Some time later, ‘No that’s not right,’ Gulliver was later to write in his travelogue followed by two exclamation marks, which showed just how hard he was finding adjusting to this world. The one good thing Gulliver found was that being different he was used to swimming against the tide (or he would have been if he knew how to swim!), so in a strange way his world had prepared him for this one, as this world gave you plenty of scope for swimming against the tide. It is said that if you are different and you don’t fit in, especially at school, later you will go on to have a highly creative life, whereas if you fit in and don’t have to struggle, you won’t, who can say? Well, Gulliver for a start, and at this point in non-time you would have found it hard to disagree with him!
Later (taking out the word some and the word time), Gulliver and Alice left the Antiquarium to find the library. Now this trip may not have been very far, a short step from the Antiquarium and in truth was not a trip full of spice and excitement, not even between the pages of the books that were housed within the library. However, all travels have to begin with the first step and this was it. What did Neil Armstrong say when first he stepped onto the lunar surface? ‘It’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.’ Gulliver later wrote this in his log of travels, not that he had any intention of walking on the moon either in this world or his. Gulliver knew Neil Armstrong hadn’t quite meant to say this rather fluffing his lines as he later put it, although it all turned out well in the end.
Now it was quite clear from talking to Alice that she had never known what time was or had ever had the opportunity to use it, and as such it could be said that she had no time for time. However, Alice had never said such a thing but she could have said it if she had wanted too. Old Father Time on the other hand certainly had said such a thing although in a jocular fashion. This was another thing Gulliver found hard to get his head around. Of course, Alice had no idea that Gulliver was from another time and place and if she had known I’m sure she too would have found it hard to get her head around.
Like I said before, the library was just a little way across town and was the biggest building in Brixham, five times the size of the library in Gulliver’s modern-day Brixham. Gulliver couldn’t wait to get into the library to see how many wonderful books he could find. However, he didn’t find any, not one single book! Although the library looked big on the outside, on the inside it was tiny, never mind about there being enough room to swing a cat in there, there was barely enough room to swing the Cheshire cat’s tail minus the Cheshire cat and its smile! The library reminded Gulliver of the glass bookcase he had at home, the one with the sliding glass doors.
The library was the polar opposite of The Pandemonium Emporium, which was small on the outside and large on the inside. The library had those glass sliding doors you often see in modern libraries except these were not electronic but worked upon large rollers, the sort you see ladders moving back and forth upon in large old libraries. The librarian was a woman who could best be described as looking extremely bookish, antiquarian of age and who appeared to be wearing a dust jacket for a dress, end of story! According to her, the library only had four books and they were all out at the moment. And what’s more, this bookish woman seemed to take great pleasure in telling Gulliver this fact. However, she did add that she could reserve one of them for him if he so wished but it could take some time before the book came back, especially as time no longer existed. Gulliver didn’t wish for this as he thought it somewhat of a wasted wish. So instead he thanked the bookish librarian for nothing apart from wasting his time, even though there was no time to waste. Then both Gulliver and Alice went on their merry way, but only if you redact the merry part from this sentence along with Gulliver’s name!
In truth Gulliver was a little irked at Alice for not telling him this was the worst library in the world and probably the universe too! In Gulliver’s book this was the first black mark against Alice but he had no intention of throwing the book at her. Alice probably didn’t know any different, after all, books in this world seemed few and far between, whereas in his world they weren’t. Mind you, what with the invention of the electronic book, one day they might well be, Gulliver thought ruefully. Gulliver then recalled to mind the fact that there was an e-library in America where books were nowhere to be seen, bookcases being replaced by rows and rows of computer screens. First the atoms that records were made of had turned to sand before being sucked into the hole in the middle of their own black disc and then books were disappearing off the shelves in libraries as if invisible elves were thieving them like book thieves, and bookshops were disappearing off the face of the earth just as quickly, and anything but by magic. What on earth was the world coming to? However, one thing Gulliver remarked upon was how silent the library was, what with there not being anybody but them and the librarian in it. Whereas in Gulliver’s world libraries were nosier than the local zoo at times! Now it was Alice’s turn to look puzzled, ‘Weren’t libraries supposed to be quiet like a graveyard?’ she said quizzically.
