Once upon a time former Queen Nancy and former King Paul moved from the Butter Palace to GlassUdders where they hoped to be able to continue to suck on the teats which had provided them so much milk and honey hitherto.
Newly crowned King Hārūn immediately performed a
cleansing ritual on the Butter Palace. He sang
I got a palace named Rama
Dana Dana Dana Ding Dong
It’s everything to me
I'll never set it free
For it’s mine, all mine
There would be no more butter in the Butter Palace,
but for the present the change of name was kept from the peasants.
Unfortunately, Hārūn discovered usurpers everywhere.
Princess Cordelia was telling everyone that it was unfair that she was not
Queen as no one had known the true story about Nancy and Paul. Princess Regan
was once more trying to bring back the Old Pretender King Alan. There would
once more be butter and lubrication in the Palace.
Unfortunately, the Heddlu had turned up one morning at
the Glassudders. It was fortunate that Nancy was fully dressed otherwise she
might have frighted the Heddlu horses. Paul after gaining sustenance from the Glass
Udder, which was Green and engraved “because you gave me a pay rise when I was
working for someone else, though really I only ever worked for you”, went to
discuss plumbing with Headloo and learned a great deal about ballcocks and cock
washers, rings, and cocks and bulls.
At the same time the Headloo discovered an enormous
litter at the King Mother’s. It wasn’t as if either Paul or the King Mother had
been littering, rather it wasn’t about dropping instead of carrying. Nearby
there were also one hundred peasants whose job it was to carry the litter when
Queen Nancy was due to survey her kingdom. It was so big that it had beds and
even a latrine that unfortunately was rather unpleasant for the peasant underneath,
but who treated it as a privilege to serve Queen Nancy even in this way.
Paul had wanted to surprise Nancy about the litter. He
certainly surprised Hārūn who knew nothing about the litter nor the rather
large number of ducats that had been spent on a moveable home which had never
been used.
Worse the rulers of Sasainn had forbidden peasants to
carry Kings and Queens around without being paid and demanded they got ducats.
Hārūn even more unfortunately discovered that he knew
almost nothing about the Kingdom. He discovered that the sums had not been
checked by the chief teacher, which was dreadful as how could any King or Queen
learn about sums if they were not checked and corrected. But both Nancy and
Paul had deemed it demeaning to be checked by a mere teacher and so had
developed sums that were not always according to the rules and sometimes gave
answers that others might not have got.
But subjective arithmetic was about the rights of
diverse thinking. Just as Nancy might feel that she was really a King, so she might
feel that 10 + 11 = 19. It was oppressive and discriminatory to make everyone
conform to rules that had been made up by white people from Sasainn and so Paul
and Nancy had devised their own ways of doing sums and they were better by far
than Sasainn sums.
But the teacher who was supposed to listen to Paul’s
sums had resigned because he could not accept that either 2+2 might = 5 or that
a boy could be a girl. He thought the whole way of doing sums was
contradictory.
Nancy told the Never Even Consulted committee that she
had checked the sums herself and there was no need to worry as everything was
fine. The kingdom had vast numbers of ducats as the peasants loved them. But
she didn’t tell those Never Even Consulted about the teacher who refused to
listen to Paul’s sums, and she didn’t tell them about the litter and the moveable
feast that would happen when she was carried by the peasants shoulder high through
the kingdom, because one never reveals that one knows about a birthday surprise
or an anniversary surprise.
Meanwhile desperate to divert attention from the litter
and the chat about plumbing King Hārūn decided the thing to do was to imitate
Nancy as much as possible in her method of doing sums. In his kingdom boys
could become girls just as 2+2 could equal 5 if he willed it.
The nasty Sasainn had told Nancy that she neither
could change the rules of arithmetic, nor could she make boys into girls.
Richie Richi thought counting was too important to make up as you went along otherwise,
he might turn out to be Richie Poorie. For the same reason boys couldn’t just
decide to be girls without proper counting otherwise we’d lose track of how many
boys there were and how many girls. What if all the girls became boys. What
would that do to the birth-rate? We’d all be Arthur even if we wanted Martha
and how would we pull our swords out of stones or put them in for that matter?
Meanwhile there were ever more reasons to divert attention.
The galleys that had painted windows but couldn’t float and were desperately
needed to replace the galleys that had sunk due to the wicked Sasainn enforcing
the rule that galley slaves had to be paid. How had the kingdom paid so much
but not gained any galleys? Where had the ducats gone?
The blacksmith who made all those tuagh-chathas and
somehow was able to turn rocks into something as sharp and hard as Stalin how
had he paid only 5 ducats for all those smiddys and where anyway were the Pikes?
Don’t panic we could always use wooden ones.
But then Hārūn discovered that the Never Even
Consulted could sometimes record and could sometimes leak almost as badly as
the Head Loo.
There was Nancy telling everyone not to worry, not to
question, not to even suggest that there might be anything wrong with the sums.
Did Nancy know at the time that she told the Never Even Consulted that there really
were problems with the sums and that the teacher was beginning to complain that
he was not listened too. That would look rather like trying to stop the Never
Even Consulted from finding out the truth. That would be almost as naughty as
Paul’s problems with the plumbing, the cocks and the bulls. From the Head Loo
might come all sorts, leaving the mobile litter with lots of stools, but
nowhere to sit down. Not even a throne.
"Let this cup pass from me" said Nancy it has stools in it.
