Sometimes, in Nigel’s more extreme flights of fancy, Monsieur Legume would be more than merely a shop; he would become a real person acting out the exciting life that Nigel so desperately wanted in preference to his own miserable existence.
Monsieur Legume, who was a detective, would spend his days fulfilling the dreams of his frustrated creator, wandering around the French countryside, enjoying fine French food and wine, and solving the murder cases that were an all too common part of French rural village life.
At each village Legume would endear himself to the locals by solving a murder case that had proved insoluble to the bumbling efforts of the local Gendarmerie. He would follow a trail of cryptic clues then piece them together with an infallible logic and quickly apprehend the murderer who had been ruining life in the village for its ordinary law-abiding citizens.
Afterwards, Legume would bid a tearful farewell to the simple French villagers whose inbred tears of gratitude were ample reward for the work he had done in putting the villains behind bars.
He would think and he would move on to the next village to deal with the next difficult case, for that is what he did; he philosophised, and he solved murder cases.
It often occurred to Nigel, as he ruminated on the subject of Legume, that the French knew very little about their own language.
French people would pronounce the name “Legume” with a hard g, like the g in the word groom, so that “Legume” would sound like “Lay-goom”.
Nigel disagreed with the name being pronounced in that way. To him, it should always be pronounced with a soft g, more like a z, or the s in the word “casual”, so that it would be spoken as “Lay-zyoom”. That sounded far more sophisticated, and was, to his ear, far more French.
Today, in the toilets on the 8th floor of Kirklees Towers, Legume (“Lay-zyoom”) soon put in an appearance. The Great French Detective, whose reputation stretched from Provence all the way to Normandy and beyond, emerged from the recesses of Nigel’s mind and went about his business, trekking over vividly imagined landscapes and solving murders. But today these were not the landscapes of southern France; they were the landscapes of Huddersfield, Nigel’s hometown, to which Legume had temporarily relocated, in order to apply his talents to solving the recent spate of unsolved murders that had taken place there.
An hour later Nigel emerged from his reveries and realised that he had made no progress with his work for the day. He stood up, left the cubicle, and headed back to his desk.
Waiting for him on his desk there was a box of documents that had been compiled by wonks in Whitehall. On the top was a label which read: ‘Regulations and Guidelines for the President’s visit to Huddersfield’.
Nigel was an LGO (Local Government Officer) who worked for Kirklees Council.
His contribution to the welfare of the citizens of Huddersfield consisted of reading through the endless river of policy documents emanating from central government, digesting the contents of each, then turning them into papers of manageable size for consumption by the directors and decision makers of Kirklees Council.
Typically, a government policy document would run to two hundred pages of densely-packed text, while Nigel’s version of the same documents would consist of only one A4 page, double-spaced for easy reading.
Nigel had once been a member of a large department of Policy Officers within Kirklees Council; due to the cut-backs that had been carried out by central government, he was the only one left. He’d been spared the axe for two reasons: firstly, he was the longest-serving member of the department; and secondly, he was capable of getting through more work than anyone else in the history of Policy Officers.
Even though the department had employed over thirty Policy Officers five years previously, and was now down to only one — Nigel — and the river of documents from Whitehall had not slowed one iota, indeed, if anything, had become faster-flowing than ever, Nigel was able singlehandedly to keep on top of the job. This was because he had developed a unique system which made him more efficient than anyone else.
Nigel never read the documents that were given to him to condense into A4 summaries.
He preferred instead to use two processes which he privately referred to as “assimilation” and “osmosis”.
Assimilation meant reading only the top line and bottom line of each page of a policy document and relying on instinct, experience and judgement to interpolate what the document was getting at. It was an approach that had stood Nigel in good stead for his degree (a third in Communication and Cultural Studies from Oxford Polytechnic) back in the seventies.
Osmosis involved looking at each page of a document (or as many pages as he could bear to look at) without actually ever reading any of the text whatsoever. Nigel believed that at an unconscious level, the meaning of the policy documents would be made apparent to him via Osmosis and would emerge clearly in his A4 summaries.
He frowned and opened the box.
Then he took out the documents it contained and placed them in a neat pile to his left.
He perused them one by one, randomly switching between osmosis and assimilation, and in no time at all he’d condensed hundreds of thousands of words of vital information prepared by the wonks into a handful of A4 pages which he sent upstairs to the executive officers of the council for implementation.
CHAPTER 23
M. T. Dross, the Kirklees Director of Tourism, was on the committee charged with organising the V.O.Z day celebrations in Huddersfield.
The committee met for the first time in the Magic Rock, a pub that was far enough removed from the town centre to have emerged intact from the carpet-bombing a few months previously. The first motion that was carried was that they should all have a pint or two of real ale purchased out of civic funds, as they were all in need of refreshment. Duly refreshed, they got down to business.
“I’ve got a great idea,” said Dross. “When the President comes, we ought to show him our town properly, not just the remains of the town centre. We ought to show him the whole thing because our town will get shown on American TV and that’ll bring tourists to us from all over America.”
“And how do you propose doing that? Just how can we show the president our entire town?”
Dross assumed the knowledgeable expression of a leader.
“I know just the way,” he said. “We’ll arrange a trip for him up to the top of Stonker Edge. We’ll take him right to the precipice. From there he’ll see the entire town spread out below him. And while he’s admiring the view, the American news companies are going to be showing images of it all over America. Huddersfield will become famous and tourists will come flocking.”
The committee members all nodded.
“A trip to Stonker Edge, what a great idea M.T. Motion passed!”
M.T.’s idea was the first to go on the long list the committee came up with that day. The list was duly sent to the council’s chief executive for approval. He read through it then he read through the briefing notes he’d received from Nigel Gresley about the precautions to be taken to ensure that the President’s visit went smoothly. It was clear to him, given the guidelines he’d had from the wonks in central government, as condensed by Gresley, that none of the items on the list posed any threat whatsoever, and he approved it in full and sent it back to the V.O.Z. committee for implementation.
CHAPTER 24
When the call came, it took him by surprise. He was lying in bed completely alert, not having slept for the third night running, when his mobile went off next to him. Even though he was exhausted, he reached over to the bedside cabinet, grabbed the mobile, and put it to his ear.