In the beginning there was a bog. It was drizzling and cold and the sky was grey. In a valley between muddy hills a bony man came along carrying a spade. He was small and hairy. He dug earth, put it in his wheelbarrow and rolled it to his small house in the shelter of some scrawny trees. He neatly laid the earth in rows behind the fire so it could dry. He worked hard and was the master of the house. One day he went drinking with his friends and went too far "I have not had a sip for a month, give me the bottle" he drank it all went home and jumped on his wife. The next day he had a bad headache but his wife was smiling. He dragged himself off to the bog to dig earth under a grey sky. On the way he spat a lot then finally puked up. On his way home the spot where he had puked up had turned into a slender willow and the places he had spat turned into small cotton plants. He cut down the tree and then picked the cotton. When he came home his wife was pregnant. He stayed up late and made a cradle from the willow and his wife made a blanket from the cotton. The next day they had a son. His son played in the hills and met a monk who locked him in a monastery and made him pray and study until the little boy was a scrupulous and pale faced stringy little scholar. After 7 years he grew a moustache and the monks told him he should go to the city to study law. He went home to see his family. He saw his father working in the bog and went to talk to him but his father did not recognise him and turned his back and continued digging earth. His mother was at the market so he left a note and went to the city to study law. There were even more monks than at his schools… thousands of them or shuffling about in their grey robes and dripping noses. In the school he was taught the methods of control for the giant empire which many years ago had invaded his land. He grew up and made much wealth and became one of the kings most sober-minded judges. He bought a large house on the outskirts of the city where his daughters could ride their ponies to the nearby beach when it was not too wet and where enjoy the country as he had done in his childhood. He had 14 girls and try as he might he could not get a son to continue his name then one day he met an old witch to ask her advice and she told him to drink a potion made from the mushrooms that grew between her toes and to put some of her earwax on his balls before having sex with his wife. He did that and true to form wife bore him a son. He had promised to give the witch 100 pieces of gold and a French kiss but the idea was so revolting that he offered to give her 200 instead. She took 200 hundred and pulled out a bottle of wine and slipped in a love potion inside which made him madly lustful so she got her money and much more than a French kiss. That was the last time he went to a witch.
Still he had a little son now and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to get what you want. His son was the spitting image of himself and in fact grew up to be a judge just like his father and when his father died he grew his whiskers long like his father and wore his dads old clothes and worked in the same office. However one day his most beloved sister fell ill and the doctor suggested going to a warm climate. He applied to the king for a transfer and was sent to a distant tropical part of the empire where the King had conquered people of totally different races and traditions and imposed his rules upon them. To his surprise he really liked the warmth of the sun and the beautiful native women and their colourful traditions and his elite position of privilige among them. He fell in love with a rich and intelligent former princess of the land and had a mixed race son who entered the best new school in the land and was a limeric progedy. He would put his son on the table after dinner and the little half native boy would improvise witty limerics while doing somersaults between each stanza and everyone opened their mouths wide and screamed and involuntarily farted and laughed until they dribbled and fall head first into the curry. This happy life continued for several years until one terrible day when the Kings deputy in charge of the exotic land was celebrating his wedding. By this time our hero was an important judge in this far away land and was invited to the wedding. However in the depths of the slums of the city some destitute malcontent natives were far from happy at being ruled over by a foreign power. One saucy native with a vicious hatred of anything frivilish and terribly keen to impress his mummy decided to blow up the kings deputy.
