Rubble Club Archives

Hello, this is Madge Dumpling your windswept Chairman speaking. You have arrived in the breezy doorway of the parlour of my temporary headquarters (an old upturned pram in a pile of rubble on Blackpool’s Central Promenade). I know you expected it to be the Stone Quarry of Undergrowby where all the Undergrowby pet rocks are born, but for once I am unable to get time off one of my part-time jobs so the venue has been changed. This morning, as well as hosting the Rubble Club Meeting, I am also in sole charge of digging operations here on the Prom. I often have to do two or more things at once, and this is one of those times. I am quite indispensable to the promenade building team because no one manages a rubble pile quite like me. Those big mechanical diggers can wreak havoc in the wrong hands. I have to watch them like a hawk or they would mess up the rubble. I make sure it is stacked neatly in orderly piles of small, medium and large rocks, with all the sand swept into one giant heap for the building of pet rock sandcastles. I go through all the small rocks picking out those I know will make nice pet rocks, then I tell the builders(who lack my world-famous expertise, but are not completely useless) to make a nice new promenade with the rest. It has taken me all year to sort it all out, but there is not far to go now.

Do the best you can to enjoy yourselves, Rubble Clubbers. There will be line-dancing later, and news of the latest competition. One of you could nip over to the Golden Mile and get some chips and a bag of those (mysteriously popular) soft doughnuts for the buffet. I did find a few in a bin but my friends the Promenade pigeons scoffed them all earlier when they came to exchange gossip with me. (I thought they only befriended me for my world famous rock cake crumbs but I am now beginning to suspect they will eat anything). The gravel tea, thanks to Malcolm, my husband,  is stewing merrily on the stove over there, (my Promenade blend) so there will be no need to bring any pop. The Promenade builders, who are expert tea drinkers, are growing fond of my special beverages and I dare say they will be sorry when the job (and my promenade catering) is over. They want my recipes (who doesn’t?)but I have told them they will just have to buy a pet rock so they can attend the Rubble Club and partake of my rubblicious buffets in the future if they want to keep their taste buds alive.  (Well, we have to get the membership figures up somehow.)

Suz, one of my favourite prefects, remembered me and sent me this beautiful postcard that she made for me on her holiday in St. Ives, (a holiday resort with a pier and seals which is nowhere near Blackpool and with far less sun of course). Thank you Suz, for introducing your pet rocks to the seals, and for your sunset memories captured so hauntingly on your(now my) lovely card.

No one has written to me on-line this week, but I am too proud of Suz’s card to feel sorry for myself. Anyway, the Blackpool Illuminations will soon be switched on and I have a promenade to build before that can happen. No matter how busy I am however I always make time to check the on-line postbag, but this week it was empty and I expect I know why.  I dare say all you Rubble Club members forgot to write to me because you are too busy making your pet rock boats  for this month’s competition. I understand. Don’t forget, those of you have not started on your entries, you can win a pet rock boating pool if you are the outright winner. The boat you select for your entry, (you may have found it in a shop or in a bin or you may have made it yourself) has to float, and be big enough to take at least one pet rock on a trip around a boating pool. If you want to see the entries brought into the shop so far, Grandad Gray has photographed them here below. I have not got enough clay to make a boating pool prize for everyone, but everyone who enters will win something delightful, whatever treasures I can dig out from under the rubble.

Here they are, starting with my own entry, a scary floating lily pad modelled by one of my keenest pet rock sailors, Dribbler,(he can’t close his mouth) and his lucky friend, Lucky Ducky. This rather fetching boat of mine comes with a health warning…”Do not set sail in this boat on the open sea without blu tack, no matter how much the sun is shining!”

And next comes Ellie’s entry, less scary than mine, but is that a bad thing?

and here is Emily’s lovely romantic swan boat decked with leaves and polythene sheeting.

