The Seven Ages of Man

The seven ages of man

The age of infant

The child was born when the child was young, but the world was old. It had existed for billions of years without that child – or that tribe – or that species – or life itself.

            The child was born into the teeming billions of the world, a blank slate to be written as anyone, with just the basic Bios to get it started into existence before being influenced by everything and everyone surrounding it.

            Would it live to grow into adulthood, outlive childish diseases?

            Would it be a subsistance farmer, just managing to scratch a living from the poor soil of the available fields?

            Would it be a wealthy industrial leader with material riches to command, enjoy and waste?

            Why the difference?

*

The age of boyhood

The boy is waiting for his birthday, looking forward into the unknown future of his age of man, not knowing in which land it lies with its infinite branching possibilities.

             He does not know that his future is fixed, just waiting for him to follow that one critical path.

            He does not know that the arrow of time does not move. It is a pointer to show when he is and time flows around him to coalesce behind to form his passed times and add pages to the history book of his life.

            He is unsure about everything. He knows nothing, but he knows that he knows everything.

            How can it be otherwise in a teenaging boy?

*

The age of education

The boy leaves home. He leaves his family’s supervision and safety as he joins a University and indulges in manly things. He gets drunk, stoned, catches unknowable diseases but goes home as a child for free food, washing and sleep.

            He learns enough of the course to get by. He learns enough of life to grow up, hidden from his parents.

            He thinks he understands life and rails through the drunken nights with his peers against the unfairness. He grows up some more.

            He learns to compete, he learns that the world does not care if he is there or not.

            Now he is grown, enough to accept the inevitable unfairness of the world. He turns to the matters of a man and accepts responsibility for himself.

*

The age of family and work

The man leaves education, finds work, auctions his strength of body or mind to the highest bidder. He learns his trade, labourer or lawyer, both the same – different bushels of corn for different work. He gains experience, struggles and competes, spends his money on the family that he has gathered around him.

            His children grow, needing him each day, competition between work and family. One day they need him not, leave home; but still need money, and so it goes, the circle of life.

            Children distant, nest too big, time for a bungalow? ‘No stairs.’

*

The age of maturity

His age is but a twentieth of a millennium, the mountain is four million times older, a Variscan G G G G...Great Grandfather.

             He clawed his way up the foothills of the corporate mountain range until he reached the sunlit uplands of calm acceptance, no more promotion, just the casual fending off of upstart youngsters who would dislodge him from his upland summer pasture.

            He waits for his pension, happy not to strive but to graze efficiently with minimum effort until he leaves the threshing floor at the five of each day to return to his dependable family.

            Now he can pass on his knowledge and experience, but no one wants it. They all need to learn for themselves, no short cuts.

*

The age of age

The man is old, but not old as the mountain knows old, the mountain that he can see with his one good, though rheumy eye.

            He is on his own, but content. He looks to the many years behind

            His back is bent in a way that only a wind resisting tree knows and his skin is barked like that same tree, events of the many years embossed on the lignin.

            His walking stick is cut from that very oak; unfair as he does not care to prop up the supplicating sapling that bows before the lazy wind.

            Is there enough wood grown yet to form his coffin so that he can lie restfully, peacefully in the scarlet satin lining?

*

The age of rebirth

Life leaves the man, his corporeal skeleton is boxed  and fed back into the Earth to be chemicalised into minerals, metamorphosed and subducted into the mantle.

            The life of the man is but a tiny, unseen ripple in the fabric of the universe.         

            After many billions of years, the Earth is engulfed in the heat of  the super nova Sun. Man has long escaped to new systems. The materials that were the man stay behind.

            The following inevitable, gravity – driven accretion will see him reborn as part of the star dust that forms a new system.

            The universe continues; indifferent, wheeling, expanding.

            It knows nothing of the man, an atom is an atom, to be used to build new worlds, no matter whence it came, from peasant,  rich man, granite or mud.


This piece has been published in WordBohemia.
www.WordBohemia .co.uk

'If you build it, they will come.'

If you build it, they will come.

‘Sit down, please Sophie, it’s not going home time yet,’ said Miss Adams.

I looked at the big clock above the alphabet board and tried to work out how long I had to wait. I didn’t want to wait because I had something very important to ask my Granddad.

      I looked at the clock again. It didn’t seem to have moved since I last looked. Why was it going so slowly? A day in school is sooo long.

      ‘Why are you so fidgety today?’ asked my best friend, Anita who was sitting next to me at the paint table.

      ‘My Granddad’s collecting me from school today and I have something very important to ask him.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘I don’t want to say, it’s a secret.’

      ‘Oh, but surely you can tell…/

      ‘Anita and Sophie, will you two please stop talking and get on with your painting.’

      ‘Yes, Miss,’ we chorused.

*

‘Right, it’s nearly going home time, so can we please tidy up. Put the paints away and peg up your paintings so that they will be dry when you come to school tomorrow,’ called out Miss Adams.

      I hurried to get our table cleared and everything put away. Anita laughed at me, ‘you aren’t usually in such a hurry. It must be something very important you want to ask your Granddad.’

