My Daily Roundabout Article 1

[Michael Alexander]

I will let Bob explain to you all how this column of his worked.... read between the line.... here is the first scan...

[Bob Molloy]

                                                                                        Re the Freddie the Flea column: I ran that for a number of months in the Newsletter but in the end the editor had his arm twisted by management to stop the column as it was getting to be a severe problem for some people - including, I suspect, some people in management.
Ironically it was a complete thumb-suck based on nothing at all other than the usual vagaries of any group of people in any small town anywhere in the world.
What made it full of double meanings was the fact that it was written without punctuation so that one sentence ran into the other. The idea came from the writings of Don Marquis, an American, who created Archie and Mehitabel. Archie was a cockroach and Mehitabel a slut of a cat. She spent her time reliving her old lives and loves to Archie who painstakingly wrote them down on a typewriter. As he was only a cockroach his legs were too short to reach all the keys so he used lower case only and of course couldn't reach the punctuation keys so the sentences ran together.
Archie was something of a philosopher who loved Mehitabel and kept trying to give her good advice, which she ignored. The result was a hilarious collection of Mehitabel debauches in which Archie tried to pick up the pieces. If anyone chooses to Google Don Marquis or Archie and Mehitabel you'll get the full story.
Freddie the Flea was based on Archie and of course had the same difficulty in using a typewriter. This caused many people to misread the sentences to mean something completely otherwise, and of course stirred a few guilty consciences. At one stage the editor was being threatened by no less than eight people all claiming they had been defamed by the same item which they believed referred to them. They also demanded to know who the editor's informant was as the incident was known only to a few, and in some cases only to one person. They believed there was some sinister inside whistle-blower operating in town.
It is possible to discern the punctuation after rereading after which you can fit the sentence together. The various names mentioned are also thumb-suck but for a few such as the editor (Philip Bruce, Robert Bruce's Dad) whose other job was Liaison Officer to the GM and as such he became the "lazing officer". The flea got around town by hopping on and off various people, including Sam the GM's dog – an aggressive mutt whose main claim to fame was shagging the various female dogs in town – a not too closely concealed analogy for his owner. The first column credited Marquis with the concept, despite this most people still thought the column was based on actual information. There's nowt so queer as folks as somebody once said.
Regards,
Bob Molloy