That sort of afternoon

[The cast: self, C the actress, R the manager, all braindead from a day of wrestling with the new content management system.]

C: this link won't work.

[Clicks. Works perfectly. Self and R retire back to our desks disappointed at the absence of a valid distraction.]

R: ever heard of Peter and the Wolf?

[Pause]

Self: do you mean the Boy who Cried Wolf?

R: do I?

[Subsequent research indicates he does indeed mean the fable created by Aesop c. 500BC, not the children's story written and composed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936.]

R: so what's the story of Peter and the Wolf, then?

[C. and I stare blankly at each other. We vaguely remember that apart from the obvious, there's a cat, and a bird of some description.]

C: And the wolf gets caught by the Village People ...

[Mental images of a nightmare beyond Prokofiev's wildest hallucinations cause collapse of all parties.]

C: ... villagers ...

[I finally look it up on Wikipedia and recite the story.]

Self: 'Everyone leads the wolf to the zoo in a triumphant procession-'

C: that will be the Village People, then.

[Brief outbreak of the Y-M-C-A actions.]

Self: 'At the end one can hear the duck quacking in the wolf's stomach, "because the wolf had swallowed her alive."'

C: so it did swallow the duck? I'm sure I saw this animation where it didn't.

Self: it did in the version I saw a few years ago with Rod Hull as Prokofiev ...

[Aghast look from C.]

Self: ... I mean, Roy Hudd ...

[Okay, so you had to be there.]