But I Get Ahead Of Myself
Yesteryon I cautioned you about the exploits of two English officers, who were defined as regicides by the now-Royalist Parliament, which was eager to show how determinedly Royalist they were, really and truly Your Majesty, after the Restoration.
Colonel Goffe and Major Whalley had been two very big cheeses, close to Oliver Cromwell during the Civil Unpleasantness and the Interregnum afterwards, and both had indeed been implicit in Chuck One losing his head. So, given that the new King's proclamations upon ascending to the throne had been rather coy and vague about what would happen to the very tip-top regicides, they wisely decided to skip town. Skip country, in fact. Indeed, skip continent. Art!
They took ship and crossed the Atlantic, which took ten weeks in the days of sail, and settled down to live in Cambridge, treated with considerable sympathy by the governor and fêted by the locals. Massachusetts, you see, considered itself to be practically independent from the English crown, which had been forced to leave the colony alone for nearly two decades. Most colonists wanted little or nothing to do with the Crown, but the Crown informed them that the two regicides were wanted men. The local governor, Endecott, deliberately played for time, and by February of 1661 - communication with England being by mails sent by sea and thus necessarily very slow - the colonels decided to embarrass their hosts no longer, and moved to New Haven. Art!
New Haven was an independent polyp of a colony, with a very Republican (Deputy) Governor, William Leete, who was quite happy to receive our two wandering warriors. It was at about this time that Gov. Endecott, well aware that his two charges were long gone, made out a warrant for their arrest. He then appointed a couple of pro-Royalist busybodies to try and track the colonels down; Kellond and Kirke. They were so subtly rebuffed and inconvenienced and delayed that, even knowing where their victims were, they could not do anything about it and both men escaped.
They were then set up in a distant and remote mill, far from anyone, whilst Leete deliberately prevaricated and procrastinated. Even when Kellond, Kirke and their search party caught up with the fugitives at the house of Johanna Allerton (widow of a leading figure in the colony), she hid them in a large cupboard with a false back. Ooops. None of these proto-South Canadians seems to have liked either the King or his lickspittle lackeys, do they? And this is over a century before the <two words redacted>. Art!
Chez Allerton
By June Kellond and Kirke had given up the hunt, believing that their targets had fled to Manhattan, the Dutch colony where English law, writ or monarchy had absolutely no sway.
And there we will end the first part of this tale, for there is a lot more to come. You will notice a few pertinent themes here: a disregard for royal authority, sympathy for old Parliamentary soldiers, venal toadies out to make money, and people conspiring to help conspirators.
O that bit about the Loonwaffles? Well, the Roskosmos Lunar-25 mission has proven to be an abject failure, as it is now a pile of scrap metal on the lunar regolith. The swivel-eyed bambots who bray about the Apollo conspiracy will now include this in their legenarium of looniness, because it's all obviously part of The Grand Over-Arching Plot to Not Go To The Moon. Doubtless NASA shot Lunar-25 down because it was MERE SECONDS AWAY from proving that Neil Armstrong was a fibber, or something. Conspiracies, you see. Except the one we begin this Intro with was very, very real. Art!
Before
(That's 'Zemlya" and "Luna")After
Pop Art
NO! We're not talking about puncturing any of Yayoi's balloonwerk. Mind you, Conrad being of a morbid turn of mind, I did ask a couple of the attendants if anyone had tried it; only one person, they replied, and they'd been restrained. Having to pay £15 and join a queue will have a dampening effect upon drunken vandals. Art!
This, or these, are 'Clouds', where visitors had the opportunity to climb onto a bit of balloonatic sculpture. There were cautionary edicts in place: no jumping or bouncing, no shoes, no sharp objects. The mirror in the background was flexible, and flexed periodically, which alas! I cannot properly represent here.
No, I didn't. Conrad is not mad keen on lying on a giant cushion that's soaked up the sweat of ten thousand visitors already. Besides which, I am a big bloke. I might pop it.
Which is where we came in.
"The War Illustrated"
We are now into March 1944, with the Allies slowly slogging their way up the Italian peninsula, and the Sinisters carving out great chunks of Nazi-occupied territory, along with the Nazis doing the occupying. D-Day is less than three months away and there is a definite tension about waiting for it. Art!
This montage displays the various methods the Allies would use to get ashore in Normandy and the south of France. In the background are the big ships that have to remain well offshore to avoid grounding. At port, we have a LCF 'Landing Craft Flak', basically a floating artillery battery for air defence or fire support if the Luftwaffe are absent; below it is an LCI )'Landing Craft Infantry') which can carry a whole company of soldiers; at starboard top we have an LST ('Landing Ship Tank'), which can carry dozens of tanks and land them directly on the beach, and one of it's smaller brethren; an LCT ('Landing Craft Tank'), carrying a few tanks or other pieces of heavy equipment; an LCA ('Landing Craft Assault') that carries a platoon of soldiers to debark them directly onto the beaches. At far starboard we have a DUKW, the 2½ ton amphibious truck that was one of the sinews of Allied logistics in both Europe and the Pacific.
You might, with advantage, compare those above with what the Wehrmacht was going to carry out their amphibious invasion in 1940. Art!
"City In The Sky"
The TARDIS has arrived forty years into the future, from the beginning of the Big Crash. All is not as it ought to be ...
Yet his grandfather, amongst other VIP’s of that era, had deemed this
trio so important that they had been written into the Charter, that essential
instrument of living Upstairs. As an
adviser to the Founding Families, he knew all the details of the Little Crash,
the Big Crash, the First Materialisation, the Lunar Mine, all the minutiae of
life Upstairs. Never, not once, had he
ever imagined that those semi-mythical travellers from the past would turn up
in his present.
Yet they were here now. They had
to be dealt with, before they disturbed all the agricultural work and transport
schedules.
‘Warden nearest 22-15 Enclosure, please escort the two new arrivals to
my suite.’
To anyone who had grown up living inside Arcology One, the differences between the sphere’s interior four decades ago and the present day would have gone un-noticed. To Ace and the Doctor, courtesy of a time-jump, the differences were obvious and novel.
There were more of the boxy little villages, and their housing units now
carried extra storeys. Nor was that all;
an air of shabbiness hung over things, a sense of wear and decay. More clouds hung in the air between the far
wall, making the vista softer and less distinct than before. A panel in the transparent strip overhead had
been replaced by a single opaque sheet, which the Doctor recognised as a failed
laminate panel, probably broken by meteorite impact, where the inert filler had
turned to hermetically-sealing foam.
Hmmm I wonder why they're still in orbit?
Well Well <Thinks> Ballfoot Can Go To Hades
Apparently there's a World Cup going on in ballfoot today. Played by women, as if that makes any difference, so it's not even a proper WC. A pox on both your houses! On the other hand, perhaps there will be less traffic in the Co-Op when I venture forth to get some remaindered comestibles. Art!
A W.C.
Finally -
Better post and get gone, it looks as if the rains might arrive any minute now, and I don't want to put that pair of uncomfortable-but-traction-enabled shoes instead of my comfy deathtrap Skechers.
No comments:
Post a Comment