The Mother of all Cancellations

So anybody who knows me quite well will know what I do for a living, that being that I write books, run a leaflet distribution business, and work in the family bouncy castle business. Working with inflatables, to put it briefly, is as fun as it sounds. However heavy a giant piece of plastic, its blower, and industrial petrol generator are, it's totally worth having to lug them around and deal with the stupidest of the British public, just so you can bounce around for a bit.

Call me childish.


But the majority of the money made from the business is from rentals. Renting a bouncy castle entails lugging all the equipment out to a strangers house/business, setting it up for them, taking their money, and for insurances sake begging them not to blow themselves up in the process.

Recently, we took a booking from a pub in the contender-for-quaintest-town-of-the-year village Stoke Poges (Not pronounced like the Irish folk band, but literally P-O-JES.). With barely a thousand houses in the village, the idea was that we give them a bouncy castle, they say to all the people in the vicinity that they have a bouncy castle, people flock to the pub, and in the process the pub sell a ton of drinks.

It's not revolutionary, but it's business.


Now, if you've ever had the awkward yet enjoyable moment of trying to be serious, but absolutely pissing yourself laughing down the phone at someone, you'll probably have a pretty accurate idea of what the following part went like.

We got a call from the pub, them notifying us that the booking was to be cancelled, all nice and polite so that we wouldn't have to waste our time going there. Fair play, that wasn't the funny part. The laugh came when we asked them why the booking was cancelled, and the grave and deadly serious reply came down the phone-line:

"The village, is closed today."

Now whether you're a fan of 'The League of Gentlemen' or not, you'll probably recognize this bout of British quaintness to be rather hilarious - but they were deadly serious.

The village closure had come with news that there was a gypsy wedding happening the same day of rental, and to any American's reading this, or people who aren't familiar with gypsy traveler ways, this will seem like a bit of a strange reason.

The village, having barely a thousand houses and being inhabited mainly by elderly couples probably only has about two and a half thousand people living in it. The town, also being the home of the now deceased traveler,  was being closed off as a no go area due to it being the destination, for over five thousand people. Now I'm not against gypsy folk, but the fact is that they are a group of people, Nazi input or not, who steal, fight, and generally tend to clash with society.

I have nothing against gypsies, but do take this as a lesson learnt. 


They closed a village for this.


You've been warned.


-Lewis


(P.S. Please don't kill me. My Dad's a conservative it's not my fault.)