By Gareth Edwards

Monday 23 May 2011

Where all the Flowers have gone, and an Otter in Danger.


Come, bold internauts, and set sail with me across the sea of ignorance. With your questions for our oars and this blog as our ship let us discover new islands of truth amid the waves, and maybe build hotels on them.

Where have all the flowers gone?
Archeologists recently uncovered several overgrown graveyards full of the remains of a large group of soldiers. It’s hard to put an exact number on the bodies but it may even be as many as all the soldiers. Perhaps most remarkable however is that though these young men seem to have been dressed for battle their efficacy as a fighting force must surely have been compromised by the fact of their apparently carrying a large number of flowers, possibly even all the flowers. Experts have conjectured that all the young men may have been given all the flowers by all the young girls, but it’s hard to be sure as this was a long time ago.

Is terracotta red, orange, or brown?
No, that’s autumn leaves. Terracotta is a Sardinian dessert made out of milk and clay.

Why does it take me so long to draw spaceships?
The problem may be that the spaceships you are drawing are travelling at a significant proportion of the speed of light, so time passes at a different speed. Thus five minutes for the drawing of the spaceship will feel like many years for the person drawing it. You should be careful though because your drawings of spaceships are likely to have almost infinite mass. If you drew slower spaceships it would be quicker.

If a plus times a plus is a plus and a minus times a minus is a plus, why aren't minuses dying out?
There is very unlikely to be a shortage as the Government has been stockpiling them for years, ever since the minus strike. No? Oh please yourselves.

I'm suspect of the phrase, "You can't go back again". Are my feelings of unease justified?
Like so many things it depends on context. For example, at a family party my son reacted to exactly this phrase with rage when it formed my reply to his request to make a third trip to the dessert buffet. Likewise, if you were leaving your much-loved pet otter Fifibelle in the care of an avant-garde chef you were friends with at university because you were going away at short notice for a weekend in Minehead and nobody else was available, and then just as you were leaving the premises your eye was drawn to a blackboard bearing the legend “Chef’s Special Today: Mustelid Marinière” and then you heard a muffled squeal and suddenly felt an urge to return to Fifibelle “for one more cuddle”, but no sooner had you uttered this request than you were firmly propelled out of the restaurant door into the cold grey high street as a pitiless voice growled “You can’t go back again”, you would be right to feel unease.

So that’s that for now. Do keep the questions coming in, as nobody wants to live in a world where that stops being that in the future.

6 comments:

  1. I can dig it he can dig it she can dig it we can dig it they can dig it, you can dig it, oh let's dig it. Can you dig it, baby?

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  2. very touching about where the flowers have gone. leads directly to the next one:

    when will they learn?

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  3. I remember the minus strike. Not to mention the days of negative equity and not at all positive war.

    Why does the Queen own all the swans?

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  4. Why is there a light that never goes out?

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  5. Or, even more importantly, who switched the light on?

    And, why does imaginary times imaginary give a negative?

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  6. Who is Spain?
    Why is Hitler?
    When is right?

    ReplyDelete