      I like it when Mummy is working and Granddad collects me from school. We walk home through the woods and he tells me about all the animals, birds and flowers we see. He says he likes it too as the walk is good for his room attics. He laughs when I say he doesn’t have any attics in his house. When we get to his house, Grandma gives me a drink and sometimes a piece of cake if she has been baking. Then we sit at the kitchen table and tell each other what we have been doing that day.

      ‘Yes, it is. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, Anita’ I said as I pulled my coat off my peg and tried to put it on quickly. We lined up, ready to leave, I was nearly at the front of the line.

      Miss Adams opened the gate and said, ‘goodbye, see you tomorrow children.’

      ‘Goodbye Miss Adams,’ we answered and galloped up the slope to where the parents, grandparents and childminders were waiting for us. I saw my Granddad and started to run towards him, ready to jump up into his arms so he would catch me and give me a hug but then I remembered that I was getting old now so I slowed down and walked across to him and put my hand in his big scratchy one and said, ‘hello Gandad.’

      He laughed and bent down to give me a kiss and a hug, ‘are you getting too old for a hug now, my little one?’

      I squirmed out of his arms and said, ‘I’m a big school girl now Gandad.’

      ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but you’ll always be my little one.’ He has always called me that. Mummy and Daddy call me Sophie but Granddad says he has that special name for me. I like that.

      ‘Gandad,’

      ‘Yes, my little one.’

      ‘Can I ask you a question?’

      ‘’Course you can.’

      ‘We only have a little garden at home but you have a big one so could we dig a pond in your garden?’

      ‘Where did this idea come from?’

      ‘We’ve been learning about all the creatures that live in ponds in nature study in school.’

      ‘We’ll have to ask Grandma but if she says yes, then we can.’

I jumped up and gave him a hug. This time, I didn’t care who was watching. ‘Oh thank you Gandad.’

      ‘OK, but don’t forget we have to see if Grandma says yes first, my little one.’

Mummy says I can wrap Granddad around my little finger. I don’t see how that is possible, so I don’t what she means.

*

The construction was going well. Granddad had marked out two overlapping circles on the lawn with a piece of string tied to a dibber to make a figure of eight shape. Daddy and Granddad had skimmed off the turf and dug out the holes, one was shallow and the other was deep for the fish to shelter in during the winter when water would freeze at the surface.

      ‘What are you going to do with all the earth you have dug out Gandad?’

      ‘I’m going to dig a new hole to put it in of course, my little one’ he said. Granddad is silly sometimes. You would have to put the earth you dig out of the new hole somewhere, wouldn’t you?

Each of the holes had a shelf around so that we could pots on them with water plants in. The next Saturday Daddy took me to a garden centre where we got a big piece of rubber to put in the holes to hold the water. The we filled the pond up with water from Granddad’s hose. It took a long time. It was still filling when Daddy took me home.

*

Granddad collected me from school again the next day, even though Mummy wasn’t working, because I wanted to see all the creatures in the new pond. I was very disappointed as there were no creatures, it was just full of clear water, like a swimming pool.

      ‘Where are all the creatures Granddad, I can’t see any?’

      ‘This is a good time to learn patience, my little one. There won’t be many creatures until next spring and then it will start to fill up.’

      ‘Oh, ok. I’ll just have to wait then. But where will they come from?’ I believed my Granddad because he always tells me the truth.

      ‘I don’t know but what I do know is that we have built it so they will come.’

Slated

Slated

The morning winter sun shone, watery, through the small panes of glass in the South - facing gable ended window, of the ancient classroom. I sat the furthest away from the window, hidden towards the back, in a dark corner, a sharp turn left as you came in the door, so that I was out of the first sight of any visitors to the room. Too my right was a row of shelves, painted the same dark red as the desks and almost as chipped. They were mostly empty of books; waiting for the future age of plenty, plenty of books, plenty of paper and the emergence of the plastic culture of plenty of everything including plenty of rubbish, famous as the effluent society. This was the time of real austerity where each pupil’s jotter had to be filled on each line and on each page. Complete with a signature from the form teacher to say that he was happy that it was full before you were allowed the nerve wracking trip along the echoing hallway of parquet flooring to the Head Teacher’s office for a new one. Miss Cates was always kind to the pupils but the mere fact of having to talk to another teacher – with an office, with a door that had to be knocked on - was enough to make us all nervous of getting the procedure correct.

I was sitting at a two-child desk with John Rogers. He was not really my best friend, Jack Lewry was that, but we had been separated for talking too much, Mr C Geen, our teacher,  had swapped me with Brian Hooper. Even back then I changed his name in my head to Mr Sea Green and thought of him as a sailor, even though he had been in the Army – the start of the strange brain thinking to come? He lived in the village in a bungalow with a name that always baffled me, Dulce Domum. It was many years later that I found out that it meant Sweet Home. Apparently he was something of a Latin scholar. The desk was all-of-one-piece. The framework was dark red painted angle iron with years of scratches from impatient shoes with steel ‘blakeys’ hammered in  toe and heel to make them last longer. The seat, for two, was a wooden bench. The top had two, sloping, wooden lids which we could, and did, slam down at the end of the class with many satisfying bangs in spite of Mr Green’s entreaties of ‘Pack up quietly please.’ Fingers were often caught in the bangs – revenge for imagined slights during the day. Our meagre stock of books was stored in the desk, under the noisy lids, ready for the next day. Homework was still in the future.