Both the girls’ entries are, I have to admit, sturdier, more attractive and less scary than mine, but I tried my best. Perhaps I did not try hard enough, but after all, I have all my other frightfully important jobs to do. If a few more entries come in soon I will get Granny Gray to stick them all on the Rubble Club notice board in the Magic Wand Factory Shop on Dickson Road, Blackpool, near Gynn Square, for the customers and visitors to judge which is the best. Even if no more entries come in I will still have them stuck on the board and the girls will win. I know when I am beaten.

My expertise has been in such high demand in so many different places this week that I have had no time to do the Undergrowby Gazette or to go to the football match to hand out more tangerine pet rocks to the Blackpool football supporters.  I only hope the Blackpool fans have sent a pet-rock-collecting-prefect round to the shop to collect their own. As we all know, good luck does not just make itself, after all! The tangerine pet rocks have to get to the match before they can work their magic! They are no use sitting on the shop windowsill!

And so I leave you to tuck into the chips and doughnuts and get back on with digging up the Promenade. Till next week, I remain your dusty Chairman and truly devoted friend, Madge Dumpling.

Hello to all Rubble Club members and your nice, well-groomed pet rocks. Don’t you all look extra-smart this week? I expect you will all be hoping to be chosen to appear in the pantomime featured below in the Gazette, once you find out how exciting it is going to be. I am pleased to announce  am now partly in charge of it. The other two pantomime directors are the Misses Divine who run the Undergrowby Post Office across the lane from here. We can never agree on anything so I take no notice of them. There are only two more pet rock stars needed to complete the cast of the show, the wicked queen and the handsome prince. Nobody wants to play the wicked queen, so I am going to have to make one of the post mistresses do it if this goes on much longer. More of that later.

I am devastated to have been too busy with the pantomime to go to Arsenal with the Blackpool football team, dishing out more lucky pet rocks amongst the crowd. I wonder how they have gone on without me. If only more of the supporters would take the trouble to come and get their own pet rocks from the Magic Wand Factory Shop on Dickson Road, Blackpool, rather than leave it all to me, we would be leaving nothing to chance. After all, I am already over-worked. I have my rock samples to collect, my cocktail umbrellas to disinfect, my rock cakes to bake for the buffet,(help yourselves, don’t wait to be asked), my pantomime to direct, my pet rocks to groom and take for a walk, my newspaper reporting to do, and only when all that is done, I have my pet rock whispering to do. I can’t be everywhere. Somebody else has to do something!

On to the postbag. The head prefect, Linedancer, ha s reminded me that she is still on duty, silently, even when there is no time for linedancing and therefore nobody else knows she is there. That’s why the meetings always run so smoothly without intrusion by non-members. Thank you, Linedancer, but I already knew I could depend on you. I may be invisible, but I am not blind. If there is anything to report, I know you will report it with the speed of light, as always.

Linda from Kilmarnoch, the Deputy Head Prefect and chief knitter is now on holiday far away across the ocean, but still finds time to write letters. I would promote you to Secretary, Linda, but I can’t think what your job description could be. I have thought about it and I can’t help deciding I myself am the secretary as well as being the chairman, so don’t get too excited and start writing out your own job description. Anyway, you have too much knitting to do.

On to the competition. There have been no entries yet, so please get on with it, Rubble Clubbers. If you need reminding what the theme of the competition is, please refer to last week’s Meeting.  If nobody enters I will have to declare myself the winner of the pet rock boating pool for my floating lily pad contraption with its resident tiny rubber ducky and pet rock boatman. Surely not!

And so on to the Gazette, and with that, until next week I am signing out. I remain your world-famous and yet surprisingly modest Chairman and friendly show business pantomime-directing personality, Madge Dumpling.