The bitter conspirator crept in among the crowd with an icy heart and a soul full of hatred and anger at these foreign rulers. He waited at a crucial point in the parade close to where the rich carrages were going to pass. In the land of his birth, a tough mountainous place, gold had been plenty and even poor hard working peasants could afford golden rings and necklaces but silver had been very rare and only affordable to the most-wealthy. When the carriages came into his sight he saw a quite simple but silver coloured carriage just ahead of a more ornate but golden carriage and assuming that this beautiful simple silver carriage must contain the evil mouthpiece of the hated foreign king whose animal like soldiers had killed his brothers and sisters and commited gross crimes of impurity in his beloved land, he waited til it was nearby and then threw his bomb. As he ran he looked behind his shoulder and was shocked to see a beautiful native lady covered with blood being carried out of the wreck of the carriage by a mortified foreigner. The conspiritor felt pretty bad and jumped under a juggernault at the next village festival a few days later. The judge had been mistaken for the lieutenant and had lost his dearly beloved wife. The joys of living in the exotic land no longer held any attraction after that day… the colourful dresses brought bitterness, the exotic food turned to ashes in his mouth and the realisation of his position as a instrument of foreign oppression reminded him of his own conquered land where similar expressions of independance were taking place against the empire. He decided to go home and took his son with him… but back in his native land the revolutionary sentiment unsettled him… having seen the world he found the parochial and viscious minded malcontents who represented his homeland not to his taste. His childhood happiness was far behind him and he decided to settle his lot, unenthusiastically but decidedly, in the heartland of the empire where, despite the many wrongs commited in its name, educated and intelligent people could still talk crap about silly things round a warm fire smoking quality cigars. He moved to the very capital of the Empire and his young son, oblivious to the political questions that upset his father and full of the growing energy of youth, recovered much quicker than his father from the death of his mother and embraced the new lifestyle wholeheartedly. His privileged education continued and he became a doyenne of the arts, making a living praising the most elite and refined expressions of culture in this rich land. He fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a wealthy colonialist family. She had wonderful cool blue eyes and dark flaxen hair and would laugh and skip about with the voice of a hyena and the foot of a doe. His wife's life had been similar to his own, brought up in a distant part of the empire and now returned 'home' -she was gentle, beautiful and cooked a killer pot of tea.
He became a critic of ballet and opera and many a night he spent in gold leaved boxes looking down on dazzling swan like women floating across the stage to dream like arias. He was a great critic of beauty and came to consider it his professional duty to take his studies into the wonder for he female form and it manners and graces backstage. His swarthy exotic looks (remember his mother had been a native princess of that far away land) and his wide experience in life made him not unattractive to these young and unexperienced girls whose young lives had been mostly spent in rehersal rooms and expensive social balls. One or two had made eyes at him and fell under the spell of his charm during his journalistic interviews and naturally his wife grew jealous at their attentions and he thought what the hell and left her and their several children. He married a few more ballet dancers and had many children who he loved dearly but distantly not letting anything much disturb him from his love of life and beauty.
His first wife was left to look after her large family alone but he gave her a pot of gold so she was ok for money and she was not poor herself so she lived on in relative luxury and a great deal of comfort but behaved like a widow to her true love. She may have liked to marry again but unlike her wild husband she was more conscious of the whispers of society so she stayed a single wronged lady with many friends and quite happy and held all night card games with her buddies where they developed some very bizarre slang. She had three girls who were all beautiful and pretty smart for girls, she also and two sons, one much younger than the other. The eldest boy was very much fussed over and nagged by his Herpe-like sisters and he took his revenge by exploding paper bags behind them when they were kissing their young boyfriends in a quiet spot. He was very relieved when he had a brother and desperately tried to teach the young child to play boys games like bows and arrows and making temples in the garden and so forth: any manly sport which his sisters had never wanted to play with him. He was strong willed although not outstandingly intelligent. He inherited some of his fathers fire and passion for life without the wide experience and exotic charm. He wanted to be an architect from an early age and threw himself into his studies with all the energy and passion of youth. The empire by this time had crumbled like an apple crumble but a new more insidious mercantile empire was taking over the world and early on he noticed its creeping fingers scratching away the old traditions and communities of his hometown and decided he could best counter this by bringing the community together and struggling to save their lifestyles and group spirit. He fell in love with another archiltect on his course, a pretty and calm but spirited girl from a modest small town family. He met her at a brick fair.They married and she took on her role as a mother soon after and he continued to work as an architect and fight his pigmy battle against the new ruthless giants of the world. He did not manage to save peoples lifestyles because the monsterous power was too strong and rich and while he was a single man working with a bunch of local greengrocers, ironmongers, publicans and elderly residents, the monster had millions of slaves working night and day to break down the old structures of society and build new commercial centres where the slaves worked incessantly and the monster took most of the profits. But he DID manage to save many of the old buildings which the new monster wanted to replace with its modernist monolithic homogenous black towers. His wife approved of his hopeless cruscade but as the children grew up their material deprivations that idealism and youth can shrug aside became less comfortable and eventually they both went to the countryside to live like cavemen…. Separately.
THE END OF THE PART 1
ABOVE: a bowel made with a honey glaze over two shades of clay thrown together.
ABOVE: the lid in the shape of the mock turtle
ABOVE: the lid in the shape of the mock turtle
