Snow joke for the dustmen

I CALLED in bags of favours for this assignment but it paid off in the end as I was able to send an email to a closely guarded address.

I’d been partly amused, partly infuriated by the hysterical reaction to the news that a dustman had been sacked for decapitating a snowman while on his rounds in Hereford. Thousands have signed a petition demanding his reinstatement. Others think he should be boiled alive.

We humans are so predictable. But I wanted to find out what the snowmen of this world thought.

I prepared for a long wait but soon received a reply from Glacial Gordon, the world’s longest-living snowman, from his ice house in Greenland. Sadly, even top snowmen have PR people these days and the email was little more than a plea to humans to stop sharpening carrots for noses, because it makes all their creations look like snooty Frenchmen.

Gordon, I was informed, did not comment on individual cases but I was given a number for Dalwhinnie Dave, in the Scottish Highlands. (If only readers realised the effort that goes into this reporting lark!)

Dave was happy to talk but asked me to get a move on since the Met Office had forecast a drop of two degrees that afternoon and he’d only just had a new mouth.

“Och aye, we’ve all heard about Hereford Harry,” he said, promptly apologised for slipping into Scottish dialect because, as he explained, snowmen get their nationality from where they hail from, not where they land.

“So, you want to know what I think of the dustmen that did for Harry. Well, I dinnae gi’ a monkey’s! We snow people come and go. Here one day, down the drain the next.

“Harry was out on the street, which makes him sort of public property, though we never really belong to anyone, you understand. And he was never built by the three-year-old boy whose mum kicked up a fuss – young Harry’s twice as big as the wain.

“Anyway, here’s a story for you,” Dave added. “That Newcastle United striker, Joelinton – him that put his picture online while he was having his haircut in lockdown. Now that really is stupid.

“I’ve read he’s paid 80 grand a week, yet he’s only scored five times in 58 games.

“That dustman, young Callum Woodhouse, he had a fair kick on him. Not easy to get your foot up that high. Perhaps Newcastle should give him a game.”

And with that Dave laughed and laughed until all I could hear was a slushy sound and a drip, drip, drip.