David Hadley's Blog, page 206

The Newcomers

I suppose it had to happen one day. But we didn't expect it here, not yet, not so soon.

Some of them arrived a few weeks ago and set up home down on the shore, not all that far from where we live. Shallan said it was the end, that everything was over now for this planet and that we should move before they destroy everything.

I must admit, at first I thought she was overreacting, but now I have seen those... those Earthlings... humans, they like to call themselves, I'm beginning to think Shallan had a point.

I mean, they are supposed to be an intelligent race, but none of them seems to have fur, not that we can see anyway. Thresa said she thinks they must shave it off, for some reason. I'm not so sure. Obviously they must be ashamed of not having fur, for why else would they cover themselves up all the time with those bits of rag they drape over themselves?

Of course, it didn't take long for the rumours to start.

Krillec came rushing home from the learning dome saying that her Learning Facilitator had told her group that the humans practised sexual reproduction. Obviously, we all laughed, thinking it was a joke. At least, we thought it was a joke until Krillec showed us her learning tablet.

"This is something I must see," Shallan said at the day's end meal, everyone else agreed.

Unfortunately, we could never – it seemed – catch the humans in the act, not that we were sure what that act really entailed. Krillec's learning tablet was rather vague on the details.

Still, we are determined that one day we will catch them doing it and record it all. That video of it is bound to be a massive hit on the Universal Net. After all, as far as we can see there seems to be no videos of humans doing sex on the whole of the Universal Net. We all agree there must be some videos of them doing it somewhere out there, we just wonder where it all is.

High On Your Hill Of Remembering

Seasons rise and then fall. Days appear on the horizon and draw closer. Although, before you can take them into your hand, and begin to shape them around you, they have gone, each one taken on the wind, far out of your reach, never to return.

You can turn, there high on your hill of remembering, to look back over that landscape of former days. Seeing it all now spread out far below and out of reach, you know no matter how you try to run down your hill towards those former days they will always be beyond anything you can do to touch them once again.

Magic Carpet Ride

"What is it?" I said, already thinking I knew the answer.

"It's a carpet."

"Hmm...."

"A magic carpet!"

"Bollocks!"

"It is... honestly... would I lie to y... well, it is a magic carpet. Not a word of a lie."

"What, you mean flying... all that Arabian Nights stuff?"

"Yes."

"Bollocks!"

"Come on, then?"

"What?"

"Outside...."

"I'm not going to fight you about it. If you want to think you've got a magic carpet... well, that's fine with me. I'll just be off."

"No, not that. I'm going to show you...."

"Show me what?" I'd heard rumours.

"Come on," he said. "I'll prove to you that it is a magic carpet."

"I'll have to warn you...," I said, laughing as I followed him out through the back of the shop out into the loading bay. "... I don't like heights."

We sat down together on the carpet in the traditional manner. Him cross-legged at the front, me kneeling behind him, feeling like a tit, and giggling.

"You won't be laughing in a minute," he said.

He was right.

A minute later I was puking over the edge of the carpet down onto the town far below us. "I told... I told you I don't like heights," I managed to croak in-between the bouts of vomiting. It didn't help that there was a hole in the carpet I could look down at the town through, and that if I dared to look up I was immediately hit in the face by what seemed to be thousands of flying insects.

Not to mention the helicopter.

Not that I didn't try, but I'm sure he never heard it over the sound of the wind rushing past our faces, and having to fight off the swarms of insects.

Still we – sort of – managed to land with most of the carpet intact.

Although, I'm sure the flight engineers will no doubt have to ask the pilot why he has fragments of shredded carpet entangled in his rotors.

In the end I decided against buying the flying carpet after all, even when the price was reduced due to helicopter damage.

Like I said: I don't like heights.

The Toast of the Gods

But still we had all those smaller pieces of the once-mighty toast of the gods, but we had no butter and very little marmalade. It had been a long and dangerous journey to the heart of a lost civilisation, which – as it is often the case with lost civilisations – was deep in the heart of an almost impenetrable jungle. A jungle filled with the deadliest creatures on the planet, who in an eat-or-be-eaten arms-race had become some of the most fearsome creatures in the known universe, including the dread Estate Agents of Earth, a fearsome - and some say, mythical - tribe of the primitive Earth beings who – it is said - will cause untold suffering to those unwary enough to search for a desirable residence on that planet.

