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.
It is hoped the reader savoured the brevity of the preceding chapter. When last we saw Samantha Panther she was drowning in a subterranean submarine waterway deep under curvaceous Luxemborg. But first...

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 56

Being one of the few people to stand up to the Vice-chancellor and live to walk away was no small achievement… It was no huge achievement either of course. Probably best regarded as a pretty middling achievement as far as such things can reliably be measured and graded.

The one time resident of the small south Devon town with the distinctive name wandered….stumbled even, down the cobbled side street. Until very recently his mission had been simply to reach the town, since arriving he had been further inspired to draw his trek to a conclusion by reaching the shore, the narrow strip where the cold waters of the English Channel lapped up onto the cold land of the English coast.

‘My gods, man, where have you been?’*

There was a delay as the message was received and a suitable response generated and returned. ‘Where haven’t I been you mean,’ came the eventual reply from the weary figure.

‘Err… no… I think I said what I meant.’

‘Aha! But did you indeed mean what you said?’ Erm retorted with a slight air of triumphantism. He was beginning to come awake now. He couldn’t tell whether it was because the drugs in his system were wearing off or kicking in. He’d been in a drug induced state or lowered consciousness for such a long time now it was hard to recall what counted as normality. Occasionally he thought he got flash-backs, but he couldn’t be sure. The flash-forwards were much more straight forward and easier to cope with.

‘OK clever clogs, don’t go all Carrol Lewis on me here. I was just enquiring where you had been to.’

‘Lewis Carroll; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898.’

‘What? Look, I was only making polite conversation you know,’ he raised his eyebrows and nodded his head slightly, ‘Small talk.’

‘Ah! Microchip technology?’ the older man offered. ‘Greentongue? Flexicopomsite processors?’

‘I don’t really know about that sort of thing. I’m just a postman,’ said the postman.

From the hill top that was the bottom of Hill Street, the older man nodded and looked past the other, past him and out into the blurred and foggy horizon. ‘Who are the good guys in this mess?’ he asked.

‘What mess? What are you talking about?’

‘We used to stand for something…once.’

‘Sorry mate, you’ve lost me there,’ the broad minded idiot postman said.

It seemed this was neither the place nor time for that particular conversation. ‘Never mind my good fellow, it seems not to even matter anymore.’ With that the Professor decided to terminate the conversation and move away. He quietly turned and, with a brief wave of his right hand, continued to walk up the street and down the hill to he shore.

For his part the postman was left standing next to the post box, shaking his head. That was old Erm wasn’t it? He gathered up the remaining contents of his postbag. The great academic and intellectual who hailed from this very same little coastal town? He hurriedly stuffed the letters and parcels into the post box. He couldn’t be sure that is was Erm, but he knew he had to tell as many people as possible, and soon. After all this time he had returned. The ‘Professor’ was back, back in Beer®.

Time, it is often observed*, is a curious thing. Some people will tell you that they never seem to have enough of it. Others will lament their inability to fill the time they have. Rhoda Crwys, for example, would spend ages trying to time the time it took her to do even the most trivial and mundane of everyday tasks in an attempt to identify areas where she could streamline a particular practice and thereby save herself some more time in the future. It was a time consuming process! One grey winters afternoon she almost caused her brain to freeze up while she was pondering the best way to time the time she had been taking to time herself timing things. She was only saved when one of her many countdown timers went off to remind her she had to time herself turning off countdown timers – to see whether she could do it in a more expedient manner. But most people do not dwell on the constant passing of time in a manner anything like as intensely as Miss Crwys. Most people largely fail to notice time at all - until they find themselves in a situation where the future availability of time, for them at least, suddenly looks deeply restricted.

This was the situation that the intrepid Channel 12 correspondent Samantha Panther now found herself. With water levels rising faster and faster the young reporter began to drift away - physically with the current of the water and unconsciously as her mind began to think hard about ensuring her continued survival. Fighting hard to push through the immediate panic reaction that often materializes when the brain realizes that it’s body is about to drown, Samantha began to calm herself down. Her mind looked long and hard at the options open to her: there seemed to be just two, live or die. It wasn’t that hardest choice she’d even had to make. The hardest choice she’d ever had to make was whether to buy the pink ankle length high-toe boots with the Squirrel skin lining or to go for the green and silver platform flip-flops with diamante inlay the last time she went shopping. The decision now was that she wanted to… live! It was a decision aided by the one previously alluded to. Lashing out and kicking with her legs in the gloomy dark darkness of the gloomy water, she managed to briefly touch a rocky outcrop of rock on the wall of the rocky water filled cavern. Pushing hard against this geological protrusion she was thankful that she had, in the end, decided on the platform flip-flops. The extra eight inches of height that they afforded her was just enough to allow Miss Panther to spring herself upwards, up and above the water line.***

As her head broke the surface she hungrily gasped for air like a smoker denied an intake of tobacco for an extended period, perhaps as a result of being stuck in a ‘no smoking’ compartment of a local train that then became stranded in a tunnel due to an freak accident involving a landslide, two goats and some persistent and localized rainfall.

Despite this fortunate turn of events her position was still rather precarious. Not as precarious as a couple of goats who find themselves stranded on a muddy outcrop of mud above the entrance to a rail tunnel in the midst of a torrential downpour… but precarious none the less. This precariousness was mainly due to her current footwear. It was at times like this, and indeed at this exact time, that she often wished she was somewhere else altogether – (being somewhere else unaltogether never really appealed to her, no matter how precarious a situation she found herself in). But it was no use crying over spilt toast, she’d just have to deal with the situation in hand and make the best of it.

In the meantime, with the instant 24 hour a day news coverage now afforded to those who could afford it, erroneous news of Miss Panthers untimely demise had leaked out. After a brief broadcast obituary, just after the weekend ski reports and before the early mid afternoon traffic update, had been shown on Channel 12, normal service resumed. Within minutes the channel bosses had begun the recruitment process to find a new intrepid reporter of the same caliber, or at least someone with a similar trigger action and recoil. The list of names was long. The list of names was also the main criterion by which the decision to employ, or not, would be made. As Miss Panther herself discovered you had to have a good name to be in TV news!

There was no time to waste: if he was going to get a bigger part in this novel the postman would have to act. Act fast and act decisively. Before long the he had seen to it that everyone he knew in the town, and he knew everyone in the town, knew of his news. He was rather dismayed to find that some of those he told already knew what he was telling them – but it didn’t stop him telling them again anyway. The reason that some residents knew the news before the postman could tell them was that they had seen the Professor for themselves as he had ambled along the narrow streets on his way to the sea front. This was not good news at all for the star-struck postman, he realized that the only way to play a bigger role in the text would be to do something dramatic, something unexpected. At that exact moment, if not sooner, he collided with an oncoming bus coming on in the opposite direction to the one from where it had just been. In a cruelly twisted twist of cruel fate his continued presence in the tale was curtailed. The bus drove on, its driver oblivious to the oblivion being caused.

* Not a narrow minded idiot, this man had reverted to believing in, and worshipping, multiple Gods, a state of affairs only relatively recently frowned upon in human history. For interested readers a full list of possible alternative / additional Gods can be found in the appendix.
**Observing time can be a dangerous practice and should only be attempted by trained individuals. For details of introductory courses in time observation please contact you local Temporal Surveillance Unit.
***It should be noted that Miss Panther was fully trained in the use of this particular ‘specialty’ of footwear. On the feet of untrained, inexperienced users such items can be a hazardous hazard.