So he just got on with it, and went with it for the next few days.
So the night finally came - well it wasn’t really a night more of a slightly less intense bright glare -everyone was ready, and all the little penguins and chicks were busy trying to pretend to be asleep.
It was at that point, when it was all quiet, that Dave decided to wander off to get some peace. To try and think things through a bit, on his own.
He walked away from the colony, and up one of the small hills at the base of the mountain that overlooked the valley of the penguins. He wanted to be away from everyone, to have a bit of space, to rest, and not be in danger of waking up with a red nose wedged on the end of his beak, and being surrounded by sniggering, pesky chicks.
He made a last check around, leaned with his back against the rocks, looked over the whole valley for a moment, gave a sigh, and then closed his eyes.
Then, no more than a few moments later there was an awkward cough next to him. Dave didn’t open his eyes, he was too scared, nobody ever came up here but him.
“Blimey, it’s cold out here” said the voice.
Then there was another voice that came from to Dave’s other right, “You’re telling me” said the other voice. Dave opened his left eye and caught sight of a ghostly penguin figure next to him.
The ghost penguin was all in white, with a white light around his head. Dave wasn’t frightened at all, even though this was the first ghost he had ever seen. The ghost penguin looked at him and nodded and continued to blow virtual hot breath in-between his transparent flippers as he rubbed them together.
“Who are you?” asked Dave.
The ghost puffed himself up and waved his flippers around expansively, and spoke in a deep, echoing voice. “I am the penguin Ghost of Christmas Past, and I am here to show you your life and what you have done wrong until now, and why you are so bad, bitter and cold-hearted, even though so many people have helped you.”
Dave looked worried. “What should I call you?” asked Dave tentatively. “You can call me ‘IT’ if you like - everyone else does.”
“Here we go!” said the ghost and there was a whoosh in the air, and then – nothing. “There you go, that didn’t take long did it?” asked the ghost.
Dave looked very confused.
“Now I will pass you on to my colleague on your right, the penguin Ghost of Christmas Present.” Dave looked to his right, and there was another ghost standing there; but this one was much larger, rounder, jollier, and more colourful, and was busily tucking into a tray of sushi.
“Hang on…” said the Ghost of Christmas Present, his mouth full of fish and rice, “Be with you in a minute. That went a bit quick sorry, wasn’t expecting you back so soon”
Then, before anyone could say anything the wind changed and became quite chilly – which was going some. The air took on a feel of darkness and oppressiveness, the same as Dave had once felt when he was a small boy waiting outside the Headmaster’s office.
Then another ghost appeared in front of him, but old, withered, and fearful. Dave looked sideways to the first ghost but he had vanished, and so had the second one, along with the sushi.
“Dave,” came the voice from the last ghost “I am the penguin ghost of Christmas Future. I am here to show you what will happen to you if you do not change, if you do not become a better penguin and mend your ways. You have been shown what you have done wrong, and why that is bad, and you have been shown what that has led to today and what people think of you. Now I will show you what will become of you if you stay on that path.”
Dave raised his wing, and gestured with it to ask the obvious question, but the figure just ignored him and carried on with his script.
“If you carry on the way you are, in the future, you will be alone, cold, on your own on a beach, just you, with nothing to do, with nobody wanting to talk to you, is that what you want…… is that what you really, truly want….?”
Dave didn`t know what he wanted, of course he didn’t want to be alone but he did like peace and quiet.
“Ummm…” said Dave “Well actually…” but the ghost interrupted him again.
“You must change Dave, you must become a better penguin, not be such a grouch, go forth and help others, work hard, share and give all your fish away. You must become a better penguin, and then you will find happiness.”
Dave still looked very confused - it didn’t make a lot of sense. Then a cloud appeared, transparent and misty, which lifted them both up into the air and carried them to the penguin graveyard at the bottom of the mountain.
The ghost then gestured towards a small pile of loose rocks. “This ….. Dave, is what you will become if you do not change, just a forgotten pile of rocks that nobody cares for.”
It made Dave feel very sad, very lost and alone. He wanted to change, be more, be a better, harder working, caring penguin, it made him very sad indeed, and guilty.
It was then that he looked sideways to a large marble obelisk just to the left of the rocks.
Dave the Saviour Penguin was written on it in big carved letters, and there were many brightly coloured stones at its base, and bits of fine seaweed laid carefully in front of it.
The ghost looked at Dave. “Ignore that - it belongs to another Dave, not you.”
Dave looked a bit further up the obelisk and there was a big picture of Dave in a frame higher up on one side; he was wearing a medal and holding a Nobel Prize, and there were lots of girls names scrawled in lipstick next to the picture.
