8.4: Masongill returns

It is three days later when Masongill returns, during the breakfast hour, which is always officially between 8am and 9am but tends to 8am, and even earlier, in summer, and closer to 9am in winter.

He looks somehow different. 

Lottie remarks on this but finds it hard to put her flipper on it. “Do you think there’s anything different about him?” 

pTravis: “When I was a hatchling, I didn't even realise that Michael Barrett and Frank Bough took it in turns to present Nationwide, a news magazine programme on BBC television. I didn’t realise there were two of them. I assumed there was just one, vague looking, bloke. Even though one had a luxurious bouffant and the other a pathetic 1970s comb-over!”

“I think there is something optically different about him though.” 

“Ah, well if it’s that. it may be worth bearing in mind that you are some sort of fish-lizard thing and I’m a reptile of a species that went extinct millennia ago. Long before ‘they’ invented colour vision or television.” 

“All the same, don’t we know that we wear the yellow scarves of the Order of the Sponge and their yellow sponge insignia. Do you think that that counts as yellow? It is both similar and quite, quite different.” She points at Masongill.

“I can honestly say that I have never seen that precise shade before in my entire life. It’s like that story by HP Lovecraft when a new colour appears down a well and they all go mad and die.” 

“Shouldn’t that be a ‘they’ too? All the same, I hope that that’s not going to happen to us.” 

“Die? Almost certainly. But perhaps not because of ’Gillo’s scarf and sponge.” 

With that they decide to cross the breakfast hall and ask their friend the questions we, too, would probably ask.