The next day both Gulliver and Beagle woke up late and ate a hearty breakfast which Mrs Old Father Time had laid on for them and which, to Gulliver’s mind, was a spread fit for a king and a queen. Gulliver could see why Mr and Mrs Time were both pear shaped.
That night Gulliver had some weird and wonderful dreams which kept him tossing and turning most of the night. One such dream saw him fighting pirates off Penzance in Cornwall, which considering the rivalry between the two counties wasn’t that unexpected. Gulliver had a dream in which his face resembled a clock like the one he’d had as a child on his bedside table. And the clock was being thrown onto a giant pile of clocks which were being thrown away and he was suffocating at the bottom of this pile. ‘I’ll file that dream under nightmare’ Gulliver later wrote in his dream journal.
In between these dreams\nightmares he’d also had time to think. Well, he didn’t because time had stopped, but he did think, and this thinking led him to wonder how you managed to get out of the bottle with the ship in it. And how come everywhere was green when the clouds, the sun and the moon were all outside the bottle with the ship, Devon, Old Father Time and his wife, the small man with the big head under the even bigger hat who owned The Pandemonium Emporium, his dog Beagle, him and old Tom Cobbley and all in it!? And did birds with very little brain bump into the top of the glass snow dome or sides of the bottle with the ship in it, knocking them senseless in the process?
All these questions needed answering and luckily for Gulliver, as before Old Father Time was happy to provide answers for them, or at least most of them as some questions could only be answered by God or the gods or the God-like geniuses of Einstein, Newton, Archimedes and the like.
After Gulliver rattled all these questions off to Old Father Time this was what he said verbatim, in other words, word for word.
‘Dear boy, aren’t you the inquisitive one? Well, let me see,’ Old Father Time said studiously as he peered over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Well, although the sun is outside the glass, as it shines through it, it creates condensation on the inside of the roof of the bottle and thus eventually it produces falling rain,’ the old man with time on his hands said as he folded his arms across his chest in somewhat of a contented fashion before adding, ‘And as for birds bashing into things, well, birds have got far more sense than most people, they quickly realised that the roof of the world was made of glass, sooner in fact than the pilots of our hot air balloons did!’
‘Of course!’ said Gulliver as if he was Archimedes and had meant to say eureka instead of, of course!
This reminded Gulliver of a bad joke his father once told him about Archimedes running down the road naked after his eureka moment in the bath tub. After which Archimedes was stopped by a policeman who said he was arresting him. Archimedes said something to the policeman along the lines of ‘have you got a screw loose?’ although it could have been the policeman who said that to Archimedes, as this was in Greek it might have been somewhat lost in translation, as the expression goes, ‘it’s all Greek to me’. Of course Gulliver knew all about Archimedes’ invention, the Archimedes screw, otherwise the joke would have sailed right over his head. (To be honest sails did tend to sail right over your head unless they were in the January sales where you often got trampled underfoot!)
‘And as for how we get out of the bottle, well we remove the cork, dear boy, we remove the cork,’ Old Father Time said in a matter-of-fact manner.
It was round about this time, which didn’t exist, that Gulliver thought that actually, this world wasn’t quite as complicated and nonsensical as he may have at first led himself to believe it was. Both the answers to his questions were completely logical, which led him onto another question.
‘Old Father Time, does this mean that if you need to get to the North or the South Pole, sorry North or the South Snow Dome, you have to take the stoppers out of the bottom of the domes? And furthermore, you have do it very quickly so all the ice and water in them doesn’t leak out onto the globe which in turn would lead to the map peeling off!?’ Gulliver said hardly drawing breath before sitting back and folding his arms in somewhat of a contented fashion mirroring Old Father Time.
It was almost as if Gulliver was playing a game of chess with Old Father Time. Luckily he wasn’t as Gulliver had never been very good at playing chess, while Old Father Time on the other hand often played chess against himself. Well, while ensconced within the giant clock in Greenwich, OFT did have plenty of time on his hands, and there is only so much clock watching you can do without it sending you as cuckoo as a cuckoo clock!
Old Father Time said Gulliver was pretty much correct in his assumptions and, due to time, which no longer existed, the corks in these ships in bottles, which were scattered all over the antique globe had been worn away somewhat so there was a tiny, almost imperceptible gap between the glass and the cork. Through this gap air managed to squeeze its way, as could people at a pinch, the people who climbed through this gap were the ultimate free climbers, Old Father Time joked. If you waited for the tide to rise you could then sail your ship through it, which wasn’t a joke because that’s what sailors did. The ship in the bottle would face lengthways with the cork and bottle neck pointing towards the sea so when the tide rose people didn’t drown in a flood of mythical proportions. The houses, schools, shops churches etc. were set well back from the neck and cork of the bottle. Old Father Time did say that in this procedure it certainly helped to keep a tight ship!
Gulliver wanted to ask Old Father Time whether he’d ever read Gulliver’s Travels for if he had Gulliver could make a joke of his own. Something along the exact lines of, if he were Gulliver the giant in Lilliput he could stand on a giant stepladder and push the cork out with his own hands. Old Father Time would have probably said one of the gods would be standing there to stop him doing that. The gods were a contrary bunch, they wanted life to flourish, but at the same time they wanted to watch your struggles from a safe vantage point, and have a good old laugh at your expense while very rarely lifting a finger to help you in these struggles. Of course from time to time the gods did condescend to giving you a helping hand or a leg up, well, until the day time had ceased and the gods had swanned off to sunnier climbs, and didn’t appear to be coming back any time before, now, soon or later.
