The Dartmouth Boggle and Word Yahtzee Sports Club (amateur)

established just before teatime 1993^©

Len Parr Ferris

Way back in the year 1975, old Ma Ferris was laid on her back, sure as can be that the little purple baby she had just squeezed out was not alone.  Even though the doctors had said one, she knew it was two.  The sheer pangs of pain she was recovering from were nothing compared with what was to come…

And so it was that Len came in to the world in second place, behind that fisheyed twin of his.  And on that day, with his belly button still knotted and sticking out, he looked around him with those bulging blinkers and vowed “I will never come second again”

He has been in last place ever since.

As he strived to achieve and strove to achove, he began entering more and more bizarre events in the blind hope that the next event he could win, if not through talent or effort, then by being the only person who was stupid enough to enter.

But even as he closed in on his desire to win, a whole new story was unfolding inside his chest cavity…

Bernie and Slop were little areoli, busy in their usual chore pushing the oxygen blocks into the fast flowing blood stream and fishing out the blue and spent carbon dioxide from the flow.

“Coor, Bernie.  I think the boss must be doing something energetic, cos there sure is a lot of CO2 today.”

“I don’t know Slop, but for gods sakes slow down.  I’m expecting another delivery of Oxygen anytime now and I’m running out of space for all this CO2 of yours.”

Slop looked around to where Bernie was stood totally swamped in CO2 blocks.

“What’s going on, Bernie?”

“I don’t know, but it’s getting hard to move in here for all this stuff.”

“C’mon.  Let’s go and see.”

At that moment the delivery of oxygen arrived.  But instead of the usual truck full, there was just a small wheelbarrow.  The guys unloaded it and stuffed as much CO2 back on to the barrow as possible.  Curious to see what was going on they made their way up to the bronchi, where there was much commotion…

“What’s going on up here?” asked Bernie.

“The guys in muscles are all confused.  They were trying to help out with the whole breathing mechanism when they got orders from the top to shut down the pipes.” said a helpful bronchi “now the pipes are so small we can’t shift stuff up or down apart from a tiny bit”

“But we need the Oxygen…”

“Yeah, and we need to shift some of this CO2 and quick”

At that moment a huge waft of fog came down and knocked out all the muscles.  When the little areoles and the bigger bronchi looked up, they saw that the pipes were clear again 

“Phew.  That was close, Bernie.”

“Yeah.  Too close for my liking, Slop”

Everyone started working properly again and kept an eye on the muscles.

Len has struggled with his asthmatic lungs almost as much as he has struggled with giant spaghetti.  But some people actually die… not from the spaghetti, but from the asthma.

So Len decided to do something massive, something so monumentally stupid, that not only would he win by being the only person monumentally stupid enough to enter, but also when people saw how far he was prepared to go, they would throw money at him for doing it

However, after entering the Flora London Marathon 2005 he found that 38,999 other people were at least as monumentally stupid as him, not least of which were Ed and Ross.

But Len was worried.  Even the chap who started the whole marathon thingie died at the finish. So what chance did Len have with his inferior lungs?

Well, to overcome his concern, Len pledged to give all the cash thrown at him to the lovely people at ASTHMA UK, to aid them in their plight against all things asthmatic.

Please throw money in my general direction and help stem the tide of inferior respiratory systems.  Just send me your details and sit back and watch me suffer on your television set on April 17^th 2005.  (Although I won’t actually be running on top of your TV, because I’ll be running the Flora London Marathon in London that day).

Len Parr Ferris