Joe the Plumber Part three.

I am beginning to think Joe's ears are burning with all this talk about him, but then if you are an entertainer I think it goes with the territory.

The elevating story of the raisins which could raise machines.

Joe's mother used to cook rice -pudding and put a few raisins in it to sweeten it up. As all children like to do he then ate the rest of the raisins from the bag. Not long after, the cooker began rising up into the air and nearly fell on top of him.
Later in life he went to work in London.
One day he was outside on the street and he had a similar experience with a car. Another time he was in a house fixing a washing machine and it began rising up and again he thought it was going to fall on him. He didn't feel well at all, so he went to the doctor. After some questioning about what he had been eating it turned out that the connection was raisins. I couldn't figure out how a simple thing like raisins could cause hallucinations, as they are meant to be a healthy snack. My children used to bring them to school as part of their packed lunch. So it turned out that it wasn't the raisins themselves that were causing the machines to rise up. You know that they can last months, even years in storage. Well, it is no accident. There is a preservative put into them to make them last, and Joe was having a reaction to it every time he ate anything containing raisins. I found it hilarious that the hallucinations came in the form of menacing machines, considering that he is a plumber.

A joke as he was walking out the door with his tool bag.

Two Kerry men were talking over the phone.
"My business isn't going well at all. I haven't sold a thing in over three months."
"Is that so?"
"T'is man. I am thinking of giving it up and opening a brothel."
"Is that so? How are you going to be able to sell soup, if you can't even run your old business properly?"

How someone could cram all these stories plus some, into an hour and simultaneously fix on some new taps is beyond me. Next time I lave a leak, I will get out my dictaphone, because he told them way better than I ever could. He even used props as illustration. Kitchen paper, junk mail, the pepper pot and other items were all introduced at selected moments when words were starting to fail him. At one point he did a kind of shuffle across the floor in his boots to illustrate how he had to walk when going through the woods in the dark at night. This was the story about the heron which he thought was a banshee. And how you had to be careful not to have your ankles bitten by the badgers who live a night-life on the forest floor. I remember my 'nanny' telling me a similar story about badgers, and how you should carry a stick and snap it in half if they sunk their teeth into your leg. They would hear the snap and let go, thinking they had broken your leg. Which obviously was their main aim. True or not, I always used to carry a stick if I found myself alone in the woods in the dark. This wasn't very often, let it be said. Although there is nothing nicer that a walk in the woods at night in the remote country-side of Ireland, especially if there is a lake nearby. We don't have to contend with snakes or bears. Badgers are the only real danger. But then if you are sure to carry a stick for snapping, all you have to worry about after that is the banshees. That is another story.