However, we knew that the toast of the gods was no myth. Many ancient records speak of the great toasting fork of the gods, and in later centuries the automatic toaster of the gods, as well as the vast fields needed to keep the enormous herds of cows necessary to produce the butter to keep the toast buttered, and the fabled orange marmalade orchard which was once said to cover almost an entire continent of that planet.

The Disuse of Hats

At the time it seemed as though none of our hats would be suitable. Over the preceding decades - for reasons historians still had fistfights over in the car parks of this once great nation – people had, more or less, stopped wearing hats. However, this was not the case with the penguins, for they still found hats very useful , or at least, so they claimed.

You, though, had your deerstalker, but the less said about those kinds of rather dubious endeavours the better, especially as his antlers often got caught in the hedges when he was trying to observe you from a safe distance, especially when you were out in your garden, stark naked and dead-heading your petunias.

I, of course, had my trusty bowler hat, but the bowler kept demanding it back, so I thought some other titfer would be more appropriate, if not more becoming. I have often thought about a flat cap, but those are not the sort of imaginings one would like to share with other people, especially not with the number of trainee nurses and the excessive amount of baby oil such imaginings necessarily entail.

All in all then, one would have to say that, no matter how straightforward and simple it seems on the surface, such a decision about what hat would be appropriate, therefore turns out to be not that simple at all. Perhaps that then is the reason for the hat to so suddenly fall out of fashion, and if any historian wishes to question my reasoning and conclusions then I will be in the car park... waiting.

Furry Pink Slippers

'Good Morning, fellow student!' Ron cried as I walked into the kitchen the following morning.

'Hello, how long have you been up?' As I filled the kettle, I risked a glance inside it. Was that stuff moving? It was certainly growing. I shuddered and turned the kettle on.

'Not long, but long enough to meet Margot. She's gone out to run a marathon, or practice to run a marathon, or to be run over by a marathon… something involving a marathon, anyway. She was talking for ages; she just goes on and on. You stop listening after a while and you drift off. When you come back she's still going.'

'So, I see you have a lot in common then?'

'Bollocks!'

'You both have bollocks? Well, that's something else you have in common then.' I gave Ron a mug of coffee and sat down with my own. I rolled a cigarette. Ron picked up my tin, glancing up at me. I nodded and Ron rolled himself a cigarette and lit it.

'I'm going to buy a paper,' Ron said a few minutes later as he finished his coffee.

I put my empty cup down next to his. 'I'll come for a walk with you. I'll get myself a paper as well.'

*

Ron bought milk and sugar from the shop along with his paper. Back at the house again, we sat each side of the kitchen table and sorted out the readable sections of our newspapers. When we had done this, the discarded pile was higher than the piles in front of each of us. For a while, we read, drank coffee and smoked in near silence. The only sound was turning pages and the sigh of relief at the end of each section.

I could feel the traditional Sunday torpor creeping over me. I leaned back against the wall and lit a cigarette. Ron was reading the Business section. I thought about commenting on it. How anyone could find anything of interest in that section amazed me. But Ron was studying Economics, maybe that explained it. Dismal reading for dismal scientists.

Alison came in, her hair wet from the shower. She was wearing an old white dressing gown and bright pink fluffy slippers. Ron looked up from his paper and noticed the slippers. He opened his mouth to speak. She wagged her finger at him and he closed his mouth.

Alison turned on the kettle and sat down next to me. 'Oh, there's a pub up the road a bit that does Sunday lunches. It's very good and very cheap. Do you two want to go?'

'Cheap?' Ron said. 'My favourite word. Yes, I'll go.'

'Yes, okay,' I said. 'I don't fancy cooking anything, anyway.'

Ron closed his paper and stood up. 'I suppose the bathroom is free now?' He said to Alison. She nodded as Ron walked around the table to take a closer look at her furry pink slippers.

'Ron,' she warned.

'Not a word. Not a word,' Ron said as he walked to the door. At the door, he turned and pointed. Covering his face with his hand, he bent double and shook as if in laughter. He glanced up and saw Alison searching for something to throw. He ran and the door slammed behind him.

[Extract from Hanging Around Until]

 

The No First Use of the Banjo Treaty

There were times when some of us even began to consider the use of the tambourine. Fortunately the crisis was over long before such a deployment became necessary. Even so, there was talk of reneging on our signing of the No First Use of the Banjo Treaty signed all those years ago when it seemed that a war of mutually-assured destruction involving banjos, ukuleles, even accordions or the dread bagpipes was almost inevitable.

