The Velvet Moustache (who occasionally answered to the name of Bobby) was ninety-seven carrots old. This meant he was precisely the colour of a wet Wednesday afternoon in Yorkshire. He lived in a draughty teapot under a cabbage leaf, but the tea was always too loud, and the leaf kept whispering secrets about hedge funds and the international price of coal.
One morning, the grandfather clock in his waistcoat pocket sneezed twice.
It was an omen. The clock had never sneezed before, though it frequently suffered from a mild case of hiccups. Bobby took off his spectacles (which had no lenses, only thin paper flags that read YES and PERHAPS) and made his decision:
He would move abroad. To the Grand Kingdom of Elsewhere.
The Official Packing List
Before being able to depart for Elsewhere, one must satisfy the customs officers of the imagination. Bobby packed his three and a half cardboard suitcases with the absolute essentials:
- Three yards of silence, freshly ironed and folded into neat squares.
- A pocketful of bicycle spokes to ward off any unexpected geometry.
- The left-hand corner of a very famous painting of a turnip.
- A damp postage stamp depicting a king who had forgotten his own name.
- Half a bag of pistachio nuts.
- Last but not least, two teaspoons of yesterday’s fog, just in case the weather abroad was too clear.
‘To travel,’ Bobby said to a passing snail who was disguised as a postbox, ‘is merely to swap one’s ears for a pair of fluffy slippers and jump headfirst into a bowl of lukewarm alphabet soup.’
The snail did not reply. He was busy crossing the line in the sand.
The Voyage Across the Fig Tuesday
Bobby did not take a ship, for ships are far too watery and have a dreadful habit of pointing towards the horizon. Instead, he boarded a tram made entirely of Tuesday afternoons.
The conductor was a portable typewriter that typed only the letter Q. Capital.
‘Tickets, please,’ said the typewriter, clattering as if possessed.
Bobby handed over a blue button and a slice of lemon. The typewriter swallowed them eagerly and spat out a ticket printed on a small, yellow parsley leaf: ‘Q Q’. The journey was swift. They travelled past the Great Green Mustard Fields, through the Valley of Forgotten, Open Umbrellas, and straight over the edge of the kitchen table.
Arrival in the Grand Kingdom of Elsewhere
Abroad was magnificent. The sky was a chequered tablecloth of blue and white. The grass wasn’t greener, as many would think, and did not grow upwards; it grew sideways, whispering soft, mathematical equations to the earthworms. The local inhabitants were all pristine porcelain teapots who spoke fluent Finnish but only when it was raining.
Bobby unpacked his suitcases. He laid his three yards of silence across the grass, sat down on his half-suitcase, and began to grow. He did not grow taller, for that would be terribly bourgeois. Instead, he grew sideways, gradually turning into a very comfortable armchair.
A passing teapot looked at him with great respect.
‘Hear ye! Hear ye! Oyez!’ said the teapot. ‘The new resident has arrived! He has excellent upholstery.’
Word of the comfortable new armchair-resident spread quickly to the palace. For, as everyone in Elsewhere knew, the absolute ruler of the realm was HM Snakequeen, a cobra of immense dignity who insisted on wearing dark sunglasses, even when slithering through the darkest corners of her domain. She immediately issued a royal decree, typed entirely in capital Qs, declaring Bobby’s upholstery a national monument.
And the clock in Bobby’s pocket slept, at last, without sneezing.
