Bread

by Stephen Brown

THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY

  It was only with the greatest reluctance that we agreed to attend the press conference and when we were brought out from behind the purple curtain it was to a rapturous applause. Scores of camera crews had been squeezed into the room and reporters from all over the world, each of them wanting a piece of us.

  We had been dubbed both saviours of the world and heroes of the hour, along with a colourful plethora of other ill-fitting titles, the strangest and most far-fetched of which came from a ‘reputable source’ - always a bit of a give away that one - and declared that the three of us, Ollie, Geeza and myself, were in reality the best of the best - top MI5 agents… answerable only to the Prime Minister and the Crown.

  Laughable I know. Wherever the ‘reality’ is that some of these journalists live in, I have absolutely no desire to go there. Somehow they had got my name - the hotel in Eilean Ban probably. It could have been the SAS I suppose, as I sang like a skylark (albeit an extremely frightened one) when they interrogated me in the back of one of their vans; but I doubt that lot give much away to the press somehow. So yes, all of a sudden Special Agent Sir E. Cripplesby and his associates, as we’d been called, was splattered all over the papers and TV screens from here to God knows where. We were being heralded as national - even global - heroes.

  It didn’t help that somehow somebody had discovered that my home phone number ends in 001. You can imagine what the imaginative editors of the tabloids made of that!

  But that was it. Finished. Done and dusted. The crisis is apparently over and although the Professor has disappeared along with all the money he collected, stability is beginning to return. The governments of the world are trading as usual - perhaps they have turned to the Andorran Florin, or some other obscure monetary denomination - and the stock market is beginning to rise again like a phoenix out of the financial ashes of its predecessor.

  Peace has largely been restored and loathe though I am to admit it, I suppose I do have to hold my hands up and agree that we were, in part - only in part mind you - responsible for, and I am not really comfortable with this expression: ‘saving the world.’

  Interestingly, no more has ever been heard of the fiendish Professor Alan Humphries. Let’s hope it stays that way.

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