“Peter! Susan!” cried Lucy, “Edmund has been to Narnia too now, and he can tell you all about it!”
“Edmund – is this true?” asked Peter.
Edmund shuffled his feet in a shifty sort of way. “Ah no, we were just playing a game about her imaginary country, Peter. We had fantasy Narnian Lions v British & Irish Lions teams.”
Lucy turned pale, and ran out of the room.
Peter was very angry with Edmund for encouraging Lucy in her apparent silliness. Susan, also concerned, scowled at Edmund. Such a scowl he had never seen before, barring seeing Peter O’Mahoney once, and he also left the room.
“Peter,” said Susan, earnestly, “I think we should speak to the Professor. Lucy is going mad.”
* * *
“Bless me, me bairns,” said the Professor, taking off his glasses and wiping them, “Whatever makes you think that Lucy is mad?”
“But … but … Professor, we have told you about her imaginary country and Lions,” gasped Susan.
“Have you ever known Lucy to tell lies before?”
“Well … no,” admitted Peter, “She’s always been particularly truthful. That’s why we fear for her sanity.”
“The young lassie seems very sane to me, and we’ve established that she doesn’t tell lies. Perhaps she is telling the truth, hmm?” answered the Professor. “There are more things in space and time than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
As soon as the children had closed his study door, the Professor took a favourite memento out of his drawer, and stroked it absently. “Thank ye, Karlus, for the Narnian Lions medal,” he whispered to himself.
* * *
Things rumbled on for another week or so, with Lucy morose, Edmund gloating in a sulky sort of way, and Peter and Susan concerned.
Another wet day ensued, and the housekeeper, Mrs Weir, was showing another lot of visitors around the house. This was really a bit naughty, but they were all doing their best to maintain social distancing, which made it even harder to dodge the party.
No matter which way the children went, there seemed to be visitors wearing face-masks heading in their direction, and they were inexorably pushed towards the dusty gym. Assembled inside, they could hear voices approaching. It was as if some magic were pressing them into a hiding-place in the gym.
“All right, Lucy,” said Peter, “Show us where to go.”
Lucy pulled open the rustiest locker with the Lions shirts, and led them inside. Soon they found themselves gazing at snow-covered conifers.
They wandered around in amazement.
“I say,” said Edmund presently, “If we’re heading for the lamp-post, we should be going that-a-way.”
Peter and Susan stopped dead in their tracks.
“So you have been here before!” said Peter. “You absolute rotter. You bounder and cad. You … you Saracens fan, you!”
“Lucy,” said Susan, “I do apologise.”
“That’s all right,” replied Lucy. “Let’s go and see Mr Iknus.”
* * *
Lucy led them towards Mr Iknus’ cave, but as they neared its entrance, she gasped in dismay. The door was wrenched off its hinges. She spotted something white, and rushed forward.
There was a note pinned to the door.
To Whom It May Concern,
The Traitor Iknus has been arrested by the order of the Queen of Narnia for fomenting rugby enthusiasm against Her Majesty’s express wishes.
Any fellow enthusiasts will also be hunted down and arrested.
Signed,
Maugrim
Chief of Her Majesty’s Very Secret Police
* * *
As Lucy stared, dumbfounded, at the notice, Peter caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye.
“Oh Peter, Susan, Edmund,” wailed Lucy, “We must help Mr Iknus! It is probably my fault that he was caught!” She explained to the others all about Daughters of Maeve.
“That’s odd,” said Susan, “My mother’s name is Maeve too. I’m not sure why, because she is from the Valleys.”
“Well, my mother’s name isn’t Maeve,” said Peter. “It’s Eve, and my Dad’s George. But he’s always called Hamish on account of being born in Glasgow.”
Edmund’s eyes boggled.
* * *
Mr Beaver burst out of the undergrowth.
“Two Daughters of Maeve and two Sons of George, upon my word!” he cried.
The children all took a step back, because they had never seen a large Talking beaver before, and were a little surprised. But they were soon reassured by his smooth patter (“Call me Clyde”), and gratefully accepted the invitation to his lodge for tea, because they were getting right peckish.
“Shh!” said Mr Beaver, putting his paw to his teeth, “We must be very quiet and careful. The Witch’s spies are everywhere.”
They all crept cautiously after him through the forest until they came to the river, and scurried into the lodge under the cover of the fallen darkness. To their delight, Mrs Beaver, who didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, was just laying out a large feast, and they all tucked in heartily, along with the three Beavlets. (The Middle One occasionally made some disturbing pronouncements, but not disturbing enough to put them off their food. They were very hungry.)
As they all pushed back from the table, replete, Mr Beaver lit a fag, which he sucked through his teeth.
