Sunday, December the 5th, 2004

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Hengist Pod Asks a Question

Now here is a question worth asking. Did there once exist, aeons ago, on a distant, icy planet, a race of beings not unlike emperor penguins in appearance, if not size, for let us say that these beings were minuscule, that a hundred of them gathered together would be no bigger than a gnat, and that these beings were unfathomably stupid, that their behaviour patterns were inane and pointless, but that they somehow managed to construct an intergalactic spacecraft built from pack ice, and used it to ferry themselves to other planets and other galaxies for no purpose other than what we might call sight-seeing, and that over millions of years they visited thousands of planets without ever once alighting on earth, for the pale blue dot of our planet, to use Carl Sagan's phrase, was visually horrifying to these beings, whose eight eyes could not tolerate the colour blue, in any of its tints and shades, or green, for that matter, given that their own planet bathed in a totally alien colour spectrum unimaginable to the human brain, unimaginable even to someone like self-styled brain guru and MindMap™ maker Tony Buzan, and that one of these beings, wearing a sort of rocket booster backpack, jetted out of the spacecraft when it was near earth, and this tiny emperor penguin-like being collided with an asteroid and was pulled into earth's magnetic field, if that is possible, and it came in to land on the towpath of the canal just outside my door, last Wednesday, when I was on my way to buy a rake and a hoe for my allotment, having counted my potatoes as I liked to do every morning, wearing a plastic Viking helmet with only one horn, the other horn having broken off when I was clambering down the hillside without pausing for breath on that day I was pursued by an ill-tempered giant badger whose sett I had accidentally demolished? Answer me that, and I will give you sixpence.