Auld Man Cratchit
Jamie and Cratchit outside the comb factory
The legend of Cratchit dates back to the early 1400s. We'd heard rumours that a crabby old man roams 'The Middle Kingdom' preying on young westerners. He just so happened to book a ticket on the same bus we were on...
As soon as Cratchit had clocked me taking a bite out of my apple, the sprightly fellow ran over wielding his trusty pocket knife. It was four inches in length and hand-crafted by Tibetan monks in the valley of Jiu Zhai. He passed the knife over and insisted that I carve my fruit into small pieces. Due to my incompetent knife skills, he impatiently snatched it back and returned to his seat muttering some colloquial obscenities.
Throughout the rest of the trip, he kept asking us how much we earned. Each time, we just pretended we didn't understand as he was gesticulating with a few bum-notes from his wallet. He even tried to translate it into English on his iPhone! What the hell was HE doing with an iPhone!?
Whilst this 80 year old man had an abundance of technology at his fingertips, we were scraping by on one bar of signal and unable to connect to the internet. We had to get our hands on that iPhone. We considered mugging the old tyke but remembered his knife.