Jun 2012
An introduction to the Apocolympics
08/06/12 15:15 Filed in: Apocolympics
The Olympic Year of 2012 started with a premonition by my wife, Imelda. It was the early hours of New Years Day and we were in bed together. She awoke with a jerk.
“I’ve had a dream”, she said, in tears. “There was an overturned police horse on Whitehall and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was tearing flesh from it and his eyes were swivelling around and glowing green”.
“I’ve seen that”, I comforted her, “it’s just George’s astigmatism”.
“Not the Chancellor, the horse. The horse’s eyes were glowing green and there was a shaft of bright light shining from his bottom…”
“Well, you see, George’s…”
“Not George’s bottom, the horse’s.”
“I’m not sure I can quite grasp the symbolism”, I offered, weakly. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the sun shining from a horse’s arse. Is it something to do with the economy?”
“It’s more serious than that”, she said, her voice trailing off.
A fear gripped me. It had been many years since my wife’s last dream. A brief course of pills and a more or less constant diet of vodka martinis had seen them off in the intervening period, with only the occasional act of Parliament drawn up and passed to allay her fears for the future.
My wife’s dream, it turns out, was a portent of one potential future and, as this collection of diary entries, memorandums and official correspondence seeks to present, at one time in the past that future could have been a very different future indeed.
That the future we now face in the present is distinct from the one that was present in the past is a sobering thought. All of our tomorrows will, one day, be the yesterday that might have been if today had turned out to be what would have been yesterday’s tomorrow.
I think it was Winston Churchill who once said something important and I, for one, would whole-heartedly agree with this. Which is why I believe our Olympic Legacy is a fundamentally British one: a Legacy forged in the White Heat of the Blitz Spirit; a Legacy inspired by the ethos of excellence against insuperable odds; a Legacy galvanized lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
That is what I believe and I’ll stand by it until the day I die. My wife had a dream. I urge you to do the same.
Comments
Post Legacy Wormhole opens.
07/06/12 16:27 Filed in: Apocolympics
We received the following documents and, as part of our policy of transparency, are making this document public as part of an isolated, one-off, without prejudice, non-precedential process of publication.
Introduction by the Official Archivist of the Prefelicity, Dr. Pale Manilla Envelope.
Date: 25th Janice, 7011, Post Legacy.
What do we really know about our ancestors, those known to us as the Official Stakeholders - the wizards of the Dark Arts of Middle Management who ruled the Earth before the moments of the Great Felicity? What were these tribal elders like, with their red canister-tubes of brown bubbly liquid and their sandwiches of unidentifiable meat and a strange cheese-like substance that has stayed flexible, in many cases, for over 5,000 years? Most of all, what was the mysterious object or state of being that the Official Stakeholders were so in thrall to; in short, what was the Olympic Legacy?
Until recently, very little was certain, but all of that changed in 5008, when a thin veneer of detritus which represents the events of the Great Felicity itself was discovered.
At the top of the four-finger thick layer of charred remains that make up the Horizon of Felicity, the line under which the Official Stakeholders themselves can be discovered, this veneer contains a strange collection of artefacts. Found among the now-famous palm-sized plastic holy relics - the ‘Dove Devotionals’1 - and a similar item, the sacred Oyster Token2 - was a sheaf of papers. The papers, the partially scorched remnants of a diary, along with some other notes, promise to help archivists focus collectively as a group to unravel the moments that led up to Felicity. In particular, it is hoped that their recent discovery will be able to shed some light upon the Olympic Legacy itself, whether it is an object, a state of grace or is somehow linked to the strange meat sandwiches and red canisters.
The following pages are drawn from this artefact. They have been painstakingly pieced together and provide a transformational shift of insight into the period that led directly up to the Felicity. Our work continues, going forward; some tracts of time are missing and the Olympic Legacy, which the Official Stakeholders channelled so much of their ring-fenced resources creating, has yet to be found. It is my hope that archivists of the future will find something in these pages which will illuminate their own studies into this period of time and, to use a phrase that was apparently common among our forebears and which has survived to this day, I will be ‘over the moon on a stick’ if they do. That said, I do not know what a ‘moon’ is, much less deduce why one should be said to be over it in order to be pleasantly surprised or why, given its contribution to gaiety, it was apparently deemed necessary to smash it to pieces during our ancestor’s search for the Olympic Legacy. I trust your quest is not so destructive.
1 ‘Dove Devotionals’ are so called because they carry a silver picture of a flying dove and the name of a pagan deity such as ‘Santander’ or ‘Halifax’.
2 The Oyster Token is so named because it too is believed to be a devotional token of some kind. This mysterious artefact has the same form as the Dove Devotionals - it is rectangular and a palm’s width across - but is two shades of blue in colour with a white band to one side and the word “oyster” prominently displayed on its face. There are two mysterious symbols in the bottom right hand corner - symbols which have also been unearthed attached to large buildings over and underground for which the only logical explanation is ‘ritual use’. The reverse of this artefact may have carried a tract of a devotional prayer or a chilling prophecy as the only words still legible appear to say ‘conditions of carnage’
Introduction by the Official Archivist of the Prefelicity, Dr. Pale Manilla Envelope.
Date: 25th Janice, 7011, Post Legacy.
