The Pagan Activist

 We would like to introduce to you our regular columist for 'Harry, Mummy and ....' - The Pseudomat.

The Pagan Activist

The Pseudomet is ensconced deep within the Midlands of mainland Britain, with his wife and two children.

Kids say the best things. They just do, it's a fact of nature. Ignoring social etiquette, common decency or the situation that happens to be falling apart around them, children will ask, at that volume that only children possess, why that woman's got a funny nose or why that man is so fat, or will happily explain the size, shape and colour of their last bowel movement to the entire customer base of a Little Chef. The only other time in our life where such things are tolerated is extreme old age, but I'd much rather be 3 again.

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2008:

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January

2007:

December / November / October / September / August

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“Mummy? What we doin’?” asked Harry, idly kicking a piece of expensive looking equipment bedecked with switches, levers and lights that a frantic technician quickly pulled out of the small child’s way.

 

Mummy was struggling into a tiny, gold and silver sequined leotard with the help of several assistants, a lot of breathing in and swearing.

 

“Mummy….is…about…” she gasped, pulling at the miniscule outfit in a vain attempt to get it to cover more of her than it actually would, “…to…go…on…stage” she struggled on, “…and…play…to…the…biggest…audience…in…entertainment…….history!” This last word came in a rush as something in the costume tore and mummy, who had been pulling it upwards with all of her might, almost punched herself in the face. As she fought to regain her balance, Harry giggled to himself and casually pressed a couple of buttons on the handset that one of the techs had foolishly left within his reach, causing a minor explosion of fireworks and pyrotechnics on the other side of the stage that sent members of the special effects department running for cover. He looked at the mayhem he’d caused without expression then turned to mummy and said “Can I help?”

 

Mummy and the assistants had ditched the tiny sparkly costume and had opted for a much more sensible silver number with a huge headdress and matching wings that mummy was currently climbing into.

 

“Of course you can help, Sweetie” mummy cooed as her assistants mounted the enormous feathered headpiece onto her skull and began screwing it to the back brace that was required to hold it in place. Without looking around, because doing so would have required the joints in her spine to forget everything they knew about pain-free movement, she said “You could start by taking mummy’s gold clothes and putting them in her dressing room.

 

Harry scooped the sparkly wisp of material from the floor and two lumps of clear rubbery stuff fell out, that he proceeded to kick across the floor. As he arrived at the door to mummy’s dressing room, a member of the wardrobe department caught sight of him and wandered over.

 

“Can I help, honey?” said the woman, crouching down.

 

“Mummy said I had to take this to her dressing room” said Harry in that voice he saved for people he didn’t know, just in case he’d done something he shouldn’t have.

 

“Well” said the woman “I can take it for you, it really needs to go on a hanger anyway.” She made to stand up, then said “Would you like to see all of our other costumes?” Harry, who had no idea what a costume was, nodded enthusiastically. “OK” said the lady, “Let’s go and wish mummy luck first, then we’ll go and see the clothes”.

 

They went back to mummy, who was preparing to go out on stage. “Ready Harry?” she said, “You’re about to see mummy sing to the biggest audience in history. Over 4billion people will be watching. Exciting, isn’t it?” Harry nodded in agreement and gave mummy a kiss on the cheek, then he watched as she walked out onto the stage to thunderous applause and roared cheering from the enormous crowd.

 

“Come on then Harry” said the wardrobe lady, let’s go and get mummy’s other costumes ready.

 

As they wandered down the corridor towards the costume department, the lady stopped and bent down to pick up the rubbery things that had fallen out of mummy’s leotard; the things had had been using as footballs.

 

“Oh, dear.” said the lady, “Your mummy should be wearing these.”

 

Harry’s forehead developed creases as he frowned at her. “What are they?” he asked.

 

The wardrobe lady, thought about the best way to describe breast enhancements to a toddler, and decided on “They’re special things that go in mummy’s bra to stop the top of her dress falling down”. Congratulating herself on a well thought out explanation, she said “I’m just going to pop these over here, Harry, I won’t be a minute.” She jogged down the corridor and through a door.

 

Harry, now at a loss for anything to do, spied a microphone standing all by itself, alone, not doing anything. He walked over to it and pulled it over so that he could speak into it.

 

“Mummy?” he said, the resulting feedback screech jabbing at the air like nails on a blackboard. “Mummy? I love you”. The huge audience who had just pulled some of the worst faces known to modern man as their ears were assailed with interference, now all said “Aah” together.

 

Mummy, on stage in front of ¾ of the worlds population, smiled and shouted, “THANK YOU HARRY!!”

