A Blink of the Screen (7 page)

Pisces? Taurus?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s me.’

Bells tinkled as the lady laughed with glee,

And clapped her hands, and said ‘I’m never wrong.’

And then another pilgrim joined our throng.

Black-clad she was. ‘I always get a hitch,’

She said, when climbing in, ‘’cos I’m a witch.’

‘Oho,’ said Ley-line Joe, with fancies lewd

A-thinking of her prancing in the nude.

But I thought, yes my girl, I’ve met your kind

At parties, where you always seem to find

Strange lines on people’s hands and put on airs

And then go and be sick upon the stairs.

With seven in the van plus tents, the tension

Was getting rather tight on the suspension.

The wheels were giving mystic sort of whines;

We went round corners hopping in straight lines.

And then as I must quickly now relate

The seven of us nearly met our fate.

‘You see, inspector, as I drove along

Listening quite astonished to the throng

Discussing miracles, I think, and Re-

Incarnation – it’s all Greek to me,

Your Worship – I think that when I die

I’ll come back as a corpse, but this is by

The way. I’ve got to tell you (honest) now

How come we very nearly hit a cow.

The herd came surging out across the road –

I braked, but trouble was, I had this load:

The road was hot, the tyres too and so

We did a mystic skid. And, er, you know

The van it sort of grit its teeth and lunged …

The occupants went white with fear and plunged

Very nearly in my lap, bags, beads and bells,

Ropes, sandals, Levis and assorted smells;

On, on we slewed, and how I hoped that seven

Didn’t mean my number’s up and me in Heaven.

The witch said “Jesus!” which just goes to show

It pays to hedge your bets. You never know.

And then with one heroic braking judder

We halted seven inches from an udder.’

I’ve got to say that generally the town

Of Glastonbury always gets me down:

A nasty little town of moaning traders.

But then, there is this problem of invaders …

I left them near the Tor. I hope they found

What they are looking for. A holy ground?

Sacred to what? I really do not know.

A sort of mystic Glastonbury glow.

I wondered, as a cheerful atheist,

Exactly what, besides a cow, I’ve missed.

THERE’S NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL FOUND IN AN ENGLISH QUEUE

B
ATH AND
W
EST
E
VENING
C
HRONICLE
,
14
J
ANUARY 1978

This was one of those letting-off-steam things: you underwent what the late Patrick Campbell used to call rigours of life, and instead of taking it out on somebody, you wrote it down in a tea break and forgot about it, until it turned up here
.

Text of the party political broadcast shortly to be given by the Rt Hon Maurice Dancer, the newly appointed Minister for Queues

Good evening. You will notice how crisply I said that – good evening. I mean I didn’t drag it out, I came right out with it. Good evening.

Many of you will be wondering why you need a Minister for Queues. Well, it’s obvious. This is, after all [
Glances at board behind camera
] 1978, the jet age. We must all, ha ha [
Grins
] get with it, although we must not of course freak up, I mean freak off. Off out. Lose our heads.

It has come to the notice of your vigilant Government that many people today, in this country of ours, are too slow in queues. We at the Equal Speeds Commission will be doing something about this, make no mistake about it.

Take Post Offices. When you and I go in all we want is a 10½ pee stamp, for which we are proffering the correct money. Of course we are. But in front of us there is always some nit who wants to send a parcel of live ants to Bolivia, and renew his lawnmower licence, and blow us if he doesn’t start to fill in a great big form there and then!

Of course, everyone in the queue behind us nips off smartly to the three other vacant counters, and then the selfish clod pulls out a purse and starts to pay for it all in pennies! Meanwhile looking very self-satisfied! [
Realizes he is standing up, coughs, adjusts tie, sits down, smooths hair back into place
.]

Sorry about that, got a bit carried away there. Now, banks. You go to the Quick-Service Counter to cash as it might be a cheque for £10 and the lady in front of you, it turns out, wants to arrange a complicated transaction that needs phone calls and the taking down of large official books.

And then when you rush to the next counter the man queuing there suddenly opens his briefcase and takes out dozens of little bags of coins, which all have to be weighed and counted!

How many times have you got to the railway station in reasonable time for the train only to find some complacent person at the ticket counter opening negotiations for a return ticket to
Vladivostok?
And of course the clerk, instead of motioning him to the back of the queue, abets him, because it’s a change from the usual cheap day returns to London.

Ho yes! I’ve got my eye on the likes of him! He’s the sort who whips into a garage forecourt a bumper ahead of me and then fills his car up very slowly from the one available pump. I mean, you know how you can make those self-service pumps shoot the petrol up at a gallon every ten seconds but not this chap, oh no, he fidgets with the trigger just in case it runs away with him, and then when you’re waiting to pay he takes out a cheque book, verrrry slowly, asks the man what the date is, and then says ‘By the way, sorry to be a nuisance, have you got a fanbelt for a 1954 Austin Trundler?’