‘There were also times that Neptune or Poseidon would take the cork out of the bottle just to make sure everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ Old FT said, which immediately made Gulliver think of his namesake Gulliver in the book Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, who by now was giving Alice a run for her money in the wondering department, wondered if he might bump into Jonathan Swift the author of Gulliver’s Travels as he was born in 1667 in Dublin. The thing about Gulliver’s Travels was that it was a great story for children but at that age a lot of the satire went right over your head. It was only when you read the story as an adult that you could read in between the lines, something which in all honesty sounds like a fairytale as there is nothing in between the lines, literally nothing!
And you won’t be in the least bit surprised that there was a Wondering Department in The Compendium, where heads of department would literally get their heads together and wonder about how they were going to improve sales figures and get more customers through the doors.
There was also a Wondering Garden just outside Brixham where people came to wonder about this, that and the other, as they wandered slowly around the gardens taking time to smell the roses as they did so.
‘Yes, that’s the gods for you, they think they’re above us mere mortals. Mind you, I suppose when you think about it, they are!’ Old Father Time said laconically.
Old Father Time then went on to describe how the condensation, falling rain\rainfall could, due to the closeness of the sun, cause flooding. After which everybody including the animals would have to pile onto the gigantic ship, which would now in effect be like one gigantic Noah’s Ark. Well, they didn’t all want to end up in a whale’s belly like Jonah now did they?’ Old Father Time said with a smile on his face. He also said water and sunlight, when combined, produced life. In truth Gulliver had been a little\lot perplexed how life inside a ship’s bottle could get started and now Gulliver knew this, it was one less thing to keep him awake at night. Talking about Noah’s Ark, recently a stone tablet had been discovered from Babylonian times which mentioned a story which was remarkably like the ark story. However, this ark was a giant round coracle. It appeared to Gulliver that the writers of the Bible were obviously no more apposed to plagiarizing than modern writers were!
Old Father Time should probably have dropped the Time from his name, like Gulliver said he should drop the Old from his name. But he’d got so attached to his full given name that he found it nigh on impossible to do so. Being the Guardian of Time made him a somebody, and being a nobody took a bit of getting used to. Gulliver on the other hand had always been a nobody and as he still was he only had to get used to the body of a twelve-year-old boy again. Mind you, if Old Father Time dropped both the Old and the Time from his name he’d just be left with Father, which having two daughters and a son of course he was. In time, Old Father Time would see that being a father was plenty to be going on with and nothing, but nothing, beat being a father to your children.
Old Mrs Time, who rarely spoke unless addressed personally, and that’s addressed and not dressed personally, because she wasn’t the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland or Queen Elizabeth I and she didn’t have her own personal maids. However, Gulliver did address Old Mrs Time personally, although being the perfect gentleman he was, he dropped the Old from her name. Gulliver did wonder if he should be addressing Old Father Time as ex-Old Father Time and his wife as ex-Mrs Time, although as they weren’t divorced he saw no reason to do so. Some may have said that this couple may not have been divorced but they were divorced from reality, although in this world in that respect it appeared they were not alone!
This addressing of Old Mrs Time consisted of asking her where she got her dress from, a yellow lace number that flowed outwards from the middle like a river, and had so many ruffles at the bottom of it that to Gulliver’s mind it looked like waves breaking on the shoreline. Gulliver certainly found this dress most pleasing to the eye. Old Mrs Time said, ‘Oh, this old thing? I’ve had it for some time.’ Gulliver wasn’t sure if she was joking or not as she didn’t smile at the time she was addressing him. However, after this comment she did go on to say that at the time time ended, Old Father Time’s hair was as grey as a grey squirrel and now it was as white as Father Christmas’s beard.
This got Gulliver to thinking which led him to wonder how long time had ceased to be? But as there were no calendars and no clocks and no one was recording time since Old Father Time had retired, who could say. Certainly not Old Father Time. Gulliver wondered why nobody had thought of restarting time but with time all mixed up as it was, where were you going to start it at? Perhaps you could restart it at the precise moment it stopped, which was 1.30am Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday the 17 March 1743. But now with time so radically altered, that wouldn’t make sense either. I suppose you could calculate a date and time between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, which seemed to be the two centuries that had now snuggled up in bed together, metaphorically speaking that was. Perhaps that wasn’t a bad idea, however, it was no good him doing the calculations especially, as the only thing they had to hand nowadays to calculate things on was an abacus. Maybe if he ran into Sir Isaac Newton, Pythagoras or Archimedes he could ask them to figure it out and then Old Father Time could come out of retirement. Perhaps Old Father Time could roll a dice or toss a coin but then again, perhaps not!
But what if Old Father Time didn’t want to come out of retirement? Perhaps he was happy to be retired with time on his hands. He might not thank Gulliver for interfering, especially as he didn’t even live in this world, as his world obviously ran parallel to this one. Or he might thank Gulliver but in a manner that could be said to be tinged with sarcasm, ‘Thanks for nothing, Gulliver!’ to which Gulliver, being a twelve-year-old boy and not entirely at home with the complexities of sarcasm, would reply, ‘Think nothing of it. I was happy to be of assistance.’
Old Father Time said the truth was that they didn’t want to restart time as it gave the gods too much power and control over their world. What if the gods were to come back and shake time up again and again and again? This way was better this way they had more control over their own destiny. Gulliver thought of this parallel earth as a twin, albeit not an identical twin.