 

Harry smiled. “Mummy? The lady says that you forgot to put your boobs on.”

 

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“Mummy, who that?” asked Harry pointing at the two figures that had suddenly appeared in the dining room, his scowl wrinkling his small nose with concern. Mummy, spatula in hand, looked up from her recipe book and gave a start.

 

“Oh” said Mummy, surprising herself by including absolutely no shock in her tone as, by rights, she should have been shocked to hell. She wandered around the sideboard and took Harry’s hand. “It would appear” she said, “to be us, Harry.”

 

And, indeed, it was. Standing in the corner of the room, looking slightly uncomfortable, were a woman and a small boy who looked very much like Harry and Mummy.

 

The four stood and stared at each other for a few seconds before the second Mummy said “Sorry to just drop in on you like this, but we have a bit of a problem.”

 

“Oh” said Mummy One, surprise still failing to put in any form of appearance in her voice, “Are you…?”

 

“You? Yes” answered the second Mummy before Mummy One could get her words out, “Sorry” she said again, “But we don’t have a lot of time. 42. A pair of red wellies and a dead sparrow”.

 

Mummy One didn’t appear to be listening and said “If you’re really us, then what number am I thinking of right now and what is on the mat by the back do…?” Mummy One’s forehead wrinkled in confusion and she wandered through the kitchen and poked her head around the corner. A pair of red wellies stood on the mat next to the corpse of a small bird that hadn’t been there 20 minutes ago. She went back to the dining room to find the second Mummy looking at her with that expression people wear when they don’t want to say ‘I told you so’.

 

Harry One, on the other hand, was eyeing the second Harry warily. The second Harry was, in turn, looking at Harry One with a scowl.

 

“So.” said Mummy One, unsure what to say to herself, which was odd because she spent most of her days talking to herself.

 

“Right” said the second Mummy “The problem is that when I, I mean you, when you were adding ingredients to that cake you’re making” she pointed to the large mixing bowl on the kitchen side “You inadvertently added Uncle Brian’s Instant Temporal Vortex Mix instead of cinnamon.”

 

Mummy One looked at the packets that were strewn all over the kitchen side and noticed that what she’d thought was cinnamon was, indeed, Uncle Brian’s Instant Temporal Vortex Mix that she thought she’d thrown away weeks ago. “Ah” she said, by way of explanation.

 

“Quite” agreed the second Mummy. “The problem is that in about 5 minutes a portal is going to open up right where you’re standing and you’re going to be sucked into, well, now…into this conversation. And I’m here to tell you to step to your left a bit so I can prevent…” She didn’t get to finish what she was saying as at that moment there was a flash and a third Mummy and Harry appeared.

 

“Bugger” said the second Mummy quietly.

 

Harry One and the second Harry watched the third Harry carefully, their size 6 ParaDoc Martin’s shifting warily on the carpet. The third Harry watched them with cagey interest.

 

“Don’t say another word!” said the third Mummy to the second Mummy, “Giving her any information that could change the outcome of things will create a paradox that could wipe out the universe. You know this. You heard it when you were her, just as I did.”

 

“Yes” said the second Mummy, sighing, “But we’ve seen what happens and…”

 

“Ah, ah, ah” warned the third Mummy. Mummy One looked on in bewilderment.

 

Flash! Flash! FLAAAAAAASH!

 

The room was suddenly filled with more Mummy’s and Harry’s than Mummy One could count.

 

“Bugger” said the second Mummy again.

 

“Can I just ask…?” said the fourteenth Mummy

 

“No!” said the eighth, “You know you can’t.”

 

Mummy One, completely bemused by the whole affair looked down at the floor that had begun to distort in that distinct way floors do when a temporal vortex is forming within them. Luckily she had her Vortex Shimmying Jimmy Chu’s on, a present from Uncle Brian, which would be more than capable of dealing with the trip she was about to take.

 

There was a sound like 27 small boys saying “Ooooh!” followed by the sound of 27 small boys doing a little dance, then an odd tinkling sound.

 

“Ready Harry?” asked Mummy One, “We’re about to become the first people to travel through time for no discernable reason and meet ourselves. That will be fun won’t it?”

 

The sound of 27 small boys saying “Ummm” was followed quickly by the sound of 27 small boys saying “Mummy, I wee’d myself”.

 

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“Mummy?” asked Harry, as he gazed out of the tiny round window into the murky darkness beyond, “Mummy?”. Mummy was poring over a huge map that she had spread out over almost every available surface, and was comparing what she was reading with a tiny SONAR screen that was pinging happily to itself. Every so often, she’d scribble something quickly onto the map, invariably swearing quietly as the pencil broke through the thin surface of the paper, and adjust the settings of the SONAR.

