“My lord Aragorn!”
“Ah, Gandalf, my trusted counsellor.”
“Remember that mini budget the other week? The one announced by your chancellor?”
“Oh yes, Wormtongue.”
“You know he asked you to stop calling him that.”
“Well, what about it?”
“The market’s crashed.”
“What market? We’re a pseudo-medieval economy: we haven’t invented capitalism yet.”
“The flea market above the Queen Beruthiel Home for Superannuated Cats. The floor gave way.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“Well, my lord, you’ve heard of a ‘dead cat bounce’..?”
Hardy fuchsia“Miaowch. All right, what are our options?”
“My lord, we can either put up taxes or cut public services.”
“But we can’t touch any more taxes! I mean, we had to u-turn about removing the 45-groat top rate of tax on dragons’ hordes.”
“You mean the gilt intervention? It was a dumb idea anyway.”
“Well it’s better than your ‘Let’s send hobbits up chimneys to clean them to get around the child labour laws’ plan. All right. How about cutting the public sector?”
“The only thing left still in state ownership is the orc resettlement programme.”
“The who of the what now?”
“Orcs, my lord, the ones who survived the war.”
(Frowning) “But I thought they all fell into that big pit thingy.”
“Not all of them, my lord. I mean, there must have been many thousands of them.”
“But Mordor’s just fire and ashes and stuff.”
“Only some of it. After all, on the map it’s about the size of Australia.”
“Australia, eh? Though that does rather support my fire and ashes theory.”
“Never mind about Australia. We haven’t even discovered it yet.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. We keep sending boatloads of elves over the horizon, but none of the little blighters ever come back. Not even so much as a saucy postcard.”
“I keep telling you, they’ve gone to the land from which no traveller returns.”
“So… not Australia then?”
“Galadriel on a bike! Look, we’ve got a whole country of orcs to find jobs for.”
“But where do they all come from?”
(Sighs patiently) “I’d have thought Arwen might have… I mean, surely by now the two of you must have… Look, it’s like this. When a mummy orc and a daddy orc love each other very much, they—“
“No, hang on, that’s not right. I thought orcs were just corrupted elves.”
“Seriously? I mean, all the elves we know just drape themselves over the furniture and sing sad songs about twilight. If you corrupted them you wouldn’t get orcs, you’d get a sort of fey Black Sabbath.”
(Gloomily) “Oh, well, that’s out then. And we’re getting hammered in the polls.”
“I know, Sauron and his ‘Nazgûl Are People Too’ Party.”
“Yes, I’ve got a MMGA hat.”
“Mummaga?”
“Make Mordor Great Again.”
Wick riverside“Tell you what, my lord, we could always put a tax on pipeweed.”
“That’s true. Everyone smokes in Middle Earth, even dragons.”
“There we go. Though I sometimes wonder if there’s any connection with our life expectancy of about 25 years and our booming cough sweets industry.”
“Probably just a coincidence. Was there anything else?”
“Just one thing. Someone called Gollum keeps phoning, leaving voice messages asking you to give him a ring…”
mmph.
Lovely gansey. Hobbit-sized, is it?
I like that shade of green.
Thanks Tamar, no, it’s for a grown-up 😀! Sometimes I wish I knit ganseys for hobbits, though, id get through them a lot faster…
Wha-a-a-t ? !!! Another beautiful gansey, Gordon.
Yeah, I know, sorry Julie. I’m like Bob Dylan when he was writing so many songs back in the 60s he gave most of them away to other artists to record. (Or maybe it’s getting out of hand and I should seriously consider getting a life…)
That bit in Archie & Mehitabel where he’s eaten his way through several volumes of Kipling & is, as they say, off on one .. 🤔😁
Hi Deb, you know that bit at the end of Back to the Future, at the school prom, when he’s fixed the future and segues from playing Johnny B Goode into Jimi Hendrix, and everyone is just staring at him open-mouthed… Yeah. Like that.