Secret Trillionaire Day 5

The Maestro – Thomaso Elsicar Gordono, gives up a lot of his spare time running a choir for the children and vulnerable of Badgertown. He offers a free meal and singing lessons. Today we went to see them, on the pretext that I was interested in joining the choir. The choir is composed of the offspring of needy dwarfs and some of the Crookball people. For the most part, the Crookball people live on the grassy plain at the top of Lonely Tower. It is laid out in plots and they live in little wooden huts around the edge. The Crookballs are pretty strange. All very shabby. Dressed in sack suits and with leaves and flowers in their hair. They are named after a vegetable that grows there and nowhere else and they make themselves a drink called Cowcup. Because they were an undiscovered tribe, for many years they lived for free on my property. I could not treat them any differently to my other tenants, of whom there are thousands, so I now charge them a farthing a week rent. I generously foregoed charging them any back rent. They live very solitary lives, on Lonely Tower, and unfortunately their contact with the wider world has led many of the youngsters to seek out the bright lights of Badgertown - hoping for a more exciting lifestyle. Sadly, being such innocents, many of them end up being totally overwhelmed by the modern world. The Maestro has a dreadful temper which often gets the better of him. He gets into a passion over music, because he can’t bear to hear things played badly. Luckily the dwarf children and the Crookball just find this extremely amusing. I noticed that sometimes they deliberately sang out of tune just to see his reaction. The first number we performed was the favourite ballad of the Crookball people, Stingshanks. It has a stirring tune, and we were soon all singing gaily. They all laughed uproariously, however, when The Maestro flew into a rage at my attempts to hit the high notes. "Really, that is an awful trumpeting," he cried "You may look like the great and noble Uncle - but you sound nothing like him!" The Old Monkey kicked me in the shins before I could set the fellow straight. "Remember - undercover!" he whispered. We had Steaming crookballs straight from the cauldron for lunch. They tasted something like celery and I thought I might have a talk with Butterskin Mute about growing them on his farm. I thought that the choir was excellent! - another good cause worthy of my largesse. This evening we had crookball pate on toast.