            “Just one second, Sweetie” said Mummy, crossing out a mark she had just made on the map, “Mummy’s made a mistake and is trying to fix it.” She cast around for her glasses, patting her neck and head. Then, realising that the huge sheet of paper was probably hiding them, she disappeared underneath it and re-emerged a few seconds later with her glasses on her face and a coffee in her hand.

            “Mummy?” said Harry again, still staring out of the tiny window. He appeared to have stopped mid-flow, his finger touching the thick glass had long finished writing the word ‘Poo’ which was fading quickly as the mist dissipated. “Mummy?”

            Mummy swallowed her mouthful of coffee and grimaced. It wasn’t the mug she’d thought it was, and had obviously been there since this morning. Shivering as the frigid beverage hit her stomach she turned to look at the dial of the boat’s compass, the special shellsuit coated Anneka Rice Edition™, and tapped it. It didn’t move. Harry said “Mummy?” again.

            “Hold on one more minute Darling” Mummy said, “This is a complex operation and Mummy’s liable to get confused”. As if to demonstrate her point she took a sip from the cold coffee again and spat it back in. “If we’re successful in this mission,” she went on, wiping her mouth on the corner of the map “we’ll be heading back to the mainland, not just with proof of the existence of the loch Ness Monster, but with the actual monster itself, thanks to our patented NessieNet™”. She glanced over her shoulder at a large red button on the wall, bordered with black and yellow tape, that had the word ‘CATCH’ written on it in large white letters. “What do you think about that?”

            She looked up at Harry, who was still frozen in position, finger against the glass of the porthole, staring out into the silty water.

            “Sweetheart?” she asked, her forehead wrinkling up in confusion “Darling, what are you looking at?”

            Without turning round, without, in fact, moving at all, Harry simply said, “Monster”.

            The speed at which Mummy appeared next to Harry was so great, that she was staring out of the small window at the huge, grey/green Plesiosaur-like creature that hung majestically in the water a few feet from the side of the boat, before the map, which she had simply run through, had finished ripping itself in two. Mummy didn’t notice this amazing phenomena, and a hitherto unknown contravention to the laws of physics went completely appreciated.

            “Oh. My. God.” exclaimed Mummy, which was a feat in itself as she hadn’t yet closed her mouth, such was the extent of her amazement. “Harry, that’s, that’s, that’s…” She pulled herself together and, tearing her eyes away from the Jurassic scene in the water beyond the glass of the porthole, ran across the calmly swaying room, and jammed down the large, red catch button.

            There was a huge ‘swooshing’ sound, followed by a beep to say that the manoeuvre had been completed. Mummy returned quickly to the window. The scene beyond it was empty save for the remnants of a recent disturbance to the floating particles.

            “Come on Harry!” she cried, scooping the toddler up and running out of the room and up the steep steps, “We may have just made history!”.

            Fighting against the sway of the boat, that had increased due to the release of the net, Mummy struggle to stay up right and lurched the length of the boat, with Harry, who was grinning like a loon and who thought this was all good fun, grasped tightly in her arms. They burst through a door into the huge marine biology lab which, as it was still a room for doing science in, inexplicably had a vast array of intertwining glass vials and tubes running along every available wall.

            Mummy stopped dead, her Manta Ray Manolo Deck shoes gripping the slippery surface perfectly, despite it being inside, therefore not technically the deck. In front of her, dangling like a huge, dripping wet, slightly oily and flippered Christmas decoration with a long neck and huge teeth was the Loch Ness Monster, struggling to free itself against the tight bonds of the NessieNet™.

            “Look Harry” said Mummy in hushed awe, as she placed the boy gently on the metal floor, “We’ve made history. We’ve found evidence of the existence of 21^st century dinosaurs”.

            Harry jumped and down excitedly, clapping his hands. “Yay!” he shouted, “Where?”

            “There” said Mummy, pointing at Nessie.

            Harry stopped clapping. He also stopped jumping and yaying and turned to face Mummy.

            “Mummy” he said firmly, “That’s not a dinosaur”. He crossed his arms and flumped himself onto the floor, grumpily. “Dinosaurs are purple”.

 

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“Mummy?” asked Harry quizzically, as he stared at the pointed end of the huge, deathray-esque contraption, that hung from the ceiling of the brightly lit laboratory and appeared to be aimed at a small wire cage containing nothing but a single white mouse, “What you doing?”. Mummy, who was sat in front of a huge array of databanks, was twiddling dials and flipping switches and reading the printout that spewed sporadically from the printer at her side with increasing interest. She glanced at the continuous sheet of punched paper one last time, smiled to her, and spun her Wheely-Efficient™ office chair around so that she was facing Harry.

