Happy New Year to you all from ‘Down Under’. During the second half of 2025, while I was posting Willow, I played around with a few ideas, ending up with a batch of solos and a few short stories, based on not much more than the title that invaded my mind. Well, something close to the actual title.

A Shaggy Dog Story

My name is Brian Woods, and I was in third year at the Kesgrave High School, Ipswich, studying Design and Technology when my story really began. My father ran an engineering workshop, a little way north, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, but Dad thought that Kesgrave had a better technology course than the local ones. I had a three-mile bike ride to and from school and all my earlier schoolfriends were at the school in Woodbridge, which was upsetting but ensured I studied, rather than messed around.

Our family business was general and fabrication engineering, working on making attachments, linkages and cabins for agricultural machinery. I had spent time in the workshops since I could see over the bench-top and was quite handy with my hands.

The business had been started by my grandfather, with oxy-acetylene welding bottles and a hammer. He was well into his later years now, and a lot of what we did was beyond him. Computer controlled welding and machining was a long way from what he knew. Which was why I was studying the Design and Technology. It would allow me to have a good start for my apprenticeship. You don’t take a lad out of school and send him out with a tradesman to learn on the job any longer.

Now, Grandfather was what some people would call a ‘card’. Before he had started the business, he had been a skilled welder, and had worked as a salesman for a welding and accessories company. He was a born storyteller, and his great love was old-fashioned ‘shaggy dog stories’, the ones that take forever to tell and end with an anticlimax, or even no climax at all.

If anyone asked him about his past life, he would tell them about the time that he was sent to a new area to sell his welding equipment, parking in the hotel carpark. In his story, he got out of the car and looked around, seeing a big van backed right up to the wall. He looked around and saw no door, so set off to find it, walking along a path to the corner, and following the wall to find the door.

Of course, the distance he walked, and the time he took, and the things he saw was dependant on the gullibility of the listener. He would walk along the wall to another corner, along that wall to yet another, and along that wall to a door, which had a big sign saying, ‘Salesmen not admitted’. If anyone hadn’t gone to sleep by this time, he returned to his car by going the short distance to the corner, to find himself back in the carpark. The van had gone, revealing a sign, with an arrow, saying, ‘Hotel entrance around corner, twenty yards.’ He would slap his thigh and declare that it was all true.

He had another one about a chap who was travelling across the desert with a string of camels. Once he had cleared the village, in the desert silence he could hear someone speaking, starting with ‘one’ and increasing the amount as he went on. The short version is that he started to go mad, and if he saw a camels’ lips move, he would shoot it. Ending up in the endless dunes, he was down to one camel, and the voice now well over three million. On the top of a dune, he dismounted and shot the last camel, so sealing his fate. As a last thing, before he shot himself, he decided to have a smoke and pulled a packet of Players Navy Cut cigarettes out of the saddlebag, with some matches, and slid the pack open. At this point, Grandfather would pull out a similar cigarette packet and slide it open. The flap that was exposed read, ‘It’s the Tobacco That Counts.’

There was one that he had told that resonated with me. It was about an engineer that designed and built a new style of sea-going vessel, which he called an ‘Ockle Cockle’. He had piles of engineering drawings and had attracted a lot of backing, seeing that he was a very successful boat designer. In the end, when you arrive at the climax of the story, the new vessel is tested. There’s a big crowd to watch and the rowboat sized prototype is lowered into the water, only to slowly sink with the sounds of ‘ockle cockle, ockle cockle’ coming from inside it as it filled with water.

I wanted to build an Ockle Cockle the day I heard the story. In my spare time I studied acoustics and wind instruments, designed labyrinths that would amplify the smallest sound, and made little prototypes of my own to see if I could create the sound. I made small parts out of sheet metal and plastic in school, after I had completed the set projects. It took me a year before I had something worth testing.

