The Toymaster's Castle

Chapter Twenty-Three - 'What If' Planning

As I served up breakfast... 'big cauldrons for cooking up huge loads of porridge'... and we ate... 'crockery and cutlery for twenty people... plus breakages'... we carried on doing our 'what if' planning... talking about all the extra stuff you'd need if you were stuck on the island for six months with a dozen other people.

Then we got dressed, ready to head out for a stroll around the island... 'heaps of spare clothes... and loads of sewing stuff for mending them... and because these are basically army type people, we should probably get the spare clothes from the army surplus shop...'

As usual, we went up to the north along the west coast... it just seemed automatic. Maybe it was just a habit... or maybe it made sense to get the trickiest walking out of the way whilst we were still fresh.

I was making my way up a steep, scrambly type climb when I found myself face to face with one of the local resident sheep. It looked at me stupidly for a bit until I said "Shoo!" at which point it wandered off.

By the time Daniel appeared, something had occurred to me. "Are we being stupid here?" I asked. "You can eat sheep, can't you? And there are millions of them roaming around here."

He looked at me for a few seconds then said, "Yes, you can... and we're surrounded by the sea here too. We should probably give some thought to catching fish!"

"So a couple of books on DIY butchery... and fishing might not go amiss."

"In fact, books on almost everything would come in handy. If the worst really does happen, I can't imagine there's going to be an awful lot on television."

I thought a bit more then went on, "Maybe we should even think about growing stuff too... I mean... after six months of living off those long-term stores, I suspect we'd be quite happy to have something fresh to eat."

And, through the rest of the day, we carried on playing the game of 'What If'...

Over lunch... 'some way of making bread'... I asked Daniel whether he had a detailed list of the food he had down in the cellar. It was a fair bet that I was going to end up doing all the cooking so I thought I ought to know what was there. When he reached for his phone, I gave him a frown and I carried on frowning at him until he worked out what I was going on about.

"You don't think I should be relying on my phone?" he said.

"If things do go as badly wrong as you think, how long is it going to keep working?" I answered. "I strongly suspect that your spreadsheet app is dependent on the net."

He looked me in the eye and nodded. "Thank you," he said simply. "You're right."

That was pretty surprising. I couldn't remember him ever having admitted to being wrong in the past... in fact, I couldn't really remember him ever being wrong about anything before!

So, after lunch, we went down into the cellar and I started looking through what he had bought. It consisted almost entirely of tins of 'long term storage' food - millions of them.

"What does this stuff taste like?" I asked him.

"I don't know. I've never tried it. I just ordered it from a catalogue. They guarantee that it remains nutritionally well balanced for years."

I looked at him in shock. "For someone as clever as you, that's quite spectacularly stupid!" I told him.

He, in turn, looked at me in shock. "Upstairs... bedroom... now..." he told me. "Clothes off... assume your primary punishment position..."

"Yes, Master," I replied obediently. But I couldn't resist adding, "But please would you carry these upstairs for me." I handed him a couple of the tins - one of texturised soy protein and one of freeze-dried vegetables. I could tell he was nothing like as cross as he was pretending to be.