Life Without The Boring Bits
Page 19
Milord, it’s a rock! It just looks like a potato.
MILORD
Why would it look like a potato if it’s not a potato? I’ve seen kumeras and yams when I was H.M.’s Governor of East-north-east-east Igololand, but they’re cousins of potatoes. Sometimes I saw things I thought were rocks masquerading as potatoes, but they always turned out to be potatoes.
JAM-BUTTY
What else would they turn out to be, you toffee-nosed git? The only shovel you ever laid hands on in your pampered life was silver-plated, so what’s with this digging potatoes with potato shovels?
THLOW
Um — ha ha ha! The nut-potato-rock is officially called MCC!
EMBER
Of course it is!
JAM-BUTTY
Think you’re fooling me, eh? Don’t want to answer the potato shovel charge, eh? Trying to change the thrust of the argument, eh? We’re talking about potatoes and shovels here!
THLOW
Sir Stanley, it is a rock. An asteroid code-named MCC originating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
JAM-BUTTY
Oh, Jesus, whose belt? Now you’re trying to tell me that there are belts out there as well as nuts and washed potatoes! I refuse to be hit by a belt! You can’t eat a belt either.
SHIRLEY
Nyah, nyah, can so too eat a belt! A licorice belt!
EMBER
Usher, throw that woman out!
MILFORD
I learned Roman numerals at Eton, and M is one thousand and C is one hundred. Therefore M plus C plus C equals twelve hundred potatoes. Bet you didn’t do any Roman numerals at your slimy school, Stan.
EMBER
A thought! MCC is short for the Marylebone Cricket Club!
MILORD
You mean the shell is a cricket ball?
JAM-BUTTY
A cricket ball? Oh, I see what’s going on now! So it’s an upper-crust rock, is it? Too good to be a potato, eh? And what happened to the potato shovels, Archie, you chinless wonder?
MILORD
They dug potatoes, you Marxist-Leninist layabout!
EMBER
Gentlemen, gentlemen! We are talking about a rock from inner space — not a nut, not a potato, not a belt, licorice or otherwise, and definitely, definitely, definitely not a hard red leather ball with several rows of ecru stitching around its equator! It is a rock code-named MCC, which doesn’t mean twelve hundred in Roman numerals or the Marylebone Cricket Club, curse me for saying that! Thlow, what exactly does MCC mean in Pentagon-speak?
THLOW
Massive Collision Catastrophe.
MILORD
What a ruddy silly name for a potato! Potatoes are an American vegetable we name after their Indian tribes. How about Mohawk Cherokee Chippewa?
JAM-BUTTY
What we call them doesn’t count. Americans call potatoes after English sovereigns like King Edward. That would make MCC Matilda Charles the First Charles the Second — what a mouthful! Why not call it BAM? Boudicca Arthur Merlin.
MILORD
Merlin was a king-maker, not a king.
JAM-BUTTY
The Earl of Warwick was the king-maker.
MILORD
What, they taught history in your vile and stinking slum school, did they, Stan? Oh, this is boring! When do we get to eat the potato? With lots of melted butter and freshly ground pepper, please.
EMBER
It is not not not not not not a potato! It is a rock code-named MCC for Massive Collision Catastrophe.
JAM-BUTTY
On one point we agree, Archie — MCC is boring, even for a potato. BAM for Bloody Awful Mess.
MILORD
How about BEB for Back End of Bus?
JAM-BUTTY
How big is this spud from inner space anyway, Golly?
EMBER
Don’t call me Golly! MCC is a rock, Sir Stanley, not a spud, a murphy, a Pontiac or a King Edward!
THLOW
MCC is a mile wide and half a mile long, the Pentagon said.
EMBER
You mean half a mile wide and a mile long, surely.
THLOW
Who says the width has to be less than the length?
ALL CHORUS
Everybody!
THLOW
Then everybody is mistaken. The Pentagon said a mile wide and half a mile long, and the Pentagon is always right.
EMBER
Turn it ninety degrees and it becomes deeper than it is wide, and its hypotenuse will be longer still. Instead of a vertical or horizontal impact, why not a diagonal one?
MILORD
Then, old chap, it can’t possibly be a cricket ball. A cricket ball is round and its impact uniform.
EMBER
No one said it’s a cricket ball! It is a rock that has the misfortune to look just like a potato.
MILORD
Twelve hundred potatoes.
EMBER
Shut up, all of you! Thlow, answer me the burning question — why does MCC look just like a potato?
THLOW
Matilda Charles the First Charles the Second is but one of five billion rocks floating through inner space looking just like potatoes. Inner space is virgin ground. Any farmer knows that the first crop in virgin ground should be potatoes.
MILORD
I prefer Mohawk Cherokee Chippewa.
