Bread

by Stephen Brown

THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY

  Well, thank God that’s over! I am talking here about the national tour I have just been forced to endure, appearing on just about every TV and radio station you have ever heard of and then dozens more you haven’t. Since when have there been so many channels? I can only assume that what with the monetary upheaval the world has just undergone, the price of cameras must have plummeted, as have subscriptions for a broadcasting license. Why on earth would Woodwork TV be interested in me anyway?

  I kept on telling them all that I didn’t actually do anything, but they constantly told me that I was modest to a fault and that seemed to make me even more popular! The people, it seems, want a hero and in the absence of a proper one have got me instead.

  At least Ollie Donald came with me and he was a tower of strength, he really was. Of course he is an old hand as far as the media goes and helped me to deal with it all wonderfully well. The Press loved him coming along because he is a good looking celebrity whose image they were only too happy to have plastered all over their pages. He is far more photogenic than I and they positively lapped him up. The wounds on his face have healed enough now to let those looks shine through, but still give him a certain rugged look, a bit of a rough edge and this made him all the more appealing.

  They even turned the absence of Geeza, whose name we never told them, into a selling point - sorry, a personal, human interest aspect to the story. Nearly got cynical for a minute there.

  The third member of this world saving trio has been affected badly by ill-health, suffering not only from the arduous strains of their mission, but also bearing the scars of a face to face confrontation with the evil Professor. He remains in a secret government hospital where he is receiving the best possible medical care and is visited everyday by Her Majesty the Queen.

  What? Come on! We all know the papers exaggerate things a bit, adding a bit here and there, but really! How can they lie so openly? So blatantly? Yet the readers just gobbled it up, baying always for more.

  Needless to say, this turn of events has pleased Geeza no end. He wanted a way to get out of the media circus that was looming over us and he got it. Lucky sod. I only hope he hasn’t gone to Africa already without saying good-bye first.

  He hasn’t handed in the bill for his services either. I’m not sure either of us especially wants to mention that anymore. I’d like to think that we have become firm friends, rather than just employer and employee.

  I don’t think there has been a single, solitary angle that hasn’t been poked at and investigated by the media - someone even tried to interview the milkman whose patch included the house where the Professor was finally cornered, but it was a bit of a flop as far as cutting edge media was concerned.

  They still showed it on ITV though:

  The screen shows an ordinary semi-detached house from across the street.

  It was the house in which the world was held to ransom and millions of lives were ruined, the report began in that awful sort of glossy-magazine seriousness the main stream media is intent on spooning out to us these days. A normal street in a normal town where somehow the madman had managed to live undetected amongst the good, honest, normal people going about their normal, honest daily lives – some of these other people were children.

  Oh my God. The way it was heading there was going to be enough syrup to keep a Canadian happy! Mercifully, it got cut short.

  Brian, you deliver the milk around here. Was there ever any indication that this Humphries was, in fact, a maniacal super-villain plotting to overthrow the world?

  [Cut to shot of Brian, wearing his Prestwick Dairies cap]

  Err… I dunno. He didnae have his milk delivered. Must have got it from the One Stop.

  I laughed.

  One thing I was still confused about was why he had taken those few paltry items from us all, back in the MacPlimsol conference hall. No matter how many times I tried to twist my mind around it, I just couldn’t figure it out. Watching an interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight I finally got my answer.

  A senior member of staff declared that Humphries had approached the hotel with an offer to buy their Scottish money off them and had been refused. It was only after that, two weeks later, that he booked out the hall for his ‘Maths Can Be Fun’ lecture (I knew it was a facade - well, it had to be didn’t it?) In further interviews, every person present was tracked down and they each told the same story.

  After receiving the compensation from the hotel, two hundred Scottish pounds in each case, along with the free nights, each person was then visited - once they had returned home - at around three o’clock in the afternoon by a disguised Humphries, posing as a hotel spokesman. He explained to them all that the management and shareholders had agreed that they had not received enough for their ordeal and promptly offered to buy the money back off each individual for three hundred pounds, English.

  Who was going to refuse? I was the only one he did not visit in this manner, presumably using his time machine and for a while I wondered why? But when the answer came to me, it was perfectly simple - I had come in to the lecture late and did not have my name down on any register, so he didn’t know who I was and therefore couldn’t approach me like the others.

  He must have had all sorts of thugs and ne’er-do-wells out looking for me though and those Bikers at the Stock Exchange nearly got me. Geeza’s hunch had been right from the very start - they were indeed working for the Prof, but whether they knew the full story or not…? My guess is probably not.

  Oh yes - I almost forgot the most bizarre thing of all! I don’t know why, but everybody in the media has labelled me as being Scottish!! We were a brave threesome of international super spies. Donald, the South African, the mysterious Englishman, – Geeza – and the leader of the group, Scotsman Sir Elliot Cripplesby!

