Spring has sprung and my latest pub visit finds me off of my customary West Country stomping ground and in Sunny South Oxfordshire on tour with my local pub's shove ha'penny team where we've just played a tournament at the Leathern Bottle in Lewknor.
And a lovely old pub it was too I thought to myself as we trudged up from the car park through a sea of yellow daffodil heads nodding in the breeze before such notions of rural tranquility were cruelly shattered upon our entrance to the pub.
There we found a rather boisterous throng of burly young men from the local gym who, owing to the recent harsh weather conditions, were having a belated Christmas party and were taking turns to bench press a dwarf that they had hired for the occasion.
A lively little fellow he was too was our Ivan. He came over from Russia in the 1970s and joined Billy Smart's Circus and enjoyed a relatively lucrative career trading on his being a dwarf.
Unfortunately for him, all this came to an end in the 1990's when PC diktats issued by the actor's union, Equity, deemed any form of entertainment involving dwarves as being discriminatory and offensive and the work soon dried up.
I have to confess, I found his lachrymose musings on these halcyon days slightly disingenuous as he was always beaten to gigs by David Rappaport, the dwarf from central casting who got all the diminutive roles back then. Pretty much in the same way Burt Kwouk did whenever an actor of oriental ethnicity was required.
In fact Ivan's only real claim to fame was that he had a starring role in a 1980's advert for Mazda. The car featured in the ad had the smallest 6 cylinder engine on the market at the time and he featured as one of 6 dwarves stood in a line jumping up and down to the sound of a revving engine thus approximating the motion of the 6 tiny pistons.(I was going to call his bluff and point out that Mazdas have wankel engines and therefore the pistons would move in a rotary motion, but I refrained on account of his rough diamond friends).
He was certainly having a ball that evening, that's for sure. In between being man handled by the beef cakes from the gym, he was throwing down pints of Brakspears and carousing with the female patrons. Indeed, the ladies were allowing him to commit no end of transgressions that would have resulted in a clip round the ear for any non-dwarf and at one point he had his head up the vicar's wife's dress and was visibly enjoying the experience.
Ever the consummate professional, Ivan knew when to call it a day and announced that he needed to get his beauty sleep for the following morning as he was booked by the ladies of the local pilates class to use as a Swiss ball on which to perform their situps.
And he gets paid for all this! No wonder, as he made his way to the exit where his taxi awaited, he turned to us all with thumbs held aloft and declared
"It's fecking great being a dwarf!"
Amen to that.
And a lovely old pub it was too I thought to myself as we trudged up from the car park through a sea of yellow daffodil heads nodding in the breeze before such notions of rural tranquility were cruelly shattered upon our entrance to the pub.
There we found a rather boisterous throng of burly young men from the local gym who, owing to the recent harsh weather conditions, were having a belated Christmas party and were taking turns to bench press a dwarf that they had hired for the occasion.
A lively little fellow he was too was our Ivan. He came over from Russia in the 1970s and joined Billy Smart's Circus and enjoyed a relatively lucrative career trading on his being a dwarf.
Unfortunately for him, all this came to an end in the 1990's when PC diktats issued by the actor's union, Equity, deemed any form of entertainment involving dwarves as being discriminatory and offensive and the work soon dried up.
I have to confess, I found his lachrymose musings on these halcyon days slightly disingenuous as he was always beaten to gigs by David Rappaport, the dwarf from central casting who got all the diminutive roles back then. Pretty much in the same way Burt Kwouk did whenever an actor of oriental ethnicity was required.
In fact Ivan's only real claim to fame was that he had a starring role in a 1980's advert for Mazda. The car featured in the ad had the smallest 6 cylinder engine on the market at the time and he featured as one of 6 dwarves stood in a line jumping up and down to the sound of a revving engine thus approximating the motion of the 6 tiny pistons.(I was going to call his bluff and point out that Mazdas have wankel engines and therefore the pistons would move in a rotary motion, but I refrained on account of his rough diamond friends).
He was certainly having a ball that evening, that's for sure. In between being man handled by the beef cakes from the gym, he was throwing down pints of Brakspears and carousing with the female patrons. Indeed, the ladies were allowing him to commit no end of transgressions that would have resulted in a clip round the ear for any non-dwarf and at one point he had his head up the vicar's wife's dress and was visibly enjoying the experience.
Ever the consummate professional, Ivan knew when to call it a day and announced that he needed to get his beauty sleep for the following morning as he was booked by the ladies of the local pilates class to use as a Swiss ball on which to perform their situps.
And he gets paid for all this! No wonder, as he made his way to the exit where his taxi awaited, he turned to us all with thumbs held aloft and declared
"It's fecking great being a dwarf!"
Amen to that.
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