 

“I’m about to undertake one of the most significant experiments in scientific history” She said with a smile, as she strode quickly across the lab and gently coaxed Harry away from the, now gently glowing, and quietly humming machine, “And you’re going to be the first witness to one of, if THE, greatest breakthroughs since records began”.

 

“What records?” asked Harry, rather grumpily as he was not happy about having been moved away from the machine; he’d been planning on poking it with a fork he’d found in the kitchen, just to see what happened, and was now at a loss for anything remotely mischievous to do. He fiddled with the fork in his pocket and looked around the tiled room for something he could prod with it. His eyes fell on the cage with the mouse in it.

 

“Don’t worry about it” said mummy, who had returned to her chair and was reading the printout again, “Just watch”. She clicked a few more switches, glanced down at the computer paper a final time, then pressed a large green button and pulled long lever that looked particularly out of place alongside the other, slightly more hi-tech gadgetry.

 

The deathray machine’s hum grew louder and became a low whine, and it’s glow got brighter and brighter. Mummy checked the printout that had begun ejecting itself from the printer again, and said, “I am about to shrink that mouse and his cage down to the size of a marble. How exciting’s that?”

 

“This mouse?” asked Harry, tapping the cage with his liberated fork, his Dr Cheeky Mischief Grade sandals™ with specially designed thick soles for getting into proper trouble, easily making him tall enough to reach the mouse’s wire prison on top of its pedestal.

 

“Yep” said Mummy, “That mou….” She snapped her head round and her eyes grew so wide that her eyelashes actually touched her forehead. She whipped her chair around so quickly that she did two full spins before she was able to dismount and was actually quite dizzy as she leapt towards Harry.

 

“Harry! Move sweetheart!!” she yelled as she flung herself through the air. There was a blinding green flash and a space-age ‘twonging’ sound, and Mummy landed just short of Harry, at his feet.

 

“Ooh!” said Harry in awe, as the shrink ray, it’s function complete, returned to its non-glowing, non-humming state, “Pretty”.

 

Mummy leapt to her feet and looked around her, hoping that what she instinctively knew had happened, hadn’t actually happened.

 

It had.

 

The two of them and a small mouse cage were perched high on a pedestal, the surface of which, at first, second and third glances, appeared to Mummy to now be the size of an average ballroom dance floor and that was situated in a stark white laboratory that was now, as far as they were concerned, about the size of Liverpool.

 

“Bugger” said Mummy, biting her lip.

 

“Don’t say that word” chided Harry, looking cross.

 

“Sorry Harry” said Mummy, looking across the now immense room at the chair she had vacated so recently that is was still gently spinning, but now looked as though it would support the weight of a large block of flats, complete with car park and garage block, “But I’m trying to work out how I’m going to get us down from this pedestal, across the room and up to the equipment over there.” she sighed, “Then all I have to do, is figure out how I’m going to push that lever back up, which would probably take about 300 of me, the size I am now, and make the return journey before the machine kicks itself into life.” She crossed her arms, chewed her bottom lip and allowed her eyebrows to slam slowly into each other in concentration. “Any ideas Harry”.

 

Harry was standing bolt upright and looking particularly shifty, a now open and empty mouse cage was at his feet and a fork was jammed between the bars of the cage’s door. He looked up at his mum, raised his eyebrows, pulled the most innocent face he could and said “The mouse fell down.”

 

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            “Mummy?” asked Harry, peering at a length of cable that snaked it’s way across the floor and disappeared into the back of a large, heavy piece of electrical equipment, “Mummy? What we doin’?”

            Mummy, who was sat at a desk situated creepily between 2 hospital stretchers upon which lay 2 motionless bodies, looked up from the computer terminal she had been studying intently, “We are trying,” she began, tapping a few keys on the computer’s keyboard, seemingly at random, “to see if we can download a person’s brain onto a computer, before uploading it into a completely different person. Look,” she continued, quickly, pointing at the end of one of the cots to draw Harry’s attention away from the electrical outlet upon which he was about to launch a physical investigation using a pair of forceps, “See this funny hat here?”. From a hook at the end of the bed she had indicated she lifted a tangle of leather straps and coloured cables and, after a short fight in which she managed to break a nail but held back the swearing, she finally held it upon her upturned hand to demonstrate that it would actually fit a person’s head, “This,” she said “is the Brain Swapifier Headgear Thing. We place it on Patient A’s head, and press a couple of buttons, and the content of his brain will be wooshed into this computer here. Then we put the headgear onto Patient C (because Patient B chickened out at the last minute) and press some more buttons and Patient A’s brain content will be wooshed from the computer into Patient C’s brain.”