Although Gulliver didn’t think there was anything obvious about anything that had happened to him since he’d woken up in the cave. ‘Obvious’ or ‘obviously’ were two words, although they obviously only counted as one word, that he had no business using in this world, along with ‘of course’. In fact, if he ever found The Last Bookshop in the World and found a dictionary upon the shelves he had a good mind to go through it and as Mark Twain suggested, cross out all the wrong words like, ‘obviously’ and ‘course’ (which of course didn’t make sense without the of!). ‘Definitely’ definitely had to go, after which he’d put it back upon the shelf and walk away with a broad smile upon his face. Of course the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary would have had their collective noses put out of joint but that was a small price to pay for giving the English language a well deserved boot up the gluteus maximus! Of course, being dyslexic Gulliver couldn’t spell the words gluteus maximus for toffee, words that to Gulliver’s fertile mind sounded like a Roman emperor with piles!
One last thing Gulliver wanted to ask Old Father Time was this… ‘What about the church?’ Gulliver was hoping he hadn’t hit on a sore point! In his world, religion was one of those things you were never supposed to bring up, or at least not unless you were prepared for an argument or a theological debate.
‘What do you want to know about a church, other than it’s a big, cold, empty building with spires and stained glass windows?’ Old Father Time said, yanking someone’s dog collar other than Beagle’s. Although thanks to the clock at Greenwich, Old FT was more than a little hard of hearing.
‘No, I mean what about religion?’ Gulliver said, making himself as clear as he knew how, which was by talking slowly and in a loud voice as if Old Father Time was completely gaga. (Gulliver liked Lady Gaga and thought she would have fitted into this world without any problem whatsoever.) Gulliver hoped he would bump into P.T. Barnum the freak show promoter, then he could borrow one of his loud hailers to enable Old Father Time to get the cloth out of his ears!
‘Oh religion, well, since the gods deserted this world, the people have deserted God. Most of the churches are now deserted,’ Old Father Time said, as if religion wasn’t exactly high on his agenda of things to worry or talk about. There was no doubt about it, Gulliver thought, at times this world mirrored both Gulliver’s Travels and Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass.
Gulliver decided not to press the point so changed the subject to the Crown, in other words, Her Majesty’s subjects, of which he now both counted and considered himself as one.
‘So what about the queen?’ said Gulliver as if he and Old Father Time were both playing a game of chess against the gods and he was asking his opinion whether to move the queen or not.
‘So what about the queen!?’ said Old Father Time, yanking Gulliver’s crown. Gulliver wasn’t quite sure what to say next to that question other than to say, ‘What!’
‘You mean who is the queen?’ said Old Father Time adding a serious note to the proceedings.
‘Yes,’ said Gulliver as the conversation at this point seemed to require a yes.
‘Queen Elizabeth I and a mighty fine queen she is too. She takes no nonsense from anyone and in this world that’s a must,’ said Old Father Time earnestly.
It was at this point in the time that no longer existed that Gulliver could see the old man had had enough of being cross-questioned so Gulliver quit jabbering, as to be honest, he was tiring of the sound of his own voice. That and his throat felt like a piece of sandpaper which time had left untouched. Gulliver did wonder that as the time zones of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria appeared to be so inextricably linked, as if their time was hanging upon the same thread, why both queens were not upon the throne at the same time.
After all this think tank-type thinking and Alice-type wondering, Gulliver was only too ready for a good hearty breakfast, which was all Old Mrs Time seemed able to prepare, her being old school in the cooking department. Gulliver didn’t think she’d warm to Heston Blumenthal’s style of cooking.
Heston Blumenthal, who unlike Stephen Fry, Fiona Bruce and Doctor Who, had in reality actually been into Gulliver’s antiques emporium in Brixham at the time he’d been shooting one of his cookery programmes on board the Golden Hind. Heston was cooking up a storm by making sweet chips and other weird and wonderful delights. Gulliver thought the people of this world would appreciate Heston Blumenthal’s style of cooking. He was only surprised Heston hadn’t cooked the books ‘as they say’ by cooking an edible book, just give it time!
After breakfast Old Father Time took Gulliver back to the old aquarium, otherwise known as the Antiquarium. This was so he could sketch some more of the wondrous creatures on display in the main large tanks, which included some giant seahorses and what Gulliver believed to be the Loch Ness monster. Old Father Time said Gulliver believed correctly because it was the Loch Ness monster. The monster had been fished out of Loch Ness some time ago. The Loch Ness monster wasn’t the only monster in the Antiquarium as the kraken, the giant octopus-like sea monster, had been captured swimming off Greenland by a whaling ship. Later the kraken was sold to the Antiquarium for both a small and a large fortune in keeping with this crazy mixed-up world. However, Old Father Time couldn’t tell Gulliver how long ago these events had happened, and that wasn’t because his memory was failing him but because when the gods had shaken things up, in part his memory had been shaken up with it. Old Father Time said his memory was settling down like the flakes in a snow dome but there was still stuff missing. The stuff probably wasn’t missing, Mrs Old Father Time said, it was probably just misplaced like her husband always misplaced his socks. Gulliver was glad to see some things in this world ran parallel to his own! Later, after this compendious discussion, Gulliver was to write this in his travelogue: ‘To my young mind this world appears not unlike the Land that Time Forgot or the Lost World or the World that Lost Time or something along those lines.’ It appeared Gulliver was caught in two minds like this world was caught in no man’s land!
Today was the day when Gulliver bumped into a young girl, or should I say she bumped into him? Although in truth it was hard to tell who bumped into whom, it was probably half a dozen of one and half a dozen of the other.
‘Sorry!’ Gulliver and the girl said in unison and then they both laughed.
