The Writers' Circle

Mr. Letterman was as smug as a Cheshire cat during National Smugness week. For he was the proud owner of a volcano.
Not a particularly big volcano you understand, in fact as volcanoes go his was a touch on the small side, being no more than two feet high, but all the same, he had one and his neighbours didn't. So he was very pleased with himself.
Mr Letterman's volcano stood in his back garden about six feet away from the apple tree. Normally, sometime during the middle of the afternoon it would give a little cough, and then belch forth a bright orange flame that would last for an hour or so before subsiding.
In order to make use of his volcano, Mr Letterman had built a barbecue over the top of it, and during fine summer days he and his wife would sit in the garden and eat al fresco under the shade of the tree.

One day, the Lettermans decided to have a barbecue. They also decided to invite Mr Letterman's boss from the office, and Mrs Letterman's friend Doris from the wet fish shop in the high street. They figured that it would be a good opportunity to show off the volcano in thier garden.
Mrs Letterman bought some bread rolls, salad and various bits of reconstituted dead animal to cook, and Mr Letterman busied himself with the preperation. He laid out the meat on the barbecue grill and stood waving away the flies while he waited for the volcano to ignite. It seemed to be taking longer than usual to start up, so Mr Letterman found a stick and prodded it down the hole in the top of the volcano.
Nothing happened, and so he prodded it a bit harder.
There was a low rumbling sound, much like the noise made by uncle John when he's asleep in front of the TV on Sunday afternoons. A few sparks and a wisp of smoke appeared, and Mr Letterman gave it another poke for luck.
The noise steadily became louder and louder, until with a sound like a clap of thunder the volcano erupted in a shower of flame and molten lava.
The flame reached a good twenty feet high, and the force of it scattered marinated chicken legs and honey glazed pork chops all over the garden.
Mr Letterman stood back in some alarm. His volcano had never done that before. He tried to extinguish the flames with the water from the paddling pool, but every bucket of water he threw at it instantly turned to steam and the ironed creases of his shorts fell out.
Mrs Letterman had seen the eruption of the volcano and the disapperance of her husband in a cloud of steam through her kitchen window and went off to find the yellow pages. She looked up emergency volcano engineers, and was heartened to find that one lived only a few streets away. Not only that, it appeared that he also did calls at the weekend. She dialled the number and spoke to Mr Rennie of Rennie's Volcano Breakdown Services Ltd.

A short while later Mr Rennie pulled up in his van outside of the Letterman household and wandered around to the back garden.
"Thank goodness you've come" said a steaming Mr Letterman. "Is there something you can do to help"
Mr Rennie scratched the back of his head with a carbonated sausage and surveyed the scene.
"Hmmm" he said after a while. "I think that we will need a number 4 volacano plug. I'll see if I've got one in the back of the van"
"Oh do hurry" said Mrs Letterman. "Doris is due to turn up at 3o/clock"

Mr Rennie got some tools out of his van and went down the road where he turned the volcano off at the mains. He then retrieved what appeared to be a large rock from the back of the van and hammered it down over over the top of the volcano.
"It's not perfect" he said "but it should get you through the weekend"
He turned the volcano back on, and presented the Lettermans with his bill(Double time at the weekend) before getting back into his van and driving away.

Mr Letterman rubbed the sweat away from where his eyebrows had once been and inspected the temporary repair to his volcano. The rock that Mr Rennie had put over it was not an exact fit, and there were some small flames escaping through the gaps around the edges of it. He realised that it was still not too late to save the afternoon's festivities under the charred apple tree.
Mrs Letterman was dispatched to the supermarket to buy more meat while he collected up the scattered pieces of the barbecue and reassembled it over the volcano.

There was not much time to go before the guests arrived, and the small escaping flames would take forever to cook the meat, so he found a stick and started prodding at the gap at the edge of the rock.