On the top of the desk, forward of the lids, were two ink wells that were topped up by the duty ink monitors from what looked like a small watering can. There were, of course, many ‘accidents’ during the day when ink would be mysteriously splattered across someone’s work or, even worse, a dress or shirt. We were each issued with a small square of blotting paper at the start of each school day. Between the ink wells were grooves in the wood where the pens were put down. As you may imagine, the wood in these grooves was soaked with the ink of years. The pens that lay in these grooves were wooden with steel nibs. They were only used for ‘best work’ as the nibs were in short supply and were constantly crossing over as the favourite trick was to press down too hard as we all tried hard to write with these devilish contraptions. When the tips crossed over, the pens would jam in the paper, tear a hole and leave a large blot as evidence. It took much persuading of the teacher to get a new nib as they were in short supply, many a nib was carefully bent back into almost working order. Most of us preferred the pencils we used in the jotters although there was always a queue to use the one sharpener for the class.

It was hard to write at all during this time of year as the classroom was always cold which made for stiff fingers. There was still coal rationing and the railways had priority over heating. When it was really cold, Mr Green used to get out the Valor paraffin heater and dispatch two of the biggest, strongest, boys to the hardware shop to fill the gallon tin can with Blue or Pink paraffin, paid for from his own pocket. The bonus with this was that we got an extra hot drink as a kettle was heated on top of the stove. We all looked forward to that hot cup of ‘billy tea’ mid morning when the kettle boiled.

      There were rumours of it for weeks but the day finally came. Sweets were off ration! All it took to make yourself very sick after eating too many sweets now was lots of money – and that was the parent’s problem wasn’t it? Now, instead of walking into a shop and asking, ‘What have you got for two stamps?’ you could march in and ask for what you wanted, the only limit was how much money you had managed to blag from your Mum, one penny or sometimes, even two.

      Today we were to have a session on  history. This turned out to be a discussion about the bad old days where your teacher told you how much better you had it than he did when he was at school.

      We sat there, half listening and almost believed it as Mr Green described the slates that each child had. It was about the size of today’s A4 with a wooden frame around it. You drew on it with a steel stylus but wo betide you if you pressed too hard because it would be difficult to rub out. All the writing and arithmetic was done on this. No paper was used except for the exams when paper, ink and pens were counted out and then counted back in. We knew what the desks were like because we were sitting on them. The school was the same. Most of the teachers were now ex Forces from the war but they would never tell us their stories.

      Mr Green then told us that the worst punishment that an unruly child could expect was to have their slate confiscated for a certain length of time. Without their slate they could  do nothing.  They were ‘slated.’

Leaving Home

Leaving Home

It was time.

      The babies had been hatched many months before. The feeding had been exhausting for the parents. They had been flying further away from the nest and it had been a bad year for the remaining small mammals that seemed to get better able to evade their clear-eyed stoops from high level as the year wore on. Their two children had grown with all the feeding. They were hungry with their mouths always open when the parents returned from their foreys away from the eyrie with their mobile larder of dead bodies - or fresh meat, depending on your point  of view. They started by looking like skinny chickens, ready for the oven, but gradually their feathers started to grow and as they did, the young birds grew to be the same size as their parents.

      It was unusual for there to be two youngsters at this stage. Normally the stronger and larger of the two would tip the smaller one out of the nest, to fall to its death on the ground below or to be be spiked on the waiting branches of the Douglas Fir. Less competition, one less mouth to share the available food with. Survival of the strong.

      The two young ones enjoyed their new feathers. They flapped their wings, took short exploratory hops around the nest. Tried to see if their wings would take their weight and transfer it to the waiting air but neither of them would take the ultimate, no way back, step of jumping off the nest.

      The adult birds circled high above the nest in the clear air, taking advantage of the rising thermals generated by the sun heating up the bare rock walls of the nearbye quarry. They called to each other; it was as if they were discussing their children’s future. They seemed to come to a joint decision, dropped a wingtip and circled down to their eyrie. The male eagle perched on a branch above the nest while the mother landed next to her children who, aparently sensing something was different, stopped their pleading for food  and closed their beaks.

      They all waited. The decision had been made. Today was the day, only the time was not known. The sun  shone, air rose in the tested thermals. The mother hopped across to the first chick and talked to it, persuavely, but nothing. The nearly fully fledged chick jumped up to the parapet of the nest. The mother called again – last minute instructions. Then the chick did the irrevocable, it jumped off, onto the waiting air. It dropped clumsily, spread its wings, waggled its tails and folded its feet under it.

      It was flying.