            “Oh, I see” said Harry, pushing his Joe-90 brand Makemelookintelli-Specs™ further up his nose. He looked back at the plug socket, then at the forceps, seemed to decide against a full-frontal assault on the curiously sparking little square holes, and instead turned his attention to using the pincer-like tool to remove pens from the top pocket of his Mothercare Tiny Science™ labcoat.

            Mummy looked back at the computer, pressed her American TV brand Makemelookanerd™ specs further onto her face, and smiled. “Well Harry”, she said, gathering up a bunch of free-hanging cables, “It’s experiment time”.

            She began plugging all the loose cables into various sockets on the back of the computer and into an assortment of the bleeping, flashing, buzzing consoles that lined the walls of the lab. When done, she slipped the leather-strapped headgear onto the head of one of the bodies on the beds and placed her hand on the computer mouse in readiness. “Here goes” she said, and clicked the mouse button.

            There was an almighty clamouring of sparks and alarms, the lights began to flicker and pointless Van der Graf generators situated around the room began allowing blue ribbons of electricity to climb swiftly up their antenna before ceasing their existence at the top with a very scientific clickypop sound.

            So great was the commotion that Harry, who was looking intently at his left hand as he coloured it in with a marker pen, actually looked up to see what was going on, wasn't particularly interested in what he saw, and returned to covering the skin on his hand with black ink.

            The din reached a crescendo and with one final burst of electrical interference, everything stopped and the lights went out.

            “Ooh” said Harry, “Dark”.

            A groaning sound emanated from the centre of the room that appeared to be using male vocal cords.

            With a fuzzy-buzz and a click, the dim emergency lighting sprang into dim life and Mummy was stood in front of the computer looking incredibly confused.

            “Oh bugger” said one of the men, sitting up and swiping the headgear from his head, “There appears to have been a cock up.”

            Harry stopped drawing a moustache on himself and watched as the man swung his legs over the edge of the bed, looked oddly at Mummy, then padded over to Harry and crouched down to his level.

            “Harry” said the man “It’s mummy.”

            Harry looked at the man, then put his hand up to the man’s face.

            “It would seem” the man began “That I connected 2 of the cables to the wrongs outlets meaning the feedback from the initial power surge, repolarised the inertial dampometers and defragged the Menudo valves so that Patient A’s brain was swapped with mine instead of being downloaded onto the MSSwappy program on the computer.”

            The man turned to look at mummy who was still looking confused and was feeling the top of her head and working his way down the sides of her skull.

            “So? What do you think Harry?” asked the man, “Mummy is going to be stuck like this for a while until she can get another Spackler Protuberance delivered. I know it’s going to be difficult, but we’ll struggle through, OK?”.

            Harry looked into the man’s eyes and said, “Mummy, you need to shave.”

 

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            “Mummy?” asked Harry, shivering against the frigid wind that swirled around the snow on the roof top on which he and mummy sat, hidden from view behind a chimney stack, his Sno-Biznez™ padded tartan all-in-one jumpsuit not offering much resistance to the chilly breeze, “What we doing?”.

            Mummy clicked a button the laptop that she held in front of her and, after a short whirring sound, several sensors pushed their way through the freshly fallen snow. As each sensor began emitting a thin red beam, mummy said, “We are trying, Harry, to captured the last remaining example of Mythicus Populii, more commonly known as Santa Claus”.

            Harry, who at that moment was trying to pick his nose with an icicle and discovering to his distaste that icicles were bloody cold, said “Oh, I see. Why?”.

            “Because” began mummy, “This particular Santa Claus is the only one left in the wild and if we don’t capture him and place him in captivity, then the whole species will die out, and their will be no more Christmas. Ever.”

            This last sentence seemed to strike a chord with Harry as his little eyes widened in terror “No more Christmas!!! Catch him mummy! Catch him, catch him, catch him!!”.

            “Careful sweetie!” cried mummy, a little too late, as the excited toddler batted the laptop out of her hands with a flailing mitten-clad hand. The expensive piece of equipment landed heavily a little further down the roof, before sliding gracefully off and ceasing to be expensive a few seconds later as it landed, not quite so gracefully, on the freezing concrete below. A sad clattering sound, not unlike recently liberated computer components landing on frozen cement, was the last sound mummy heard.

            As if duty bound to follow their fallen comrade, each of the sensors that scattered the roof gave a small popping sound, just before their lasers stopped working and they each began emitting a small column of black smoke.

