Sweaty Patel’s Tackle Shop

The Sweaty part was easy since the man seemed to be constantly covered in a layer of fluid that was a mix between sweat and lard, and smelt of cigarettes and onions. The Patel part was a mystery lost in time and pipe smoke.

Sweaty Patel has gathered the usually tackle shop clique about him, Dry Bob who’s skin was like sandpaper and left small mounds of dry skin whenever he scratched his buttocks (which was often). Whistling Ralph, who had won his dentures in a WI raffle and were so ill fitting dogs followed him if he said a sentence with too many letter S’s in it. The last of the group was Rattling Pete, whose cough sounded like a dozen marbles being shaken in a tin bucket.

Sweaty Patel himself looked like someone had sneezed on a dead cat and tried to swipe it up with chip fat.

Sweaty ran the shop like a mix between a prison guard and the aftermath of a train crash. Bits and pieces of tackle crammed seemingly randomly about the shop but Sweaty Patel watched every customer in case some kids should try to steal a maggot or two.

There was a back room separated from the rest of the shop by a thin curtain of indescribable colour, best described as the colour of the inside of a French man’s jockstrap that has never been washed for 6 years. Behind this curtain was rumoured to be the largest collection of pornographic material outside of Manchester, where Dirty Mo ran his empire of sleaze from burnt out burger van in the Manchester branch of Asda’s car park.

The day that Sweaty Patel’s burnt down was a sad loss to the tackle trade and an even bigger loss to the Charles Scumbody museum of scud mags.
No one is sure what really happen to this day, some blamed Bottomless Jim, whose buttock had been lost in an incident with a bacon slicer and had been the first person in Britain to have an arse transplant. Unfortunately his body had rejected the donor buttocks, which had come from a circus midget that had met an untimely end when a short sighted elephant had mistaken him for a fig roll.

It was said Bottomless Jim was lighting a fag in the back room whilst reading a copy of ‘Undone Nuns’ when a sneeze from Geezer White, another of the Sweat’s regulars, caused him to drop the ciggie.

Geezer White had misfortune to have slipped on New Year’s Eve and fallen on a party blower, which had become permanently lodged up his left nostril. Whenever Geezer sneezed the party blower would unfurl and the Geezer would emit a loud hoot.

The party blower is said to have knocked the lit cigarette from Bottomless Jim’s hand into a well thumbed copy of ‘Girls in Garters’ and this in turn set light to the curtain, which was so greasy it ignited the whole shop in minutes.

All those in the shop that day died in the blaze except for Boozy Alf, whose nose was so red from drink it was used to guide planes in to Manchester airport on particularly foggy nights.

Over time another tackle shop was started in the village and although the new shop owner tried he could never quite capture the mixture of grubbiness and sleaze that was Sweaty Patel’s.