      It dropped twenty feet and felt the difference in pressure under its wings, felt the air rush past its staring, unseeing eyes, felt the pressures around its steering tail and found a thermal. It rose effortlessly, soaring with the warm air, the pressure lessened. It rose past the nest and screamed with ecstatic delight at its mother and sister. It was flying. This what it was born for. It experimented with the wing tips feathers, making and destroying the vortices, swooping, plunging and rising.

      It circled around the nest, called its sister to join  it. She did.  They soared and flew together. The greatest day of their life.

      They grew tired and hungry. It was time to return to the nest, to accept the congatulations of their parents and to gorge on some food to assuage the ravenous hunger they had built up with their aerobatics. They would be nurtured and fed for the last time today.        

      Tomorrow they would be taught how to hunt, they would go hungry until they learned how to catch their own prey. Once they could fly and hunt their parents would throw them out of the nest to make their own way in the world. A new generation.

      They were ready to leave home.

Ghost word - 1

Ghost word - 1

You might laugh me out of the text but I think is is etymological discrimination. Just you check and see how many times little words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ get used compared to me. I understand the argument about conjunctions and articles being used a lot because they are essential to the smooth running of the prose but what about real meaning? Now there is something that is vital to any exposition, have you seen what Elmore Leonard used to do to his novels? I never rated them myself and I think some of the readers who raved about them could be described as me; I mean, he never really even describes his characters properly and leaves out the bits that readers would skip anyway. That’s no good, novels are supposed to be hard work aren’t they?

      I think my basic problem is that I was born as an adjective. Now, what is the essence of adjective. What is its function?  The humans always boast ‘I think therefore I am’. The most an adjective can say is that ‘I describe therefore I am’. This means that my existence depends on someone using me to describe something or someone else. I have no independent existence, I always have to depend on a noun being available that I can apply myself to.

      Don’t get me started on nouns. Do you know how arrogant they are? ‘I am therefore I am’, they always say, relishing their independent existence. And as for gerunds, they are even worse, seeing themselves as upmarket nouns, ‘we can do the job of both nouns and verbs,’ they boast, ‘I am and do therefore I am.’ Snobs, all of them.

      Yes, I’m afraid I suffer from the adjective’s perennial problem, low esteem. I have been been to see my Thesaurus, Dr Roget,  but she wasn’t much help. ‘You should just accept your place in the lexicon and be happy with that,’ she said. ‘you have had a good life, I know you were in the Army, the Paras wasn’t it? That gave a you a chance to travel and I believe Jonathan Swift wrote all about your adventures around the world.’

      ‘Yes, but even he spelt my name wrong. You’d think a man of the church would go to the trouble of getting that right wouldn’t you? I think the main cause of my problem is that I am still the only word that has been left out of an edition of the OED by mistake. They made sure I was back in the next edition but how do you think that makes me feel? What do you think I should do?

      ‘ My suggestion is this. Accept your place in the order of things and your characteristics that you cannot change. You will always be an adjective for example and there is nothing wrong with that. Where would we be without the valuable work that you and your colleagues do? The world would be a very simple and plain place. I suggest that you go back to your home in the OED and make friends with your neighbours. The one before you, ‘the passage by which food passes from the mouth to the stomach,’ sounds like he may have some interesting stories and the one after you,’a ravine or channel formed by running water’ may have some stories of far-off places that you both have visited?’

      ‘OK, I’ll try that. Thank you doctor.’

      ‘No problem, always glad to help. If you have any more problems, you can always come and look me up.’

I walked out through the waiting room and saw an old friend of mine, Hanna Rayburn,  sitting in the corner.

      ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked

      ‘I’ve been coming here for some time, to see Dr Roget, she is treating me for my problem.’

      ‘What problem is that?’ I asked, a little indelicately.

      ‘I get frightened by old fashioned cookers in big, open plan kitchens, ‘ she said, ‘ the doctor thinks I am suffering from agarophobia.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I had better let you get on with your therapy then, I can see you have a lot on your plates.’

      ‘Yes, I’m cooking dinner tonight.’

She knocked on the door and walked in the doctor’s treatment room. I didn’t believe a word of it. Who did she think I was? I’m not a backward Evian. I’ve been around a bit.

      I did as Dr Roget suggested and made my home in the ‘G’ section of the OED. I was getting well settled in when, one day, there was a lot of noise from just overleaf, on the next page. I looked it up and found it was gunfire, ‘the repeated firing of a gun or guns’ so I looked across to the opposite page and talked to my guardian, ‘a person who defends and protects something’. Yes, I know he is one of those nouns, but he agreed to look after me. I think he was feeling quite proud to be asked, even if it was only by a lowly adjective. He was really a guerrilla guardian from Guatemala who was quite fond of alliteration so we bonded well as we went fishing for gudgeon together.

      That’s what he told me and I, of course, believed him. That is what I do.

*

I heard on the grapevine, ‘the spreading of information through talk or rumour’, that some of the subjects and predicates of sentences had been getting together to form independent clauses. This was, of course, not allowed by the Great Samuel J., but it seems they crept past Maurice Waite and Sara Hawker, of the OED, unseen. The next I heard was that they had been chatting up verbs, and even some gerunds, to try to make sentences. They were really getting above themselves.

