‘we’ve got one back at the Old Parsonage. Victorian lady. Quite a beauty. She’d be fanciable, I reckon, if she had a bit more flesh on her. The Laudanum Empress, she calls herself. Wears a lot of petticoats. Abbie reckons she popped out of the same wardrobe she found the animals in. She’s been wreaking havoc with our telly.’
That was another post-Millennial thing. I’d read about it. Supernatural sightings had gone up by 300 per cent. This, I thought, does not bode well.
‘Fancy some nibbles?’ Norman’s asking. ‘Pork sushi? Cheese Loons?’
And he’s wheeling his bulgy bottom across to the bar.
What did Norman and I discuss that night, before the momentous newsflash?
The usual things: how United were doing, my virtual Elvis collection, the new freak strain of ulcerative arthritis in Spain, the pros and cons of the new Windows software, the fact that it was quite a year for aphids but you could zap them with that new eco-chemical, the latest on the Fertility Crisis. It made Norman glad he wasn’t my age. He had two grown-up girls, he said, his ‘Gruesome Twosome’. Rose and Blanche. The names somehow rang a bell.
‘We’ve had twins in the family since way back when,’ Norman is saying. ‘My side of the family, that. My mother was a Tobash.’
He might as well have told me she was a Martian, for all it meant to me.
It was that evening, from Norman, that I learned that Thunder Spit, population fifteen thousand, had once been a herring-shaped peninsula, but a land-reclamation scheme back in the late 1980s had knocked sense into its impractical geography, rendering it more a suburb of Judlow than a separate town.
‘Some folk were against it being rationalised,’ said Norman.‘But not me. Include me out, I said. Me and the hard core on the Council stuck to our guns. It put paid to the barmy one-way system for a start.’ He had a weak bladder; as he wobbled off for yet another ‘Jimmy Riddle’, he called over his shoulder: ‘Show me a man who says he isn’t proud of being a Thunder Spitter, Buck, and I’ll show you a liar!’
While he was gone, I wrote a mental list:
1. Sort out the surgery.
2. Check out the farmers.
3. Get laid.
Norman returns with two more beers, slosh, slosh, and another fistful of plastic-wrapped snacks. He plonks the lot on the table, and beer-foam whudders down the sides of our glasses.
‘Cheers.’ He slurps a big mooshful of bitter.
And then, as though intercepting item number three on my list: ‘Women. I love ’em to bits, but do I understand them? The hell I do!’ There is a pause, as I nod and he ruminates. ‘Woman’s a mysterious creature,’ he pronounces finally. ‘And we’re entranced by her mystery, aren’t we, Buck, as men?’ I try out one of my new agreeing faces. ‘I saw a documentary about it,’ he continues. ‘It’s all to do with the DNA business.’
Here we go, I thought. Another spouter of gobshite putting in his ha’p’orth on the subject. There’s nothing worse than a scientific ignoramus with a biological theory. They pick them up like verrucae. Norman’s telling me it’s all in the genes.
‘DNA’s simplicity itself, Buck. I reckon that, in a nutshell, it’s all about history having to replicate itself. Enigma variations on a theme, type-of-thing. Bit of this, bit of that, chuck it all in the melting-pot. You’ve heard about these new pig-heart transplants. Their DNA’s been doctored so’s we don’t reject them. Amazing, eh? And Jessie Harcourt, she’s got a llama’s pancreas. You know what I reckon about this Fertility Crisis,’ he said. ‘I reckon our time’s up. That’s the bottom line. Look at thedinosaurs. They died out, didn’t they? Same thing’s happening to
Homo Britannicus.
’ He paused to burp. ‘We’ve evolved as far as we can, mate.’
That’s what the woman on the radio had said, too.
As a child, I used to try to imagine how the earth looked when it all began, those millions of years
That was another post-Millennial thing. I’d read about it. Supernatural sightings had gone up by 300 per cent. This, I thought, does not bode well.
‘Fancy some nibbles?’ Norman’s asking. ‘Pork sushi? Cheese Loons?’
And he’s wheeling his bulgy bottom across to the bar.
What did Norman and I discuss that night, before the momentous newsflash?
The usual things: how United were doing, my virtual Elvis collection, the new freak strain of ulcerative arthritis in Spain, the pros and cons of the new Windows software, the fact that it was quite a year for aphids but you could zap them with that new eco-chemical, the latest on the Fertility Crisis. It made Norman glad he wasn’t my age. He had two grown-up girls, he said, his ‘Gruesome Twosome’. Rose and Blanche. The names somehow rang a bell.
‘We’ve had twins in the family since way back when,’ Norman is saying. ‘My side of the family, that. My mother was a Tobash.’
He might as well have told me she was a Martian, for all it meant to me.
It was that evening, from Norman, that I learned that Thunder Spit, population fifteen thousand, had once been a herring-shaped peninsula, but a land-reclamation scheme back in the late 1980s had knocked sense into its impractical geography, rendering it more a suburb of Judlow than a separate town.
‘Some folk were against it being rationalised,’ said Norman.‘But not me. Include me out, I said. Me and the hard core on the Council stuck to our guns. It put paid to the barmy one-way system for a start.’ He had a weak bladder; as he wobbled off for yet another ‘Jimmy Riddle’, he called over his shoulder: ‘Show me a man who says he isn’t proud of being a Thunder Spitter, Buck, and I’ll show you a liar!’
While he was gone, I wrote a mental list:
1. Sort out the surgery.
2. Check out the farmers.
3. Get laid.
Norman returns with two more beers, slosh, slosh, and another fistful of plastic-wrapped snacks. He plonks the lot on the table, and beer-foam whudders down the sides of our glasses.
‘Cheers.’ He slurps a big mooshful of bitter.
And then, as though intercepting item number three on my list: ‘Women. I love ’em to bits, but do I understand them? The hell I do!’ There is a pause, as I nod and he ruminates. ‘Woman’s a mysterious creature,’ he pronounces finally. ‘And we’re entranced by her mystery, aren’t we, Buck, as men?’ I try out one of my new agreeing faces. ‘I saw a documentary about it,’ he continues. ‘It’s all to do with the DNA business.’
Here we go, I thought. Another spouter of gobshite putting in his ha’p’orth on the subject. There’s nothing worse than a scientific ignoramus with a biological theory. They pick them up like verrucae. Norman’s telling me it’s all in the genes.
‘DNA’s simplicity itself, Buck. I reckon that, in a nutshell, it’s all about history having to replicate itself. Enigma variations on a theme, type-of-thing. Bit of this, bit of that, chuck it all in the melting-pot. You’ve heard about these new pig-heart transplants. Their DNA’s been doctored so’s we don’t reject them. Amazing, eh? And Jessie Harcourt, she’s got a llama’s pancreas. You know what I reckon about this Fertility Crisis,’ he said. ‘I reckon our time’s up. That’s the bottom line. Look at thedinosaurs. They died out, didn’t they? Same thing’s happening to
Homo Britannicus.
’ He paused to burp. ‘We’ve evolved as far as we can, mate.’
That’s what the woman on the radio had said, too.
As a child, I used to try to imagine how the earth looked when it all began, those millions of years
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