If you’re old enough, as Under The Counter most certainly is, you’ll remember the 1958 smash hit ‘Hoots Mon’ by popular beat combo Lord Rockingham’s XI. You know, the instrumental with the line “There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose!” that Maynards ripped off for a Wine Gums advert back in the day.
Well, fast forward to now and – hoots mon! – if someone didn’t go and phone the fire brigade when they discovered a moose loose inside their hoose.
The Auld Boy scoffed at this notion, fed up to his back falsers with tales of people dialling 999 because they’d been sold a cold kebab and so on, until he discovered the caller was in Alaska and the moose was a 36-stone walking lump of venison that had stoated through a skylight into said someone’s basement.
One tranquiliser dart and a large tarpaulin later, the unfortunate beast was back out in the sub-zero temperatures where it belonged, groggily posing for pictures with its smiling rescuers – and the grim-faced gunman who’d shot it in the bahookey.
This was a more favourable outcome than UTC’s far-fetched proposal, which involved sourcing a gigantic cat and starving it for a fortnight…