By that time, there was a lot of interest generated in my family and school. I picked a Saturday for the testing, and there was a crowd of about fifty that gathered at the Tidemill Yacht Harbour, on the edge of the River Deben. I called for complete silence, and ceremoniously lowered my prototype into the Tidemill reservoir water, where it sank without a sound.

There was a lot of laughter, some jeers, and I was picked up and followed my prototype into the water. When I was helped out, my grandfather shook my hand and declared that I was a chip off the old block. I had, he grinned, pulled off one of the biggest shaggy dog stories of all time, over the course of a year, including a total anticlimax, in real time.

You would have thought that it couldn’t get worse. Of course, there had been someone taking pictures that appeared in the Suffolk News, with one of my creation and another of me standing there, dripping wet. The headline was, ‘Woodbridge boy pulls off massive joke!’ That was repeated in the East Anglian Daily Times, with more detail about the actual shaggy dog story and what I had been trying to do.

I was the butt of a lot of jokes for a while after that. My teachers thought that I had been brave to try and prove the story but the result of disproving it altogether was classed as a win. A month later, there was a letter, addressed to me, that arrived at home. It was from the University of East Anglia, asking if I could go and talk to them. They gave us a phone number to ring in business hours. The University was based in Norwich, about forty miles from us, as the crow flies.

Dad rang them and talked to the person who had written the letter. I was to be taken to Norwich on a Saturday morning, to have a talk and get some information to bring home. Two weeks later, I was sitting beside Dad as he drove the company Toyota Hilux Invincible to Norwich. Even after his talk with them, he was as much in the dark as I was. The Ockle Cockle was behind us, in the tray with a tarp over it, just in case that’s what they wanted to talk about.

Now, I was not used to someone taking serious attention. I had tried to be in the background as a way of self-preservation. My family were all what you could say was ‘nuggety’, old farming stock. All around me, in school, were kids from other areas who were taller than me. There was enough of us ‘nuggety’ ones while I was in primary, to be part of a group, but at Kesgrave, I was in a distinct minority. I think that the failure of my experiment would have released some pressure among a few of the spectators, allowing them to bully me in public.

When we arrived at the University, the grandest and most beautiful buildings I’d ever seen, we went to the reception desk and asked for Professor Hitchins. He was phoned, and the receptionist gave us a map, marking the route we would have to take to his office. When we were there, he stood and held out his hand. Dad shook it and then he held it out to me.

“Good morning, Mister Woods, Brian. Thank you for coming to see us. The reason that I got in touch is because you, Brian, had taken an imaginary tale and proceeded to turn it into a reality, taking, from the newspaper article, more than a year to create your prototype. Did you do all the work yourself?”

“I did, sir. I studied acoustics and wind instruments to design my labyrinth.”

“Have you worked out why it didn’t work?”

“I think so. My studies were all about the flow of air, and my mock-up sections all produced a sound. I didn’t test them with water, as it would need me to build a complete test rig to do that. I realise now, that water flow and air flow are two different things. I feel a bit stupid for not seeing that.”

“Nonsense, Brian. You were on the right track with your initial design. Have you thought of a way to actually make the Ockle Cockle work?”

“I think so. If I included a snorkel, with an impellor, I could pump air into the bottom of the unit. It could be sent to something like a garden irrigation tube, with a row of the small nozzles. That would create bubbles of air in the rising water, which would flow through the labyrinth and create sound as the air passed each layer of holes. I doubt that it would be loud enough to be audible, though.”

“Excellent thinking, Brian. You have a very bright and enquiring mind, and that’s why you’re sitting here. Mister Woods, what are your plans for young Brian?”

Dad looked at me.

“Well, he was slated to get an apprenticeship with the family firm and study computer aided designing and manufacturing. We make attachments and cabins for agricultural machinery, and now have a laser cutting machine for sheet metal, a CNC lathe and machining centre to produce the metal parts to consistent tolerances, and a welding section with robot welding. I was looking at getting 3D printing machines to make small parts and was thinking of Brian developing that side of it, as well as taking over the design and programming side in five years, or so.”

