The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [606]
31. Spending the Surplus
32. The Austen Rover Roving
33. Somewhere Else Entirely
34. Rescue/Capture
35. The Bees, the Bees
36. Senator Jobsworth
37. The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco
38. The End of Time
39. A Woman Named Thursday Next
Author’s Note
This book has been bundled with Special Features,
including The Making of… wordamentary, deleted scenes,
alternative endings and much more.
To access all these free bonus features, log on to
www.jasperfforde.com/features.html and follow the
on-screen instructions.
The year is 2002. It is fourteen years since Thursday
almost pegged out at the 1988 Croquet SuperHoop, and
life is beginning to get back to normal….
First
Among
Sequels
1.
Breakfast
The Swindon that I knew in 2002 had a lot going for it. A busy financial center coupled with excellent infrastructure and surrounded by green and peaceful countryside had made the city about as popular a place as you might find anywhere in the nation. We had our own forty-thousand-seat croquet stadium, the recently finished Cathedral of St. Zvlkx, a concert hall, two local TV networks and the only radio station in En gland dedicated solely to mariachi music. Our central position in southern En gland also made us the hub for high-speed overland travel from the newly appointed Clary-LaMarr Travelport. It was little wonder that we called Swindon “the Jewel on the M4.”
The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.
“How could they let it get this bad?” asked Landen as he walked into the kitchen, having just dispatched our daughters off to school. They walked themselves, naturally; Tuesday was twelve and took great pride in looking after Jenny, who was now ten.
“Sorry?” I said, my mind full of other matters, foremost among them the worrying possibility that Pickwick’s plumage might never grow back, and that she would have to spend the rest of her life looking like a supermarket oven-ready chicken.
“The stupidity surplus,” repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table, “I’m all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later—even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots.”
“There are a lot of idiots in this country,” I replied absently, “and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”
But he was right. Unlike previous governments that had skillfully managed to eke out our collective stupidity all year round, the current administration had decided to store it all up and then blow it on something unbelievably dopey, arguing that one major balls-up every ten years or so was less damaging than a weekly helping of mild political asininity. The problem was, the surplus had reached absurdly high levels, where it had even surpassed the “monumentally dumb” mark. Only a blunder of staggering proportions would remove the surplus, and the nature of this mind-numbing act of idiocy was a matter of considerable media speculation.
“It says here,” he said, getting into full rant mode by adjusting his glasses and tapping at the newspaper with his index finger, “that even the government is having to admit that the stupidity surplus is a far, far bigger problem than they had first imagined.”
I held the striped dodo cozy I was knitting for Pickwick