JAM-BUTTY
Marx’s Communist Creation is better.
THLOW
I vote for Matilda Charles the First Charles the Second.
EMBER
And I am not voting for the Marylebone Cricket Club! It’s a Massive Collision Catastrophe.
JAM-BUTTY
What is that racket? Sounds like a gigantic potato whizzing through the air — what are these black grains? Yum! Freshly ground pepper!
MILORD
It’s raining melted butter!
THLOW
Smells delicious for a rock.
JAM-BUTTY
Well, this is one disaster we can blame C per cent on the Americans — it’s their sodding vegetable.
THLOW
Tuber.
JAM-BUTTY
I don’t play a musical instrument, you Welsh idiot!
MILORD
Mashed by mashed.
EMBER
And farewell from One Fiery Ember!
Creepy sci-fi music starts as a gargantuan, swirling cloud of dust and smoke envelops the set of One Fiery Ember. The camera lifts and lifts, higher, higher, until the whole planet is revealed as a ball of smoke. Hovering on a hawser anchored to the Moon is the Pentagon, which gives a mighty shudder and is exposed as a Klingon Vulture warship. The dust and smoke is being dissipated by an enormous fan protruding from the Vulture’s beak. Earth looks much as always — no visible damage. It can now be seen that the epicentre of the impact was London. All the city’s old-style, majestic buildings have survived unscathed, whereas every single socialist monstrosity from the Millennium Dome to the anal suppository glass skyscraper has vanished, replaced by gracious old-style buildings, squares and parks. A weeny Klingon fighter is skywriting KLINGONS LOVE PRINCE CHARLES! and PRICK ALL BLOW-UP BUILDINGS!
The camera zooms in on the old One Fiery Ember studio, and the sci-fi music diminishes as there comes the unmistakable sound of reconstituting molecules. Two shimmering cylinders form into two Klingons.
KARK and KACK stand hock-deep in mashed potato alongside the corpse of Shirley, a potato pillar with a severely Doric capital. Their phasers are in their hands and set to “stun”, but they are quite relaxed.
KARK
You really have to poise your fingers on your forehead wrinkles when it comes to potatoes, Kack.
KACK
Well, Captain Kark, the potato is the best thing the Americans ever gave to the Universe — I mean, we all love turkeys and hamburgers and Imperial measure, but the potato is in a class all on its own. Didn’t they teach you about the Great Potato Famine of Kling in your school? I kn
ow it was five parsecs ago and you come from Kikstarkikik, but so many Klingons died.
KARK
During my school years on Kikstarkikik, the Famine was utterly eclipsed by the Great Potato Plethora and all the revelations about the graft behind el cheapo blow-up buildings and just whose rectum formed the mould for that frightful rash of anal suppository looking skyscrapers — if it hadn’t been for his chronic haemorrhoids, President Klok — say no more!
KACK
I had quite forgotten, Captain. We’ve been lucky to find a vacant space in this solar system. Fancy the Romulans pinching the green cheese planet Gorgonzola! I heard it turned out to be the wrong shade of green.
KARK
De-phylled their chlorphyll, the fools. Ah, but who could forget towing all those potatoes through hyperspace to make a belt — I ask you, a belt? I was a midshipman grade zee-doublezee, and it was my job to keep the tow lines from tangling every time an earwig ate a worm hole. Five billion potatoes! All to make a belt? We midshipmen petitioned Admiral Kork to make a beaded jerkin with ice moon buttons and cloud moonlet detail, but his answer was to chuck us into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Man, those methane gales! I came out with six extra wrinkles on my forehead. Sexy and pulls the women, I admit, but a pain in the koxkilliuk to keep clean. That’s how come I invented Wrinklean. I’m rich from the royalties.
KACK
Do you know why the King of Kling is so set on exterminating Earthlings, Captain?
KARK
They have to go, Kack. They don’t even know the difference between a potato and a rock, Kack.
KACK
Or a nut, or a belt, or a Kriket ball.
KARK
I heard it was a licorce belt.
Comes the sound of more reassembling molecules. Two Earthlings form to triumphant sci-fi music. Their phasers are set to “kill” and KARK and KACK go up in smoke. As the air clears, it can be seen that one is a genuine Earthling, whereas the other has pointy ears and the green skin that denotes chlorophyll blood.
KIRK
Goddam Klingons! Scratch the surface of a planet, and it’ll bleed Klingons. I note from that potato-smothered lot over there that this planet was populated by Earthlings. Unusual, this far out from Centre Black Hole, but we are a bit like potatoes — proliferate profusely. Have you managed to squeeze Gorgonzola back into place, Spock? Amazing how much space, inner or outer, a potato can eat. However, our luck that the Romulans mistook Gorgonzola’s type of green.
