Day 1 Today, Norman and I spent a few hours regurgitating pear slices. It was neither entertaining, pleasant nor educational, so I won’t dwell on the details. Tired of conventional orienteering, I decided to use an old Salopian navigational technique to find the nearest airport. Essentially, it’s based on reverse psychology, and the assumption that we really do know a lot more than we are telling ourselves. You decide what it is you want to find, and then go out of your way not to find it. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and it’s far too complicated to explain fully here. I mastered the technique during my in-depth training as a consumables and procurement clerk and it really is the most effective way to resolve an untenable situation. So I was able to find the airport, book myself on a flight and find a suitable home for Norman before the sun had slipped from view.
 | | No more hard work for Norman |
Norman is to live out the rest of his days under the assumed name “Spurios” at a petting zoo near the airport. The owners assure me he will enjoy the finest in equine accommodation and constant love and attention from needy children. The zoo did tell me that Norman’s hind legs are quite unusually weak for an animal of his age and he shouldn’t be used as a pack animal anymore, so it seems I retired him just in the nick of time. Those long days of me telling him all about Shropshire really must have worn him out more than I realised. I looked into those loyal, knowledgeable eyes one final time and said a brief but poignant goodbye to my travelling companion, confidant and compadre. Pausing only to wipe the donkey vomit from his cheek before kissing him. It was a moving and beautiful moment I shall treasure forever. Day 2 I spent flight 709C to New Jersey sandwiched between two very large men. If they had both inhaled at exactly the same time I would have been catapulted forwards from my seat, squeezed out like an egg from a chicken with dietary issues. I did briefly engage the man on my left in conversation, trying to tell him about Milo and how he was my new arch nemesis and how important it was that I vindicated myself by confronting him and convincing him that Shropshire is what he really should be obsessed with, but the man started reading his in-flight magazine, a sure fire indicator of extreme disinterest. I’m beginning to realise that some people just don’t want Shropshire, they don’t want to soar like unfettered kites above the mundane world, dipping around the clouds and reaching for the upper atmosphere. Rather, they would prefer to get their strings caught in a small tree and wait for someone to come with scissors. It’s like trying to fit an EP573-5 fax toner cartridge into an EP575-T fax machine. No matter how much you might want it to gratefully slip into place, sometimes it just isn’t meant to be. Day 3 I’m being detained at Newark International Airport. Apparently a tip-off was received that a man fitting my description would be bringing nerve agents into the country, so the FBI are chemically analysing my gingerbread. This is either another attempt by Milo to thwart my attempts to reach him, or the FBI are using the current high state of alert to find out the secret ingredient in Market Drayton gingerbread. So, either way, it’s a situation with potentially serious repercussions. Mother rang. Among the general chitchat and gossip she had some terrible, terrible news from home about Richard Whiteley OBE, presenter of Countdown and raconteur extraordinaire. He has faced the final countdown and met his last consonant two vowels and two consonantsĚý - 'death'. I am genuinely quite disturbed by this news. The world is suddenly an emptier, more monochrome place, less tolerant of colourful ties and pointless wordplay. There was a time in my life when a straw effigy of Richard Whitely was my best and only friend. I’ve seen every episode of Countdown since Channel 4 started, so I feel like I’ve lost a close and dear friend, albeit a close and dear friend I’ve never met. ĚýI’ve written and offered my services as the new presenter of Countdown, pointing out my many qualifications - my dextrous wordplay skills and my eagerness to flirt with Carol Vorderman, adding a disclaimer that I can only accept the job once I have completed my sacred mission and the globe is living in harmony like one big Moreton Say. I’m hoping Channel Four will see this as a reflection of the commitment I show to tasks I undertake and hold the position for me... maybe give it to someone like temporarily while they wait for me to become available. Day 4 The FBI released me without charge. They didn’t return my gingerbread though. It seems, as I continue my Salopian Odyssey, that time for me passes more slowly. When I get news from home, so much seems to have happened there - little Felicity is growing up so fast; Mother is recovering so quickly; Sideways Ada from Market Drayton has had her bladder stretched again; the hybrid wheat crops have swallowed over another village; another meteor has landed in Marchamley Wood and the bigamous