At last, someone other than Chris will be the butt of the pub jokes…

Jim looked the part in his elf onesie as he won the pool game

There’s a friend of mine named Jim who reads my column in My Weekly and then tells everybody in our local pub exactly what I’ve been up to.

“You’ll never guess what he did last week. Damn near electrocuted himself! The man’s a liability!”

Consequently, every time I walk into that pub, I spend the first five minutes facing down a barrage of amused mickey-taking. I do get sympathy pints though, so I don’t mind at all.

What I do mind is that Jim is a good, sensible kind of guy and never does anything ridiculous or daft, so I rarely have any sort of come-back to offer at all. Until now. To my surprise, when I walked into the pub last night, I received the usual vocal barrage, but with one major difference – nobody could wait to tell me exactly what Jim had been up to.

The pub had hosted their yearly Christmas charity pool tournament the weekend before, and Jim chose this event to propel himself from straight-man Jim to Calamity James and into the pages of My Weekly.

Jim started the evening well enough, looking the part in his elf onesie and winning his first pool match with ease. It was then his troubles began. Lining up his cue to take a shot in his second round match, he somehow pulled it back way too hard, lost grip, and propelled it straight through the air into the pub Christmas tree.

Not content with this, he then made a desperate lunge to retrieve it, accidentally swinging it wildly enough to send baubles flying in all directions before raising his now tinsel-covered cue sharply up to a sudden halt.

Unfortunately, the thing that had brought the cue to a halt was the referee – and a very sensitive part of the referee at that. Most people thought the ref a bit harsh to disqualify Jim, but given he was crying at the time, his judgment was clouded.

That would probably have been enough, but Jim wasn’t finished.

A little later, and possibly after a mulled wine or two, Jim was settling on his bar stool to watch the last few shots of the tournament final when his backside slipped off the stool and he found himself pitching forward towards the floor. In a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable, he began running in a high speed crouching-waddle straight at the pool table.

The fact he was able to stop himself hitting the floor was quite an achievement, but as he did it by slamming headlong into the pool table… it probably wasn’t.

As he clambered up the side of the table, the left lens of his specs shattered in comedy fashion and he inadvertently swept his hand across the pool table baize, thus completely disrupting the final.

The fact that Jim actually asked me to write his story here suggests to me that he may not have fully recovered from his knock on the head.

It’ll be fun when he reads this one out, though!