Gulliver just said, ‘Of course they were!’ he was simply just being playful.
‘I don’t suppose anybody gets in her good books!’ Gulliver said out loud as Alice looked at him as if he wasn’t all the (library) ticket.
‘Sorry, Alice, just thinking out loud,’ Gulliver said looking down at his shoes for the umpteenth time. ‘Just thinking out loud,’ Gulliver repeated under his breath so Alice couldn’t hear him.
‘You should never think out loud in a library, librarians frown upon thinking out loud in a library!’ Alice said admonishing Gulliver, but in a lighthearted manner.
Now Gulliver was beginning to get the hang of this world for this description of the library fitted like the book jacket fitted the man in The Pandemonium Emporium, who looked like several of Dickens’s grotesque figures all rolled into one. In truth the book jacket the mad hat was wearing was quite ill fitting, although wearing it didn’t make him ill like a not-so-fashionable ill-fitting straightjacket appeared to make you ill in Gulliver’s world.
Some of the curious thoughts Gulliver’s mind was throwing in his direction were not unlike the thoughts he had as a child, but which as an adult had for the most part disappeared like the Cheshire cat’s grin. Gulliver kept forgetting he was a child again and not an adult, his mother was always saying that his father and grandfather were in their second if not third childhoods, or at least in their minds they were. But although Gulliver was a child he was an adult as well and as such, his memories were all mixed up, like this world’s history was all mixed up. Having done a pretty good impression of Alice in Wonderland, having shrunk in size, now everything seemed much bigger to Gulliver!
If ever the expression ‘man child’ fitted a man, it fitted Gulliver like a well-tailored straightjacket fitted a tailor’s dummy, or at least it did in Gulliver’s time. In this world people were beginning to say Gulliver was old before his time, like they did when he was a boy. Every time Gulliver looked in the mirror he smiled and ran his hands around his chin half expecting to feel stubble. That was one thing he didn’t miss about not having an adult’s body, shaving!
After Gulliver left the library he couldn’t help himself and finally asked Alice why the library was as it was, for what good was a library without any books in it, apart from the fact that you’d never have to pay fines on an overdue book? Alice simply smiled shrugged and said that to her knowledge, which being twelve was limited, it had always been that way, which is what Gulliver expected her to say. Perhaps it was down to council cuts, Gulliver thought, and perhaps this world wasn’t so different from his after all. Of course there was always the slim possibility that he was or had gone stark raving mad, but he’d explored that theory before and dismissed it out of hand, or relatively out of hand. But still, if the worst came to the worst and he was madder than the owner of The Pandemonium Emporium or a librarian who wasn’t all the ticket, was that really the end of the world? What did Alice say in Alice in Wonderland? ‘All the best people are mad!’ Maybe the Alice in this mad world would someday say exactly that.
After this thought made itself aware to him, another one quickly followed on its heels as he recalled a poem he had learnt off by heart at school. The poem was the Mental Traveller by William Blake, although he could only bring one verse to mind – ‘The guests are scatter’d thro’ the land, For the eye alters all; The senses roll themselves in fear, And the flat earth becomes a ball.’
Gulliver knew some people in the sixteenth century were known to be one ship short of a crew as they thought the earth was flat, and that if you sailed too far you would fall off the end of the world. At this point in the story it appears that Gulliver has wisely blanked from his mind the fact that he was\is a member of the Flat Earth Society! When Gulliver thought about the poem the Mental Traveller, it fitted his situation as he was a guest in this land, and as for his senses, well, they were definitely rolling themselves in fear as at times were his eyes. And the eye altering all well, he knew the sky wasn’t really blue or the trees and fields really green, your eye just perceived them to be that way, at least that was something he did remember from his school days. And this world sat on an old globe which was shaped like a ball, unlike his world which was an oblate spheroid, which in layman’s speak meant it wasn’t quite as round as a ball. William Blake’s poem hadn’t made much sense when he had first heard it at school all those years ago, but now, in this world it made perfect sense. Gulliver wondered if it would make sense when he got back to his time, if he ever did, that was.