What do we really know about our ancestors, those known to us as the Official Stakeholders - the wizards of the Dark Arts of Middle Management who ruled the Earth before the moments of the Great Felicity? What were these tribal elders like, with their red canister-tubes of brown bubbly liquid and their sandwiches of unidentifiable meat and a strange cheese-like substance that has stayed flexible, in many cases, for over 5,000 years? Most of all, what was the mysterious object or state of being that the Official Stakeholders were so in thrall to; in short, what was the Olympic Legacy?
Until recently, very little was certain, but all of that changed in 5008, when a thin veneer of detritus which represents the events of the Great Felicity itself was discovered.
At the top of the four-finger thick layer of charred remains that make up the Horizon of Felicity, the line under which the Official Stakeholders themselves can be discovered, this veneer contains a strange collection of artefacts. Found among the now-famous palm-sized plastic holy relics - the ‘Dove Devotionals’1 - and a similar item, the sacred Oyster Token2 - was a sheaf of papers. The papers, the partially scorched remnants of a diary, along with some other notes, promise to help archivists focus collectively as a group to unravel the moments that led up to Felicity. In particular, it is hoped that their recent discovery will be able to shed some light upon the Olympic Legacy itself, whether it is an object, a state of grace or is somehow linked to the strange meat sandwiches and red canisters.
The following pages are drawn from this artefact. They have been painstakingly pieced together and provide a transformational shift of insight into the period that led directly up to the Felicity. Our work continues, going forward; some tracts of time are missing and the Olympic Legacy, which the Official Stakeholders channelled so much of their ring-fenced resources creating, has yet to be found. It is my hope that archivists of the future will find something in these pages which will illuminate their own studies into this period of time and, to use a phrase that was apparently common among our forebears and which has survived to this day, I will be ‘over the moon on a stick’ if they do. That said, I do not know what a ‘moon’ is, much less deduce why one should be said to be over it in order to be pleasantly surprised or why, given its contribution to gaiety, it was apparently deemed necessary to smash it to pieces during our ancestor’s search for the Olympic Legacy. I trust your quest is not so destructive.
1 ‘Dove Devotionals’ are so called because they carry a silver picture of a flying dove and the name of a pagan deity such as ‘Santander’ or ‘Halifax’.
2 The Oyster Token is so named because it too is believed to be a devotional token of some kind. This mysterious artefact has the same form as the Dove Devotionals - it is rectangular and a palm’s width across - but is two shades of blue in colour with a white band to one side and the word “oyster” prominently displayed on its face. There are two mysterious symbols in the bottom right hand corner - symbols which have also been unearthed attached to large buildings over and underground for which the only logical explanation is ‘ritual use’. The reverse of this artefact may have carried a tract of a devotional prayer or a chilling prophecy as the only words still legible appear to say ‘conditions of carnage’
Emergency etiquette as guitarist abducted
06/06/12 09:59 Filed in: Apocolympics
As part of the double bank holiday festivities to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, some of us were invited to the Palace yesterday to the concert held in Her Majesty’s honour. Unfortunately, it did not all go as planned.
In what can only be described as “mysterious circumstances” the Queen guitarist Mr Anita Dobson, who was reprising his role with his guitar solo version of the National Anthem on the palace roof, was unexpectedly consumed by what was believed, at the time, to be some kind of amazing pyrotechnic effect. From where I was standing, as Dobson came to the end of the second verse and prepared to segue into Rule Britannia, he appeared to be trapped in an incandescent vortex. The swirling column of bright white light then quickly turned to bright green smoke and the guitar stopped abruptly. At the end of the three seconds of silence that followed, the vortex suddenly disappeared and there was only the amplified sound of a plectrum and a tremolo arm falling onto the palace roof where Dobson had stood.
The guitarist had disappeared, for which he received a benused round of applause from the Royal Box, where specialists in emergency etiquette and Royal protocol spent the next thirty minutes improvising a ceremony with the tremolo arm, in order that Her Majesty would not be officially dismayed. All attempts to find the guitarist have so far failed, though a lingering scent of hairspray was detected in the Royal Standard when it was lowered later as Her Majesty left for other Jubilee duties.
In what can only be described as “mysterious circumstances” the Queen guitarist Mr Anita Dobson, who was reprising his role with his guitar solo version of the National Anthem on the palace roof, was unexpectedly consumed by what was believed, at the time, to be some kind of amazing pyrotechnic effect. From where I was standing, as Dobson came to the end of the second verse and prepared to segue into Rule Britannia, he appeared to be trapped in an incandescent vortex. The swirling column of bright white light then quickly turned to bright green smoke and the guitar stopped abruptly. At the end of the three seconds of silence that followed, the vortex suddenly disappeared and there was only the amplified sound of a plectrum and a tremolo arm falling onto the palace roof where Dobson had stood.
The guitarist had disappeared, for which he received a benused round of applause from the Royal Box, where specialists in emergency etiquette and Royal protocol spent the next thirty minutes improvising a ceremony with the tremolo arm, in order that Her Majesty would not be officially dismayed. All attempts to find the guitarist have so far failed, though a lingering scent of hairspray was detected in the Royal Standard when it was lowered later as Her Majesty left for other Jubilee duties.