      I decided that something had to be done. I got together with a few of my friends, well neighbours really, and we formed The G Force or Grammarians. The founding members were; myself of course as GB (Gully Bull ) with Guardian, Gully and Gullet closely behind in the Guerilla Army. Our motto was ‘G today, then onwards through A to Z’. ( It’s alliterative if you say it properly, with an American accent )

      We decided to set a test case so we reported a couple of dodgy clauses to the Lexicon Police.( Leptons for short, hadrons for long or Higgs for very short ). They investigated and passed the file to the DPP ( Department of Publishing and Philandering). They decided that there was a case to answer so a date was set for a trial in front of a Judge. ( after all, what was the point in holding it behind his back? ). The public prosecutor was An Urine Bevin who was reluctantly brought back from  the dead after the requisite affydavid was signed by the Judge. He was the only literate on the centre court on that day, all the rest were away playing tennis, or some similar racket, on the Net.

      We had appointed a leading QC, called Quentin Carrville, to lead the defence’s case so we just had an ordinary barrista, called Jen Dobrie,  for the coffee, from Gdansk.

On the appointed day everyone turned up in court and the Clerk pounded his Gavel and said, ‘All be upstanding, the ‘orrible Judge Dreadlock presiding.’ The clerk had a way with words but it wasn’t anyone else’s way so there was plenty of scope for misunderstanding. Luckily we were moving on to ‘H’ words next. The judge calmly combed his hair and asked if everyone was there. ‘Is everyone here?’ No one answered.

      ‘Well, that’s ok then, everyone’s here,’ he said, ‘on with the trial,’ “Just like the Red Queen,” said Lewis, as an aside to Llewellyn as the judge tried to bang his gravel. It sounded rather gravelly so I investigated where the extra ‘r’ had come from. It transpired that it was from Farther Christmas, some misspelling in a letter to the North Pole no doubt. I removed it so that the judge could bang on properly.

      As I said to the Grammerians, ‘if we can’t even get a ‘G’ word right, how are we going to manage with the other twenty seven letters?’ That was a rhetorical question so there was no answer. We had no plans to do the ‘R’ words for many a year, so no one understood what I meant, so they still didn’t answer. A case of two unknowns ending up with the right answer.

      The judge asked for the accursed, ( sorry, ‘the accused, that pesky extra ‘r’ again ) Mr S Clause, to enter the dock, alongside the Maersk St David, the biggest container ship in Wales. It was too big for the Suez canal, the Panama canal, with the new extension and even for the Manchester ship canal so it normally berthed at Pembroke Dock – minding the draft of course. Because of this, it was called a Man’ size container ship. He floated in on the tide and pleaded to be set free. ‘No,’ said the judge, ‘wrong answer. Guilty or not guilty are the only two possible answers. Otherwise you’re sunk.’

      ‘Not guilty then’, said Santa Clause. ‘I did never, not do it, wot I wos accursed of.’

      ‘Enter a Not Guilty plea please Mr  De Klerk,’ said the judge, in spite of the apartheid.

It was getting late by this time. All were assembled, the Gury had been sworn in – I had managed to change the Jury to Gury so that they were in the ‘G’ section with me and so more likely to believe whatever tall story they were told by the accused. Luckily the Gudge hadn’t noticed as both Gudge, Gury were ‘G’ words and so had been checked out by the grammerians. It was now lunchtime so the Gudge asked Jen Dobrie to produce the coffee for everyone. She banged the dripper on the edge and saw the grounds for dismissal drop into the tray. The Gudge also asked if there was a Friar in court as he was very partial to his chips.

      Friar Tuck trudged in, pulling his handcart. ‘Can’t you leave your cart outside?’ said the Judge, ‘It smells a bit ripe in here.’

      ‘That’s Robin, I’m afraid,’ said the Friar. ‘He’s been dead a while and he gets a bit whiffy now and again.’

      ‘Yes, I can tell, but why?

      ‘Well, it was like this see, Judge,’ said the eponymous Friar. ‘I was attending to Robin, one of our most famous hoodies, who was feeling quite poorly at the time and he was contemplating his demise like. I was in attendance.’

      ‘Do you mean he was thinking about his death?’ asked the Judge politely.

      ‘You’re right there Guv, you ain’t a bad a Judge. He came up with that old trick of shooting an arrow up in the sky.’

      ‘What for?’ asked the Judge.

      He said. ‘ Wherever this arrow lands within the boundary of Nottingham Wildwood, let my mortal remains be buried there.’

      ‘What has that to do with your smelly cart?’ asked the Judge quite reasonably.

      ‘Well the arrow rose up in the air, turned around and descended. It landed on my cart, unfortunately. I had to keep my promise to Robin of course, being a Holy Man and all that. So I ‘as to cart his body around like. Most inconvenient, the weight of course, apart from  the smell.’

      ‘So, given all that, can you still make us up some French Fries?’

