At last, an explanation

The weekend

At the Creationists’ Bar in the Toppled Bollard (our town’s most famous and infamous public house – the place from which we were barred during the previous regime) Janice told us that she had been to Spec Savers in the town. They were, it seems, doing a special offer in which one could be measured up for and prescribed glasses and get the frames for free.

Janice, who I should explain, has a white skin, and is what is usually called Caucasian, and who once told me that her ancestry was Irish, had them do all the measurements and was then told by the lady doing the measuring that the positioning of her ears, the distance between her eyes and the breadth of her nose were all more in keeping with an Afro-Caribbean face than a white Anglo-Irish face.

It was obviously quite a surprise to her to think that she had a link with an Afro-Caribbean person, or perhaps even family and by the time she told us she already had all the holiday brochures for a trip to the West Indies. On hearing this, Binky said that she had been told by her mother that she was of Japanese extraction although again there is no trace of it in her looks.

We all turned to Havoc Blythe, expecting him with his ultra smart clothes and refusal ever to dress in any way other than in a three piece suit with restrained conservative tie, to confess to some sort of link with royalty, or at least the land-owning aristocracy. He surprised us by announcing that his great-grand-father was in fact an inspector of sewers in Tottenham.

I have never looked into my family history. It is clearly something to be considered.

Naturally we then debated the issue of the takeover of the school, the Parasite Corporation, and what on earth had been going on. HB at last gave us an update on current thinking.

“Forget terrorism being about Al Qaida. Forget spies being about James Bond and Jason Bourne. Al Qaida exists, and there are undoubtedly spies like Bond and Bourne, but that’s not what it is really about on a day to day basis.

“Take overs of our country, our society, our town… anything like that… these things are going on all the time, and there are a million organisations trying to find a new route in, a new breakthrough. The Norman Tradition is one fringe bunch, and they are one among many.

“The Parasite Corporation is a company that experiments with parasites and the way they affect other organisms, and there is nothing wrong or illegal with what they do. The problem is that organisations such as the Norman Tradition, have taken their research a step further, and used the Corporation’s technique of moving the parasites around species. In short, they have experimented with getting toxoplasmosis into humans. They do it through food, and through having people touch canvas and paper that is impregnated with the parasite.”

“Quite a breakthrough, and brilliant science,” said Bodger.

“And with results that are easy to grasp,” continued HB. “Think of the parents who turned up on Friday demanding that their children have places in the school. Risk taking in the extreme – driving in the playground among the pupils, leaving the car unlocked in a school environment – these are not the actions of a rational sane person, but the actions of a wild risk-taker.”

“But why bother?” asked Binky.

“Because,” said Havoc Blythe, “what this results in is a group of people who will take wild risks – who need to take wild risks. If they are not putting themselves in danger they just stop functioning – that is how the parasite drives them. Imagine having hundreds of such people under your control. You want a bank raid done – who better to do it? They might get caught, they might kill themselves, but they might just get away with it and be able to hand some money over to the organisers. You want to drive a competitor retailer out of town, you want to close down a business, you want to destroy a rival political party… An organisation that offers a service to do any of those things will never have a shortage of clients. Think of someone who wanted to disrupt the entire banking system – they would need to have in place hundreds of mortgage brokers and bankers who would take insane risks.”

“Exactly as has been going on,” said Janice. “And the organisers are the Norman Tradition.”

And at last we understood. The school was simply a way of getting a group of people to have the parasite – and once they had the parasite, the Norman Tradition could lease them out to anyone who wanted wild crazy things done.

“But the Norman Tradition needed a group who they could easily follow and stay with,” said HB. “Put the parasite in the food dished out by a restaurant or a supermarket, and you have no idea who has it – you can’t recruit these people. But in a school, there is a register of every child, and every parent. You know who you can call on, to take risks.”

“So having planted the parasites, they left the school, because their job was done,” I said.

“Not realising that the five of us were already onto them,” replied HB. “We are heroes.”

“Do we get a reward?” asked Binky.

“Most certainly,” said HB, but he wouldn’t tell us what.

This entry was posted on 24/11/2008 at 06:58 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print