A Pun Too Far
やりすぎた駄洒落
It was Mr Thorne, of all people, who brought the matter to a head, and he did so with a .
Puns, in Little Wibbling, were regarded as one regards damp: unavoidable, faintly shameful, and best not encouraged.
"I have," Thorne announced, with the beaming pride of a man who has thought of something clever precisely once, "the perfect ."
He unveiled it with a flourish: "A GOOD MAN AT REST — WE SHALL NOT BOARD ANOTHER."
The double meaning, he explained at unnecessary length, lay in 'board', which referred both to the wooden bench and to the committee, or 'board', upon which they all sat.
There was a pause while the committee performed the mental arithmetic that puns demand and generally do not repay.
"It is," said Miss Featherstone at last, choosing her words as one chooses one's steps across a bog, "certainly a play on words."
"It is a play on several," said Binks grimly, "and none of them can act."
"I rather think," Thorne pressed on, deaf to the frost in the room, "that 'rest' works on two levels also, the bench being a place of rest and Pockle being, as it were, at rest himself."
"He is dead, Mr Thorne," said Mrs Crumb, "not on his lunch break."
But the damage, as damage does, had already begun to spread.
Deirdre, in a she would regret for years, mentioned the proposed to her cousin, who mentioned it to the county paper, who could not believe their luck.
By Friday the headline read: "PARISH IN A PICKLE OVER POCKLE PLAQUE," a so shameless that even Thorne had the grace to .
The article observed, with the wounding politeness of the press, that the committee had "clearly bench-marked a new low in local wit."
Radio Wibbling, a station broadcast largely to sheep, ran a phone-in on the affair.
Listeners were invited to submit their own inscriptions, and did so with the boundless enthusiasm of people who would never have to carve them.
"SIT DOWN, YOU'RE ROCKING THE BENCH," suggested one; "REST IN PIECES," offered another, which struck even the presenter as a plank too far.
Mr Binks, who prized his above rubies, found himself described in print as "the plank of the panel," and did not sleep for two nights.
Miss Featherstone convened an emergency session to consider the committee's public standing, which had, in the space of a week, gone from unremarkable to unmentionable.
"We have become," she said, with the understatement of a captain noting a slight leak, "a source of amusement."
"We have become a ," corrected Binks, and even he seemed unaware that he had made one.
It was agreed, in a rare outbreak of unanimity, that no further puns would be entertained, submitted, or in any circumstances carved.
Thorne, sensing his moment of genius had curdled, retreated into wounded silence, muttering that no one appreciated craftsmanship.
"The trouble with a ," Miss Featherstone reflected aloud, "is that it invites the whole world to sit down uninvited."
Everyone nodded, and no one dared point out that she had, just then, made one herself.
The bench, meanwhile, had acquired a small crowd of tourists, who came to photograph the famous furniture and left disappointed to find it merely a bench.
It occurred to Deirdre, watching them go, that the town had contrived to become ridiculous over an object that asked nothing of anyone but to be sat upon.
That night, unable to sleep, she opened the minute book and began, against every instinct she possessed, to invent.