My story goes back fifty-five years, to a small grain of silt lying on the floor of a cold and windswept tidal mudflat near Morecambe Bay in which lay my burgeoning writing talent.
This silt grain had lain there since before the time of Jesus and bided patiently for its time to strike the unsuspecting world of mortals, eagerly watching the ebb and flow of the tides and waiting for the earth to warm enough for the sea levels to rise to cover the mudflat in a happy aquatic community of cockles and muscles and some "alive, alive - o". Needless to say, global warming and CFC's did what even the best pumping machines couldn't and helped the sea to cover the mudflat in its briny embrace.
Henry, a hithertofore unnamed cockle was one of many results of this inevitable submerging, living in a colony of likeminded Socialist Party cockles and enaging in "Activities Beneficial to the Proletariat", which mainly consisted of microfiltering seawater for microscopic food. However, this was all to change when the small grain of silt containing my writing talent was to lodge in his sensitive feeding apparatus; an event so heady and portentous that Henry was knocked into a coma for a day and woke to deliver prophecy to his cockle brethren (a task made both difficult and fustrating by a lack of vocal chords, external signalling apparatus and only a very rudimentary nervous system), eventually garnering their support and beginning preparations for an exodus to the promised land of "Ffhtlhdg", as this is the closest approximation that cockles can make to the city of "Liverpool"
Unfortunately, being cockles, they were harvested the next day and sent to a local resaurant to be eaten, which in the due course of time, they were.
One of the guests dining there, Rajpal Kuratheem, had the mixed blessing of getting the plate of cockles that was being fearlessly lead by a now dead Henry. So reckless was Henry that even in death he exhorted his cockle brethren to rise up and help him combat the oppressor that was Mr. Kuratheem; sadly, the other cockles weren't quite as restless and were hence dead and beyond exhortation as well. Resolving to inflict terrible damage on his oppressor, Henry was swallowed by Rajpal and eventually came to rest in the seething acidic juices of Rajpal's stomach. Such was the end of Henry.
Rajpal was a moderately successful businessman enjoying a romantic dinner with his bride from an arranged marriage and due to fly to Italy for a weekend of ritual purification and meditiation in a commune for the visually impaired Mullahs of Middlesborough. So without further ado, he finished his dinner, croaked out a feeble joke into the stony silence that he shared with his deeply scornful arranged bride and left to get a taxi for the nearest airport.
Hoodwinked into being driven to Heathrow by the cheeky, but loveable, British cabbie, he arrived at the airport early in the morning of the following day. However, things took a turn for the worse for our friend Rajpal, as the effects of Henry's revenge made themselves felt; crosseyed with food poisoning and spouting crazy ideas from his foaming mouth, Mr. Kuratheem was assaulted by airport security and instigated a manic chase through the terminals, culminating in his collision with a speeding baggage cart on the runway. Unconscious, he was loaded with the rest of the luggage into the hold of a long haul flight to Vladivostok, whereupon the plane took off and he was eventually frozen and suffocated in the unpressurised hold of the aircraft, the moisture in his flesh gluing him to a small collection of luggage. Such was the end of Rajpal Kuratheem.
Rajpal's journey wasn't finished yet though, as his corpse was found amalgamated to several items of carry on luggage, which caused hours of merriment in the baggage handling concourse of Vladivostok airport. Dosed up on cheap vodka and the whispered promises of prostitutes, these Russian workers cheerfully decorated the poor Rajpal's cadaver and left him in an industrial freezer as some sort of perennial mascot, which was horrifying to the disembodied spirit of Henry the cockle, as everything he had stood for was being betrayed by the slipshod and lackadaisical Workers of the Proletariat. This mortified refrigeration persisted for almost two years, until such a time as a Communist Party official happened across them while endeavouring to find a frozen snack after an illicit meeting with a one-eyed Polish dancing girl.
The official, one Georg Frototski, quickly saw an opportunity for advancement and ordered Rajpal's corpse to be loaded onto a cargo plane destined for a secret testing facility in the wastelands of Siberia where the Russians were testing experimental rockets and beginning to design spacecraft. Rajpal's corpse was an instant hit and Georg quickly attained promotion and better prospects as the cheerfully decorated cadaver was useful in so many ways; Rajpal could be usde for rocket testing, as a convenient, yet stylish, clothes rack and also as an impromtu, somewhat grisly, dartboard. Poor Rajpal.