Hello to all you pet rock owners and your excited little pets. Come in, you have arrived at Rubble Club H.Q., the Stone Quarry Cottage in the magical land of Undergrowby, somewhere not far from the Magic Wand Factory Shop in Blackpool. Pop your little pets on the mantlepiece to reunite them with the others. This is Madge Dumpling, Chairman of the Rubble Club and world-famous pet rock expert here in person to answer your queries and concerns about your ever-growing collection of pet rocks.  If your collection is not growing as rapidly as it should, there will soon be no excuse because Grandad Gray, my computer expert, is changing his on-line shop for another better one so we can put more pet rocks on it. He has been saying that for a long time but two weeks ago, just when the new shop was due to open, tragedy struck.  His giant poodle, Oz, became seriously ill and ended up in a hospital far away, so since then his time has been taken up with travelling to and from hospital to read his dog its usual pet rock bedtime stories without which it cannot hope to recover. That’s the trouble with dogs, they get ill when you least expect it, unlike pet rocks. Why would anyone want a difficult dog when they could choose to have a nice hardy pet rock? It’s a mystery to us, isn’t it, Rubblers?

Two prizes have not yet reached the photo competition winners. Suz, yours will be coming through your letterbox on Tuesday because Grandad Gray has just set off to see his dog and forgotten to take your parcel with him. The post office will be closed before he gets back and will not reopen till Monday. Lucy, if you are here reading this, your prize is in the shop waiting for you to come and get it. If you need me to post it, let me know your address.

And now on to the postbag. Linda from Kilmarnoch sent me a nice sideways picture of a poster that she spotted in her club which had the word ‘rock’ in the middle of it. Just because you see the word ‘rock’ on a poster, it does not automatically mean I am in the vicinity, Linda. (Ah, sadly for me, because you know I love my coach trips round rocky Scotland hunting for giant specimens). If I am planning to host an event in Kilmarnoch, I promise you I will put you in charge of sticking up posters, so you will be the first to know of my impending presence, Linda. However, if you see the words ‘pet rock’, together somewhere,  please put your knitting down and report it to me immediately because I may then need to take action. It was a good reporting effort, though, Linda, although it came to nothing. You are catching up on Linedancer and my friends the Promenade pigeons, who always report disturbing pet rock related incidents to me the moment they spot them.

Sunny Blackpool has been having an odd shower this week (between heatwaves) and there are deep shiny puddles everywhere. If only I had some little boats the pet rocks could hold a regatta or at least have hundreds of pet rock boating pools. I have looked around town with my ladder searching for little boats suitable for pet rocks but to no avail, so I have decided that the next competition will be to find or make a pet rock boat which will not capsize if a couple of pet rocks sit in it with their picnic basket as they float in the puddles. You can either send pictures of your finds or your efforts or you can bring the boats into the Magic Wand Factory Shop on Dickson Road, Gynn Square, Blackpool, and I will get Granny Gray to make a boating lake display with them. The customers can once again judge the winner, and the star prize will be a pet rock pond, with pet rock picnic baskets for all the runners up. I hope for great things from you, Rubble Clubbers, and promise to publish photos of all entries.

And so on to the Gazette with which I will leave you while I get on with serving the seaweed trifle. till next week I remain your devoted chairman and damp, puddle-fixated little friend, Madge Dumpling.

 Hello and welcome to all you lucky pet rock owners and your rocky little treasures. I am glad to see you are all dressed up in your finery ready for the grand celebration, ( the announcement of the photo competition winners) . The public have been voting all week in the Magic Wand Factory Shop near Gynn Square, Blackpool, and some have been revisiting the shop again and again to catch another and yet another glimpse of the dazzling photo display on the Rubble Club noticeboard, and put another vote on the board. No wonder, they were all quite breathtaking! Ellie even sent in another page full of photos of pet rocks on an adventure holiday, but the voting had already been going on days before it arrived, so it had little chance of winning. She obviously did all that work purely for love, not glory,( much like myself). What a hard worker you are, Ellie, and what an artist! Here you are, Rubble Clubbers, here are Ellie’s late entries.

And here are the final results after one week’s voting. There were 22 entries in all, and the public voted number 17 the winner, which was Lydia and Isaac’s penguin picture.

