Eight pipers piping

(Just had a short time this morning so I thought I would write this. It was sort of inspired by a story told to me by a policeman many years ago and it also serves as a reflection on musical tastes.....)

Robert had been a police officer for nearly ten years and had seen a great deal.
In the early days he used to share much of his day with his wife. It seemed like a good form of therapy at first, then it became something of a burden for Helen, his wife. She began her career in nursing around the same time and their exchanges were good, but gradually they both began to hold back – sometimes it was just too much to explore over a quick pasta sauce and a bottle of Australian red.
Gradually, their exchanges became very selective. Humorous stories prevailed over the general tragedies of life on the front lines of society. Occasionally something hard had to be shared but for the most part, they both just got on with it.
A year after joining the CID Robert came home in a bit of a quandary. He had spent all day on a case that seemed quite straight forward. A man, he called him Joe, had killed his best mate (named Bill) and then walked into the station to confess. The outcome of the interview was both humorous and tragic. Robert didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Look,” he said to his wife, “you and your sister play practical jokes on each other and I must admit that some of them are quite funny, but these two guys had taken it to a different level altogether.”
They were eating a Chinese takeaway and drinking stubbies of French beer left over from a trip across the Channel earlier that week.
“I have watched you and your sister getting quite cross with each other but it doesn’t stop you. After this story, you might want to rethink how ‘practical’ these jokes really are.”
Helen waited with a little knowing smile as she refilled her bowl with rice and chicken with cashew nuts. Her and her sister Gail never really got very cross; they never took each other’s jokes that seriously.
“When I sat down to talk to this guy, Joe, I already knew that the duty sergeant had told a couple of the lads the top-line story and people were laughing about it. Silly tricks that grew out of hand ending up with one of them loosing it and killing the other over what might have seemed like a silly prank. To be quite honest, you know I have never really joined in on that sort of humour so it made me feel a little bit uneasy. I mean, you could hear laughter in the corridor and you could see that this guy Joe was in shock.”
“You shouldn’t have interviewed him, then.”
“No choice, really; I had to get his statement as close to the time of the incident as possible. You know how people’s minds instantly start re-working their stories subconsciously, editing out the harsher bits, building in better explanations and so on. Interview as early as possible, then get them help. In lots of cases, they really need to get it off their chest anyway.”
“OK.” Helen conceded.
“So he sits there and I do all the recording preliminaries and then the basic details and he starts to blurt it all out and I get him to calm down a bit and start from the beginning. I ask him to give me the whole story and so he does.”
“For five years now the two have been doing bigger and better jokes on each other. It started with Joe sending a strip-a-gram to his mate to deliver a birthday greeting, only the woman was also an ex-girlfriend of Bill’s and the restaurant she did it in was posh, which resulted in the management asking Bill, his guest and the stripper to leave. Now this would have been bad enough but Joe managed to time it so that it interrupted Bill while he was in the process of proposing marriage to his current girlfriend.”
“Did Joe want to deliberately break them up? Did he have something for Bill’s girlfriend?” asked Helen.
“I asked and no, it was just a silly prank. When you listen to him you begin to feel that there is something a little bit lacking in this guy’s store of empathy. Same goes for Bill as it panned out. After the shame of the ejection from the restaurant and the resultant rejection to his proposal of marriage, Bill resolved to get his revenge.”
“A series of tit for tat jokes began. Each one seemed to be both sillier and less funny than the previous one and some cost quite a bit of money and lots of bother, too.”
“Well, are you going to give me examples?” Robert was filling his bowl and had popped a large, batter-covered king prawn in his mouth which was slowing down his story.
“Only if you promise never to mimic these stupid pranks.”

