The Captain's House

 All of my companions have catchy monikers:


Drama.

Weasel.

Buffy.

We took the boat around the point for fish and chips.

I met these characters in Morocco, and they invited me up for a weekend in Wales.

Buffy is excitable and always needs reassurance from the group.

She is actually known to slap people if they are not focused enough on her.

Somehow, we get along just fine.

Weasel and Drama have been friends for so long that they make their own gay jokes.

Weasel is a swarthy little man with a thick Welsh accent.

Drama is a willowy and excitable actor- always complaining that he is being typecast as either a poor man’s Jon Heder or a crack addict.

On the window of the fish and chips place, they have written:

“Probably the best fish and chips you’ll ever eat.”

They probably would have been the best,

but something about the rash of ten year old rugby players infecting the place with their dingy teal shirts and sticky looking faces seemed to limit my abilities to evaluate this particular fish and chips experience relative to my lifetime of other fish and chips experiences.

Erosion is claiming part of the cliff along part of the main beach in New Quay, Wales. The interesting thing to me, is the viscous grey clay gathered at the bottom. It has the consistency of a wet cake batter-
I’m just guessing, since I’ve never attempted anything that rigorous.

We leave the dock and make our way back to the Captain's old estate.

We are staying of course, in the mansion of one of the most successful shipping captains in the Welsh history.

Apparently he died violently when his massive wall of, oddly enough, personalized bricks, collapsed and left him trapped. He ended up starving to death beneath that proverbial ‘ton of bricks.‘

The town has placed a plaque on the sidewalk in front of the estate to denote this tragedy. It is one of those historical markers that oxidize almost upon placement.

Weasel and the others are drinking Bell’s eight year old scotch whiskey, and I have sampled some five year old Boddingtons beer.

In the foyer, Weasel approached me with a request.

He wanted to perform a séance, but thought that the others would only go along if I suggested it. Sounded like he had requested it too often.

Immediately, I agreed that a séance seemed appropriate.

We could get the Captain back down here to ask what was going on

with all the personalized bricks in that wall.

Why Personalized?

Why not just monogram them, instead of writing your full name?

I was convinced it would be a little like visiting Morocco: some weirdness, but harmless; good people if you try to speak their language.

From the internet, Wikihow feebly offers us the grammatically poor reassurance:

“Have fun and remember, you're talking to a dead person, it's all right you'll die too someday.”

(Continued on Thursday)