Butts Wynd

Jamie leads me round a corner. He giggles all the way.
‘What? What? What’s so funny? Where are you taking me?’, I ask.
Jamie laughs.
‘Oh, you’ll see.’
We run across the high street, then down a steep hill. Jamie stops to catch his breath, and then we’re off again. Eventually we stop outside an alley.
‘Here we are’, says Jamie, laughing.
‘What am I meant to be looking at?’
There’s nothing here. Jamie points.
‘The street sign.’
What? I turn around and I see it. BUTTS WYND.
‘Yeah, so?’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’
‘Why, because it contains the word ‘butts’?’
‘Yeah. And ‘wind’.’
‘I see. You do know the origin behind this place name, don’t you?’
‘No. Why, do you?’
‘Sure. Dad told me. Wanna hear it?’
‘Okay.’
I clear my throat loudly and somewhat overdramatically.
‘Right. Well, Tobias Butts was a Roman foot soldier who, pretty much by accident, ended up leading the legion to victory in the Battle of Badoink. He’d just been messing around, trying on his commander’s helmet, when someone mistook him for the actual leader. The real one was probably elsewhere, I don’t know, peeing behind a tree.
Anyway, rather than admit that he was an ordinary soldier playing a bit of dress up, he, out of fear of being found out, gave the men their orders. Luckily, it turns out that Butts had got wind of the enemy’s position via eavesdropping, and it was this knowledge that meant the plan of attack he formulated won them the Battle of Badoink.’
By now, Jamie is sat captivated and open-mouthed.
‘Wow… Is that true? Is that why the street’s called Butt’s Wynd?’
‘Course not’, I scoff, ‘some builders probably wrote up some graffiti by mistake. Come on, let’s go home.’
Helping him up, I laughed at the ridiculous notion that Butts Wynd could ever me named after an actual person or an actual butt when suddenly there was a low rumble below us. A burst of gas wafts in from nowhere. Now, I’m not entirely sure what it was, but it smelt distinctly like…
Farts.