journey to the outer islands - V

‘Hey, Old Rogers’, I carped twittingly, ‘have you packed the tea?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he puffed, in a way that suggested a positive response. ‘And also the biscuits. Does they… does they have mouths, the people where we are going? Y’know, for putting things like biscuits inter?’ Even at his advanced age, he had a very punchy attitude and a desire for knowledge, despite being, quite naturally, terrified and fearful of anything new, strange or tangible.

‘Do you know, Old Rogers,’ I laughed, ‘I really never cared to look, for fear of seeing some toothless, misshapen, rabbit-hole-like distortion of a… oh, I do beg your pardon Old Rogers,’ I corrected myself, spying the dimensions and proportions of his own yaw. I must have been feeling sorry for him, because it is most unlike me to apologise to a servant, in fact last time I did it Labor got in and I had a lot of apologising to do at the Tory Club. ‘I imagine they probably do, though of course they may gather nutrients from the sun, or the soil, like you.’ On his nights off, Old Rogers loved nothing better than to stand for hours in the mud in the belief that he was receiving sustenance; I encouraged this, as it saved on the weekly gristle bill, and of course kept him svelte and lithe.

‘Now, I wonder if I’ve forgotten anything,’ I wondered, possibly-forgottenoratively. I had, of course, the usual list on an illuminated scroll, and had ticked everything off as Old Rogers had laded the burro with it. At the bottom of the list was, as usual, the words say goodbye to husband, which in this case I absent-mindedly ticked while not actually doing anything about it. It was Mr. Lax’s day for helicopters, and he would usually be in the good room building an enormous helicopter model out of smaller, attentively-constructed, meccano helicopters, however circumstances had since changed slightly as he had died during the week. ‘Now, affix the sofa, Old Rogers’ I yapped, authoritatively, and he bolted the sofa to Carlo’s load along with four more of those very useful helium balloons. I lay on it gracefully yet appropriately and prepared for the trip with a dish of improving novels on my left and a dish of cruskets on my right. Old Rogers climbed atop of Carlo’s neck and directed him three metres to the canal which runs behind the house and leads to the sea. There the poor beast would stand, for four days as we travelled westwards, laden with baggage. A horrendous cruelty, but what can you do?

To be, as Rev. De Witt Talmadge would say it, continufied…