            “Bugger.” said mummy, “That laptop only had 1 day left until retirement.”

            Harry looked sheepish and decided to look busy by stuffing his pockets with snow.

            “OK,” went on mummy, “Plan B. Harry, pass me that holdall.”

            A few moments later a large circle of rope was sitting quietly in the snow on the roof that had been previously occupied by the sensors, a small glass of sherry and a mince pie innocently sitting at its centre whiling away the time by doing whatever it is that sherry and mince pies do.

            Mummy was scanning the dark horizon with her Do-these-make-my-bum-look-bignoculars™, a Ninja Quality ‘Shinobi’ Glove covered finger carefully fine tuning the focus.

            Suddenly she saw something and ducked behind the chimney stack.

            “Quick, Harry!” she hissed, “he’s coming!”

            Harry stopped eating the snow, and looked around just in time to see a huge sledge with massive wooden runners, being pulled by 47 reindeer, skid to a halt on the roof the other side of the chimney stack behind which he and mummy were hidden. He stared, open-mouthed, as a large fat man, clothed in a red tunic, with white woolly piping, and similar red trousers slide from the sledge and began fussing with a huge sack in the back seat.

            It was a full 30seconds before he spotted the sherry and mince pie and he actually did a comedic double take, complete with sound effect.

            Eyeing the tasty snack warily, the large man, circled around it twice before quickly stepping into the rope circle and snatching for the pie.

            “Now!” hissed mummy.

            With the reflexes of a soon to be frozen toddler, Harry pulled on the end of the rope and the slip knot that mummy had tied quickly unravelled itself, and the aerial that had been straining to right itself ever since mummy pulled it almost double and looped the rope around it, twanged itself straight again, the consequence of which was that the red suited fat man was pulled off his feet and hauled into the air with such speed that it pulled him out of his boots.

            “YES!!” shouted mummy, punching the air in triumph, “We gottim!!”

            Harry and mummy began a celebratory dance as the fat man hung upside down by his foot, and did not look amused.

            Harry, who by now had realised that the pie was something that could be eaten, waddled over to the hanging fat man, and looked him in the eye.

            “Well, Harry” said mummy, “That’s 2 Santa’s, 1 Gaia, a Loki and 48 Easter Bunnies, we have now. All we need now is a David Copperfield and we have the set.”

            Harry looked at her, “Poo!” he said “He smells like pub!”

 

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“Mummy, where we going?” asked Harry as his feet swung slowly over his head tipping him gently upside down.

“We’re going,” said Mummy “to the moon”. She pressed a couple of buttons and flipped a few switches with the rounded end of her NASA Girly-Girl™, hot pink space gloves, and the capsule inside which they were encapsulated lurched slightly as the computer stated, in that matter-of-fact manner that computers have “25 seconds to lunar touch down. Gravimetric stabilisers stabilising.”

            Harry tried to turned around to look out of the window into the depths of space, but the zero gravity within the module wouldn’t let him do any more than hang upside down and squirm, his Little Lunar-tic, all-in-one spacesuit and AstroKids, mist-free helmet making him look like a chubby, white worm on a very large hook.

            “20 seconds to lunar touch down“ droned the computer “Primary landing rockets fired”. A muted roaring sound could be heard and the capsule bucked and rocked as the plunging module was caught mid-descent by the landing rockets and brought under a controlled fall.

            “Are you ready Harry?” asked mummy, pulling on her L’Oreal Hair Protecting helmet with matching Lash-Magnifying visor and twisting it into place with a click, “You and I are about to go where only a handful of people have gone before.”

            Harry wasn’t listening and was still trying to turn himself round with a combination of flailing arm movements and gurning.

            Mummy, being the sensible parent that she was, took hold of him and strapped him into his Rocket Booster seat, a task that Harry took great umbrage with and crossed his arms in a sulk, his face screwed up in as tight a frown as he could muster.

            “Secondary landing rockets fired. 7 seconds to lunar touchdown.” stated the ship’s computer “Please ensure all personnel are strapped into their safety restraints.” Mummy looked over at Harry to check he hadn’t un-clicked himself from his seat and smiled as she watched him tapping his index finger on his visor, his frustration showing on his tiny face, as he tried, desperately, to pick his nose.

            “5 seconds to lunar touchdown” barked the computer again, “4…3…2…1… touchdown”. Nothing appeared to happen. “Recalculating touchdown sequence” continued the metallic voice, “5 seconds to lunar touchdown, 4…”

            The capsule rang like a struck bell as it impacted hard with the lunar surface, jarring everything on board loose, and causing Mummy to curse as her make-up bag fell gently off the shelf of the capsule’s bathroom and crashed slowly to the floor, sending her eyeliner and mascara skittering across the floor.