  I’m not Scottish! But then of course, I wasn’t a Knight of the Realm either, but they soon made me one! They wanted to bestow upon me some land, so that I could be “Lord of Somewhere,” and they insisted - despite my protestations - that because I was Scottish born and bred, it was only appropriate that I be Lord of somewhere in Scotland!

  Unfortunately, however, all of the land in bonnie Scotland was already taken, and had been lorded over by some peer or other for hundreds of years. As a goodwill gesture though, Denmark handed back the Faroe Islands (which they had wrestled from Scottish control way back more than a thousand years ago), purely so that they could be ‘given’ to me!

  Thanks a lot Denmark!

  So I am now officially Lord Cripplesby of Faroe. This leads interestingly on to the true origins of the pyramid builders and God-Kings of Ancient Egypt, but I’ll not go into that right now, except to say that there are some stone slabs up here with archaic writing on them and rumours abound amongst the locals claiming these stones contain information which reveals who was really responsible for the ancient civilisation built along the banks of the Nile.

  Talking of which, many of the greatest treasures of ancient Egypt are in fact feared lost and gone forever. The Death Mask of Tutankhamen for example, already priceless, has been made more so by the discovery that it was made using Scottish gold - if only anybody knew where it was. It had been handed over to the Professor, along with so much more and has never been seen since.

  And neither has the Professor. Still. He was never caught by anyone in this day and age, but wherever it was he disappeared off to he must have met with a sticky end, as he has never showed his face again in our time.

  And so the world has begun to rebuild itself. The wars and riots have been stopped. Economic stability is returning, gradually. Somehow or another, all the governments who had any in the first place, have managed to recoup all the Scottish money they lost to Alan Humphries. They have not thought it necessary to explain how, but are now quite open about the fact that they trade in Scottish money, now that all the trifling pounds and pennies kept here and there are gone. And I don’t know whether it is just me and my over activ
e imagination, but Britain appears to be throwing her weight about on the stage of international politics far more than she ever used to in my memory. The way our Statesmen are posturing and the rhetoric they are using, it is almost as if we are as powerful again as we were in the days of the Empire. Strange.

  So yes, all the loose Scottish money is gone. All except mine that is. I still have my one hundred and ten pounds, thirty pence, which makes me one of the richest men in the world.

  With it I am financing several environmental projects to try and bring a halt to the destruction that Humanity has brought upon the Earth with so much vim and vigour. Spending only that little time with Geeza has rubbed off on me I think, in more than a couple of ways, because I now feel a tenderness for the world that we live in similar to that which a son feels for his mother. My first project is one that I hope will flood the seas with fish again.

  The problems of over-fishing were already being felt across the globe long before the Japanese ships contaminated much of what was left. Cod stocks had almost been wiped out, tuna had become seriously depleted, many species of shark were already facing extinction and as for Salmon – well, where to start?

  Atlantic Salmon in recent years have somehow become mixed up with their Pacific relatives, which is an absolute disaster as far as biodiversity is concerned and the wild Atlantic stocks themselves are being wiped out by diseases originating in the over-crowded fish farms up and down the western coasts of northern Europe. Positioned in the estuaries that lead to the traditional spawning grounds upstream, these diseases have, of course, escaped from the farms and got out into wild populations, decimating entire shoals.

  Several fishermen had long since hung up their nets complaining that they sometimes caught just one fish – or nothing at all – in the latter days of their ocean going lives and that had been up to ten years before this latest calamity.

  Yes, the seas were already in a mess, but the Japanese ‘plague ships’ have only made things worse. However, since Humphries disappeared the world has got together and taken action. All the ships have been clustered together off the shores of Sri Lanka and are being broken up at sea, the parts being placed in specially made, vacuum-sealed containers prior to being jettisoned into space.

  Every tiny, dismantled fragment of these contaminated ships is to be loaded up into one of NASA’s newest, giant Super-ships which have replaced the Shuttle fleet. When its vast storage bays have been filled, The Caber will be sent off on a trajectory out into deepest space. Once the conventional rockets have run out of fuel they will then switch over to a new type of solar powered engine, to ensure that they are blasted from our Solar System and cannot possibly return to do the Earth anymore harm.

  I am pleased to say that I have received the backing of many of the world’s environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Captain Birdseye, and was very pleasantly surprised a few days ago when I was visited by a Japanese delegation with a most unexpected gift. A high ranking Japanese civil servant came forth holding two fish, the genus of which I did not recognise.

  They are the sole survivors, one male and one female, of what used to be Emperor Hirohito’s private aquarium. Not only that, they are the two remaining members of a species of fish thought to have become extinct over one hundred and fifty years ago. They are Loch Ronnoch Koi (Japanese for cod), and have been donated to my hatcheries by way of a thank you from the Japanese people!

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