      ‘Yes, no problem except that they will have to be chips. I don’t hold with that French rubbish after Agincourt, the field of the cloth of gold and all that other stuff that Henry made up.’ said Friar McDonald, getting out his chip pan, wood chips and  filling up his barbie with waste diesel oil.

      I didn’t believe his name, who is really called ‘Friar McDonald Tuck?  I looked it up at Dr Roget’s’. ‘A wily owner of a chippy who masquerades as a Holy Man. Known to have a high BMI and is a good friend of Robin Hood.’

      Well that settled that, he was whom he appeared to be. His Carte may not be very Blanche but he was the real deal, or Happy Meal as he was sometimes known.

      We all settled down to eat our chips, with some highly suspect red sauce, and finished our meal off with an excellent cup of coffee from Gdansk. ‘Dziękuję,’ said Dzień Dobry politely, as we passed the cups back.

      ‘The court is now in session,’ said the Judge as he banged his gavel on the newly formica’d bench. ‘ Call the first witless, sorry, witness.’

      ‘Call Samuel Johnson, call Samuel Johnson, call Samuel Johnson,’ the call echoed around the corridors of power until it woke up he good Dr who was sleeping off a rather large lunch on a bench in one of the waiting rooms. He pulled himself together and walked into the court and stepped up to the witness box.

      ‘Do you, Dr Samuel Johnson, swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’? recited Mr de Klerk.

      ‘Not likely, would you?’ Answered the good Dr..

      ‘Err, well, no, of course not,’ said the clerk.

      ‘Well, don’t ask me then, OK?’ said Sam.

      ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said the judge irritably, who was a little dyspeptic. ‘ Your witness Mr Bevin.’

      An Urine heaved himself to his feet and addressed his notes, he had forgotten to do it over lunch.

      ‘You are, I believe Doctor S Johnson who is an acknowledged expert on Lithology. Is that so?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Have you heard of clauses getting together asking nouns, and sometimes Gerunds, if they would like to make a sentence?

      ‘No’

      ‘What do you mean, No?’

      ‘What do you think I mean? I don’t know what a clause, noun or gerund is, do I?’

      ‘But, but, you are a world renowned Lithologist are you not?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Is not Lithology the study of words and grammar?’

      ‘No, it is the study of rocks and minerals. Things like granite, clay and limestone. I can witter on for hours about them if you wish, just like any geologist.’

      ‘That will not be necessary Doctor, thank you,’ said the perspiring An Urine, as he sat down.

      ‘No questions, your honour.’ Said the defence QC, quickly. He didn’t want to hear about rocks, just like any normal person.

      ‘I call Mr Callum McDillon,’ said the worried An Urine.

      The call went out and echoed around the halls as before but it gets too boring to write it down each time so please assume it happened, thank you.

      ‘Are you the standard feckless Irishman?’ asked An Urine

      ‘Yes, I am sir. I was taught to stop swearing by my Ma in Law a couple of years ago.

      ‘Do you…’

      ‘Not likely, that Dr Sam got away with it so I don’t see why I should have to.’

      ‘Objection.’ Said the Judge. ‘I’m bored, can we move on please.

      ‘Very good, my Lord. And what do you know about the clauses having a conspiracy?’

      ‘I heard that they were getting above themselves and promoting themselves as sentences.’

      ‘Thank you Mr McDillon. Your witness.

Mr Quentin Carrville stood up to his full height, adjusted his wig and fixed the Feckless Irishman with a stare that would easily have turned a statue from stone into wiggly snakes. ‘Tell me, Mr McDillon, or may I call you Callum?’

      ‘Yes, Callum is OK.’

      ‘Tell me Callum, are you really a Feckless Irishman or are you just one of those witlesses we heard the Judge describe earlier?’

      ‘To be sure, I certainly am one of those fecking, feckless witnesses, soir.’

      ‘Thank you Callum, I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then shall I?’

      ‘I think so.’

      ‘You may be excused, Mr McDillon. Case proven,’ said the Judge. ‘Let’s all go down to the caff on the corner and get some decent chips,  begging your pardon, Friar. After I have summed up of course.’

      ‘I find the defendant guilty on all counts of trying to be a sentence. I shall now hand you down a sentence; from the tall wardrobe. It will be a custodial sentence. I sentence you, Mr S Clause to serve 43 years in custody with the Tooth Fairy and The Easter bunny until the 24^th December this year. Chips away.’

This meant, of course that Father Christmas only had Jen’s coffee left overs to rely on for a retrial.

     

     

 This piece has been part - published in WordBohemia.
www.WordBohemia .co.uk    

The meeting

The meeting

Colin climbed slowly up the beautiful white Portland stone steps and manoevered himself through the mahogany revolving door, taking care not to touch the immaculately polished brass finger plates. He debarked from the door system onto the polished, pattened Carrera marble floor with two symetrical columns rising majestically to support the vaulted roof. He tried to work out if they were Doric, Ionic or Corinthian. He pictured himself back at school in Miss Atabelia’s classics class where he had been faced with the same question,  ‘Ionic has the most scrolls, Doric is the plainest and Corinthian is the fancy one,’ he thought he remembered. Colin stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around him at the richness of his surroundings. ‘Was it all designed to impress or intimidate?’ he wondered. It seemed to work as he was feeling both.