It appeared to Gulliver that his head mirrored this mixed-up world: half was in one time and half was in another. In his head he had both feet planted in the past, except they were not planted firmly, it was almost as if he was standing on the deck of a ship out on a wild and windy sea. The past was in the Devon of 2013 and the old Devon of both the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gulliver was both young and old all at the same time, although thirty-five could hardly be considered old, however, to a twelve-year-old it could and it often did. In some respects, in his own world Gulliver was old before his time and being surrounded by antiques didn’t help, while in other respects he was very much young at heart.
As far as the present was concerned, well, in that respect Gulliver was all at sea. Time no longer existed in his world and for somebody like Gulliver whose life was governed by the clock, this took a great deal of getting used to. It seemed to Gulliver that he was going to have to rely heavily upon his body clock. At times in this world Gulliver felt like Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Darwin, Alice (in Wonderland), Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Drake and Gulliver (from Gulliver’s Travels) all rolled into one, no wonder the poor boy was mixed up!
Gulliver thought, if he was going to find books to feed his various appetites for the written word, which he felt compelled to do, he needed to track down The Last Bookshop in the World. Unfortunately, according to everybody he talked to, this bookshop didn’t exist, it was just a myth, a good story like Troy or Atlantis, or the Loch Ness monster, although supposedly Troy had been discovered some time ago and Gulliver knew the Loch Ness monster existed because he had seen it with his own eyes in the Antiquarium. That’s, of course, if this was the mythical Loch Ness monster and it certainly looked like the monster, which meant The Last Bookshop in the World also existed, that was only logic wasn’t it?
Mind you, in this world a first edition copy of The Origin by Charles Darwin didn’t exist and nor did the author Charles Darwin, or according to the owner of The Pandemonium Emporium he didn’t. Of course, this man was as mad as the Mad Hatter in the Wonderland that Alice didn’t own, so Gulliver probably shouldn’t put too much store by what he said, or much store of the store that was The Pandemonium Emporium either for that matter. Maybe while in the confines of The Pandemonium Emporium, if Gulliver had imagined Charles Darwin he would have appeared sitting on one of the shelves in the shop, a thought which was even further out there than the thoughts of a quantum physicist!
Maybe Darwin hadn’t written The Origin yet, perhaps he was the same age as Gulliver or maybe he was in a different time altogether? Gulliver had always thought that if he found an original copy of The Origin before it became The Origin of the Species, that to an antiquarian book collector really would be like finding the Holy Grail. One thing Gulliver didn’t want to do was find the Holy Grail while looking for his Holy Grail The Last Bookshop in the World, as there just wasn’t time for all that nonsense!
So Gulliver made finding this mythical bookshop his top priority and he would do it with the help of Alice and Old Father Time, and anybody else he could find along the way to help him. After Gulliver had written this in his book with no words and no pictures, which now had words and pictures in it, he remarked how this quest was beginning to sound not unlike a cross between The Wizard of Oz’s, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels. Wow, that would be some book, Gulliver wrote in his travelogue, after which he added three exclamation marks!!!
Most if not all travelogues are littered with times and dates, this makes it easier for the armchair traveller to understand where the traveller is at any given point in time in his journey. But how do you do this when there is no time and there is no calendar? Well, by the moon of course, and the stars, like travellers and explorers have done throughout the centuries. Unfortunately, in this world it wasn’t quite so straight forward, especially if you take out the word ‘quite’! Then you had to take into account the glass between the viewer’s eye and the celestial bodies, although of course in your travels, especially when on the sea, you weren’t always within the confines of the ship in the bottle. Add the fact that Galileo’s telescopes didn’t have the scope they had in the year 2013 in his world, and there were no satellite navigation systems, or Google Earth, then as you can see that Gulliver was faced with a dilemma. How was he to make his travelogue easier to understand, not just for him but for anybody who wanted to read it at a later date!?