Farmer Robert has been arrested for not paying his television licence since 1978. It’s almost like several weeks pass in Shropshire for every week I live through. Maybe it has something to do with my constant travelling. Didn’t someone do an experiment once with atomic clocks and planes, to prove that time is relative to movement? They put an atomic clock on a plane, and set it to the same time as another atomic clock on the ground. Then the plane flew around for a bit and when it landed, the clocks showed different times. I feel like that second clock, out of synch with the world. My local vicar tried a similar, more ambitious, but cheaper experiment with the Moreton Say church clock. He set up an atomic clock in the church tower, and synchronised it with an atomic clock that he then posted surface mail to an obsolete address in Australia. This was in August, 1987. When the parcel eventually returns “Address Unknown” he intends to see if the clock that has circumnavigated the globe proves the inextricable relationship between the four dimensions and differs from the church clock. The problem is, while the vicar was setting the mechanisms on both atomic clocks, he was distracted by a rutting badger and made some calibration errors. If the church clock is now corrected, it will ruin the experiment. So in the interests of understanding space-time, the Moreton Say church clock been reliably wrong for the past 18 years. The vicar, tired of explaining about the circumstances, now blames rusty clockwork or bird droppings on the minute hand, but we know the truth.Ěý I’m on a greyhound bus, heading straight for Slatington. I can pause no longer. I am not afraid of whatever the fast bowler of fate might hurl at me, but as a precaution, I intend to conceal my identity by wearing atypical clothing. I have bought a hoody from a local store, some oversized trousers and a skateboard. I intend to blend with the skater boys, hang with the homeys and pass myself off an unruly teenager while I do some reconnaissance. Day 5 I’m in Slatington, New Jersey. Slatington is actually quite nice. It’s clean, the people seem polite, and I found a nice cafĂ© that serves adequate tea and homemade scones. I noticed quite a few of the people, like me, are wearing black armbands. I naturally presumed this was because of Richard Whiteley's recent demise, but when I mention to people that Countdown just won’t be the same, they seem confused. I must investigate this further. I’ve rented a room near the centre of town, and I spent today hanging around on a bandstand with my fellow skateboarders, pulling ollies, grabbing air and checking out the delmontes. Oddly, none of the youngsters here have heard of Milo. I imagined he would be well-known, in much the same way I am spoken of in frequent but hushed tones in cafes in and around Shropshire. In between skating handrails and gnarly gaps today, I was speaking with a fellow rider of the board called Kevin, who reminded me of an overweight Brad Dourif. He refers to himself as “Heavy Kevvy” and spends two days a week hanging around the local bandstand with his board and his homeboys, not letting the fact that he’s actually a 43 year old investment banker deter him. Kevvy told me some interesting things about Slatington. Apparently there have been a lot of new people move into the area recently, mostly on a new real estate development on the outskirts of town called “Windy Harbour”. The development isn’t anywhere near a harbour, and isn’t particularly breezy either. I’m not treating this in itself as suspicious, there’s an estate in Telford called “Timber Valley”, it’s on the top of a hill and made of reinforced concrete. Day 6 The house I’m staying in is quite lovely - it has two bedrooms and seven bathrooms. Apparently the owner, a lovely widow called Ruth (who reminds me of an elderly and confused Clive James), had quite a large family, three boys and three girls. As each child grew up, instead of moving out, they, like so many young adults nowadays, stayed at home, enjoying the benefits of the special combination of low rent and a reliable maid service that only parents provide. This interfered with Ruth and her husband’s plans to set up a free-range ostrich farm in Utah. When one of the sons went on holiday, they converted his bedroom into a bathroom, forcing him to find alternate accommodation. This was so successful they tried it again when one of the girls had a week's training course in the city, and again when another offspring had a holiday in Mexico. By the time they were onto their seventh bathroom, all the children had got the message and moved on. Unfortunately her husband had a massive heart attack and died while plumbing in his sixth successive bidet, and Ruth has found a seven-bathroom house nearly impossible to sell in today’s market. She never realised her dream of ostriches and Utah, and now rents out the “only triple en-suite room in America”. Day 7 Had quite a nasty fall from my skateboard so I spent today resting. I also had eleven baths and a shower. Tomorrow I’m going to Windy Harbour. | 
