In keeping w the pub old old name (George and The Dragon) Gina bought a dragon one summer. They kept it out back, much as other pubs might in those days might have placed a stupid or dangerous inflatable castle, just something bouncy bright/frivolous for the kids to play on while the rest got drunk during those Long Xtended Summer Months of the global warming.

The dragon itself was a large mournful creature in sick hues of gray green the opposite of vibrant. Scaled and once powerful, now indolent, tethered and real they said (the sellers) it was, according to their framed cert. and the local paper writeup what G had proudly placed behind the bar, descended from the very same dragon that once upon a way back in the true true olden times of Endland had fought and been defeated by St George.

G started summer w all good intentions – to make the most of her purchase in business termz – and closely followed the instructions from a marketing webinar she had once attended. At her instruction a small marquee was erected near the dragon and meanwhile some tables was installed at the edge of the beer garden, up toward the overflow carpark in which the dragon was enclosed, long strings of new plastic flags being stretched taut, crisscrossing sky and barren tarmac like a celebration of the old Battle of Britain and leading back towards the pub.

Later G found a loose gaggle of neighborhood teenagers to gather awkwardly at the folding camping table she bought from Argos and from which they could easily more or less run the show, charging entrance to the dragons’ area for parents, grandparents etc of toddlers tirelessly desperate to clamber on what the signs said was a glorious and mighty beast, or for those more adventurass (sic) of them (the kids) to slide down its permanently cowed neck and land on the filthy crash mat below or for those even bolder to offer the miserable creature water from the set of six plastic buckets provided for that purpose.

As the heat of that summer rose month on month though the novelty of the dragon attraction wore pretty thin and there was neither the enthusiasm or the organizational infrastructure to maintain the setup it required– the ticket station was abandoned, the water tank run dry, the flags fell tangled in the blighted pervasive Endland rose bush and barbed wire, the britely coloured pendants trodden roughly into the heat-soft tarmac underfoot, while the dragon itself cowered daily and desperate up against the creosoted fence, ankles worn to bleeding by its chains, eyes lethargic, seeking shade and moaning louldy in a woeful broken and terminal distress at the edges of its crash-barrier enclosure.