My grandad was forever telling tall stories, jokes and anecdotes and you could never tell whether he was being serious or not... He was good value, and for many reasons. Everyone loved him and his funeral was the only one I've been to that wasn't miserable.
By way of comparison, the nearest we have is Doorstop for wit and humour and it's a shame we'll never bring the two together. Anyway, here's a daft bit of nonsense that he told us when we were kids...
We had an uncle Ellis. Actually he was a great-fer-how-many Uncle Ellis and Grampfer teased us with a story when we were knee high and gullible.
Uncle Ellis was working on a road gang, filling in the potholes. Unfortunately, his mind was of the wandering persuasion and when his mates yelled at him to get out of the way of the road-roller, he was somewhere away from the planet, out with the asteroids.
Poor Uncle Ellis went under the front wheel of the road-roller and came out the other side flat as a pancake.
"What to do with Ellis?", they wondered. "We can't leave him here."
"We shall have to take him home to Mary."
"Well, ah! But who's going to do the explaining?"
Wanting a plan, they folded Ellis up and John put him under his arm and to the King's Head they went to formulate a strategy. Several pints of Butcombe later, they felt braced to face Mary, and made their way to her front door. They knocked on the door but there was no reply.
"Bugger! Of course 'tis Thursday. Mary'll be down the Legion Hall for the bingo."
So they unfurled poor old Ellis, slid him under the door and went back to the pub.
History does not record Mary's reaction to her "postcard".
...and we actually believed this load of old rubbish!