This masterpiece of cognitive commentary will take you on a hilarious tour of alternative philosophy. If Douglas Adams and William Blake could be morphed into one being, possibly some kind of space octopus, that would have no bearing on the quality of the writing in this book. If you like science fiction and philosophy combined with modern Irish comedy, like Philip K Dick meets Roddy Doyle, then you should give this book a go. On the other hand, if you would rather spend your evening drinking peyote smoothies and rubbing medicinal horse flu syrup on your thighs, that is equally acceptable.
Here’s a cutting which didn’t quite make it to the editor’s desk:
The De Clewe family have all but disappeared into genetic obscurity these days, although they were at one time a highly influential family in English society. Theirs is a riveting history bespeckled with an eclectic melee of famous, and infamous characters. In the eighteenth century, a one Stephen De Clewe famously became the first man to swim the North Sea from Orkney to Norway. He was swallowed by a whale shark at about the half-way point but managed to escape by hooting incessantly from inside the stomach of the fish causing the shark to believe it had accidentally ingested a trombone, therewith regurgitating De Clewe unharmed back into the water. Not long after that, De Clewe was in trouble again, this time being accosted by a team of painfully persistent narwhals, who sportingly tossed him from horn to horn for a period of about thirty seven minutes before getting bored and swimming off. He arrived into Bergen, Norway, to rapturous applause on the 4th of May 1765, where to this day a plaque honoring his feat stands unappreciated in the harbor.
Stephen De Clewe’s great, great nephew, Orbot De Clewe, hit the papers in 1860 as the infamous Chicken Rustler of Cornwall. It’s the age-old story of boy meets chicken, chicken meets doom, boy develops unhealthy obsession with chickens.
He’d had chickens as a child, seven of them. He loved them. He used to sit in the coup with them and pretend that he was a chicken. He convinced himself that he could communicate with them and that they could speak to him. It was a strange situation, but he was happy.
Then one night, tragedy befell. A fox managed to get into the chicken coup. It killed every single chicken. Orbot was the first on the scene the next morning. The carnage was absolute. The devastation was gargantuan. And the scar it left on the wounded mind of poor Orbot was indelible. He matured a strange and unhealthy compulsion to save every chicken he came across. Whenever he would espy a badly constructed coup, he would make it his mission to break in at night and ‘rescue’ all the birds. His vigilante rampage of salvation increased exponentially as he grew, sometimes saving over twenty or thirty birds per night. He would relocate them to secure coups of his own making and sigh with relief as he listened to their grateful bock-bocks in their new home. Unfortunately, he soon ran out of places to keep them, and the management of so many animals became unfeasible for just one young man, so he took to hoarding them away in ever more unusual places. When he was eventually apprehended, he was found to have secreted chickens in his attic, in the boot of his father’s car,
He terrorized the farmhouses and chicken coops of Cornwall for a period of eleven years before finally being brought to justice. When he was apprehended, he was found to have secreted away over 1,200 chickens in various unused barns and outhouses throughout the countryside. He was the last, and admittedly the first, man to be executed for chicken theft. His last words as he lay under the guillotine were bock bock bock.
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