            “Lunar touchdown complete. Thank you for flying NASA Budget Spaceflight. Please ensure that you have your…” Mummy click the computer off, as she took Harry’s hand and led him to the door of the capsule that led to the top of the landing module’s exit gantry.

            “Ready Harry” she asked, “We’ve landed on the moon”. She pulled hard on a lever and the module’s door swung slowly open, revealing the stark, dusty, grey lunar landscape that stretched away before them.

            Holding hands, the 2 explorers climbed carefully down the gantry and stood in the thick lunar dust looking up at the Earth that hung gently in the air in front of them.

            “What do you think Harry?” Mummy asked in awed tones, “That is where we’ve just come from.”

            “Wow!” said Harry

            “I know” said Mummy, “Isn’t it just magnificent”

            “Yeah,” breathed Harry, “I’ve wee’d in my suit and now my feet are warm”.

 

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“Mummy?” asked Harry one morning, which delighted mummy as he usually started sentences with “OI!” or “Oh Bugger!”. “Mummy?” he asked again “Wassat?”

Mummy followed the pointyness of his finger up to a small crack in the ceiling that was letting in a gentle shimmer of gold light.

 

“I don’t know.” Said Mummy, completely taken aback. If the crack was going to allow anything through, it should have been dust and bits of plaster, she thought to herself, not gold shimmery light.

 

Mummy pulled over a dining chair and stood on it. The only effect this had was simply to make her as tall as a normal person, and didn’t help, particularly with getting her any closer to the gap in the artex.

 

“Wha’ you doin’ Mummy?” asked Harry watching her intently and groping around inside his left nostril with an index finger at the same time.

 

“I’m trying” she said, dragging the dining table across the room, “to get up to the ceiling to see what’s wrong with it.”

 

She climbed onto the tabletop and squinted at the glowing fissure in the otherwise pristine paintwork of the ceiling. The crack glowed at her, in that way that glowing cracks that appear in your ceiling tend to do when provoked.

 

Mummy decided that that was just rude, and poked it. Her finger went through the ceiling plaster, showering her with dusty fragments that made her cough and swipe at her face and widening the gap.

 

Gold light poured through, and as Mummy looked closer (which was no mean feat as she was still only slightly over 6ft tall, even stood on the dining table), she noticed that beyond the crack, the light was actually liquid, creating a gold shimmery puddle in the crawlspace between the ceiling and the floor above it. This, she decided, required more investigation.

 

She lifted the dining chair up onto the surface of the table, and stepped on it. Then, she reached up into the bigger hole, and her arm disappeared into the shiny puddle of liquid light, far further than it should have done if it the floor above was still intact.

 

Mummy pondered. She retracted her arm, climbed down from the chair, and back down onto the floor.

 

“What is it Mummy?” asked Harry again, still spelunking around in his nasal passages.

 

“It would appear” began Mummy, “As if your bedroom upstairs has become a multi-phasic gateway to a different universe that exists purely in a liquid form, as theorised by Wechslers Model of Dimensional Fluid Ergonomics.”

 

“Oh, I see.” Said Harry, finally pulling his finger from his nose. He held it up to Mummy’s face,

 

“Bogey” he said.

 

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“Errm…..no” said Harry, shaking his head, his face wearing a serious and solemn expression.

 

“Please, Harry?” pleaded Mummy, her hands reaching through the leafy, bamboo bars of the cage in which she was locked. The cage itself was suspended by vines from a large Baobab tree a few feet off the ground and Mummy’s reaching was causing it to rock gently to and fro, “Tell you what” she said, “If you give Mummy the key, we’ll get some sweeties when we reach civilisation. How about that?”

 

Harry thought about this as the sounds of whooping and yelling drifted through the air towards them, carried along by rhythmic drumbeats and the clatter of wood on wood. “We get some chocolate?” he asked, his eyebrows knotting together, giving him the look of someone attempting to see a magic eye picture in a bowl of salad.

 

“We can get anything you want” said Mummy, “But first you have to let Mummy have the key.” She reached out through the bars again.

 

“OK” said Harry. He toddled over to the cage, his Adams ‘Foliage Fun Boots™’ stomping creepers and small plants into mulch, and held the wooden key up so that Mummy could reach it.

