A Blink of the Screen

I’m only employed here because none of my new fellow comrade workers is big enough to push a broom.
    I would also like to make a protest that the parrot they’ve got operating the switchboard won’t let me make personal calls, and as for the flamingo on the tea trolley, well, how would
you
like your tea stirred?
    I hope this message reaches you, on account of me attaching it to the leg of one of my fellow comrade workers who’s going to see his relatives, he says they’ve got a little nest just outside your office window.
    Thanking you in anticipation, I remain,
    Yours fraternally,
    TERRY TERRYANOVICH PRATCHETT
    PS: Sorry this letter is a bit nibbled at the top, only the works manager has been out for a fly-around and you know what these budgies are like – little scamps.
    1 Author’s note: Should have said comrade, shouldn’t I?

AND MIND THE MONOLITHS

    B ATH AND W EST E VENING C HRONICLE
, 1 A PRIL 1978
    Around the time this was written an Iron Age village was being reconstructed somewhere near Farnham in Dorset; I had contacts in the area, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived. People had been brought in to this new prehistoric settlement and were filmed going through the working day of Iron Age man, but rumours began that locals nearby were going in during the hours of darkness to flog fags and (if I remember correctly) soft lavatory paper to the ancient and rather desperate inmates. In no way can I vouch for the truth of this, but there seemed to be a vogue for this sort of thing and so, for a jobbing journalist, looking outwards through the pigeons, that was enough of a spark to start a fire. Wind yourself up to a sort of English music hall humour and away, boys and girls, you go
.
    You can’t miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you’re not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV’s Beaker Folk village, and we’re next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.
    It’s not a bad life, all things considered. There’s only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television’s Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week: he said he didn’t mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day’s flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn’t have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sodding sod hut hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.
    I can’t say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith falls over.
    Still it’s not too bad. I can put a pretty good edge on a flint, even if I say it myself, and next week it’s our turn to go hunting. There’s been a bit of a stink over this hunting business ever since the Granada lot came back with a side of best beef and three chickens with their giblets in a plastic bag. I thought that was a bit odd, and I said as much to Sid.
    Mind you, Sid’s an old hand at this business. He did a year on the Sussex University Ancient Farm, then he wangled a place on the Radio Three Celtic Living Experiment, and then he did nine months being paid to reconstruct Silbury Hill. He can knock out a copper bracelet quick as a wink, can Sid, and when it comes to hunting, he just nips over to the nearest farm and pinches a cow.
    The TV types have never rumbled him; we hardly see them now, what with there being no bathrooms in the Paleolithic and the midden right outside the hut and everything – they just stay on the main road and use a long lens.
    Where I disagree with Sid, though, is over this flogging of fags to the other villages. I looked at his straw mattress the other day and it’s stuffed with Benson and Hedges, toothpaste, shampoos, and rolls of soft toilet paper. I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the thing, but Sid said trading was very important in the olden days, and anyway, he can get a quid for a roll of Andrex down at the Bronze Lake Village.
    What? Oh, that was just that lot next door again. They’ve found 27 different ways Stonehenge couldn’t possibly have been built. No, I shouldn’t go and look,