A DAFT QUESTION DESERVES!

Les has a critical look at the questions pages of our National Newspaper

I enjoy reading the Question Page in one of our National papers; it assumes, I believe, that if you ask a daft question hopefully you will get a daft answer.

A recent question was "Has a bull ever gone in to a china shop and if so was any damage?" Another one was "Has anyone ever found a needle in a hay stack?" Yet another was "If Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lived at 221b Baker Street who lived at number 221?"

If we start at the last one, it would appear the answer was the Butler, a Mr Hudson who was invalided out of the Army when a stray bullet believed to have been fired by a sniper hit him in the right knee.

This was the story told by the Butler when he applied for the position with Holmes and Watson. Something told Holmes that all was not well with this story and he set about getting to the truth of the matter in true Holmes fashion.

He quickly discovered that it wasn't a sniper who fired the bullet at all but none other than the Butler's Wife, Mrs Hudson, who was quite frankly fed up to her back teeth with her Husbands womanising. Further brilliant detective work by Holmes also revealed, later to be admitted by the Butler, that he wasn't even shot in the knee but in fact in another part of his body. Holmes, ever anxious to save the blushes of his Butler, never did disclose just where the bullet finished up but it appears that from the moment Mrs Hudson pulled the trigger her Husbands womanising days were over.

The Butler served Holmes and Watson faithfully for many years during which time no one ever saw Mrs Hudson. What really happened, as Holmes was aware, was that many years previously she had left her

Husband and had gone off to live with a retired Vicar.

Before retiring the Vicar, in addition to his pastoral duties, also kept a china shop in Abbeygate Street in Bury St Edmunds. And it was in this very shop that this bull appeared. It had escaped as it was being driven to the nearby slaughter house. No damage was done to the contents of the shop as the bull spotted a cow which just happened to be going by and the bull decided that there was plenty of other ways he could spend his time without smashing up china shops.

The Vicar, in later life, achieved some sort of celebrity status when the Guinness Book of Records showed him to be the only man ever to have found a needle in a hay stack. This came about when he accepted a "bit part" in the film "The Outlaw" which featured Jayne Russell, and it was when he was cavorting in the hay with the delectable Jayne that he came upon this needle.

And to think that some people will tell you that a Vicar's life is a dull one, they don't spend all of their time in Church you know.

Les Lawrence