AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In Chapter 18B, the lip-reading lethal librarian pondered the incongruity of Welsh University student enrollment and Welsh University student/s. Now -- Luxembourg.

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 19
In earlier past days gone by, Wales had envied other nations, free nations. It had looked to them with jealous eyes and longed for what they had: Freedom. Iceland, Ecuador, Georgia, Fiji, Luxembourg. All places that were free. All places that Wales wanted to emulate. And so it had.

Unceremoniously squeezed between France, Germany and Belgium (Belgium!), Luxembourg had, in great inter-nation-al irony, looked back at Wales with equal, if not greater envy. A small nation. A tiny country. Slightly smaller than Rhode Island: a mere one thousand square miles of central northern European anonymousness. One thousand square miles and growing. Growing by the day. Growing outwards and growing upwards. The sheer indignity of losing all that land to Belgium (Belgium!) in 1839, even if it was in return for greater autonomy, had never fully been resolved.

Secretly, or at least as secretly as it is possible to do such a thing, Luxembourg had been importing prime ‘Grade A’ Welsh soil for several months. Under the cover of an overly elaborate network of systems and utilizing a system of networks, the cunning plan had been put in place. Then, once all those who needed to know were told, and on a strictly need-to-tell basis, the plan was buried; buried beneath the ever increasing amounts of soil being shipped in each day.

All of this under the watchful, if wandering eye of an aged Bangladeshi immigrant. While the old figure clearly had an eye for the ladies he fortunately also had an eye for detail. He liked little more than to combine both eyes and focus his attentions on lady’s details. But there was work to be overseen too. Time enough for the other stuff.

Luxembourg had been desperate to raise it’s international profile for many years. So it was the only Grand Duchy in the world. What good did that do it? It hadn’t been taken seriously for far too long and so decisions were decided and actions acted. But shipping in the soil deemed necessary was too obvious and someone would probably notice such a blatant ploy. Things had to be done in a more subtle way. Using a complex of complexes in the remote isolation of the Southern Belgian forests, and combining series of staging posts radiating towards those points from the channel ports of Calais and Oostende, the large lorries of soil would shed their loads on to smaller and smaller vehicles. With each step the amount of mud being conveyed would decline in direct proportion to the increasing umber of vehicles employed. At the border who was going to question a long line of small family cars entering Luxembourg? After all some 80,000 people commuted into Luxembourg each day as it was.

Gradually, with great skill and precision, Luxembourg was growing. The lowly Buurgplaatz peak had already been raised from just under five hundred and sixty metres to well over six hundred and forty. With equal landscaping proficiency the contours of the undulating uplands, the shallow, but broad, valleys had also been increased in height. Meanwhile, in what passed off as general maintenance, Luxembourg had progressively been redefining it’s borders too. It had slowly eaten into neighbouring France and Germany, they didn’t even notice; besides it wasn’t like they’d actually miss the land. But the biggest advances had been directed at Belgium (Belgium!). It was, all those years ago, the Belgians who swallowed up almost half of the Grand Duchy after all.

And the aging figure, what of his place in all this. …all this…whatever it is?

His place is at the dock, watching the clay vessels decant their cargos of the fine-grained material consisting mainly of hydrated aluminum silicates. In another ingenious ploy to avoid detection, this stuff was cunningly formed to look like tea sets, yes, tea sets, but soon they would be pulverized and rehydrated and by Friday they’d be Luxembourg.

Shortly after 5:46 pm. the last clay vessel had been unladed and sailed back down the river that must surely exist.

Just then a smartly dressed young lady, a man struggling to rest a large video camera on his shoulder as he moved and another man weighed down with a rectangular shoulder bag and what initially looked like a grey, limbless ferret on the end of a metal pole, all piled out of a rickshaw. Clearly, they’d just arrived from China. The news team and its mascot had arrived too late. They’d literally missed the boat.

The Bangladeshi patted himself on his inner back – his ruse had worked. He’d gambled that somewhere in the former UK rumour-mill, mysterious earthen tea cups would become china. The rest would be inevitable: the search for some preposterous connection between Wales and China, the disappointing Beijing trip –’Tianenmen Square isn’t half so big as looks on the telly!’ – the long ride back to Cymru with its scheduled 5:47 pm layover in Luxembourg. He’d timed it to the minute and the gamble had paid off. He was going to meet the beautiful Samantha Panther.

(to be continued...)