      His first words to the receptionist behind the modern glass desk were, ‘Lovely pair of Dorics you’ve got there Miss.’

      ‘What? How dare you say things like that to me.’ said the outraged  receptionist, Judy Tench, according to her name plate set on the desk in front of her.’I’ll report you for a health and safety violation, you should be wearing a Hi Vis jacket like every one else in the country.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said a flustered Colin. ‘Are they Ionic then, I get confused as to which has the most scrolls?’

      ‘Mr Hadnib, can you please come over here.’

The heavyset security guy in a smart, but ill fitting three piece suite, marched over to the reception desk, his gleaming black boots squeaking – he was clearly not used to walking sofa. ‘What seems to be the problem Miss Tench? Is this man bothering you? Shall I ask him to leave?’ he suggested with a joyful glint in his eye, hinting that he would perhaps enjoy the process a little too much as it would probably include a little less asking and a little more physical persuasion.

      ‘No thank you Mr Hadnib, I just need to find out what he is doing here.’

      ‘Wot are you doing here, mate? Miss Tench needs to know’, asked Iqbal, with a firm grasp of Colin’s left elbow

      ‘I’m here to meet with the governor and the rest of the MPC, err that’s the Monetary Policy Committee.’

      ‘Yerst, we know what MPC stands for. We’re not stupid are we Miss Tench? Why do you want to see that lot then, wot’s your business with them?’

      ‘Well, I err, I’m the new economist on the committee and I’m here for my first meeting with them.’

      ‘Name?’ asked Judy stiffly.

      ‘Err, well it’s Colin Tudge actually.’

      ‘Why have you got three names?'

      ‘What do you mean?’

      Well, Colin Tudge-Actually, that’s a very posh name isn’t it?

      ‘No it’s Colin Tudge really.’

      ‘Well make up your mind, which is it?’

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘Oh never mind, I’ll call the governor’s secretary and let him know that you’re here.’

      ‘Err, OK, thank you. What did you used to do for a living before you came here to work at the Bank of England, Iqbal?’ asked Colin, always eager to make new friends.

      ‘I was a screwdriver.’

      ‘A what?’

      ‘I was a chauffer for the govenor of Wormwood Scrubs.’

      ‘Oh, and before that?’

      ’I was a drug dealer.’

      ‘Heroin, cocaine, that type of thing?’

      ‘Nah. I used to work in Boots, selling aspirin, paracetamol and benacol. Then I got promoted to the perfume counter. I really liked Lulu, I had a real obsession about that one. I was always sniffing so I got sacked.

After that I got a summer job as a lifeguard at the gene pool.’

      ‘You may go up now Mr Tudge and please leave my dorics off the agenda in the future.’

      ‘Err, ok then, thank you Judy. Which meeting room are we in?’

      ‘It’s the Schrődinger room, its locked and open. I know it’s there somewhere but I never can find it.’

      ‘Huh?’

     

*

‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the MPC meeting and a special welcome to young Colin here and myself, haw, haw. It is our first meeting and I am sure you will all make us both feel at home. I have a list here and I see that Brian Sledge is missing, where is he?’

      ‘Eh, I’m afraid he called an hour ago and said he would be a little late,’ said James Threadneedle, the governor’s secretary, from his support seat behind the governor’s right elbow.

      ‘That’s not good enough, I thought you Brits were tougher than that. Didn’t Churchill say, “ask not what your country can do for you but what can you do for your country?”’

      ‘Err, no, that was Jack Kennedy.’

      ‘Who’s he? Never heard of him. Well, let’s get on with the meeting, Brian can join us when he decides to get out of bed. “This is not the time for sound bites but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder”, as Nixon said a few years ago.’

      ‘No that was Tony… err never mind.’

      ‘Oh, hi, come on in. You must be Brian. What happened to you?’

      ‘I’m so, so sorry Guv but I was walking down Oxford Street with a friend of mine – his name is Henry and he walks very fast and… well, never mind all that. The point is that Henry was hit by a rental car that ran over one of his legs and broke it in two places. By the time I called an ambulance and got him sorted out I lost quite a bit of time and so that is why I am late. Sorry again.’

      ‘Waal, that sounds like a good enough excuse to me but don’t let it happen again. Was Henry in much pain from his broken leg?’

      ‘Yes, I think so. I asked him that and he said “Yes, it Hertz.”’

      ‘I surely hope he gets better soon.’

      ‘Thanks guv.’

      ‘Call me Bruce, please.’

      ‘OK, Bruce Please.’

      ‘Is that the famous Limy sense of humour.’

      ‘Err no, I thought that was your name.’

      ‘If you call me that, I’ll call you Brian Sledge-Late and hope you don’t do a runner. Haw, haw, “runner”, geddit? I said “runner” because your name is Sledge and sledges have… oh never mind.’