Number 2 came second, a pretty hand-crayoned pet rock portrait by Suz.

Third was Number 12, the tiger’s mouth by Lydia and Isaac.

Three special prizes, in no particular order, are also awarded for special features that cannot be overlooked. The prize for first entry, with so much sunshine and happiness in her photo it made me weep, goes to Lucy. The prize for the most exotic and romantic holiday destination(he went all the way to Spain to take his brilliant photos, wow!) goes to Sam. And last but definitely not least, the prize for true dedication, imagination and ingeniousness goes to Ellie, who must now be quite exhausted. A special thank you, but no prizes, goes to all the voters who chose their favourites and helped a decision to be made. I could not possibly decide between them all. They were all so spectacularly good for different reasons, and they all had pet rocks in them, which in itself makes them all winners to me.

All prize winners will get a certificate and prizes of various kinds (pet rock stuff, toadstool rings, fabulous bits and bobs, whatever I can rummage around and find under the rubble). Please come and collect your prizes whenever you are ready. Suz, yours will be posted off to you because I know that sadly for you, you do not live in sunny Blackpool. (I will include a hag stone amongst your bits and bobs, Suz, because I know you are dying for one.) Any prize-winner who has not yet got a prefect’s badge, just ask Granny Gray for one. You are all prefects now whether you like it or not. Congratulations!!!!

Right, that’s the presentation over. You can go and help yourselves to the banquet now. I have swapped some pet rocks for a big bottle of nettle fizz from May Greenbottle, the herbal potion maker from the Wandmaker’s Forest. It makes a festive change from gravel tea, I’m sure you’ll agree. There’s just a thimbleful each, don’t be greedy. The cream in the rock cakes was washed up on the beach as if by magic, already whipped up to a froth, just by the toilets on the promenade. I scooped it up in an old chip carton for use on this special occasion. Waste not, want not, you know me!

Who would have thought that this entire fabulous buffet cost …absolutely,…nothing? Most of the ingredients were just lying around on the promenade for the picking, but you have to get up very early to get it before the road sweeper pinches it all and puts it in his bucket. Even the Scottish oatmeal for the cream cakes was donated by Linda from Kilmarnoch who is leaving us soon to to go on a coach trip across the ocean on holiday to somewhere tragically other than Blackpool. Never mind, Linda, you can’t help it if you got the wrong tickets. Just make the best of it this time, but next time, check that the coach says Blackpool on the front before you step in.

Grandad Gray says I can’t do the Gazette this week because there are already too many pictures. I have been out and about nevertheless, with my reporter’s pad,  at the punk rock festival which is on this week in Blackpool. I have wandered about looking for these punk rocks but I can’t find them, whatever they are. I think they are the stuff of fairy tales told by drunks. I thought at first they might belong to a tribe of strange looking visitors with lager cans and sticky-up hair who have arrived in Blackpool this week, but I have searched in their pockets as they lie on the pavements asleep, to no avail.

They seem a very nice, jolly and kind tribe and would make excellent pet rock owners if only they knew where to get some. Perhaps they have somehow heard about my pet rock emporium and have organised a pet rock hunting festival, but they are so drunk on lager all the time they can’t spell ‘pet rock hunt’ correctly, which is how the word ‘punk’ came into being. Nor, sadly for them, can they find their way out of the middle of town up to Gynn Square where all the pet rock action is. I tried to direct them up along Dickson Road to get their punk rocks but they just ignored me. It was as if I were invisible.

Anyway, in case some of them find their way to the Magic Wand Factory Shop on Dickson Road, near Gynn Square, Blackpool, I am sticking some removable feathers on top of some of the pet rocks heads, so they can look like their new owners. If you know anyone looking for a punk rock, just let me know.

And with that, I am signing out so I can pack up all the prizes for the competition winners, who are probably queuing up outside at this very moment. Till next week I remain your feather-encrusted chairman and nice little friend, Madge Dumpling.