“Please, Clyde,” said Lucy, “tell us what you know of Mr Iknus!”
“Ah, my dear,” sighed Mr Beaver, “That’s a very bad business.
“We last saw him being taken by the Witch’s Secret Police towards her castle. Few who enter those gates come out again. They say that the whole castle is furnished with statues – but these statues are Narnians who have been turned to stone by the Witch’s evil spells. Some of them are even Narnian Lions.
“But there is a prophecy in Narnia that when two Daughters of Maeve and two Sons of George sit on the High Thrones of Cair Paravel, then we shall be freed. And lo, we hear that our true ruler – the great Narnian Lions Captain Paulan – is on the move from his long exile, and we shall meet him tomorrow at the Stone Stadium.”
Unnoticed by everyone else, Edmund had sneaked away to find the Witch’s castle.
Ovally Balls 
@Slade – at the current rate of progress lockdown might be over before they’ve finished.
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Not that I’m locked down of course.
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Slade, I may have mentioned this before, but one thing I can remember so clearly from my time in France was sitting alone in my kitchen on a Sunday morning and the weather was wicked, really heavy rain battering against the windows. I had coffee and The World Service for company and I listened to Under Milkwood, read by Richard Burton and others.
It was magical.
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I watched the first Star Wars today, it must be 30 years since I last watched it all the way through.
If you ignore the clunkiness of the time it still stands up as a film, imo.
I have the man flu, not the ‘Rona, just a cold that keeps coming back, so I ended up watching three films today, first Star Wars, then a Costner Western called Open Range – a familiar theme of a big baddie with hired gun slingers v the good guys with a past. But it was well done and the scenery is always a winner in these films.
Then we watched Bad Times at the El Royale, which got more Tarantino-esque as it went on, but it was good.
I like Jeff Bridges.
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@ticht
You will recall Wedge the X wing pilot who had to fly off cos his spacecraft was damaged. Denis Lawson (the actor who played Wedge) recorded this the other day
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No cabin fever there then.
I have to admit I didn’t recognise him as the fighter pilot for the Rebel Alliance, but he’s the hotel owner in Local Hero
I cannot pass up the opportunity to re-post this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04pt7vt
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Like the T-shirt Patrick Stewart is wearing in that reading. So for him, if he happens by :-
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Read that Sunday Times piece. My initial thought is “Please not Gove”.
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For those without a Times sub: https://archive.is/20200418182037/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh
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Sunday Times being wise with the benefit of hindsight. What should have happened was that as soon as the outbreak was identified in Wuhan in December was that all travel from China be stopped immediately. That would have stopped the pandemic in its tracks.
Some people were saying that in January. I don’t remember any mainstream journalists saying that, or the blessed WHO.
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That’s the wrong way of reading it, OT. In part it’s the Murdoch press lining up a pathway for Gove. Secondly, (really obviously) things could have been done better and it’s good for the public to know how they were done (providing the public can get round the paywall).
Did you see the FT report on the ventilators from yesterday or Friday?
“Muddled thinking punctures plan for British ventilator”
https://www.ft.com/content/5f393d77-8e5b-4a85-b647-416efbc575ec
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Refit / Tomp
Not an encouraging read! I think you are both right, except Gove? – Surely not………………………..
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Unfortunately, FT is paywalled
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However, Gove does induce extreme nausea
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/michael-gove-fails-to-deny-pm-missed-five-coronavirus-cobra-meetings
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@tomp
I did see it. I was quite angry when I read it as it is a huge deliberste misdirection, the sort that gives journalists a terrible reputation as bellends. And this is a prime example. It turns the entire ventilator story on its head. Plan A was to scale up existing Penlon and Smiths devices using spare manufacturing capacity in the aero and auto sectors. If that failed they needed a plan B. Dyson, Red Bull F1 said they were sure they could make something from scratch given a performance spec, so they asked for one. So the government supplied one. Meanwhile my medical device colleagues said “you can’t build a brand new ventilator in a week” so the Penlon-Smiths consortium got on with it and got approval this week, delivering hundreds already. Meanwhile we learned that simple ventilators were not actually needed as it turns out we were probably intubating too many covid patients. So plan A was a success and plan B proved to be both unnecessary and unrealistic. But reading that FT article it only mentions plan A in passing and pretends that plan B was the main government policy. This FT journalist tweets the article and gets the narrative badly wrong:
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Yup, you are correct OT. Shutdown earlier was the best option. The WHO was still insisting it wasn’t necessary on feb the 3rd, at least, which however hard it is to say, does give Boris and Donald some leeway.
Scoring political points at the moment is, frankly, disgusting behaviour.