“Of course!”
“Well the list was quite long but here are a few highlights. After Bill got Joe’s new car towed away, Joe managed to convince a locksmith that he was locked out of Bill’s house and had him change all of the locks. Then he went away on holiday leaving Bill to sort that out. So, after having a ton of soil, then a ton of manure tipped onto Joe’s front garden, Joe retaliated by booking a whole series of ‘therapists’ who turned up at Bill’s door one evening and then continued to turn up at his office, too.”
“Therapists?”
“Yeh, ranging from some traditional ones like psychotherapists, physiotherapists and osteopaths to the alternative ones such as acupuncture, Chinese medicine consultants, etc, through to more dubious ones like Swedish Masseuses, sex therapists, psychics and horoscope readers, etc. They were all expensive to hire and were very angry when they were told it was all some sort of practical joke.”
“Wow. One or two, yes, but that is excessive.”
“Please, don’t even go there. Then there were internet tricks, like putting various things of Joe’s on Ebay, like sending estate agents around to not just to Bill’s house but to his ageing parent’s house and various siblings. The water company dug up Joe’s front garden to plug a leak that wasn’t there and charged him for the privilege so Bill had an endless supply of people responding to his apparent adverts claiming that he wanted to fund new business ventures. Joe was set up as a new porn star with his own, mocked up web site which caused lots of problems not least because the pictures were all ‘borrowed’ from a website that did not take kindly to Joe using their material for his own personal gain.”
“Phew! Did they have any time or money to do anything with their lives, apart from playing tricks on each other?”
“I have no idea how they managed to finance these things. They both seem to have had relatively ordinary lives apart from their jokes.”
“And did they still regard the other as a friend?”
“Err, it seems so. They went out to the pub together, communicated regularly, shared other friends and seemed to be almost normal.”
“But the thing got worse?”
“Well, that was the rub. That was the problem. They had called a truce. They were starting a new life as non-competing, non-joker friends. They even signed a pact together.”
“A pact? What, like the North Atlantic Treaty? Did they have to sit down with lawyers and agree a form of words?” Helen was mildly amused as well as a little bit bemused.
“A mutual friend found some sort of agreement on the internet – apparently this is not a unique case and there is some sort of name for the ‘condition’ they were both ‘suffering’ from.”
“Practical joke-itus?”
“Something like Competitive, Compulsive Prank Disorder, I think he called it.”
After some laughter and further speculation Helen returned her husband to the situation. “So, what went wrong?”
“Well, everything seemed to be going really well. With the compulsion to beat each other up using practical jokes behind them, they both got on with life a bit more seriously, Joe found himself a girl that he wanted to marry and Bill started to see someone, too.”
“No tricks on their respective partners?”
“Not a sausage. In fact, Bill was the best man at Joe’s wedding and he didn’t even tell jokes about Joe that were particularly offensive or inappropriate.”
“And married bliss ensued until now?”
“Well, the wedding was yesterday. The bride and groom stayed at the Groves House Hotel last night after the celebrations.”
“Very posh, nice grounds!”
“Quite. And this morning they were due to go on their honeymoon but instead, Joe popped ‘round to Bill’s and bumped him off with a shotgun.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Joe and his wife, Maria’s flight was at eight thirty this morning and dear old Bill thought that a grand setting like the Groves called for a grand sort of wake up call. So this morning, at half past five, eight highland pipers dressed in Joe’s family tartan (the Magoo’s, apparently) piped him and his lady wife awake from the lawn of the hotel.”
“And Joe hated the pipes so much he blasted away his best mate?”
“Well, not quite. Bill had meant it as a good thing – Joe loves the pipes, or so he says - but Joe was convinced Bill was back to his old tricks again.”
“Why? What was so bad?”
“That’s just it. I asked him straight. I wanted to know what was so bad and he looked at me as if I was completely stupid. He said, ‘They woke us up and I knew then that Bill had it in for me. The pipers were standing there just outside our window and they were playing Mull of Kintire for God’s sake! And then, as I opened the window, they started playing Flower of Scotland. If I had my gun there I would have shot them all. Mull of Kintire AND bloody Flower of Scotland! What else could I do?”
Helen sat quietly stunned for a few minutes before popping the last of the spring roll in her mouth.
“I suppose you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.” She said as she opened another couple of bottles of beer.