Standing on the top was a large statue of Dave, it was unmistakably him, but they clearly hadn’t quite got his side profile quite right - some of the features were clearly a little ‘overdone’, and clearly ‘six-packs’ were very tricky to do in marble.
“So now you have seen, now you understand” said the ghost gesturing towards the pile of rocks. Then he began ushering the confused Dave back onto the cloud before he could say anything.
He was clearly pleased that the point had been made. The cloud lifted up and they returned to the rocky hillside, and back to the present day.
“So you see” said the ghost, “Unless you change your ways you will become nothing more than a lonely pile of rocks that nobody remembers, and nobody visits or cares about. You will be forgotten. You must change, feel guilty and do something.”
Why was everything always trying to get me to change, thought Dave, do things, be something else?
There was a great expansive whooshing noise, and the ghost vanished, but just before he did, there was an expression on his face that indicated that there may have been the slightest of chances that he may have received the wrong memo, or picked up the wrong file on the way out of the office, and delivered the wrong speech to the wrong penguin ?
Which of course never happens.
Dave felt worse after the visit from the three ghosts; he hadn’t done anything wrong, he didn’t want to change, and as far as he could see it was everyone else that was the problem.
He walked back to the colony and was greeted by all his friends, and then his wife, who seemed very excited.
“I have a surprise for you” she said. She took out a piece of mistletoe from behind her back. “I found it washed up on the beach a few days ago.”
She raised it up and kissed him – he was very surprised, and he smiled. The mistletoe must have been carried a long way by the sea, and from a land very far off, it was a miracle how it had arrived here.
Then he understood what it was all about, he understood the message that had been carried a long way from distant shores. Or at least how it was interpreted and transferred.
The love - that was what it was all about - that was what was important. Just penguins coming together to remember to love each other, that was what mattered nothing else really.
Despite everything, it was love that mattered, and what could be more important than that?
Except that obviously Dave drew the line at his mother-in law, after all there had to be
rules and limits...
…even at Christmas.
9 The Saviour Penguin
It was a complicated system, this evolutionary business, on many levels - and not just the physical world but also within the spiritual quantum consciousness field thingy – or wherever it was that all the penguin programming information came from.
‘The Messiah Penguin’… thought Dave …there was always a clue in the job title, in this case the first bit. Sort of like ‘crash test dummy’, as with most of these sort of jobs you don’t just have to read the small print, to get a clue of what was involved.
The problem was that he wasn’t really the Messiah ‘saviour’ Penguin, as in the Life of Brian film he was ‘just a naughty little penguin’, just as his mother had always told him he was. It was merely a case of mistaken identity, and the collective penguin consciousness had obviously got it wrong.
More likely it had come up with the idea of what he should be subconsciously from all those films, books, and needy thoughts and wishes everyone had. It was just waiting for some fool to come along and sign up to the ‘Saviour’ Job Description; some idiot, some gullible muggins to fall into the usual ‘Saving the Penguin World’ hero trap.
Besides the role sort of required a selfless nature, putting yourself last, losing your ego, and sacrificing everything for ‘the cause’. Which Dave wasn’t very good at.
For starters he was rather attached to his ‘self’, and if he had an ego somewhere, then he was sure it would be a large one and subsequently, one worth keeping.
It was all very well experiencing all of those synchronistic events, having knowledge, events pointing to him, all those people writing about him and prophesising about him, but it was more likely that it was all part of trying to convince him to take the bait, trying to make him think he was ‘the one’, getting him to somehow believe he was ‘the chosen ‘Saviour’ penguin’.
Which of course he wasn’t.
He wasn’t falling for that one, not even if the bait was a large barrel of fish. He wasn’t signing on the dotted line of any virtual contract, and then just end up becoming another religious cliché.
Oh no, not him, not ever.
No, it was just a whole range of ideas and thoughts that other people had had over history that it was trying to manifest into form, trying to make happen, trying to get someone to live the dream, be the hero.
If he was the ‘Messiah’ penguin he would have been told, shown what to do, or, at the very least asked, but he hadn’t, so he wasn’t, and that was that.
The trouble was though that he knew everything; he knew what had to be done, he could see things that others couldn’t, he saw everyone in a different way, and it all made him feel responsible, awake to the problems and what was going on.
This was a problem, or a kind of dilemma, but only if he knew what that actually meant.
But from Dave’s point of view, he was just a penguin, what difference could he make? He wasn’t going to stand up on some hill or rock, and tell everyone what to do, with a glowing aura about his head.
With everyone expecting him to be saying all the right things, flashing his white teeth, his electrifying charisma and personality, inspiring everyone, and somehow making everything OK.