‘Is this yours?’ said the girl, handing Gulliver his sketch pad. To be fair the girl had seen Gulliver sketching and was curious to see if his drawings were any good for she also sketched. This broke the ice between the two of them, having said that, they weren’t encased inside a snow dome as this wasn’t the North or the South Pole. However, they were encased inside a large ship in a bottle. Later Gulliver was to wonder how these ships in a bottle and the snow domes didn’t simply fall off the large antique globe. Perhaps he would bump into Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein and they would explain things to him, mind you, as they had both found it hard explaining things to him in his world, he didn’t think they would have any more luck doing so in this one. Perhaps, once again, I should clarify that last line by saying that the books Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had written, Gulliver had found difficult to understand. ‘What goes up must come down,’ Gulliver muttered to himself when this thought made itself known to him. Perhaps everything was stuck onto the globe with super glue, he joked to himself, and perhaps Gulliver being twelve as he now was didn’t quite understand the gravity of the situation he now found himself in.
‘So do you come here often?’ Gulliver asked the girl and then cringed at the corny chat-up line, but then again he always had been tongue-tied around the female of the species.
However, the girl didn’t bat an eyelid and replied, ‘Yes, I do. I virtually live here, or so the curator of the Antiquarium and my stepmother are always telling me!’ said the girl as she looked at her feet as if she needed a new pair of shoes.
By this time Beagle had wandered off as per usual, inquisitive to see what was behind these large walls of glass before returning to his master’s side with a puzzled expression upon his face.
‘What’s your name? My name’s Gulliver,’ Gulliver said as he stopped looking at his feet as he had just bought a new pair of shoes.
‘My name’s, my name’s Alice,’ said Alice a little bashfully.
‘That’s a nice name,’ said Gulliver awkwardly while thinking he had actually wandered into Alice’s weird Wonderland.
‘So is Gulliver,’ said Alice stroking her long golden locks.
Gulliver didn’t quite know what to say next, luckily for him Alice did.
‘Is that your dog?’ Alice said as Beagle wandered in between Gulliver’s legs like the Cheshire cat on the make.
‘Yes, he is. His name’s Beagle and he’s a Labrador,’ Gulliver said as if he expected Alice to say, ‘but he’s not a beagle, he’s a Labrador’, but Alice didn’t, but that was children all over, they only asked stupid questions to ones that had obvious answers. There were times when Gulliver wished he hadn’t named his dog after a ship, although these times were few and far between.
‘Can I have a look at your drawings?’ Alice said changing the subject as she reached her hand out for the sketch book she had only just handed back to Gulliver.
‘I’m afraid they’re not very good,’ said a bashful-looking Gulliver as he handed Alice back the book with both pictures and words in it.
Alice took the book and flipped through the pages as a puzzled expression appeared upon her face.
‘There aren’t many words in this book!’ she said as she studied the picture of the giant seahorses more closely, holding the book up in the direction of the seahorses in the aquarium, as if to see how lifelike the drawing was.
Gulliver wanted to ask Alice if she knew that the biggest island in Galapagos was an island called Isabella and to Gulliver and other artists’ minds it resembled the shape of a giant seahorse. Well, artists were always drawing comparisons, he could hear his grandfather in his head saying as much and chuckling as he did so. Gulliver wondered if Alice knew that Galapagos meant tortoise in Spanish. Perhaps in this world the Galapagos Islands were just up the coast where Cornwall used to be, as was Spain, and as such Alice spoke fluent Spanish. She may even be able to speak the mixed-up language of Esperanto.
However, Gulliver didn’t say any of these things as he didn’t want to seem like a complete geek know-it-all with a head the size of a giant ostrich’s egg, so instead he said, ‘No, I don’t like words, or should I say, they don’t like me. I’ve got dyslexia,’ said Gulliver admiring his new shoes again as if they were some priceless antique.
‘That sounds painful!’ said Alice sympathetically.
‘What sounds painful?’ said Gulliver sounding like he’d forgotten his own question.
‘Dicewhatsia!’ said Alice.
‘It can be at times,’ said Gulliver truthfully.
‘Have you seen the crazy mirror maze by the giant tropical fish tank which distorts both the size of the fish in the tank and your face all at the same time?’ Alice said gabbling excitedly, grabbing Gulliver’s hand and pulling him in the direction of this amazing exhibit.
Gulliver thought the world he was now living in was one big crazy mirror maze but he didn’t tell Alice this in case she thought he was as mad as the Mad Hatter. Later he was to ask Alice if she had heard of Lewis Carroll and the Alice stories but she just gave him a curious look as if he was talking nonsense. Perhaps on this parallel earth Lewis Carroll was still a boy like John Logie Baird.
A short while later Gulliver found himself in a long corridor where a large fish tank sat and housed within it were huge brightly coloured fluorescent tropical fish, which all seemed three or four times bigger than in Gulliver’s world. In this tank swam the angel, butterfly, and tiger fish and a golden catfish variety which normal resided in Africa and which was as blind as a bat so it had a good excuse for bumping into things. Despite the catfish being blind, it had a knowing grin upon its face like the Cheshire cat in Alice’s Wonderland. Gulliver wondered if the golden catfish was daydreaming about another golden catfish. There was no doubt in Gulliver’s mind that the golden catfish was quite a catch as it was as pretty as a picture.
There was also a scorpion fish in the tank, which was sure to have a sting in its tail, and several parrot fish which came from the coral reef in New Holland, and some golden jellyfish which came from the South Pacific seas. And that was just to name but a few of the fish in this tank, for if we were to name a lot we would be here until kingdom come.