Tin hat time, but whichever way you look at it, China was either lying massively about the numbers, or they were taking massive preparations without telling anyone, and the Chinese government are culpable. Follow the chain on the web, and you can see that around 2015, the Wuhan virus lab at the centre of last weeks claims of understaffing and lax protocols in 2018 happily announced that they had successfully crossed Sars with a bat coronavirus, then managed to infect mice, and then human cells. Not a very far stretch to suggest accidental lab release, which they should have been all over it in hours, as soon as an employee was ill, not months.
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Not what I found about 2 months ago, but similar.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26552008
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHC014-CoV
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Boring , I know. Funny its taken the world press so long to jump all over this, I spent hours a couple of months back nosing around this subject, kind of hard work, now the same search is flooded with results from the last few days.
Thaum, you are welcome to delete these last few posts of mine, they don’t have much to do with rugby.
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But they’re really interesting, SBT. And the various versions of OB have never been about rugby only.
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Thanks Deebee, was a bit worried about going full tin foil, but all this stuff fascinates me.
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Was going to blame NMA and play White Coats, but I’ll play one of y favourites instead, which seems kind of personal, for varying reasons over the years.
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What would be interesting to understand is if SBT from Ovally Balls can join the dots with some focused internet research, where was Trump’s intelligence? Or does he only rely on the WHO? Catastrophic failure of US (and other) intelligence if it’s true. And if it was a lab thing gone wrong, I think the world is entitled to ask China for some kind of compensation, given their lack of transparency. Won’t happen.
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Good choice!
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Not sure as I want to go down that particular rabbit hole, Deebs. Last time I was nosing around a US government department website related to an interesting single numbered polygon, my computer went all funny for a while.
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slade,
As long as your cache is clear (that’s what sag used to say and I don’t know what it means), you can often copy the headline on an FT article and stick it in google and then click on the link to the FT and it magically pops up.
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Still the almost definitive on Gove:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/cartoon/2012/mar/16/1
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Tomp
Thanks for the tip – I’ll try it next time…………………………..
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Sunbeamtim
I for another find your stuff really interesting – it’s the richness of the blog, which is not just about rugy.
Thanks again.
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SBT – I’ve no problem with people posting things that are not about rugby, especially when there’s no rugby on!
Dunno about the FT, but the Torygraph give you (or used to?) 5 free reads a month or something, and if you cleared all Telegraph cookies from your cache, you could have as many as you liked.
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Lock-down fever setting in…………….
I just ordered the complete works of Anthony Trollope for my Kindle.
36,000+ pages for Euros 2.99
Might find something good in there…………………..
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Was it BB who watched open Range the other night?
This and other stories, Such as Dances With Wolves and it’s sequel, are available for Kindle.
I found them great reads and not spoiled by seeing the film first.
Also anything by Larry McMurtry
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I think it was Ticht who watched it, Slade.
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Slade – I like Trollope (Anthony, anyway), but it’s a bit of a niche taste for many. The Palliser ones give an interesting insight into how politics has and hasn’t changed.
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Didn’t John Major say he liked going to bed with a Trollope?
(Don’t anyone make the obvious joke.)
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Ah, seems it was Harold MacMillan.
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…………..as often gets a mention in Private Eye
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…………….best imagined spoken via a Peter Cook interpretation
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Slade, Major did like (or claimed to like) reading Trollope. I think my mind was already set on not making the joke.
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The Eldest is playing hangman on Zoom with her (sort of) boyfriend. She just nearly did for him with “vegetable”, but I helped him out. He had _E_ETA_ _E and me waving a parsnip and a carrot didn’t help him, but when I finally wandered past with a cauliflower he saved himself at the last.
Not sure if he’s all that bright.
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Sorry that’s not about rugby and all that.
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I’d forgotten he was from a family of dog-botherers. Mrs CMW just saved the Eldest by guessing “Hudson Taylor” for her on the basis that she already had Taylor and the lad’s brother is called Hudson. Apparently he was a famous missionary which was news to all of us though it seems we were expected to know this.
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Here he is, quite the obvious go to ‘famous person’ for your average nine-year-old hangman player…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Taylor
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Whoever thought it would come to this.
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“I’d forgotten he was from a family of dog-botherers.”
You should put a stop to this relationship right now, CMW.
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Game over, he threw the towel in on Jacqueline Wilson. Understandable in a way, but a it was good test as she’s very much the Eldest’s favourite author.
“He doesn’t know me, he’s hanged himself”.
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If there’s another game in the next few days I’ll make sure to post the MBM.
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There not being that much live sport around at the moment and all that.
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Gove?
*boaks*
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