Get A Ferret in Your Pants!
True story: A woman walked into a Ballina office recently and asked the receptionist: “Do you have A Ferret in Your Pants?”
“Do I have a what?” asked the receptionist, more than somewhat taken aback.
“A Ferret in Your Pants. It’s a book,” replied the woman.
She was right too! It’s a book by former Northern Star editor Jim Brigginshaw, pictured, and demand is such for the Iluka-based journalist’s fourth book that already it is in its third printing.
Jim says the book is a collection of 145 stories of animal antics, selected from more than 4000 newspaper columns, Our Crazy World, that the author wrote for The Northern Star over 22 years, from 1978 to 2000. His column restarted in 2006 and still appears every second Thursday.
Jim, formerly of Lennox Head and Alstonville, was the editor of The Northern Star for 16 years. He left the paper in 1988 to start a public relations business and write books. Now 81, he moved to Iluka in 1990 and has lived there ever since.
“The title, A Ferret in Your Pants, comes from a story in the book about a genuine English sport called ferret-legging,” says Jim.
“The sport began in the days when the squire’s gamekeeper came across rabbit poachers who hid the incriminating evidence, their ferret, down their pants.”
Jim says the sport died out – and suggests that otherwise the English race might have died out – but has since been resurrected. The winner of the ferret-legging contest is the one who keeps the ferret down his pants the longest.
A sample of other titles of the 145 stories in the book: The Turtle that Couldn’t Swim, Sloshed to the Gills, Bull of the Ball, The Mayor’s Mutt and the Garbo, A Moose on the Loose, The Saint and the Fly, A Duck in Trouble … and dozens more. A Ferret in Your Pants is available at Northern Star district offices.
Not all of Jim’s books have a humorous slant. The Dream that Wouldn’t Die is a novel based on the disastrous Marquis de Rays’ confidence trick that sent Italians to New Guinea then resulted in the settling of New Italy near Woodburn. The book was launched at New Italy in April last year and is in bookstores.
Shimpusan Healer of Hate is the biography of a Lismore-born missionary who spent 52 years in Japan healing the wounds of war.
Jim is a keen angler — he kicked off The Northern Star’s Fish of the Year competition — and his first book was Fishing the NSW North Coast, which unfortunately is out of print.