In fact, there were so many fish in this tank that it seemed fit to burst and they were all lit up like a neon sign. Gulliver wondered if this fish tank was like the Tardis, small on the outside and large on the inside. Not that the fish tank was small but perhaps the fish tank was as big as the ocean, literally as big as the ocean. This was yet another strange thought but how strange was it? He’d have to refer to his strangeness scale later on as this thought weighed heavy upon his mind! I would, however, add that there were several sharks in the tank, and several giant manta rays that appeared to by flying through the water in slow motion rather than swimming, such was the gracefulness of their bird-like motion. There were no flying fish in the tank, one of the staff said they had tried putting them in but they kept flying out; it seemed the flying fish was rather like a fish out of water! Gulliver wasn’t sure if the man was throwing him a line or yanking his fishing rod but by the look upon his face I’d say not! Gulliver was later to write this line in his travelogue word for word.
As you walked past the crazy mirror maze you could see your distorted face in the mirror along with the distorted images of the fish, it was quite an amazing sight, which made your eyes go funny.
‘Wow!’ said Gulliver, his eyes nearly popping out of his head like the eyes of some of the tropical fish appeared to be doing.
‘I thought you said you didn’t like words,’ said Alice, who by now looked twice the size she was before as if she had just opened out like a huge telescope or a giant sea anemone. To Gulliver, Alice looked at least nine feet tall, possibly taller, and her face looked like the giant hat in The Pandemonium Emporium.
Gulliver looked a little puzzled by what Alice had just said. This expression was almost becoming a permanent fixture on his face since he’d stepped into this strange and compelling world.
‘Sorry, I’m not with you,’ said Gulliver dimly.
‘Well, if you’re not with me then I don’t know who you are with!’ said Alice as the smile on her face grew so big it resembled a crescent moon. ‘Wow, that’s a great word. Do you know any more great words like Wow?’
Finally Gulliver realised that he was being a complete dunderheaded nincompoop of the first, second and third order. In fact, he should probably get a brain transplant and be done with it, or swap his brain for one standing on the shelves of the Natural History Museum. Darwin or Sir Isaac Newton’s brain would suit his needs, he thought wistfully!
Gulliver wondered what museums must be like in this world, a world without time, a world where history was… was… what was history? History was history, end of story!
‘Well, I know the word phantasmagorical but I couldn’t spell it to save my life!’ Gulliver said as a large spider fish appeared out of the blue, a fish which appeared to have two heads and which floated past Gulliver’s head. ‘Two heads are better than one,’ he heard a voice in his head say, it was the voice of his grandfather.
‘Phantasma-whats-ama-call-it, what does it mean?!’ said Alice who had now shrunk to the size of a teapot as a shoal of butterfly fish flew past her ear, or at least they did in the crazy mirror maze attached to the wall.
‘It means a shifting quality of dreamlike figures,’ Gulliver said sounding like he’d swallowed a dictionary.
‘That sounds about right,’ said Alice as her head was replaced by the head of a large angel fish. ‘I must find a sentence to fit that into. It’s sure to impress my friends. In fact, it will probably make my teacher, Mrs Finickity-knickers, have a fainting fit. She normally has a fainting fit or a hissy fit whenever I write left-handed!’ Alice said as her head swam away on the body of a giant terrapin. ‘There goes my head,’ Alice said pointing to the terrapin, who appeared to have taken her head. My father’s always saying I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on properly! These fish are phantasma… phantasmagori… phantasmagorical,’ Alice said triumphantly as she finally managed to spit the word out, which was momentarily stuck to the tip of her tongue.
‘I suppose they are,’ said Gulliver as his body swayed first one way then the other like weed in a fish tank. ‘I think I need to sit down before I fall down,’ Gulliver said holding his head tightly as if to make sure it didn’t swim off into the distance on the body of some exotic fish.
‘Yes, the mirror does make you feel a little light headed after a while,’ Alice said taking Gulliver’s hand and leading him away to a bench where they both sat down. By now the pupils in Gulliver’s and Alice’s eyes were as big as saucers, no make that they more resembled blue moons.
A little while later, for it certainly wasn’t sooner, Gulliver’s pupils had returned to their normal size, as had Alice’s and Beagle’s, who was still pawing at the glass of the fish tank and barking at the misshapen fish with a puzzled expression on his face. This barking, however, didn’t make Beagle mad for the fish was a catfish and everybody knew how much cats and dogs hated one another! This was another line Gulliver was to include in his travelogue, which on first reading appeared to be the sort of nonsense Lewis Carroll was to one day write, for in this world at least it appeared he was still waiting to put pen to paper. However, if you stood on your head or read the line backwards or looked at it in a crazy mirror maze then it made perfect sense!
One has to remember Gulliver was using the right words but not necessarily using them in the right order, a bit like Shakespeare used to do, and in this world that didn’t seem to be much of a problem. In fact quite the opposite, it actually seemed to make things clearer!
While Alice and Gulliver were sitting on the hard wooden bench provided for short periods of rest before continuing on with the tour around the Antiquarium, Gulliver started to think. The way things were panning out Gulliver was doing so much thinking perhaps he should consider joining a government think tank. Now it’s funny you should mention think tanks as Gulliver was surrounded by fish tanks. Not that fish did much thinking, mostly they did swimming followed by eating, followed by some more swimming, followed by some more eating, not necessarily in that order, although mostly in that order.