 

“Thank you darling” said Mummy taking the key from Harry’s tiny hand. She quickly unlocked the cage, and climbed quietly out onto the jungle floor, staying low so that she wouldn’t be seen over the bushes. At home 5’ 4” may have made her a midget, but out here in the middle of the jungle it made her seem like a pituitary giant compared to the stunted growth of the dwarfish Teenidana tribe. Especially as her Clark’s kitten-heeled, ‘Indiana’s Finest™’ gave her an extra couple of inches.

 

“Right” said Mummy, “Let’s get out of here.”

 

Mummy took Harry’s hand and led him quickly across the clearing, towards the jungle, away from the chanting and clattering of the Teenidana.

 

As they reached the edge of the thick foliage Harry said, “MUMMY, WHERE WE GOIN’?” with more volume than Mummy would have liked.

 

“We’re trying to escape.” said Mummy, who was painfully aware that the chanting and whooping had become angered shouting. Their getaway was obviously now common knowledge.

 

“Come on Harry” said Mummy, scooping Harry off the floor, “We have to be quick”. But they hadn’t gone 5 paces before there was a whooshing sound and leaves and grass were hurled into the air as a huge net, that had been hidden beneath the greenery, launched itself skyward, enveloping Harry and Mummy and carrying them into the treetops.

 

The Teenidana tribe stood beneath the net and shook their spears, shouting something in their native tongue. Harry pondered.

 

“Mummy?” he asked, “What they saying?”

 

Mummy, unable to hide the dejected tone of her voice, said “They are saying that we heathen scum for desecrating their sacred ground and that we must be sacrificed to appease their God, Minip-Arker, by being pelted with jelly-babies, then covered in honey and placed on a rock in Minip-Arker’s cave of eternal torment, whereby we’ll be eaten.”

 

“Oh,” said Harry, ”I farted.”

 

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“Mummy, I told” said Harry, shivering against the frigid wind that whipped across the deck of the naval ice-breaker, HMS Chilly-Willy, despite the many layers of military issue thermal underwear and the 3” thick, Eskimo tested, Huggies™ ‘Arctic-Play™’ parka that enveloped and padded out his small frame, giving him the look of a small, fur-trimmed hand grenade in Crimson Postman Pat wellies and a cerulean bobble-hat, “Pick me up please.” He lifted his arms as best he could to indicate that he wanted to be carried.

 

Mummy, bent down and scooped him from the steel deck of the huge ship just as it pitched violently, threatening to throw her off balance. She caught a handrail to steady herself, and could feel the freezing temperature of the metal through her Alaskan, Husky-skin gloves.

 

There was no other word for it; it was cold. But then, winter in the Antarctic wasn’t renowned for it’s heatwaves.

 

“Mummy,” began Harry, “What we doin’?”

 

The smashing and cracking of thick ice, and screaming of tortured steel almost drowned out his words, as the naval behemoth carved itself a route through the featureless, frozen landscape, as though the 10’ deep ice was merely a minor inconvenience to its progress.

 

Mummy stabilised herself with her free hand, and adjusted her footing to keep from sliding away across the treacherous decking, her designer, black leather, open-toed, ‘Someone-dropped-a-house-on-my-sister’, ‘Tundra-Stompers™’, proving to be more than adequate for gripping the slippery surface.

 

She squeezed Harry tightly.

 

“We’ve come out here to mount a rescue.” She said, her voice barely audible over the noise. “A team of explorers came out here to see if they could find a hidden WWII army base, that purported to have perfected the art of Alchemy. Their last message was brief and just said ‘We’re not coming back’. That was the last anyone ever heard from them.”

 

She looked at Harry, who was discovering, to his chagrin, that his Adams™ Thermal ‘Mighty Mittens™’ weren’t designed with nose picking in mind, and continued:

 

“The explorers say that they’ve found the army base, but have been unable to leave it as their backpacks are now too heavy to lift, and their sleds too heavy to pull due to the amount of gold that they feel it necessary to bring with them. That’s why we’ve come to get them.”

 

Mummy glanced at Harry again, as the ice-breaker slammed into another sheet of frozen sea, sending pulverised ice skittering across the grey surface of the ship. Harry was pulling an odd face. He was staring straight ahead and his cheeks, already red from the bitter wind, were turning crimson.

 

“BASE HO!” shouted the lookout-type-person, as he spotted the army base they had come to find.

 

“Ready Harry?” asked Mummy, “You’re about to enter somewhere, that has only had 3 other people set foot in it in over 60yrs. Somewhere that witnessed a scientific breakthrough that eluded the greatest minds in science for centuries.”

 

Harry let out a long sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath.

 

“Oh.” he said. He sniffed. “Poo, I stink. Change my bum, please.”

 

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