Contrasting Lifestyles

By Patrick Vickery

Ralph is an amiable old timer who sports a handlebar moustache and wears colourful braces to support his corduroy trousers. His moustache and braces can occasionally be spotted striding across Dornoch Bridge accompanied by supermarket shopping.

Sometimes I give Ralph and his fashionable adornments a lift.

Sometimes I don’t. It depends on my inclination for companionable chat.

Ralph is a vegetarian who takes great pride in growing organic vegetables. One morning, while tending to his vegetable plot, a dead duck dropped like a stone from the sky, followed moments later by the emergence through his hedge of a gun toting gentleman, also sporting braces and a handle bar moustache, who enquired politely whether a dead duck had passed this way. At this point the air hummed blue with expletives as Ralph expressed his considerable opinions on sporting life (braces pinged, moustaches quivered) and the dead duck became a tug of war between contrasting lifestyles.

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