The Works of a Friend

I would've posted this on writing elsewhere, but lets face it, no one reads those threads. I have a good friend who is a writer and he asked me to put one of his stories up here. It's mostly british humor, so I figure'd you'll enjoy it. :) thanks ya'll, tell us what you think, it's greatly appreciated. the link isn't working so I'll just post the whole thing here:

(remember it's not my story)

The Private Life of Sir Paddy O'Flaherty by: Kevin Connoly

Needless to say, everybody has heard of Belfast's most famous composer Paddy O'Flaherty. I'm sure I don't need to delve too deeply into the extraordinary details of his bizarre death or his amazing success story here, since the tabloids have told the story back to front ' and, I'm reliably informed, they intend to tell the story the right way around in the near future. However, I will touch upon just a smidgen of the great man's private life.

Strange to relate, for a man who will undoubtedly go down in history as the greatest classical composer of the Twentieth Century (apart from all the ones who were much better than him), Paddy O'Flaherty couldn't read music. He wrote all his major masterpieces down the way they sounded, much to the annoyance of his highbrow contemporaries ' many of whom died long before he was born, but that didn't stop their multicoloured nostrils from literally flaring in their graves.

Paddy O'Flaherty wrote his music down on whatever came to hand when inspiration struck him. Unfortunately he was always on the toilet when the aforementioned inspiration struck him, so the majority of the world's greatest museums are teeming to the rafters with sacred sheets of toilet paper (mostly unused, although there is one fascinating exception in the Louvre) containing O'Flaherty's original scores.

Sadly, nobody has yet mastered the intricate technique of deciphering an O'Flaherty score, because he wrote in a form that was totally original and unique. It's nigh on impossible even now to see how the great man himself could possibly have remembered his symphonies via his hastily-scribbled notes. 'Da da da dee, dum dum dum' is the opening of his most famous ditty Symphony Number Nine In Dee Minor. And yet, peculiarly, the very same notes are jotted down on the lavatorial-type score for another of his countless classics, The Dum Dum Sonata ' a completely different tempo and a completely different tune.

Thankfully, O'Flaherty came to prominence in the era of the gramophone record, so we mere mortals can retain our old 78s, 45s and LPs to remind us of the master's tunes ' which modern-day experts have struggled to write down in a more conventional manner, with little success. Paddy O'Flaherty seems to have used musical notes that simply don't exist any more. 'Dum' seems to come somewhere in between 'soh' and 'lah' on the musical scale, but 'doo' has yet to be rediscovered.

'I know it's there somewhere, but I just can't find it,' one eminent musicologist was heard to yell in between screams while finally being carted off to his friendly local neighbourhood asylum.

Incredibly, Paddy O'Flaherty was a virtuoso on both the spoons and the comb. The man's talents were limitless. He it was, indeed, who invented the Flarmonica ' a genius (although perhaps slightly madcap) concoction of a harmonica and a bucketful of belly-button fluff.

Regrettably, O'Flaherty was the only man able to play this most angelic-sounding of instruments. He used the Flarmonica to especially good effect on the album of the soundtrack of the motion picture about the opening and closing night of his magical opera From Belly-Buttons To Chocolate Buttons (the wondrous story of a confectionery manufacturer who becomes a naughty serial-killer, and does unspeakable things with his dismembered victims; I won't spoil your enjoyment by telling you what happens).

Paddy O'Flaherty was involved in every single stage of the production of his operas. He wrote not only the tunes but also the words to both the A' and B-sides of the 45 RPM single of his three-minute opera about a man who has an out-of-body-experience and is subsequently arrested on a charge of indecent exposure while flying naked over his hometown (his soul is eventually sent to prison for a three-year stretch, but his body isn't allowed to visit it).

Oddly enough, considering the fact that O'Flaherty's operatic gems had such complicated themes, his lyrics usually consisted entirely of 'Doo's and 'Dee's and 'Doo wop she bop's. I honestly don't think the great man could spell anything else.

Paddy O'Flaherty was only too well aware that he had inherited his creative streak from his father's side of the family, because, like his whole family line before him, his father ' once a top-selling author, until he was sued for stealing the words to all his novels from a dictionary ' was a raving lunatic (or so it says on his gravestone).

They say there's a fine line between genius and madness, well Paddy O'Flaherty was the proof of the pudding. He wasn't, to be fair, what you might commonly call a sane man. To say the very least, he was a tad eccentric. O'Flaherty was totally convinced that he was a reincarnation of his great hero Vincent Van Gogh; so much so that if and when anybody should ever happen to cross him he would threaten ' if they didn't apologize instantly ' to cut both his ears off, even though he clearly needed them to hold his spectacles on.

