5. Copenhagen & Storks

The next morning, we were meant to set sail for London, where Winston had to see a man about some buttons and Caitlin Kitty, another of Winston’s exes. But Winston felt that perhaps we should temporarily put off the Kiernens and sail for Denmark instead. And so we did.


The girl we had to visit there was called Helga, who agreed to meet us for coffee.

When she arrived, I understood why it was that Winston had spent a whopping eight months with her: she was tall, lithe, blue-eyed, brown-haired and beautiful. She sat down across from us and cooly explained that she appreciated the apologetic gesture, but that she had not missed Winston much after he left and was quite happy they had gone their separate ways. Her new boyfriend Mads was the hunky ukelele player of the local band The Elephants and she’d never been happier. Then, she gave us a flyer for their show, said she hoped we would come, it was very nice to see him again and good day.

Willoughby was quite disappointed by the lack of flying cups and saucers, but Winston was pleased. He was happy she was happy, and felt gratified at making his first successful apology. He felt re-inspired.

We spent the rest of the day walking around Copenhagen. We admired the various fountains, we lounged in sunny gardens, we took pictures of tourists and I took to elbowing Winston whenever a girl would glare, coyly and knowingly, at him. Which was pretty often. Willoughby, for his part, had a great time checking out all of the Danish dogs (he asserted that Danish dogs, on the whole, are certainly the prettiest population of dogs he had ever seen) and was drooling, now after a Danish Poodle mix, now after Shitzu. I joked that Winston was rubbing off on him.

In the evening, Willoughby saw himself back to The Star Dust (where Ramone was waiting to surprise him with his new Super-Stealth Danish Fart Machine) and Winston and I went to see The Elephants play. Dear reader, I must recommend them! On our entire trip, those Elephants were pretty near the best live music we saw.

I’m going to zip through this next little bit, so that we can get on to some of the more interesting parts of our trip: Anya in Brussels threw waffles at him (I have pictures); Cherie, in Paris, sobbed and sobbed and begged him not to go away again; Emilie, also in Paris, at first laughed and said there were no hard feelings, then drank a bottle of Bordeaux and tried to run him over with her car; Alexandra, also in Paris, made us dinner and sent us merrily on our way; then we headed back up to London, where Becx called him everything from “Arse” to “Wanker”; Michelle said “everything is fine, thanks so much for coming by” but then tried to cut herself, and Caitlin Kitty Kiernen took us out on the town for a night of dancing, proving why she was, rightly, the only one of the Kiernen sisters that anyone ever remembers.

From London, we hit the high seas for a couple of weeks and headed for Spain.

Now, if you know nothing of pirate ships, as I did not, you must be wondering, as I was wondering, how it is that people on ships procure victuals:

I had always imagined that there was some kind of hold below deck where food and water are stored; this is true. But most of what we ate while we were out to sea, was food that was--get this!--delivered by Storks. This explained so much to me, I mean about the Storks delivering babies myth and all, because, especially from below, the great bundles of food that they fly around to ships do look an awful lot like so called “bundles of joy”. Every morning a basket would arrive for us, full of fresh fruit, a loaf of bread, some cheese, a bottle of wine, coffee. Sometimes the hermits, who were organizing these deliveries, would include something random, such as Silly String, but usually Willoughby or Ramone would run off with them before we laid hands on them. Although, in the case of Silly String, Willoughby was at a bit of a spraying disadvantage, if you see what I mean.

But anyway, we had been out to sea for about a week, leisurely enjoying the fantastic weather, relaxing swimming with the friendly sea-animals (and Herman, of course) reading books and playing ukelele by candle-light, when we had our first run-in, 100 miles East of Bordeaux, with RLPs: Real. Live. Pirates.

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