Bread
Page 59
THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY
It was a happy few days, despite being tinged with the inevitable sadness that you always feel when saying goodbye. Thankfully Geeza had not already left for Africa and came up to the Faroes to see me one last time before he did. I tried in vain to persuade him to come and live up here, but his mind was set.
“The decision has been made for me already,” he said. “I don’t think I could change it even if I wanted to.”
He has spent the intervening time since we had last seen each other travelling to his favourite places up and down the country and bidding them all a fond farewell. When I asked him if he was really going for good his reply left me in no doubt whatsoever.
“Elliot, you’ll always be welcome to come and visit, to stay as long as you like, but if I ever leave Africa it will be because something has gone horribly wrong. I am going, heart, mind and soul, for good.” He laughed and put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “I promise you’ll be the first person I look up if everything crashes down around me. Not that it’s going to,” he smiled a huge smile. “Life is going to be great.”
For three or four happy days we wandered extensively around the islands, exploring every little crag and bay of my new island home. I joked with him that maybe one day I would call this my ‘family seat,’ but for now it was just home. Towards the end of the second day he helped me release the two Loch Ronnoch Koi into the mouth of a river – he had persuaded me that we should set them free, despite their rarity.
“Let them be Elliot, let them be.”
So we did.
And as they swam out into the ocean, away from the confines of a tank or pond for the very first time, we sat and reflected, talking about a good many things such as the undoubted genius of the Professor, who had somehow been able to calculate exactly what he would have to do in order to get the hotel in Eilean Ban to release its Scottish money.
No mean feat in itself, before we even began to touch upon the fact that Humphries had not only discovered the formula for time travel, but he had also single-handedly built himself a time machine in his garage! Astounding. He could have been such a great man, with a brain like that.
Time travel. Hmm yes. Now that is something we spoke about for a surprisingly short length of time. There are those who still argue, despite everything that has gone on, that time travel is impossible. They claim that if it were ever to be invented some time in the future then we would already have it - and always would have done - because somebody would have come back and told us its secrets.
Personally I disagree. Having seen and experienced what the Professor had been able to do I just find it astonishing that there are people out there who seem happy to write the whole thing off as ‘the actions of some lunatic.’ I mean, that doesn’t explain anything does it? But I could never find a way to argue my case.
Geeza wrapped it up nicely for me though, in a neat and tidy way.
“Bread,” he said to me sitting on a rock watching the waves crashing in one evening. Seeing the dumbfounded look on my face as I failed magnificently to guess why he had suddenly gone off on this tangent, he continued. “The fact that bread exists proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that time travel is, was, and will always be with us.”
His explanation was simple and succinct:
“There is no way that bread could possibly have been invented. It may well have first been eaten,” as I had pointed out to him earlier, “in the North-eastern Highlands of Scotland, but it wasn’t invented there. In fact, bread wasn’t invented anywhere! It couldn’t be. Never. Not ever, under any circumstances could bread ever have been made by somebody who did not already know how to do it.
“Think about it. What goes into bread? How is it made? What are the ingredients? Flour. A by-product of wheat, which has to be ground down with a considerable amount of deliberate, physical effort before it takes the powdery form it does - it doesn’t just occur like that naturally. Then there’s yeast. What the hell is yeast anyway? Some sort of mould or something?” He held up a hand and started counting off his fingers. “Salt; optional I suppose,” one finger down. “Butter or margarine, or fat of some sort or other,” another finger “and warm water. All in the right quantities, all added at the right times. You have to leave it to prove, or rise, and then there is the temperature of the oven to consider. Not until every one of these things is put together with a high degree of accuracy do we get a single loaf of bread.” He shook his head gently and gave a light, little laugh. “I’m sorry, but no one can tell me that all this was stumbled on by accident. It just isn’t feasible.
“More likely the Professor, or perhaps some other unknown voyager through time, stopped off somewhere in the remote past and fancied a sandwich. Of course, he couldn’t get one, so he had to show the local people of whatever time it was how to make one and for that he had to show them how to make bread. That way he could have his snack and at the same time unwittingly introduced bread into humanity’s... well, to humanity.
“It all exists in some sort of time loop. No time travel, no bread. We have bread, therefore we must have time travel.”
He didn’t say QED, but he would have been well within his rights to do so. Every time I’ve thought it over since he left, I have found myself agreeing unreservedly with him.
Bread. Yes. It really is that simple.
I know I shall miss him not being around. In the short time we were thrown together I grew accustomed to all his eccentricities and strange, unfamiliar ways. Perhaps I will go and see him in Africa, who knows?
Not just yet though. A world tour is looming, similar to the one that has just taken me the length and breadth of Britain, but all I want to do right now is rest, well away from the spotlights of the media. I can fully understand now why Elvis wanted to escape all the lights and the cameras - I only hope I don’t have to go to the same drastic lengths as he did!
No, for now all is quiet here in McPresley, as I have renamed capital of the islands, and hopefully it will stay that way. Someone has asked me if I would like to read a diary that was recently discovered behind a brick in an old Victorian prison cell, penned by a Dr. A Humphries. Apparently he was a Scotsman by blood.
Do I want to read it?
Nah. Not really.
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