Gulliver’s thoughts drifted like dead wood upon the sea before stopping at this thought. As Alice went to school, what on earth was on her school timetable? In fact, did they even have a school timetable? They obviously had tables because it was a school and all schools had tables. But now there wasn’t any time to speak of, although Gulliver and Old Father Time still spoke of it, surely there wasn’t a timetable, or a times table for that matter. Although, you could speak of time if you wanted to as there was no law saying you couldn’t, written or otherwise, but as time had stopped this was really just an exercise in futility so most people didn’t bother. Gulliver was beginning to wonder if he should bother thinking at all, rather he should just do. After all, his mother was right, procrastination was the thief of time. ‘The trouble with an exercise in futility,’ Gulliver’s grandfather once told him rather un-succinctly, is ‘like all exercise it wears you out so it makes perfect sense that nobody wants to exercise their God-given right to this exercise in futility.’ ‘With such logic philosophers are made!’ Gulliver’s father once said to him after he’d asked his father to explain another one of his grandfather’s pearls of wisdom. Gulliver’s grandfather would have fitted very nicely if you please into Alice’s Wonderland, as he’s written the book on Gobbledegook, Gulliver’s father once told him with a wry smile upon his face. Of course it wasn’t Alice’s Wonderland, she didn’t own it as if it was some kind of magical theme park like Harry Potter World or Disneyland, but Gulliver knew what he meant and so it appeared did Alice! It was nice, Gulliver had found a like-minded individual, someone who was on the same page as him, as to his mind nobody in his own world was even on the same planet as him!
So many things bothered Gulliver in this disordered world it was hard to choose just one; this world was a nightmare for anybody suffering from OCD, which unfortunately Gulliver did. Gulliver had said it didn’t matter how strange things got in this world, he was going to accept things the way they were like all the people around him appeared to do! But that was easier said than done as Gulliver was rapidly finding out.
The thing that Gulliver’s mind had singled out to bother him at this particular moment was how did anybody know when Christmas was or what day their birthday fell on?! Gulliver thought that was another strange expression, ‘what day your birthday fell on’. Imagine if all your Christmas and birthday presents fell on you from out of the sky, if that happened you certainly wouldn’t say ‘all your Christmases and birthdays had come at once’ as by then you might well have joined the same club that the dodo now belonged too, the Extinct Club! Luckily there was no television in this world so you didn’t have to worry about what time certain programmes appeared, or at least not until John Logie Baird invented television. Having already met a young John Logie Baird in The Pandemonium Emporium it seemed this discovery wasn’t that far off. The thought had occurred to Gulliver that the tank of the antiquarium was like a wide-screen HD 3D TV set on the Discovery or the Eden Channel.
When Gulliver was young and he stayed with his grandparents he used to get up in the middle of the night and switch their black and white television set on, even though the programmes had ended. Gulliver would stare in fascination at the screen for hours as fuzzy random dots danced before his eyes. What he was actually looking at was the microwave radiation left over from the beginning of the universe, the big bang. Gulliver’s grandparents would find him asleep the next morning snuggled up in a ball in his grandfather’s large brown leather armchair. Later, when his grandparents got a coloured set, they gave their antique black and white set to Gulliver. Even to this day when he couldn’t sleep, Gulliver still got up in the middle of the night and switched on the black and white set and watched the microwaves until he dropped off to sleep on his settee.
It had occurred to Gulliver that his sponge-like brain was like the sponges in the aquarium tanks and the sponges in his bathroom at home, except they could swim and he couldn’t! Mind you, he could think and they couldn’t, although right now he was beginning to wish he couldn’t as his head was swimming. Whoever said, ‘in reality you spend your whole life living inside your own head’ was spot on, Gulliver thought, although travelling through your own head would put a slightly different spin upon things.
The thing was that unbeknownst to Gulliver, John Logie Baird lived just around the corner from Old Father Time and Lewis Carroll lived a few streets down from him, although he was still being pushed around by his mother in a perambulator. Can you imagine that Old Father Time and John Logie Baird lived on the same street and Lewis Carroll lived just up the road too? Unbelievable, that’s what it was, unbelievable! It might even have been phantasmagorical, although Gulliver thought it probably wasn’t unless this was a dream and then it probably was! There was nothing worse than using the wrong word for the wrong thing, nothing, or so Gulliver’s English teacher Mr Crabapple was always telling him in a crabby manner. ‘There’s nothing worse than using the wrong word for the wrong thing, Gulliver, nothing. So if you ever have a mind to, it’s best you take a leaf out of Mark Twain’s book and cross it out before I do!’ he would hear that monotonous voice droning on in his head till the end of time. He left school almost twenty years ago and still he could hear Mr Crabapple’s monotonous voice droning on like Droning Maud did in the land named Droning Maud Land in Antarctica. This land that time barely remembered wasn’t a million miles from the recently named Queen Elizabeth Land. That was the Queen Elizabeth in his world in 2013 and not the Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, unless somebody had invented a time machine in his world while he’d been away. That would be typical, Gulliver thought, he’d only been gone five minutes and while he was away some clever clogs boffin had invented a time machine!
Although Gulliver had been away from his earth for what to him seemed like a short period of time, it had occurred to him that perhaps he’d been away years. Perhaps in his world people had forgotten he was even missing or perhaps time had virtually stood still. Einstein was right, time was an illusion, and one the gods and the people of this world had become disillusioned with, and one he was rapidly become disillusioned with too.
Gulliver wanted to ask Alice the Christmas question if not the birthday question, but he didn’t because he didn’t think he’d like the answer, which was a reasonable enough reason for not asking a question if you think about it! So he asked Alice another question that he didn’t mind hearing the answer to.
‘Alice,’ Gulliver said politely.
‘Yes,’ said Alice equally politely.
‘At school what is your least favourite subject?’ Gulliver said making small talk which was a lot less wearing than long talk, because long talk made your throat sore.
Alice considered the question for a few moments and said with a grimace on her face, ‘Maths!’
