by Boreades » 11:08 am
You sure you haven't read my script already?
I did have one episode where the Chuffing Puffer and the Virtual Phoenix floating restaurant got as far as La Rochelle, on Burns Night, exporting live Haggis without a license.
In a previous episode, the Haggis had been freshly poached from the Isle of Skye. As usual, we had a lot of people on hand giving a lot of advice on how to catch them. Some who claimed to be Haggis experts say that the legs of the Haggis are longer on one side of its body than the other, in order to allow it to better stand on the steep slopes of the Highlands. As a consequence, the Haggis can only run around hills in one direction, and to catch one you simply run around the hill in the opposite direction. That might work fine in better weather, but we spent nearly all our time on our backsides sliding down the hills in the snow. No fun when you're wearing a kilt, commando-style. We were also advised to disguise our scent with liberal amounts of whisky, and then adopt a stumbling gait, swerving from side to side, so that the animal won't see you coming. Fortunately, after swallowing liberal amounts of whisky, as antifreeze, swerving from side to side got easier and easier.
For the Burns Night Supper, one of the crew took care of dispatching the wee beasties in a humane manner. She screamed at them, and they dropped dead with shock. We had some problems getting the piper sober enough, and there was a mix-up with the paperwork. We'd lost the Address to a Haggis. Instead of "Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!", our French guests got recitations from the collected works of William Topaz McGonagall. Fortunately, after the volume of duty-free whisky they had already consumed, they couldn't tell the difference.
More duty-free whisky was bartered for duty-free brandy and cognac.