And then he has the brass-bound nerve to smile in a self-satisfied way. Oh yes, he’s thinking, I’m first in the queue I am, oh yes, I can take all day if I like, oh yes, any more tooth-grinding out of you matey and I’ll buy five pints of oil, an anorak, one of these ghastly little air fresheners and a motoring map of Angola.

Ironmonger’s shops! This vermin breeds there like flies! You’re waiting there with your little packet of quite simple nails and he says to the man, ‘Sorry to be a nuisance, I want a lock.’ When they’ve shown him all the locks in the shop he decides that he’d better go home again and measure the door, but meanwhile could they show him some hinges?

In the past, if you were to seize a length of, as it might be, 22-millimetre copper piping from the counter and batter him with it, our antiquated legal system would have dealt severely with you. Not any more! From now on, unless they are a registered old age pensioner, you will be able to give these people what they richly deserve and they’d better not go and moan to anyone! That’ll teach them!

What’s the good of being in power unless you use it, that’s what
I
say. God, I hate these people, the hours I’ve spent standing behind women who open their shopping bags to open another bag to open their handbag to find their purse to find the money to pay— [
Voice off: ‘Are you going to be all night? I’ve got a simple news bulletin here and you’ve been going on for twenty minutes!’
]

Thank you, good evening.

COO, THEY’VE GIVEN ME THE BIRD

B
ATH AND
W
EST
E
VENING
C
HRONICLE
,
8
A
PRIL 1978

My word, how this brings back memories. When I worked for the
Bath Evening Chronicle,
in the dear old days of long ago, my place of work was a shed – your actual fairly cheap garden shed – which was placed on a flat roof opposite, if I recall correctly, the room that was the workplace for the Tele Ad girls, who I must say did not work in a shed, and especially not my shed, which was so ramshackle that if I moved a useful piece of wood in one corner, I had a direct view of young pigeons in a nest. Sometimes I used to feed them. That was the time when I was doing features and other hack work. Oddly enough, it was a good life if you didn’t mind being constantly surrounded by pigeons. And while I can’t remember much more about it, I must assume that my near neighbours were the inspiration of this little piece
.

According to the
Radio Times
(so it must be right), the Russians have experimented with using pigeons to do simple production-line jobs in factories …

DEAR COMRADE CHAIRMAN,

I would just like to say right at the start that I have been employed here at the Dugvilasgivichski Tool and Die Collective for 12 years and there have never been any complaints. I have never applied for a visa for Israel, I am not now and never have been an intellectual, and I have always kept my production line spotless, you could eat your dinner off it. There is not another man in the place what could say the same or, if I may put it bluntly, there is not in actual point of fact another man
¹
in the place.

Of course I realize that as a humble Factory Hygiene Operative Grade III it is not my job to criticize decisions made higher up the Party machine, not if I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the Dugvilasgivichski Mental Health Institute anyway, but I cannot help recalling the old days when there were 1,300 other comrade workers here, I mean human beings, I mean I don’t wish this to be interpreted as a criticism of the quality of the work of my current feathered comrades per se.

I mean, on the production lines all you hear is thousands of little beaks pecking away, that and the rustle of feathers, some days it drives me up the pole. Also take the case of works outings, they used to be very enjoyable, we’d all go out to Nodynoverograd-super-Mare with a few crates of wodka stuck in the back of the coach, only now it’s hard to enjoy yourself when you’re the only chap in 13 coaches and all the rest of your fellow comrade workers are in big wicker hampers. When we get there I have to let them out and then they all fly back home, leaving Joe Joevarich Muggins here with his funny hat and a bag of whelks and a long journey back home on his tod.

I wouldn’t mind that so much, but when I complained to the Chief Hygiene Operative he just flew away.

Things aren’t the same in the canteen any more, either. Well, they’re not going to produce 1,300 lunches of mixed corn and just one of caviar-and-chips, are they? No, it’s either sandwiches or up there on the feeding perch with all the rest of them and no moaning or we’ll peck your fingers.

I will pass over the failing fortunes of the works darts team, the humiliating defeat in the billiards league, the unpleasant encounter with the KGB All-Stars on the football field, and the nasty mess at the international chess championships – and I told the fraternal Chinese delegate not to take his hat off, but of course no one listened.

I appreciate what it said in
Pravda
about not being capitalist about our fellow creatures, and all that about joining together in the greater unity of all warm-blooded creatures as per true Marxist thinking, also where it said that every pigeon in a factory means another man free to build submarines, but what it boils down to is that I’m only employed here because none of my new fellow comrade workers is big enough to push a broom.

I would also like to make a protest that the parrot they’ve got operating the switchboard won’t let me make personal calls, and as for the flamingo on the tea trolley, well, how would
you
like your tea stirred?

I hope this message reaches you, on account of me attaching it to the leg of one of my fellow comrade workers who’s going to see his relatives, he says they’ve got a little nest just outside your office window.

Thanking you in anticipation, I remain,

Yours fraternally,

TERRY TERRYANOVICH PRATCHETT

PS: Sorry this letter is a bit nibbled at the top, only the works manager has been out for a fly-around and you know what these budgies are like – little scamps.