Horace awoke with a start. The snow had melted. It was cold, but it was not the snow or the cold that had woken him. A ripple of embarrassment ran through him. His spikes rattled. He recalled the opening to Charles Dickens’ novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. Although he did not have a big tail, for a while he’d been drawn to reading everything that had the word ‘tail’ or ‘tale’ in the title. It was just one of those hedgehog things, you know, searching for your identity, why am I here? The usual. He even remembered a poor joke that someone had recounted based on an old radio programme, ‘Listen with Mother’:
“Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin. I have a tale to unfold …”
“Well you can’t be sitting comfortably then!”
No, it wasn’t a stunning joke but it was better spoken than read. Anyway, we digress. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The opening was:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”
Horace felt that he had done all of that! In the past week!! After he had enjoyed himself at the IAG, he’d been to see the nice ladies in the recruitment centre. They had smiled at him and been extremely helpful in enrolling him. There had been a little hiatus regarding the fees however. What do you charge a two year old hedgehog? Should you enrol him at all or should you insist that he goes to school? But all that had been resolved by a very helpful lady named Jenny. She seemed to know everything about everything. She’d rattled off rules and codes and statistics whilst talking simultaneously to six other people without a hint of impatience. It was bewildering but it had resolved his problems and he was happy. A good start.
Even better was when he went to the clock repair class. It was at the top of the building so he had to take the lift. He couldn’t reach the buttons but he found a walking stick and waved it around a bit until he hit the right button. To an outsider it might have looked a strange sight, a small hedgehog thrashing around in the lift with a walking stick. Someone once said, ‘The ends justify the means.’ I think it was probably Machiavelli. Trotsky then said, ‘The ends determines the means’. Anyway, it worked.
Arriving on the second floor he found the door and went in. It was marvellous. It was fantastic in the true sense of the word. It was another world. There tall men and short men, fat ones and thin ones. There were men with beards and men without, men with glasses and men without. It was all men but, he recalled, not once had they talked about football. Remarkable! Refreshing.
They had all turned to look at him as he entered, but in a kindly and curious way. No-one had commented on his being a hedgehog even though you probably don’t get many in the average clock repair class.
They showed him where to sit and even piled up some books for him so that he could reach the bench. They seemed very impressed when, as he was dismantling his clock, he stored the various cogs on the prickles on his forehead. They didn’t laugh when he sneezed and the whiplash sprayed cogs all around the workshop. They had tutted sympathetically and helped him to retrieve them all, even going down on their hands and knees to look in the dark places under the benches. One of them had a sort of miner’s lamp on his forehead that was really useful for that. They had all said things like, “Ah well, these things will happen.” and other phlegmatic comments. Yes, these clock repair people were a race apart. As was the tutor! He was so knowledgeable, so self-effacing and he had a really good sense of humour. Just what Horace enjoyed.
No, these clock men in the sky really had their hands on time. They were Olympian. When he left at 9.00pm he wondered if they all actually stayed there. If he opened the door any night in the week, would they still be there managing time and ready to turn and greet him again? It was another world. Did they organise the difference between night and day? Did time speed up or slow down as they took their clocks apart and re-assembled them? Did their pendulums cut the holes in the sky that let the rain in? (What was the plural of pendulum? Perhaps that was for a later class.) No, the clock world was great. It was the Pilates where he had had problems.
(To be continued.)
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