The situation with Widow Harvey simply cannot continue. Not only do her woeful attempts at culinary blandishment become more and more inedible (the other night she served a soup that looked like Satan's piss and tasted worse. This was followed by - if I'm not mistaken - kangaroos testicles fried in a batter so stodgy that the things could have been shot out of mortars against the Little Corsican's army.)
And every room in the house seems filled with the woman's bubbies. (And by "bubby" I do not mean her baby.) The woman flops out the lacticular appendages at the drop of a hat. I wish someone would drop two hats so she could cover herself up.
The woman has no sense of what is appropriate in a Vice Regal abode. I walked into my office yesterday and she was in there with her back to me, apparently suckling her horrid brat. At the sound of the door opening she turned suddenly and I swear before God, nearly caught me across the temple with her great swinging dug. When a man can't enter his own room for fear of being battered by breasts then action must be taken.
Worse still, when her bosom flapped about my ears I was accompanied by the Reverend Charlie Howard, Master Criminal and Moral Arbiter of the Colony. And if the Gossiping Padre saw what was going on in my office, then no doubt by now every member of his congregation has heard all the milky details.
Therefore I have asked Georgie Stevenson to quietly place an advertisement in the next issue of the Gazette and Register offering a position of cook. No names, of course and enquiries to Stevenson's office. I am paying the Mad Poisoner ten pounds a year for the chance of having her murder me, so for someone halfway decent I am prepared to go as high as sixteen. We shall see.
Charlie had come to see me about an issue that has him in the sort of tizzy that only Howard can get himself into.
It seems that word has got about that Light made provision for a cemetery down in the south west corner of the city - by the corner of South and West Terraces. Of course, just because Light stuck it on the map doesn't mean that it is actually there yet. It is on my list of things to do but the list is currently up to six hundred and nineteen items and fixing up the grave yard currently stands at four hundred and nine.
But it appears that people just can't wait. We have had a few deaths here in the colony, both adults and children, and their relatives have decided to bury them in the proper place. Howard tells me that people have been digging graves by themselves and burying their loved ones themselves.
I'm not sure that Charlie's objection isn't that people doing it themselves means he doesn't get paid for his professional services, but the chief issue seems to be that people are being too damned lazy to dig the graves properly and to the right depth. It seems that the great beneficiaries of the grave yard at the moment are a large number of very well fed dogs who have started to frequent the area. And need I mention the offensive smell?
Well, I suppose we must set about finding a sexton and perhaps start to think about regulating the cemetery. Six hundred and twenty one it seems.
The half man half rabbit has managed to get it into his head that the trees need to be cleared from the city square. With an inefficiency typical of Fisher he has set about chopping away at anything that looks vegetative with little plan or little reference to any map. Light stepped in and told him what an arse he was when he start chopping down trees in the Colonel's beloved "park lands".
Eventually Brown and Mann took him aside and suggested he try cutting down the trees in the "roadways" that are to be seen nowhere else but on Light's map. Clearly Fisher thought this a topping idea because he's been wandering about the town with a pot of paint, marking trees that need to go, I heard a rumour that he's planning to offer all comers threepence a trunk in order to get the trees cut as quickly as possible.
My remaining Marines - who have been christened The Praetorian Guard by local wags - have decided to camp out now that the Buffalo has left. They have set up a campsite in the park lands on the banks of the stream at the corner of North and East Terraces and hold roaring entertainments there all through the night. To make themselves appear useful they have taken to wandering about the place, "arresting" any poor soul who has the misfortune to catch their eye.
Last week John Hallett, who is as deaf as a plank of teak, was going about his business in Hindley Street, when the Marines accosted him and demanded to know where he was going. It seems that the Marines had decided, for what reason God alone knows, that Hallett, as upright and respectable a man as ever wore shoe leather, looked suspiciously like a desperado. Of course, Hallett,bless his soul, didn't hear a word of what they said and just ignored them. He suddenly found himself bundled off to the Marines' camp where he was manacled to a tree and left there, out in the rain, over night. (Where they got the idea for this I do not know)
I have smoothed things over with Hallett and - with more difficulty - Mrs Hallett, but really, the Marines must learn to use some commonsense.
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