For all fans of LOTR, I bring an interactive version of a new book, called ‘The Master of the Medallions’. Please feel free to chip in with a paragraph or two of your own. In this introductory chapter, the main characters will be introduced, after a brief synopsis of the story so far.
*Mildew Muggins, a Bobbitt, a race of agricultural half-men that were once full-men until their forefathers had a nasty accident with a pair of garden shears that has left all males with dodgy plumbing and falsetto voices, has returned from a long and rather uninteresting journey. Since his return, he has been boring the pants off his mates, many of whom have been attempting to sign up with Cable so that they don’t have to listen to any more of his traveller’s tales. Things were made worse by dint of the fact that, despite his avowed love of the simple life, Mildew took both his camcorder and his digital camera along with him, and invested in a laptop and a projector when he got home.
His nephew, Pladou son of Dayglo, has in the meantime been approached by an old man with a beard, by the name of Gladrap the Pain, to undertake a journey of his own. Thinking ‘anything to get away from my uncle, his stories and the risk of cancer to which his incessant smoking exposes me’, Pladou thinks to himself ‘What the heck!’ His mission is to wear a particularly nasty 1970s medallion around his neck, while sporting a shirt with a wide lapel unbuttoned nearly to the navel. He has been told that many has-beens will try to wrest his medallion from him, but that under no circumstances must he part with it until he returns it to its rightful owner, Jones the Crooner, who lives in a dark place inhabited by dwarfs who sing continuously and off key. He must cross the Black Mountain and push the medallion through the letter-box of No. 16, Station Parade, Port Talbot, Mid-Glamorgan, South Wales, Cymru.*
The Master of the Medallions
Pladou son of Dayglo pondered his mission with a heavy heart. He had many things still left unfinished in his cottage, not least his online fantasy football competition, where he was having his best year ever, currently lying 17, 584th out of two and a half million players. One of his teams was even up for Manager of the Month, and now, on the 25th of the month he was being asked to drop it all and make a journey westwards such as no man has made since the roadworks began on the M4.
He took counsel with his own soul, having managed to rid himself of the self-styled guru Gladrap after pointing to the No Smoking signs that he had plastered liberally around his lounge and newly-added conservatory. He’d need companions for his journey. None could he think of who would fit his purpose better than the other three with whom he’d used to have such fun dipping girls’ hair in inkwells and occasionally chopping it off. He understood that Minty and Pepe might need a little persuasion (but not that much, when he considered the benefits of having a brother who worked for the police and wasn’t averse to revealing records), but as for his general factotum and five-time winner of the Village Idiot Award, Ben Gungee, he had no such worries. Ben would follow Pladou to the ends of the earth, such a dolt he was. Reflecting on matters seriously for a moment, Pladou wondered if he could get Ben to go to Wales without a bit of lying or blackmail, and decided probably not. ‘Never mind’, he thought, ‘I’ll tell him it’s either that or endless days cooped up along with Mildew’s audiobook on endless loop.’
With a final glance back at his cottage to make sure that the security system had been activated properly (it was – he could see the red light flashing), Pladou set off on his journey with his three companions. Little did they know of the perils that awaited them on the road, not the least of which would turn out to be the difficulty Pladou would have in filling out the diary he’d been contracted to keep by HarperCollins without endless repetition along the lines of ‘Yesterday we walked north; today we’re going east’, and ‘bacon and eggs for breakfast again today – actually Ben had it again at lunch and dinner as “all-day breakfast”’. It seemed an impossible task without giving the botanical name of every tree they passed, describing the phases of the moon, and inventing new words like ‘westering’ and ‘eastering’.
With that weighing heavy on his heart, alongside the even weightier matter of whom he would insist on to play him in the film version, Pladou set off for the house of that intolerably cheerful old bore (the place seemed full of them, the more he thought about it) who would never stop singing and dancing, Ron Bumperdild. At least, he thought to himself with a grin, as he adjusted his medallion so that the shiny bit was facing outwards, an evening or two with Ron would be good preparation for the final series of tests that awaited him in the Dark Country. For Gladrap, with customary over-estimation of his own sense of humour, had aranged that the culmination of the Bobbitt’s trip should coincide with Eisteddfod season. What was that song Bobbitts had sung from time immemorial? A few lines came back to Pladou, and he began softly to sing them as he cut through a farmer’s field, ignoring the ‘Private Property: this is not a f**king footpath’ sign:
They sing far too often,
Too loud,
And flat