Miles has been plotting the downfall of western civilization for well over 30 years now. Armed only with a Phillips-head screwdriver and a copy of Pravda from 1943, he is finding it all a bit slow going and the hours a tad unforgiving. Still, he feels that much progress has been made in recent years particularly with the invention of reality TV: surely there’s no way back for capitalism now?
Born into a tribe of penguins in the heart of the Ural Mountains in 1922, Miles quickly became disillusioned with a life of hunting for fish amongst the frozen pools of the Russian hills. Instead, he found a small cave beneath a rocky outcrop and settled down for a long hibernation. Unbeknownst to this small, ornithological mutant the winter of 1927 was a particularly virulent one, locking both the cave and its inhabitant into a prison of ice and snow and, in effect, freezing them into a state of suspended animation.
Around this time came the last of the great continental shifts when massive sliding glaciers caused a small section of Asia to splinter off from its moorings and drift off into the Barents Sea. From there it was buffered and shunted like a pinball between Greenland and Norway until finally coming to rest in the North Sea, slotting seamlessly and unobtrusively into the north east of the land mass called Albion.
Years of accusal, denial and outright disinterest between the Soviet government and Scarborough town council led to a counter cultural movement in the late sixties that was to reshape not just the social fabric but also the nascent weave of the three-quarter length pantaloon during the latter third of the 20th Century. Marauding gangs of vaudevillian performers calling themselves ‘The Family’ roamed the northern hills of Albion searching for weak-willed unfortunates to brainwash to their cause. Renaming their territory as the vale of ‘Yorkshire’, ‘The Family’ swept all before them in a violent wave of soft-shoe-shuffles, mother-in-law jokes and never-ending, accordion-accompanied songs about the moors, the state of their tattered clothes and working in the coal pits.
One such wing of ‘The Family’ were exploring the valleys around the township of Leeds when, during a particularly bawdy verse of a song called “The Dash Of The Golden Whippet’, one of the members came across a small fissure in the side of a hillock. Looking inside he was aghast to see a small figure stirring in the leaf litter as if waking from a long slumber. Calling to his compatriot, Obedire, the minstrel they called Pitkin was heard to say: “Now, then, Oberdire. Whilst tha’ tek a look dan’ inta thet there ‘ole and tell ‘ust al’ true what’st ‘tis tha’ sees? Be it a man or a duck?”
To Be Continued
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