SPOCK
A trifle too much blue, Captain Kirk. It required a millionth power of manoeuvring to fit Gorgonzola in, which has somewhat depleted the dilithium crystals. However, I then found a warehouse stuffed with lithium capsules and dyed them a beautiful shade of peacock — blue in one light, green in another. The response of the impulse engines is remarkable, and Mr. Scott assures me that the warp engines will benefit even more. We have inadvertently put the dilithium mining monopoly on Xaspryxasix out of business.
KIRK
Boo-hoo! Time those heartless exploiters of astral navies got their comeuppance. What did you do with five billion potatoes?
SPOCK
Beamed them to Xaspryxasix to plug up the dilithium mine adits. I took my example from observing potato earwigs plug up worm holes.
KIRK
Then let’s split, Splock! Places to go, things to do. A belt made of potatoes? I would have made a beaded jerkin with ice moons for buttons and cloud moonlet detail. No imagination, Klingons.
SPOCK
Oh, Jim, how can you say that? The Klingon who dreamed up a Vulture disguised as the Pentagon was inspired. I adored it!
KIRK
What are you doing, feeling emotions?
SPOCK
Um — ah — er — gee, Jim, I don’t know!
KIRK
I do, you Klingon in disguise!
Kirk’s phaser jets a red ray and Spock goes up in smoke. A beam of molecules appears and turns into Mr. Sulu.
SULU
Captain, that’s the third potato you’ve zapped today.
KIRK
That was no potato! That was a Klingon masquerading as Mr. Spock.
SULU
They’re growing potatoes in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colors these days, Captain. It was a potato.
KIRK
It was a Klingon masquerading as Spock!
SULU
Who am I, then?
KIRK
Mr. Sulu, navigator of the starship Enterprise.
SULU
I am not Mr. Sulu. I am Matilda Charles the First Charles the Second, a potato.
KIRK
You mean Mohawk Cherokee Chippewa.
SULU
That’s the name of the potato you keep calling Uhura.
KIRK
I’m the only Earthling here?
SULU
You, Captain, are a potato named the Marylebone Cricket Club, and we are all living on Gorgonzola, the green cheese planet. It lies between Mars, solid rock, and Jupiter, a gas giant, and its gooey yet substantial composition represents a transition between solid and gas. Green cheese. Unfortunately the Romulans thought its microbes were symbiotic with their chlorphyll and would provide the “O” their blood lacks, but they were wrong. It stripped the phyll and left them chlor, poor souls. The only way out was mass suicide.
KIRK
I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?
SULU
Mashed marble, roast granite and steamed geodes, all in a lava sauce.
KIRK
Is the granite well done?
SULU
Not a trace of pink, I swear it on a stack of baubles.
KIRK
Okay, I believe you. I hate underdone rock, it’s too — potatoey.
SULU
Now come along, Marylebone, old fellow. If you don’t get a move on, the sun will fry you into a rock that looks just like a potato.
KIRK
Is that why I don’t like underdone? Cannibalism?
SULU
Only if you take to eating earwigs.
ON WOOD AND WARS
Northern hemisphere woodpiles fascinate me, all those perfectly round little foot-long logs stacked in an open porch or against an outside wall, covered by a tarpaulin in case it rains hard. Basically it’s indulgence wood for a fireplace; something wonderful to look at while the central heating does the real work.
It wasn’t like that in the Australian Outback seventy years ago. The places wherein we lived could suffer stunning frosts in winter, but it was never cold enough for sleet, let alone snow. Our wood was for the kitchen stove, a big, black, cast-iron beast that had to burn every day, no matter how scorchingly hot that day might be. The stove cooked all the meals, baked the bread, kept a two-gallon cast-iron kettle boiling to brew many cups of tea. Coffee was unheard of except as a small square bottle of black syrup labeled CAMP ESSENCE OF COFFEE AND CHICORY that Nanna mixed with boiling milk for a treat.
On Mondays the copper had to be lit; it was a huge, round-bottomed cauldron of copper sheeting mounted on bricks, under which sat a firebox, and it held about twenty gallons of water that had to be heated to boiling point. In it, our mother, Laurie, and our grandmother, Nanna, boiled the sheets, towels, men’s trousers and shirts. It was situated down at the end of the backyard, where there was room for the cat’s cradle of clotheslines. Not that this was really a backyard. It was simply a cleared open space wherein dwelled the outhouse, the laundry, the clotheslines, the wood heap, the woodpiles, and the woodshed.
The wood for burning came from living trees and was chosen carefully, as all Australian wood seemed as hard as rock. When the Europeans first arrived, they couldn’t saw it or chop it. What they had called hardwood was a sponge by comparison. The great pity was that softwood did not exist, thus there was no locally made paper until the cultivation of vast coniferous forests began after the First World War, and then the wait for maturation was decades long.