Thanks to Martha i quickly made up for lost reading time in my infancy. i was soon reading prodigiously, devouring book after book. And so i came to dwell in the Kingdom of the Imagination, wherein Josef A fears to tread.
Martha’s yurt is a glorious book cluttered mess as i discovered upon being invited to step inside ‘à la Mr Benn.’ Not understanding what she meant, i’d stood frozen at the yurt’s entrance.
– Just come in.
i did and then learned about Mr Benn, the animated television series broadcast in, as she put it, the ‘Stone Age days of her childhood.’ (She has a nice line in self-deprecation.) As i had only the vaguest idea of what a television was, Martha elucidated…
– Like an immobile two dimensional e-hologram.
Her book crammed yurt she likened to the fancy-dress costume shop that Mr Benn would visit. She saw herself – extending the analogy- as the moustached and fez-wearing shopkeeper who helped Mr Benn to try on new outfits.
Instead of entering new worlds via the magic door at the back of the changing room, a reader in her yurt gained access to them by simply opening a book. A gold plated guarantee of adventure.
In her yurt i am at ease. Reading here is joyously uncontaminated by other activities. The rules are nice and simple. There must be silence and you may stay for as long as a book nestles in your hands.
Arabian Nights’ library
Martha’s library is vast with sufficient books # to satisfy the literary desires of one thousand and one readers for one thousand and one nights. Most apposite then that the yurt’s guardian spirit is Scheherazade.
Martha, curled up on comfy mauve cushions, reads with a cool avidity in the soft spluttering light of butter, disengaged from the claims of the outside world and her inscrutable illness.
Only butter fed lamps will do for Martha who, along with Calculus, has permanently rejected Koockie’s Moroccan lanterns, whose design is fundamentally flawed. (More combustible than anticipated.)
Burning catastrophe narrowly averted
Three and half years ago Koockie returned from Marrakesh with a job lot of paper lanterns – presents for his fellow Kommunards.
In Calculus’ yurt a lantern caught alight. Fortunately Calculus happened to be on hand to snuff out the flames, averting a full on conflagration. Koockie has spares but Calculus never had the lantern replaced with another, sticking to bee’s wax despite its low inconsistent flame. Koockie was displeased but Calculus reasoned that hurting his feelings was preferable to putting the Kommune’s life and property at risk.
It was from a previous expedition to North Africa that Koockie had returned with a couple of camels, laden with heavy rugs (intricately woven with geometric patterns). The arduous journey from Tangiers to Sauvette especially took its toll on Gerald, the less stolid of the beasts. Three days after arriving at Sauvette he collapsed and died.
We had not had the time to adopt Gerald as a pet ##, so he was eaten.
Camel meat, promptly curried, is musky and flavoursome. There was disappointment however among some of us that, given the meal’s principal ingredient, Koockie had not served up a tagine.
i don’t think Germaine will meet a similar fate. Of all the animals, she is held in most affection. Last full moon i had this nightmare… of finding myself using her skin as parchment for my manifesto.
## Officially there are no commune pets. Working animals only.