twig.  You two idiots, with your persistently oafish refusal to address your vile processed meat, alcohol, salty snax and baccy predilections will probably remain on the basest, crudest and most repulsive level for the rest of your unnatural lives.  Anyway I've sixty pallets of flapjacks to ship to North America and I need to focus.'
'Level?  Level of what?'
'Spiritual development, of course. An ability to commune with your higher selves.  Me and Dave do that all the time, of course, what with us being vegan and having an eco-business and living in yurts and all.  But you two never, ever will.  Be able to, that is.  Now sod off and let me get on.'
Oh dear.  Higher selves though?  I was intrigued...
'Just get me the Monster Munches and I'll be right as rain,'  a thin voice wailed as Geoffrey secured the flaps and thumped the pegs into the ground with a mallet. 'I'm bored in here.  I know it's meant to be hot and dark and sweaty and it's all for my own good but I'm fed up now - please let me out.  And if you don't let me out, rest assured that I'll wreak a horrible revenge...you know I will....'

Next time....Tuppence finally gets out of the sweat lodge, and Geoffrey and I run away from him and his wrath, on the pretext of setting off to find our higher selves.....

The Ersatz Sweat Lodge

Tuppence's fever is still raging and we haven't found any Monster Munch.

In desperation, we turned to Val Nark in the hope that she might give us some of her 'own-made'.  Of course, given her plans for stocking her farm shop freezer with choice 'Spring lamb' (see recent posts),  we knew that she might give us advice that would finish him off.  But we were prepared to run that risk.

'Tuppence is diseased Tuppy,' said Geoffrey, flapping from mantlepiece to window to arm of settee, and back again, as he always does when he's anxious, 'And what's more he's pumped full of Lem-sip.  He's not organic any more.   Val won't want him in her freezer.  I'm sure of it.'

'All right.  Let's bite the bullet and go up to the tourist car park.  She'll probably be in the post office yurt today.  I think it's her day for posting out orders from her Ebay wholefoods shop.'

'Try creating an ersatz sweat lodge of course,'  snapped Val, when we turned up, shame-faced and nervous. 'And ply him with Junior Aspirin.  The Monster Munch carry-on is simply the ravings of a spoilt and horribly precocious child, and must be ignored at all costs. Don't you two have ANY common sense? Not that I need to ask. You're as thick as two short planks. Three, probably.  If not four.  Or indeed five.'

'I've already given him my tartan knee rug.  And we've got him on a Lem-sip drip,' I replied,  dander up.

'Yes the laudanum didn't work,' added Geoffrey, 'We thought perhaps an opium tabloid and some senna tea...well perhaps not the senna tea...'  I gave him a look, and he fell silent.

Val gripped a piece of string between her teeth and glared at us as she ripped the last piece of brown packing tape from its cardboard roll.

'Oh stop being pathetic and get on with it. I've six boxes of goji berry flapjacks to send out to valued customers in the next post and I don't want any bad feedback. Some of us DO have a life you know!'

And she padded barefoot across the multi-coloured rag rug flooring to the back of the yurt, and an untidy pile of books which Dave sells - or tries to - online.  'Here.  You owe me five pounds and think yourselves lucky I'm not charging you postage.  I know you haven't got the money on you and I know you think you'll get away with not paying me.  But you're completely wrong.  I will hound you until I get my money and I am not put off by extortionate Small Claims Court charges.  It's the principle that matters to me.  I expect to be paid tomorrow morning at first light.  Now go away.'  She threw us a slim, tattered, paperback volume entitled 'How to Cure Everything with an Ersatz Sweat Lodge',  by Mrs Stanley Wrench, dated 1933.

More on what we did next,  later...........

or find more Tales in my e-books, on Amazon, here...http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Penguin-Part-Five-Selections-ebook/dp/B00FW19E0Y/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HAYA6ZJ8R7A2B0XRWNX