Heroic Failures Cartoon
Heroic failures
The least successful attempt to clear molehills
Tired of the 10 large molehills that flourished on his lawn, Mr Oscar Ejiamike decided to remove them. After a vigorous campaign of bombing, gassing and waiting round in the dark with a raised shovel, he found that the 10 molehills survived intact. There were also 22 new ones.
At this point our man decided to 'surprise the moles’ with a midnight poisoning raid. In May 1984 he drove his Jaguar 2.4 automatic to the edge of the lawn and trained the headlamps upon the enemy zone. While reaching across for the poison, Mr Ejiamike knocked the car into reverse and accelerated through the wall of his cottage, knocking over the electric heater, bursting his petrol tanks, setting fire to his newly decorated sitting room, and wrecking his car.
While this certainly surprised the moles, it had no effect on the 32 molehills. Next morning Mr Ejiamike bought 22 bags of ready-mixed cement and announced that he was going to concrete the lawn over.
The Sunday Times (BrE)