‘Me too,’ said Gulliver in a most agreeable manner. Gulliver knew Lewis Carroll was good at maths but he hadn’t held that against him as Alice’s adventures had always held him spellbound. Funnily enough dyslexia had also held him spellbound but in a bad way!
‘It seems we’ve got an awful lot in common, Gulliver,’ Alice said twiddling her hair into ringlets with her fingers in a dreamy manner, as she continued to look at the exotic fish from a distance without once turning to look directly at Gulliver.
‘You’re correct, Alice, we do seem to have an awful lot in common,’ Gulliver said talking to the side of Alice’s face.
‘I know, I think you’re correct too, Gulliver. In fact I’d go as far as to say I think I’ve never been more correcter about anything in my entire life before,’ said Alice grammatically incorrectly.
It seemed both Alice and Gulliver were revelling in their grammatical incorrectness and they didn’t give a tawny owl’s hoot about grammar, their teachers old or new, and as far as dyslexia was concerned, it could take a long walk off a short pier. It seemed the only thing that really mattered in this world was being happy, and surely any world in which the only thing that really mattered was being happy couldn’t be all bad.
After they’d got bored of sitting, Gulliver and Alice continued to look around the Antiquarium where they saw a huge white whale nicknamed ‘Moby’, several giant lobsters, and a giant salamander which the Japanese regarded as national treasures. Alice told Gulliver the Japanese were none too happy that one of their national treasures was swimming around inside a fish tank in England. The two countries were going to war over this, however, after Drake caught the legendary Kappa Sea Monster and brought it home to England all was forgiven, as in Japan it often ate children, presumably because it could fit them in its mouth. The kappa sneaked up behind children as they were playing in a river and gobbled them up, although as it was like a giant version of the giant salamander, in truth it rather sucked them up rather than gobbled them up. Some people or fish survived inside the kappa’s stomach for a little while until the digestive juices inside its stomach dissolved them!
‘Apparently the man o’ war jellyfish was named after the spat between the Japanese people and the British Crown over the capturing of the giant salamander, but that sounds a little fishy to me!’ said Alice with a smile as wide as a giant salamander.
‘So that’s the legendary kappa,’ Gulliver said putting his hand up against the glass of the tank as the fish tried to suck him through to his side. Gulliver instantly withdrew his hand and backed away from the tank as he was not entirely sure just how thick the glass of the tank was. Gulliver once had a nightmare of standing in front of a giant tank in an aquarium where the pressure of the water broke the glass and all the fish inside the tank swamped him. This wasn’t helped by the fact that this tank contained sharks. Gulliver had hated sharks ever since he’d seen the film Jaws, after which he wouldn’t even take a bath, in fact, his loathing of sharks got so bad he wouldn’t even take a shower!
‘I’m glad we’re this side of the glass and not the other!’ said Alice sensibly.
‘Me too!’ said Gulliver as he found yet another thing he had in common with Alice.
Elsewhere in the Antiquarium were some ancient deepsea glass sponges which had been fished out of the southern oceans. The sponges seemed perfectly content their side of the glass sponging up what was going on around them. Alice said the sponges were probably wondering how these strange-looking people got inside the tank they were encased in! Three goliath fish from Africa also circled menacingly in the tank and looked uglier than any sea monsters Gulliver had ever seen in films or in books. And an African king fish, which was twice the size of a man. In his world they were only the size of a man so this particular fish had doubled in size between one world and the other. There was a cornucopia of colourful coral which surrounded the deep sea glass sponges, sponges which Gulliver knew had been found off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as it was known in Gulliver’s world, as it was still known as New Holland in this one. A giant Pacific Ocean octopus, orange in colour and which had 2,000 suckers attached to its tentacles appeared, to be giving Gulliver the evil eye. These suckers were probably the reason the octopus was stuck to the glass of the tank like glue, it also had two hearts and is said to have a high IQ, well, compared with other marine creatures that is. However, despite the octopus’s high IQ Gulliver didn’t think this one would ever get invited onto the TV quiz show QI hosted by the national treasure that was Stephen Fry and say, ‘I think, therefore I am’. Gulliver also knew that if a starfish had one of its arms cut off it would regrow. He also wondered if any of these stars had fallen from the cosmological oceans, although he knew this was extremely unlikely and illogical in the extreme.
Gulliver thought in his world when days were at their busiest it would be useful if like the octopus he had eight arms, although technically he knew they were called tentacles. It would also mean he would have to get his mum to knit a jumper with eight sleeves in it!
Inside another tank was a forest of kelp where several giant white lobsters resided. These were caught by Sir Walter Raleigh off the Galapagos Islands and were the only two white albino lobsters ever to be seen in captivity. At first, some of the visitors to the Antiquarium had said that this was a trick. That in fact the lobsters had been boiled alive and then put into the forest of kelp so you couldn’t tell that they were actually dead. However, the white lobsters were alive and well and often stretched their legs to prove as much.
Gulliver pointed out to one man who insisted the lobsters had been boiled alive that the more you boiled a lobster the redder it became. The natural colour of a lobster is a drab black-brown colour. If a lobster was naturally bright red he would be rich pickings in the oceans and seas of the world and would probably be extinct by now. So said Gulliver, with great authority and while tipping his hat to Stephen Fry and QI, which is where he had heard this strange but true fact. After this the man rebuked several other people who were saying the albino lobsters were fake with his new-found knowledge of marine life.
Gulliver thought the owner of the Antiquarium must be like the famous American showman P.T. Barnum, the man who turned freak shows into an art form.