Of course, those were different times when competing ideologies vied with each other for control of the world. Nowadays, instead, we have reality television and the alleged doings of celebrities to keep the populations of our countries from paying too much attention to what the political leaders - and the real rulers of the planet - are getting up to.

After all, what is a mere lifetime of pointless wage-slavery compared to the chance of finding out what some talentless bimbo in the last seconds of her fifteen minutes of fame doesn't wear under her skirt when she goes out at night? Such things would have undoubtedly changed the minds, and therefore the theories, of so many of the great philosophers of the past, if only – in their day – they had access to hundreds of up-the-skirt shots of so many young - and sometimes slightly more attractive than average - young women.

TV Interview Techniques

Of course, it was round... except where at the one end it tapered slightly, making it look a bit like one of those other beings you see on the telly, except for the fur – obviously - and the fact that it was blue. Then there was its tendency to squeak in a slightly distressed manner when in the near vicinity of a politician. However, I suppose we can all understand, and – perhaps – sympathise with that.

Obviously enough, everyone immediately presumed it was some sort of alien, some sort of creature, from another planet.

Which it was, obviously.

Even in the genetic backwaters of the human race, nothing like that has ever really developed, not even after several generations of incestuous interbreeding, so it seemed unlikely that it was human, or - given that it had got a job on the TV – near human.

There was – as soon as it conducted its first in-depth interview - some rather robust editorials and feature articles in the various newspapers asking why a creature from another planet had managed to get a peak-time chat show on national TV, especially given its tendency to squeak intermittently when interviewing politicians. After its first show, many of the tabloids demanded that it either did, or didn't, immediately start anal probing on selected politicians on live TV.

Such was the speculation about the anal probing that the alien's agent had to release a press statement saying that the alien – who everyone was now calling Henrietta (although that wasn't her name – her name actually translated out as Steve) – pointing out that she (he... maybe) was not from a race that routinely practised anal probings on other intelligent species, or even humans.

Strangely enough that seemed to disappoint many viewers and there was an immediate slump in Henrietta's viewing figures that took several weeks to recover.

Plans for World Domination

 

Of course, it is not always easy to fully extend the taxiing area for your fleet of ground attack forces without drawing some undue attention to your surreptitious plans for world domination. This is why the average criminal mastermind with megalomaniac desires to control the planet does tend to undertake operations from a remote volcanic island, usually one especially prepared for such a purpose.

Although, one does wonder how he does manage to get the builders in and get the base completed without any spy satellite – for example – picking up the scaffolding and so on from space, or any intelligence agency noticing how a supposedly uninhabited island is getting through so much tea... and sugar.

Then there is the horde of minions that running such a base necessarily entails, after all you can't really advertise the job in the local press, can you? The people applying for those jobs too must realise that thy are basically just cannon fodder and that their long-term job prospects are not very good with career advancement lasting only until the secret agent from some western power shows up and blows them all to buggery in the concluding climax of explosions, destructions and mayhem before he goes off to shag the girl.

Then, of course there is getting the local authority planning permission for a secret base... how would you go about that?

The Wisdom of Nhigel

"So, anyway, what I'm saying is..." the Prophet Nhigel said, pausing for a moment to make sure the holy mates of Nhigel were listening to the wisdom of his words "...is that a wise man, a man of the book, a holy man, will always make sure he has enough for a pint."

The Mates of Nhigel all nodded wisely for they – to a man – knew the danger of taking issue with Nhigel in theological debate, especially before Opening Time.

"But..?" Fat Paul said.

"What, my son?" Nhigel replied, smiling upon his disciple. "Do not be afraid to speak... for how else can we attain wisdom? That is, unless you are going to say something so stupid that will just get you a kicking?"

"I was just wondering," Fat Paul mused. "You know that you said the Lord will provide? I mean, what if he's on the bog or having a kip or what have you... y'know, when you're in need of his help." Fat Paul cowered, taking a step away from Nhigel, just in case.

"An excellent point, my son." Nhigel beamed at Fat Paul. "One that has puzzled many a theological scholar, particularly after last orders, when it seems that the Lord himself has forsaken us. Especially when the takeaway is so far from the pub. So, gather around my brethren and I will explain the wonders and mysterious ways in which our Lord provides for us, his children."

Just then the pub doors opened in front of Nhigel and his mates.

"Behold, A Miracle!" They all yelled, heading for the bar as Nhigel smiled to himself, knowing that through the wisdom and beneficence of the Lord he would not be buying the first round.