It just wasn’t going to happen, his mind couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the collective penguin mind had to come to terms with that. Just to make it clear, he folded his wings in front of him and shook his head.
The trouble with that again though, was that being a Messiah Penguin or Prophet Penguin, a ‘Saviour for a time’, or whatever he was supposed to have been was a bit of a dying breed and concept really.
It was now all about thinking, influencing the collective mind, doing all the work, getting all that knowledge, coming up with new stuff, and getting everyone to do things.
Which made it was more than a bit tough going these days, intense, and somewhat life threatening.
Also it sort of made you, well, a bit boring frankly, and poor, and not very exciting, not to mention difficult to understand. Also if you were to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time, everyone would just have a go at you, even though you knew you were right, after all, you could only do so much. The whole thing was a bit like a penguin trying to tow the Titanic.
So naturally, girls too thought you were a bit weird, boring, and not very exciting, which of course made having more messiahs and prophets tricky. In fact it made the whole process kind of difficult to reproduce – as it were - a sort of reverse feedback problem, brought on by lack of external planetary evolutionary pressure or guidance.
You were much more likely to get more penguins that were the opposite, you know - exciting, flamboyant, charismatic, rich, entertaining, but all in a useless sort of way, but still popular with the penguin girls. The girls, after all were the ones that held the evolutionary ropes, and knew what they wanted, or at least thought they did. So not surprisingly everything was given somewhat of a bias towards the ‘what was wanted’, rather than ‘what was needed’, which in both cases lacked any form of overall strategy or plan.
As a result getting the collective penguin mind to change, evolve, be something more, was kind of tricky, especially when it didn’t want to, and made it hard for you to even try; reacting against you with its own perspective and subconscious objectives, when it didn’t even know what it was itself.
It was like trying to get some giant mindless bureaucratic organisation to change, which would make life very difficult for you and react against you, attacking you, unconsciously like a machine. So any time you tried to get it to do something it didn’t like, even it was wrong in itself, and in trouble, it would resist you.
It would avoid doing anything, go round in circles, anything rather than what it was supposed to do and becoming very devious and clever at doing it. But of course individual penguins never behaved like that.
So the possibility of there being other penguins being able to do what he did, and see what he saw and did, was less and less likely, and the circumstances for them to be able to do what he did, and to have someone like his wife with him, helping him and taking care of him along with others, well that was almost impossible.
Almost, but not quite – especially if there was a big fundamental problem, and Dave thought about the Titanic again in the film of it he had seen.
But Dave wasn’t a Messiah Penguin or a Prophet Penguin, or the Saviour. He didn’t glow in the dark or hear voices from a penguin god in his head, he was just an ordinary penguin who had accidentally seen too much, and worked too much out.
It was unfortunate, but that’s the way it was.
In fact the whole thing and experiences had more than ruffled a few of his feathers, which took quite a lot these days, for a ‘rufty tufty’ bloke penguin, that he knew he was.
If anything, he saw himself as a sort of manager or director penguin, yes ‘manager’, that was a good definition as it didn’t mean that he had a label that someone else had created. It didn’t have great expectations attached to it, but it also meant it sounded as though he was qualified (which of course he wasn’t).
The trouble with the Messiah or Saviour role was that it didn’t really have a Job Description; everyone wanted there to be one, but nobody could define what they would have to do, how or what it was that was meant to be done, or by when. Let alone what they should look like - all the skills, the capabilities, and charisma.
The role and objectives for the task weren’t that very well defined either, i.e. ‘Save Everyone’ - from what exactly? ‘Describe how everything was all a mess and what it needed to be instead’, ‘What was causing all the problems?’ - Those sort of clear and well defined objectives. Or was there some sort of plan that had to be followed or delivered? Or were you supposed to come up with your own plans?
It just wasn’t clear at all.
Having a ‘glow in the dark’ head, being popular, and able to do miracles wasn’t really a very good CV requirement, and could b
e fulfilled by most glow-worms. But the ‘manager’ title sounded much better.
It did though make him sound a bit boring, so other penguins would be more likely to leave him alone, and he could get on with his job, rather than being strung up or stoned.
He could also use one of those black folders and go to meetings, whatever they were. He would also have a Plan, and he would just have to think of things, get ideas, put them into the Plan and they would miraculously get done, somehow, as they always did.
Problems would just arrive, he would ‘see’ what needed to be done, make decisions, and then it would al happen, somehow, probably.
Dave was also different. Dave was smart, and he knew that if he was going to change things, which of course he wasn’t, he would have to be both a manager and a good bloke penguin.
Dave The Penguin Page 10