Another large tank housed a narwhale with a vicious-looking long-horned spike attached to its head, not unlike that of a unicorn. The narwhale was almost as big as a car! Gulliver wouldn’t have liked to have been a diver or a shark on the end of that spike. Gulliver wanted to say to Alice that the narwhale was as big as a Rolls Royce but the thought of going through the whole rigmarole of explaining the workings and the history of the automobile was just too much. Imagine telling someone that a motorized carriage had been invented but due to health and safety a man had to walk in front of it with a red flag, and in fact a horse was faster than the motorized carriage. ‘Yes, good luck with that one, Gulliver,’ he said to himself under his breath as he blew out his cheeks ever so slightly! Mind you, the invention of the motor car might not be that far off, although at this present moment in time the penny-farthing and the horse and carriage were the preferred modes of transport. Gulliver then tried to bring to mind the fact about blue whales and how many buses could be fitted into their ample belly, but he couldn’t. Where was Stephen Fry when you needed him? If he had bumped into Neptune in his travels he would have said to him, ‘You don’t see a blue whale for ages, Neptune, and then two appear at the same time!’ In his world Gulliver knew this to be the old bus equation.
Alice then showed Gulliver the shark tank which was full of tiger, hammerhead and great white sharks, which were bigger than Gulliver had ever seen. Gulliver, however, saw little of these sharks as he had his eyes virtually closed at the time, obviously his shark phobia hadn’t disappeared as easily as the crew of the Marie Celeste.
Gulliver had once seen a basking shark in St Mary’s Bay in Brixham in 2002, which he at first thought was a dolphin. One of his friends was a diver who went out to investigate this unusual sighting and swam with the shark for a while before it went back out to sea. It was funny that this sighting happened within a stone’s throw from Sharkham Point, Gulliver thought at the time. Synchronicity was a strange science and no denying!
Gulliver would have loved to have some of the species in the Antiquarium in the aquarium in his antiques boat\shop in miniature form. He already had several seahorses in miniature form in his tank, again these thoughts led him to comparisons to the land of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels.
Wouldn’t it be cool, Gulliver thought, if he had a snow dome in the bottom of his tropical fish aquarium at home, well you must remember, he was only twelve!
After looking round the Antiquarium in which Gulliver and Alice both lost track of time, like this world had seemingly done, and seeing the fish feeding their faces, it made both Gulliver and Alice slightly peckish. So they found a small bakery which sold hot Devon\Cornish pasties which were savoury at one end and sweet at the other. This suited Alice and Gulliver down to the ground as Gulliver had a sweet tooth and Alice didn’t. They found a nice piece of land surrounded by giant oak trees and weeping willows and sat down upon the ground on their knees and ate the pasty, Gulliver eating from the sweet end and Alice the savoury end until they met in the middle.
Gulliver had never kissed a girl before, actually he had, after all he was thirty-five, but he had never kissed a girl named Alice before. This quick and rather embarrassed kiss, although meeting of lips would have been a better description, was both sweet and sour all at the same time, befitting of this world. Well, once again, as they were sharing a Cornish\Devon pasty at the time this was only to be expected. Although in some respects Gulliver had memories of a thirty-five-year-old man and the occasional cynical thought befitting this age, even in his time he was very much an innocent. In this world Gulliver’s feeling towards the female of the species was they weren’t for kissing but just for friendship. In fact, the thought of kissing a girl was quite revolting and although he liked Alice, his hormones were very much that of an immature twelve-year-old boy.
I must add one thing regarding the pasty and that is, you would never call a pasty in this part of the world Cornish\Devon or vice versa, as famously, the two counties being attached to one another as they were had never seen eye to eye. If you were from Devon then the grockles (outsiders) from Cornwall were the sour part of the pasty and you were the sweet part. And if you were from Cornwall, the pirates from Devonshire were the sour part of the pasty while you were the sweet part! Although as Gulliver was Devon born and bred (and buttered) and the pirates came from Penzance near Lands End (refer to opera by Gilbert and Sullivan), then a part of this analogy left a sour taste in the mouth.
Yes, as analogies go it wasn’t crash-hot like the pasty as it happens, however, in this mixed-up crazy world which Gulliver found himself in, it seemed like a pretty good analogy, minus the Devonshire pirates! For this was exactly what he wrote in his travelogue that night before he retired to bed, and before he disappeared into that fantastical and wondrous place known as Dreamland. This world of the imagination, a world with no boundaries and no end, a world where the subconscious breaks free from the conscious mind on a crazy mixed-up voyage that turns the illogical into the logical and back again. Dreams merge into nightmares and nightmares into dreams on the ultimate roller coaster ride of a lifetime. Unless of course you’re one of those lucky or unlucky people, depending on your point of view, who never dream. Then of course it’s like the universe at the very end of its life, empty! Then Gulliver’s steamship of thought sailed off into uncharted waters as he pictured Cornwall and Devon drifting off into the Caribbean due to the continental drifts where pirates boarded the two counties and sailed them up to Queen Elizabeth Land in Antarctica. Once again this dream was inspired in no small way to the floating mechanical islands in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
One thing Gulliver was all too aware of was that any travelogue worth its salt needed some action and some travel in it otherwise it wasn’t worth the paper it was written upon. So Gulliver made his mind up that he was determined to find both so as to spice this travelogue up. Having said that, considering Gulliver had never travelled outside of Devon before this adventure, travelling through time to a land where time didn’t exist wasn’t a bad start to his travelogue. Later still, Gulliver was to write this in his travelogue: ‘Only I could travel back in time to a time where time no longer exists!’
Gulliver just hoped by the time he got back to his world he hadn’t missed the Brixham pirate festival in May.