One might say that the very success of Rajpal was Georg's undoing. During a test flight, the rocket which cheerful Rajpal was strapped to exploded and sent the frozen cadaver flying through the air, eventually coming to land on Georg and his latest date copulating furiously in a field, killing them both in an ironic, but faintly amusing way.
The bodies were never found and eventually rotted into the soil to fertilise the earth, where the iota of Rajpal which still contained my writing talent was swept into an underground river to wend its way over many years to the Mediterranean Sea where it was gobbled up by a rather offensive rogue bream named (for the sake of argument) Cyril.
Now Cyril was a rather offensive bream, a rogue and a rebel, something of a tearaway in the Mediterranean sea creature community. If it were physically possible, he would have been the kind of fish who rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle, had he the brain capacity to do so and if it weren't so patently ridiculous. It was during this period that my writing talent manifested itself once more and caused Cyril the bream to begin declaiming some of the greatest fish poetry ever heard before or since, wtih such classics as "?" and "!", due to the limited ability of the fish community to deal in anything other than abstract concepts and a completely freeform apporach to grammar and spelling.
The next several years saw an age of enlightenment in the Mediterranean, a time of such widespread sub-aquatic passions that if man only had the ears to hear, even the mightiest beat poets of the day would have been shocked by the sheer lyrical audacity of the swinging underwater world. Unfortunately, a Moroccan sailor named Hakim caught Cyrill the rebel poet bream and threw him in the hold of his fishing skiff to sell at market, thus instigating a gradual degradation of moral poetry in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, culminating in a Civil War and an Interregnum lasting many years in which the writings of William Blake were permanently banned from fish libraries
Hakim still had no idea what kind of dangerous cargo he was hauling in the hold of his little boat. He probably just sort of sat there, thinking about having a hot shower followed by a rubbing of essential oils into his suntanned skin by an exotic houri. He may or may not have picked his nose, records are a bit vague on this point, and he may also have been a Balkan spy named Boris with a penchant for small Eiffel Tower trinkets and memorabilia who had defected to serve American interests three years earlier, but once again, intelligence for this period is foggy at best.
Hakim (or maybe Boris) deliverred his cargo to a small fish market in Tunis, eliciting much excitement from the assembled shoppers and stall holders. Much trading ensued, during which at one point, Hakim (or maybe Boris) was arrested by Israeli intelligence officers on major charges of fishmongering. He was later released when they ascertained that arresting someone for fishmongering was ridiculous and so they re-arrested him for being Boris, a Balkan turncoat spy. His comments to this latter charge were recorded in a book made of human skin and were seen by some as the zentih of pithy resignment as expressed in language, to whit, "Bugger."
The journey of the germ of my writing talent is not yet done though, for in the fish market a young French-Algerian waiter named Michael Al-Imri was buying his supper and made the grave terrible mistake of picking out the mortal remains of Cyrill, the beat-poet fish for his dinner. However, it was only after his meal that he realised the true danger he was in, when in a sudden spasm he began declaiming Shakespearean verse backards and in Hebraic with numerous humorous scatological asides and much involuntary nodding and winking.
Fate was made when he went to work the next day to a restaurant in the picturesque surround of old Tunis and was assigned the table where my soon-to-be parents were sitting. After they had ordered their meal, he relayed their instructions to the head chef and dove head first into a meat locker to twitch spasmodically for fifteen minutes before carving a length of verse damning the exigences of Nazi Germany into a side of beef, a poem which was arguably the finest expression of regret and mourning at the events of the Second World War ever seen on the face of the earth and was later served as a steak to a blind couple sitting by one of the small windows.
Recovering from his fit, Michael accidentally sneezed on my parents food and mortified at his own ineptness tried to wipe as much of his own spittle off of the meals as possible or failing that stir it seamlessly into the sauce, but the damage was already done, the germ of my writing talent off loaded into the respective repasts of my parents, split in two from the force of the nasal explosion and rendered dormant until it was recombined sometime later in a bizarre and entirely arcane fashion.
The next twenty one years were a blur, like a montage where i learned how to be a ninja and do kung fu, but in fact where I learnt the things taught in the English, Indonesian and American comprehensive systems and did some swimming and occasionally crossfaded to sterotyped scenes of places I visited before culminating in a trite, but ultimately accurate image of me collecting my degree from the Chancellor of Liverpool University and the little blurry bit at the end accelerated me to the scene you are reading about now of me typing words into a beige box and contemplating the Makak.
The lesson in all of this; global warming is bad (and/or possibly highly hyped and somewhat fictionalised by the greenpeace loving masses).