'Paddy went to his grave with both his ears intact, as far as I am aware,' his doctor told the Belfast Telegraph a month after the city's fifth most famous celebrity died. 'Then again,' she added, 'I must confess I didn't actually count them at the time; it never crossed my mind, I was too upset. After all, how many people can honestly claim on their CVs that their best friend committed suicide with a dish of pilchards wrapped in cling film?'

Thankfully, O'Flaherty didn't kill himself until late on in his life; extremely late on¦ in fact it was probably the last thing he ever did.

Paddy O'Flaherty was an avid collector. He had ten boxes full of avids in his favourite Eskimo girlfriend's igloo alone. And, to my eternal pride, the composer kept three cardboard boxes filled with his phlegm in my attic. I flushed it down the toilet after he died ' I couldn't wait to get rid of the stuff! ' but then the late, great man's fan-club belatedly informed me that I could have sold the collector's item for well over a million pounds. There are some pretty weird people out there.

O'Flaherty also collected anything remotely connected with lavatories. Indeed, there was a toilet in every room in his house, and in most cupboards as well. His friends used to be ever so slightly embarrassed when, every once in a while (or sometimes twice) O'Flaherty invited a group of Belfast dignitaries to dinner and then proceeded to proudly demonstrate the art (for want of a better word) of excreting bodily effluent into an emerald-green portaloo on top of the dinner table halfway through the first course ' which usually turned out to be the last course, incidentally. He was a rather silly man.

Certain musical experts even believe there may have been a cryptic lavatorial reference in the title of O'Flaherty's depressingly-comic opera about the life and times of a fork-lift truck-driver, I'm Just Going To Dump My Load; but his doctor was quite certain that her old friend would never have stooped that low, as he was a gentleman (at least when his trousers weren't down around his ankles).

Paddy O'Flaherty had friends both high and low ' from six foot four to two foot three, you name it. Nobody disliked him. True, a great many people wanted to kill him (most notably the whole population of Scunthorpe, naturally enough), but they didn't actually dislike him, as such. Just because they wanted him dead didn't necessarily mean that they wished him any harm. Why, even his most fanatical supporters would just as soon have seen him slip on a banana-skin and tumble under a double-decker bus as push him under it themselves. But when he eventually snuffed it, the value of their O'Flaherty record-collections would soar astronomically.

Paddy's mother was one of his biggest fans (six foot two if she was an ounce). She had a copy of every record her son had ever released. Her collection was priceless; when Paddy kicked the bucket its pricelessness would double. Old Mrs. O'Flaherty's rarest record, a 78 entitled Wop Bop Plop, was worth at least as much as the vinyl it was printed on¦ maybe even more if the hole in the middle was thrown in for free.

Then there was the picture-disc of the maestro's magnum opus, Piano Concerto For Euphoniums, which showed Paddy having his knees shaved by two purple-eyed midgets prior to receiving his knighthood from the Queen. This was one of only two copies issued, the other having been used by Paddy himself as a makeshift cornflakes bowl.

After gratefully accepting his long-underdue knighthood, Sir Paddy O'Flaherty developed delusions of grandeur. He started to think there was nothing under the sun that he couldn't do. Oppenheimer had split the atom? Well O'Flaherty would put it back together again. And Einstein's greatest achievement was E = MC2? Well, O'Flaherty was formulating a theory called C = ME3 (if only he knew what it meant).

And he was going to rediscover the Ark (apparently Noah had lost it ' how clumsy can you get), and maybe even manage to invent a bran-based breakfast cereal that you didn't have to sit on the toilet to eat. And that was just for starters. Yes indeed, O'Flaherty was determined to solve all of the world's major problems¦ just as soon as he had wrapped this dish of pilchards in cling film and applied it to his person, in a lavish attempt to reach a brand new musical note provisionally entitled 'Eek'.

Paddy O'Flaherty was buried in a coffin made of cream-crackers and cheese. Nobody really believed that the maestro had actually intended to take his own life, although perhaps the evidence was a little on the overwhelming side. He had just completed his autobiography with a paragraph describing in great detail the actual manner of his forthcoming demise, and how he would be buried in a coffin composed of his own favourite snack. He reckoned (and not without foundation) that he had never seen a worm eat cream-crackers, certainly not with cheese.

Before cashing in her priceless Paddy O'Flaherty record-collection at Lloyd's of London, the decomposing composer's heart-broken mother insisted that he be buried in the precise manner that he had predicted, otherwise his money-spinning autobiography would have been ruined.