Of course, reading Gulliver’s travelogue at a later time and date in this world was not possible and as such this made it impossible. Now Alice in her land of wonder might be able to think of six impossible things to do before breakfast but Gulliver couldn’t and, he was pretty sure Alice had never fallen down a rabbit hole and ended up in this world. If she had done, Gulliver surmised she would probably have spent the whole time (which didn’t exist any longer) repeating the word all dyslexics loved with a passion, curiouser!
Apparently the four most asked questions by strangers who confront an explorer or a traveller are the following: Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get here? When are you going to leave?!
Now up to this point in time nobody had asked Gulliver any of these questions. Perhaps this was because everybody looked out of place in the world and as such he didn’t, that and everybody had got fed up to the back teeth with asking one another those four questions! Everybody in this world was an explorer, everybody, so he was just like everybody else. Gulliver had never been like everybody else, he had always been different and everybody had made him feel that way, but not in a good way. There was one more question you could have added to these four questions if you were ever to meet a time traveller and that would be – What time are you from?
To be fair Gulliver, was more than a little nervous of telling people he came from another world; they might think he was an alien or more likely as mad as a hatter. Some people in Gulliver’s world thought gods in chariots had come down to earth like Ezekiel in the Bible, and that we were originally from the stars, which we were, but these people of course meant aliens. Some writers had suggested we were from Sirius the Dog Star but then some writers were barking mad, although in theory, at least Beagle could have come from the Dog Star, Gulliver thought with a wry smile upon his face.
Children at school had said he was strange, as did most of the people he’d come in contact with in his life, and sometimes he felt like an alien from another planet. But not in this world in this world, he was normal, whatever that was, well as long as you took out The Pandemonium Emporium from that equation, which he did as did everybody else, as everybody in The Pandemonium Emporium was as mad as a hatter. If when entering and leaving The Pandemonium Emporium the people inside the shop didn’t call you strange, then you really must be strange. And although that sounds like gobbledegobbledegook it wasn’t because there was no such thing in this world as the word gobbledegook just Gobbledegobble!
Mind you, saying anything in this world was either simple or straight forward was best avoided, perhaps not at all costs because by all accounts Gulliver seemed to have an endless supply of money in his pocket. In fact, Gulliver seemed only to have to reach into his pocket and the money would be there, however much or however little, but always the exact amount he needed, not a penny farthing more and not a penny farthing less, until the next time he needed money. Gulliver felt his pocket was akin to the Bank of England, mind you, if like the song said, ‘life was but a dream’ and he was simply dreaming, then once again perhaps not. To Gulliver’s mind, in his world the Bank of England was now printing Monopoly money to bolster the economy, which was funny because as a child he had buried some coins hoping it would produce a money tree! This was monetary humour of the highest order his grandfather told him when he found his grandson burying the coins, which in all honesty went right over the young Gulliver’s head!
The funny this was, or at least it was mildly amusing, was that the people who ran the hat shop, Mad Hatters, weren’t in the least bit mad. They were as sane as the next hat shop owner, and most hat shop owners had no intention of eating their own hats, no matter how hard times got. Anyway, who would be mad enough to eat their own hat when the lining of hats contained mercury which was said to drive you mad? Or so he thought he recalled Stephen Fry once telling him on John Logie Baird’s magical box of tricks! This was a big relief to Gulliver, or if not a big one, at least a relief. If he thought everybody in this world was as crazy and mixed up as the world itself was simply by judging the first place his journey had taken him, i.e. The Pandemonium Emporium, well then it wasn’t. Being illogical might apply when in the confines of The Pandemonium Emporium but it didn’t necessarily apply in other parts of this world. Having said that, sometimes it did!
If you discounted The Pandemonium Emporium, which Gulliver wished he could have done, then people in this world were no madder than the people in his world, or for that matter madder than him. Mind you, that wasn’t saying much! Maybe this wasn’t a dream but a psychotic episode brought on by overwork. His mother had always said he was a workaholic, although his teachers had never said as much on his report cards! His father had said logically, well being a workaholic was certainly better than being an alcoholic, although some people found work drove them to drink! Hopefully not mad enough to drink sea water, Gulliver’s grandfather once said, which would send you mad if you drank enough of it.