*

‘Right let’s get down to business. I don’t know what your approach to all this fiscal and monetary stuff is but I never can tell the difference. “We’ll fight them on the bleachers, we will fight them on the baseball grounds, we will never surrender,” as M.L. King once said as he gave Roosevelt a high six.’

      ‘I think you’ll find it was Churchill who almost sai…oh never mind.’

      ‘I need some ideas on what we need to do to get your economy out of the deep, doo, doo it’s in. You can start Colin. What would you do to clear the doo doo?’

      ‘Well, err, um, I’d start by…/

      ‘Sorry to interrupt, Colin, just as you were going to share your brilliant idea with us. What about some coffee to make sure we are all awake and on top form? Is there a lawyer in our little group here?’

      ‘Err, well, yes, I’m a barrister.’

      ‘And who are you?’

      ‘Rupert Tristram Smythe actually.’

      ‘And why have you got four names Rupert? Oh, I forgot, we’ve done all that haven’t we? Well Rupert, would you like to serve the coffee please?’

      ‘Well, ok then, but why did you choose me?’

      ‘You’re a barrista ain’t yu? You just said so. Is there a law against lawyers working for a living? Haw, haw. You could call it your pro boneo job for the day – like taking a dog for a walk.’

Rupert served the coffee, he didn’t think an explanation would help. He didn’t have a dog anyway.

      ‘Back to you then Colin, we are all prepared to be amazed.’

      ‘The first thing I would do is to print some money.’

      ‘Oooh Kaaay… how much would you print?’

      ‘I’d print enough to give every citizen in the country on the electoral roll £2,000.’

      ‘Whoah there yogi bear, what about giving some to the banks?’

      ‘No point. They would just pay it out in bonuses and it would be spent on foreign holidays and luxury goods made overseas. I suggest we give out the cash in voucher form that has to be spent within three months on goods manufactured in the UK. That is a boost  to the economy of about £90 billion. It would also have the advantage that all the money goes straight into people’s pockets and improves the feel good factor so people will go on the spend some of their own money.’

      ‘I can see where you’re coming from Colin but it ain’t gonna happen ‘cos it jest won’t work.’

      ‘Why’s that?’

      ‘Come on Colin, work it out for yourself, you can’t just give money away.’

      ‘But we’ve been giving money to the banks for the last three years, ever since we started QE.’

      ‘Yes, but that’s different Col, baby. “I have a dream that one day all bankers will be rich beyond their wildest dreams.” Your Tony Blare said that y’know. It was in his ’63 speech about the British revolution being forged in the white heat of technology.’

      ‘I thought it was Martin Luther Wilson?’

      ‘No, he was in Pirates of the Caribbean, playing Johny Depposit I think?’

      ‘Right Rupert, why don’t you tell us about the interest rate? What is it at the moment?’

      ‘A recent youguv poll put it at 34%.

      ‘Isn’t that a little high? I only get 1.3% from my building society account.’

      ‘Well, if you consider that 61% are not interested and 5% don’t know, it starts to make sense.’

      ‘Maybe to you Rupert, but not to me.”Many are cold but few are frozen” not sure who said that, but it’s in the KJV so it must be gospel.’

      ‘Can I ask how you got this job Bruce? If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem like a typical governor of the BoE.’

      ‘That’s because I ain’t, young Rupert Tristram. I was working in this circus in Montreal see, when I was made redundant. I had trained the lions so well that they knew what to do, so I was out of the door – well flap actually. I needed a job so I rang my old mate Ozzy and he suggested I come over for a gig in the good old U of K. So here I am. Ozzy said that he had checked with the chancellor and she was happy so I got the job.’

      ‘Err, I’m afraid that was me. Ozzy is an old friend of mine so I just agreed with him. I’m Anne Chancellor by the way Bruce.’

*

The telephone by James’ hand chirruped gently.

      ‘Hello James speaking, how may I help?’

      ‘Isn’t he a lovely speaker?’ said Bruce.

      ‘Err, this is Judy here on reception. I have an angry looking guy here called Marvin Carney who says he is the new govenor of the Bank of England. What shall I do?’

      ‘Tell him I’ll be down to meet him directly, Judy. Bruce, you need to leave, the real govenor is here.’

      ‘Okay, I guess I had best shoot through then. Nice to chat with you guys. “I shall return,” as Ghandi once said.’

          ‘When you said about Ozzy, I assumed you meant George Osborne, and it wasn’t Ghandi, it was Arni Schwartzengaga or General Douglas MacArthur,’ protested Colin.

      ‘Never heard of them, but you know what ‘assume’ does don’t you Colin? “Makes an Ass of U and Me.”’ I think Henry Kissinger said that first, or was it Maslow?

      I must get a shift on as I’ve got a gig at the Hackney Empire tonight and need to check if Ozzy has ordered enough lions. That’s the mane thing. “Mane”, “Lion” geddit? Haw, haw. Just remember you guys, “Omnia mutanur, nihil interit”  ("everything changes, nothing perishes"), Ovid wrote that in his Metamorphoses. Check it out if’n you don’t believe me.’

      Bruce marched off, stage left, right, left, right, out of the quantum meeting room, tucking the cat under his arm.