Floods 10 (7 page)

That part won and she said – ‘You're right, let's boldly go where no housewives have gone before.'

‘This Parliament thing,' said King Nerlin. ‘Do you think we should have one?'

‘Difficult to say,' said the Chancellor, Mr Hulbert. ‘If you don't, people could accuse you of being a dictator, but if you do, it could just lead to endless arguments with lots of people wanting different things.'

‘I never took much notice of things like that when we lived in Acacia Avenue,' said Nerlin, ‘but it sounds like a lose-lose situation. Can you explain exactly what a Parliament is supposed to do?'

‘Well, umm,' said Mr Hulbert.

He thought about it for a bit, but every time he
began to speak, he stopped, thought about it some more, then said ‘umm' again. He did this at least ten times. Finally, he said that as far as he could tell, politics was what went on in Parliament and politics was a few people who thought they were more important and intelligent than everyone else, which they hardly ever were, deciding what everyone else could do, should do and had to do. Then After a while they all went away with big fat pensions and another lot of self-important idiots took over and spent the next four years doing exactly the opposite of the people they were replacing.

‘So what is the point of it?' said Nerlin.

‘I'm not sure,' said Mr Hulbert. ‘Especially here in Transylvania Waters where everyone is very clever.'

‘I see what you mean,' said Nerlin. ‘What you're saying is that humans invented politics and Parliament because most of them are very stupid and actually want to be told what to do by people who may or may not be a tiny bit cleverer than them?'

‘Exactly,' said Mr Hulbert, ‘and because they
voted for these people, they don't want to admit they chose a load of pompous, unqualified idiots to govern them, because it makes them look even more stupid for choosing them in the first place.'

‘So do humans learn politics at school?'

‘No, they don't learn anything at all, except how to make other people think they are intelligent and important.'

‘I don't see how we could do that here,' said Nerlin. ‘I mean, everyone's too clever.'

‘Still it might be a good idea if we did have a Parliament,' said Mr Hulbert. ‘After all, you do want the rest of the world to think we're a democracy.'

‘What's one of them, then?'

‘It's a sort of system where everyone pretends they are equal.'

‘No, seriously,' Nerlin laughed. ‘What is it?'

‘Honestly, it is the idea that everyone is equal.'

‘That's not possible,' said Nerlin. ‘Is it?'

‘No, of course not,' said Mr Hulbert. ‘It's just an illusion people like to believe in. It's not so much that everyone
is
equal, but the idea that everyone
has an equal opportunity in life, which is also ridiculous when you think about it.'

‘So if we have a Parliament, what are we going to do with it?' Nerlin asked.

Nerlin said he wasn't against the idea of a Parliament as such, just that it had to be properly democratic.

‘I mean, if we said that everyone who is a wizard or a witch could be a member of Parliament, that would be pretty fair,' he said. ‘Because all of us are.'

‘
I'm
not,' said Mr Hulbert. ‘Neither are my wife and children.'

‘We could easily sort that out. I could just make you honorary wizards.'

In the end it was decided that everyone who lived in Transylvania Waters could be a Member of Parliament. The building they had set aside to be the Houses of Parliament if they needed one was quite big. It had once been Transylvania Waters's leading pickled gherkin factory, but even so there was no way the whole population would ever fit inside it. This of course would be the fifteenth building that
had been used as a government building. Most of the earlier ones had ended up being turned into pickle factories, not just pickled gherkins, but pickled cabbage, pickled socks and pickled estate agents, because it is a well-known fact that witches and wizards adore pickles. The last building had been turned into TV studios when the Floods had returned to Transylvania Waters and the one before that was now a very popular public lavatory.
²⁰

So it was then decided that everyone could be a Member of Parliament once a year on their birthday. It was assumed that lots of people wouldn't bother anyway, so there probably
would
be enough room then.

‘We'll probably need to get some more chairs,' said Nerlin. ‘So could you send down to that street where all the chair makers are and get, say, fifty new chairs?'

‘Now, this is very interesting,' said Mr Hulbert.
‘If you had asked me that last week, I wouldn't have had the faintest idea where to go, but since Mordonna and my beloved Edna have begun naming everywhere, I can be there in five minutes.'

‘That is
extremely
useful,' said Nerlin. ‘Because you never know when you might suddenly need a new chair. What's the street called?'

‘
said Mr Hulbert.

‘What a lovely name.'

‘Isn't it? There's also
where they make all the sofas and
where they make all the toilet seats.'

When the fifty chairs had been delivered and set alongside the seventeen that were already there, a proclamation was sent out, which is like a sort of email without computers or any sort of internet and involved messengers running round the country shouting stuff at everyone. The proclamation invited anyone and everyone who wanted a say in
the running of Transylvania Waters to become a Member of Parliament.

Ninety-nine-point-seven per cent of the population hadn't the faintest idea what the messengers were shouting about, but then neither did the messengers.

‘I don't want to run anything,' most people said. ‘Why run when you can walk?'

‘Umm,' was what the messengers replied. ‘You're quite right.'

So a second lot of messengers was then sent out with stuff written on sheets of paper which they gave to everyone.

Ninety-nine-point-seven per cent of the population couldn't read and neither could the messengers. It wasn't that they were stupid. Far from it. They all knew what reading was, but couldn't really see the point.

‘I mean, we are a rural economy,' they said. ‘We live in perfect harmony with our surroundings and want for nothing. How would reading make things any better than they are now? Would reading make
our turnips grow bigger? I don't think so.'

Of course there was always the remaining nought-point-three per cent who had a malformed gene that made them want to learn lots of stuff, most of which usually ended up making them more miserable than everyone else.

‘But you could have a say in how our country is being run,' they said.

‘What, you mean change things?' said the ninety-nine-point-seven.

‘Exactly!'

‘Why would we want to do that? Don't forget, we are all wizards, we can change anything we want whenever we want,' said a member of the ninety-nine-point-seven, picking up a pebble and turning it into a perfectly ripe delicious golden peach.

‘Exactly,' said another, picking up a perfectly ripe delicious golden peach and turning it into a lovely pebble with an interesting iron oxide stain on it that looked exactly like Elvis Presley's basset hound, Sherlock.

‘Yes, but what about all the things that we
haven't got?' said the remaining nought-point-three per cent. ‘This country is, like, living in the Dark Ages.'

‘Only at night time.'

‘No, not that. I mean technology and the internet and solar power and mobile phones.'

‘Mobile phones? Now that's a stupid idea,' said the ninety-nine-point-seven. ‘I want my phone to stay where it's meant to be. If it was mobile, I'd never know where to look for it.'

The eyes of the remaining nought-point-three per cent began to glaze over.

‘What about connecting with the outside world?' they said. ‘Don't you want to do that? Don't you want to see what's going on out there?'

‘Have you seen out there?'

‘Well, no. There's a big enchanted firewall round our borders that means we can't get anything– no internet, no telephone, nothing.'