This response to The Kick-About No.146 began with an earworm—the phrase,‘You’re a bauble, Barbara—a toy—nothing more!’ After that, as is the way with stories, it was a matter of figuring out to whom this scrap of dialogue belonged—and who ‘Barbara’ might be. The resulting ballad, if you can call it that, was fun to figure out and I enjoyed getting to grips with all the period detail.
In common with ‘Leonard Snell and the Spiders’, the decision to use a traditional rhyming structure came from the games you can play with words, and the intensity of character and place it offers up. It was a near-thing, getting this done in time, but I had the pleasure of working again with actor Dan Snelgrove, who was up for bringing this caper to life, and giving voice to its motley crew of characters.
Enjoy more short stories in
Red's Kingdom 
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