About Mister Phipps
The entertaining diary of Mister Phipps. Or Mister Vice, as he’s known by the wrong sort of people.
It’s Tuesday. My name is Paul on a Tuesday, although I generally find that it’s Paul most days of the week, unless someone shouts “VICE!” across a crowded pub because that seems to have become my nickname.
This has two effects – firstly, I go a deep shade of red. Secondly the pub thinks it’s being raided and empties immediately. Legend has it I got the nickname because I used to hold the Vice-Captaincy of an Under-16 Laser Quest Squad when I was young. Legends, however, are almost nearly always wrong.
I have a band of followers who live in my little cupboard at work. They’re a crime fighting bunch comprised of a monkey dressed in pink satin, an owl (useful for crime fighting at night) and an albatross who often moans that the cupboard under my desk is not big enough for an fully grown albatross and I should watch it because he knows where I live. They are collectively called the VICE SQUAD – Fighting Crime With Gin And Lime.
They’re a bit angry with me at the minute because I haven’t fed them in a few days. Now, in my mind – and you may think the same – a crack force of crime fighters should have enough initiative between them to be able to work out how to use the chocolate machine down the hall, but they get stroppy when I mention that. I “should have put it in their annual review instead of springing such a requirement on them halfway through the reporting year”.
Never work with children or animals, my friends.
When I’m not out Fighting Crime With Gin And Lime I live a somewhat respectable life emptying Threshers of 3 for 2 bottles of wine. My flatmate thinks I am cheap because I can get 3 dodgy bottles for a tenner this way, whereas what I should be doing is getting three not-quite-so-dodgy bottles for around 12 or 13. But I just ignore him. Or set the Owl on him.
I escaped from Coventry 10 years ago this year. I worked out if you drove round the Ring Road anti-clockwise, and built up enough speed, going round faster and faster and faster, you could effectively break the time warp holding you back and be flung into the deepest darkest depths of Surrey. Near Brookwood, where there is a cemetary and a nice man in a paper shop.
Which is what happened, much to my amazement. It has taken me 10 years how to work out how to break out of the place I seem to have found myself in now. I think Laura Ashley has a hand in it in some evil -yet flowery and pastel – plot. I’m expecting some sort of Labyrinth style quest at the end of it, anyhow.
