And now the time was right. Mr Doveston was behind the desk of power. The nation could be told. The nation would respond. Great days lay ahead. There would be dancing in the street (quite careful dancing, given the height and complexity of some of the footwear), heavy petting in the back seats of Morris Minors and jumping for joy (again with care) the length and breadth of the country.
There would be the singing of songs too. New songs with catchy tunes and easily rememberable lyrics. Lyrics written in the new tongue of Runese. The Universal Tongue of Peace. And a few minor changes besides, such as allocating every first Monday in the month as a bank holiday and renaming the months of the year. Hence the month of Rune.
It would all be joy and joy and happy joy.
Happy happy joy.
And it was. It truly was.
Well, at least it was for a while.
1
'Dost them remember the Tamagotchi?' Big Bob Charker looked up from his breakfasting bowl. The bowl was moulded in durable pink plastic and rested upon a metric yard of pink gingham tablecloth woven from a man-made fibre. This joyful item was spread across a dining table topped with a Teflon veneer. The Teflon veneer was of pink. The curtains were rather pink too.
'The Tamagotchi toy, do you mean?' Big Bob's wife was named Minky, after the popular wash and wipe.
'The same,' said Big Bob. 'Well it sayeth here…'
'There in your bowl?' asked his wife. 'Your bowl of pink breakfasting?'
Big Bob sighed his first sigh of the day. 'Not in my bowl, woman,' he declared. 'My empty bowl, which thou hast neglected to fill upon this joyous bank holiday Monday. It sayeth here, in my morning newspaper, which I have concealed upon my knee, lest its whiteness clash with the pinky shades of our dining area-'
'Pink is the colour of joy,' said his wife, smoothing down her polynylonsynthafabric housecoat with the plastivinylsuedosilkette gay and quilted lapels. 'Pink is where the heart is.'
'Home is where the heart is,' Big Bob corrected his erring spouse.
'Our home is pink,' his errless spouse replied.
'Yes, well, quite so, but it sayeth here, in my newspaper, which is not pink-'
'The Financial Times is pink.'
Big Bob sighed his second sigh. Three were his maximum for any given twenty-four-hour cycle, even a joy-filled bank holiday one. 'Please be silent, woman,' said he. 'Lest I fell thee with the pink-hued reproduction warming pan that your sister J (named after the other wash and wipe) gave you for your birthday and which hangs above our pink-hued faux-marble fireplace.'
Big Bob's wife lapsed into a sullen silence.
'There, that's better already.' Big Bob shook cornflakes into his bowl. The cornflakes were pink; his wife had connections at the factory. Big Bob topped up the bowl with strawberry milkshake.
'It sayeth here in my newspaper, that a fellow in Orton Goldhay has one still on the go.'
Big Bob's wife viewed Big Bob through her pink contact lenses, but said nothing. Big Bob almost sighed once more. 'Do you remember the Tamagotchi?' he asked. Politely.
Minky smiled, exposing teeth the colour you get from mixing red with white. 'I do remember the Tamagotchi,' she said. 'From when I was a girl in the 1990s. It was called "The Pocket Pet", there was a tiny screen and tiny buttons and you had to look after it by feeding it and cleaning up its poo, which you did by pressing the appropriate buttons at the appropriate times, which were mostly times inappropriate to be pressing. And it grew up and changed shape on the tiny screen. But eventually, after about thirty-three days, this figure possibly symbolizing the years in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, it died and would be reborn again. It was very popular for about six months, then it went the way of the Rubik's cube and the hula hoop and the Pog. Not to mention the Scooby Doo.'
'The Scooby Doo?' her husband asked.
'I told you not to mention that.'
Big Bob withheld his final sigh. 'Well it sayeth here, in my newspaper which is not pink, that a fellow in Orton Goldhay has managed to keep his Tamagotchi alive for twenty-five years and that it has evolved into a sentient life form, possessing rudimentary intelligence, capable of performing simple tricks and communicating with its owner through the medium of mime.'
'Does it sing?' asked his wife.
'It says nothing here about singing. Why speakest thou of singing?'
'Well.' His wife teased at her tinted ringlets. They were tinted to a colour harmonious to their present setting. 'If it sang, that would be truly folderiddledee.’
‘Folderiddledee? What twaddle talk is this?’
‘Runese,' said Minky. 'I am taking a night-school course on the World Wide Web.'
'What?' went her husband. 'What? What? What?
'Folderiddledee means "the ecstatic realization that even little things can be as wonderful as big things and that everything is wonderful really, so why don't we all just smile and have a nice time instead of hitting each other with blunt instruments, or even worse with pointy ones?"'
Big Bob spoke through gritted teeth. 'Woman,' he said. 'Speak unto me. Tell me where do we live?'
'We live at number twenty-two Moby Dick Terrace, Brentford, where all is folderiddledee,' his wife answered, correctly.
'Brentford,' said Big Bob. 'Brentford being the operative word. When the out-boroughs [3] stood shoulder to shoulder, heel to toe, nose to tail, three sheets to the wind and a law unto themselves and withheld their votes at the last general election, what did we do?'
'We withheld ours,' said Minky, straightening nonexistent creases in her plastivinylsuedosilkette gay and quilted lapels.
'We did indeed. But not for the same reasons. Brentonians have always withheld their vote. Because the borough of Brentford holds a self-governing charter dating back to the fourteenth century, when Hector the Hairless, Baron of Brentford, performed certain deeds for the Monarch and was granted such from then till kingdom come.'
'I knew that,' said Minky. 'Everyone knows that.'
'And as such,' her husband continued, 'we of Brentford have no truck with the whims and fancies of the world beyond. Dost thou see me sporting foolish footwear? Do I jabber in this Universal Tongue? Don't answer! I do not!'
'You've spilt your cornflakes down your tie,' his wife observed. 'They'll soak right in.'
'Woman,' said Big Bob. 'I will have no damned Runese spoken within the pinkly papered walls of this fair house of ours. If thou must persist in such folly, kindly restrict thy usage of this linguistic tomfoolery to places more befitting. To wit-'