wouldn’t mind that so much, but when I complained to the Chief Hygiene Operative he just flew away.
Things aren’t the same in the canteen any more, either. Well, they’re not going to produce 1,300 lunches of mixed corn and just one of caviar-and-chips, are they? No, it’s either sandwiches or up there on the feeding perch with all the rest of them and no moaning or we’ll peck your fingers.
I will pass over the failing fortunes of the works darts team, the humiliating defeat in the billiards league, the unpleasant encounter with the KGB All-Stars on the football field, and the nasty mess at the international chess championships – and I told the fraternal Chinese delegate not to take his hat off, but of course no one listened.
I appreciate what it said in
Pravda
about not being capitalist about our fellow creatures, and all that about joining together in the greater unity of all warm-blooded creatures as per true Marxist thinking, also where it said that every pigeon in a factory means another man free to build submarines, but what it boils down to is that I’m only employed here because none of my new fellow comrade workers is big enough to push a broom.
I would also like to make a protest that the parrot they’ve got operating the switchboard won’t let me make personal calls, and as for the flamingo on the tea trolley, well, how would
you
like your tea stirred?
I hope this message reaches you, on account of me attaching it to the leg of one of my fellow comrade workers who’s going to see his relatives, he says they’ve got a little nest just outside your office window.
Thanking you in anticipation, I remain,
Yours fraternally,
TERRY TERRYANOVICH PRATCHETT
PS: Sorry this letter is a bit nibbled at the top, only the works manager has been out for a fly-around and you know what these budgies are like – little scamps.
1 Author’s note: Should have said comrade, shouldn’t I?
AND MIND THE MONOLITHS
B ATH AND W EST E VENING C HRONICLE
, 1 A PRIL 1978
Around the time this was written an Iron Age village was being reconstructed somewhere near Farnham in Dorset; I had contacts in the area, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived. People had been brought in to this new prehistoric settlement and were filmed going through the working day of Iron Age man, but rumours began that locals nearby were going in during the hours of darkness to flog fags and (if I remember correctly) soft lavatory paper to the ancient and rather desperate inmates. In no way can I vouch for the truth of this, but there seemed to be a vogue for this sort of thing and so, for a jobbing journalist, looking outwards through the pigeons, that was enough of a spark to start a fire. Wind yourself up to a sort of English music hall humour and away, boys and girls, you go
.
You can’t miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you’re not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV’s Beaker Folk village, and we’re next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.
It’s not a bad life, all things considered. There’s only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television’s Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week: he said he didn’t mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day’s flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn’t have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sodding sod hut hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.
I can’t say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith
Things aren’t the same in the canteen any more, either. Well, they’re not going to produce 1,300 lunches of mixed corn and just one of caviar-and-chips, are they? No, it’s either sandwiches or up there on the feeding perch with all the rest of them and no moaning or we’ll peck your fingers.
I will pass over the failing fortunes of the works darts team, the humiliating defeat in the billiards league, the unpleasant encounter with the KGB All-Stars on the football field, and the nasty mess at the international chess championships – and I told the fraternal Chinese delegate not to take his hat off, but of course no one listened.
I appreciate what it said in
Pravda
about not being capitalist about our fellow creatures, and all that about joining together in the greater unity of all warm-blooded creatures as per true Marxist thinking, also where it said that every pigeon in a factory means another man free to build submarines, but what it boils down to is that I’m only employed here because none of my new fellow comrade workers is big enough to push a broom.
I would also like to make a protest that the parrot they’ve got operating the switchboard won’t let me make personal calls, and as for the flamingo on the tea trolley, well, how would
you
like your tea stirred?
I hope this message reaches you, on account of me attaching it to the leg of one of my fellow comrade workers who’s going to see his relatives, he says they’ve got a little nest just outside your office window.
Thanking you in anticipation, I remain,
Yours fraternally,
TERRY TERRYANOVICH PRATCHETT
PS: Sorry this letter is a bit nibbled at the top, only the works manager has been out for a fly-around and you know what these budgies are like – little scamps.
1 Author’s note: Should have said comrade, shouldn’t I?
AND MIND THE MONOLITHS
B ATH AND W EST E VENING C HRONICLE
, 1 A PRIL 1978
Around the time this was written an Iron Age village was being reconstructed somewhere near Farnham in Dorset; I had contacts in the area, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived. People had been brought in to this new prehistoric settlement and were filmed going through the working day of Iron Age man, but rumours began that locals nearby were going in during the hours of darkness to flog fags and (if I remember correctly) soft lavatory paper to the ancient and rather desperate inmates. In no way can I vouch for the truth of this, but there seemed to be a vogue for this sort of thing and so, for a jobbing journalist, looking outwards through the pigeons, that was enough of a spark to start a fire. Wind yourself up to a sort of English music hall humour and away, boys and girls, you go
.
You can’t miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you’re not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV’s Beaker Folk village, and we’re next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.
It’s not a bad life, all things considered. There’s only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television’s Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week: he said he didn’t mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day’s flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn’t have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sodding sod hut hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.
I can’t say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith
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