“An admirable career, I’m sure. But I think his determination and research skills could lead to a higher level than that. I’ll make you a proposal. We have a policy of student support, which looks after students throughout their time with us. I’m proposing that we sign Brian on, today, and help him get the qualifications to come here after the higher exams. We’ll look at his results for this year, and will offer him time with our lecturers, over the summer holidays, so that he’ll be able to get high results in fifth year. Then we’ll give him support through the A Level years to get high results there. While we have him here, we’ll expose him to other fields that are within a mile of where we’re sitting, over in the research park. There are companies there doing work on plant health, microbial science, biological systems in plants and animals, food and human health, and medical research. If none of that catches his imagination, we can send him back to you as a qualified engineer when he graduates.”

Dad looked surprised, and then smiled.

“What would that cost me?”

“No more than paying him as an apprentice. There would be a small fee for accommodation and tuition before he enrols, but then he would be able to know more about what he wants to do when he leaves the high school.”

Dad looked at me.

“What do you think, son?”

“I think that it would be a wonderful experience, Dad. If I get help to ace the exams, next year, it would be well worth me being here in the summer. Even if I don’t carry on, I’ll be more certain about what I want out of life, with seeing the choices that I have.”

The professor gave us a quick tour of the university, and we left my prototype with him for his engineering students to play around with. I had finished with it, so it went to a good home. We had a heap of brochures and information sheets to look at when we got home.

I did well in the fourth-year exams and was taken to Norwich in the summer holiday. There, it was like another world. One where I was treated as an adult, given one-on-one sessions with people far brainier than my teachers, in an environment that was supportive and without tension. I flourished. I spent a few days in each of the research institutes in the Research Park, learning about their work in microbiology, stem cell research and genetics. I found that I was drawn to genetic and cellular research, as a very involved and complicated science that appealed to my brain.

Over the next years, I spent time in Norwich in the summers, working as a trainee in a research centre. Which mainly was being a helper, cleaner, preparer of experimental equipment and general assistant. I also had help with the academic subjects.

The second year I was there, the engineering students had replicated my prototype Ockle Cockle with the addition of the snorkel idea that I had proposed. They were very proud to demonstrate it in the campus pool. It did make a bubbling sound as it sank, so had been named, ‘Brians’ Ubble Bubble’. It was then, ceremonially, mounted on the wall of the engineering laboratory.

I aced my A levels and was enrolled as a student at the University, studying for a Batchelor of Science in Medical Chemistry, and spending time in the Earlham Institute for work experience. I graduated with honours and went to work at the institute, full time, as a researcher.

I was researching ways to cure baldness. It took a few years, but I did develop a drug which used a number of mice with all the hair removed, which then grew back to a normal look. We worked on the formula which would, when injected into sheep, cause them to shed their fleece naturally over six-hour period, with the loss starting after about three hours.

This allowed them to be shorn, without the need for human, or mechanical, shearers. It just needed them to get the one dose, to be held in a pen for about three hours, and then transferred to a conveyer, in a clean environment and supported for three hours. At the end, they were released into a pen, the fleece collected, and they grew another one in the next year.

I found a house near the Research Park, fell in love with another researcher, married and we had two, very brainy, daughters. My family business, back in Woodbridge, was passed to my younger brother, and became Woods Automated Shearing, with designs for the conveyer system that I had supplied.

Eventually, I was asked to see what I could do about other long-haired animals, and ended up with a modified injectable drug that would cause cats and dogs to lose their long hair, but only regrow it to a manageable length. The purists hated it, and the modified animals were banned from competition, but a lot of owners were happier with tidier animals. I was given the OBE for services to animal science.

Grandfather would have been proud of me. I had spent a lifetime, been well paid and received my award for what was a new ending to what was, essentially, a shaggy dog story.

Marianne Gregory © 2026