Alice found herself falling – down, down, down, until she landed on a soft pile of unusable PPE. Looking around, she saw that she was in a long, dark hall with doorways on both sides. Each door had a sign on it: shop, hairdresser, pub, gym, friend’s house… Alice tried them all but found them locked. ‘How am I ever to get out?’ she wondered.
Then she noticed a table on which stood a bottle with a label attached saying, ‘drink me’.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Alice. ‘But are you a viral vector potion or an mDNA potion?’ Then, seeing as she had little choice, she drank the contents anyway and tried the first door. It opened, and there on the other side was the Whitty Rabbit.
‘You could come in here,’ said the Whitty Rabbit, ‘but you really shouldn’t.’
So Alice tried the next door, and came face to face with the Whitty Rabbit again. ‘you could come in here,’ he said, ‘but you really shouldn’t.’
After the same thing had happened at every single door it all seemed so hopeless that Alice started crying, and she cried so much that she was washed away on a river of her own tears and ended up on a little island, together with an assortment of bedraggled animals. Among them was a strange Dodo Harding bird, who organised a Track and Test Race in which everybody could run wherever they liked and nobody knew who was in front and who was behind. Alice thought this was very silly, especially since it all cost £37 billion pounds.
Afterwards Alice walked on and soon she came to a shiny black door with the number 10 on it. ‘I wonder what I need to eat or drink to get in here,’ she thought.
‘Shrooms,’ said a voice, and Alice noticed a caterpillar sitting on an enormous mushroom nearby, wearing a beanie and a gilet and smoking a hookah. ‘Or weed, or hash,’ added the caterpillar. ‘Just don’t go in sober.’
‘Why not?’ asked Alice.
‘Because they’re all mad.’
‘And if I go in blitzed to the eyeballs?’ asked Alice.
The caterpillar shrugged. ‘They’ll still be mad.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ thought Alice and she went inside.
The first person she met was a Duchess with an uncomfortably sharp chin and a baby under her arm. Alice looked at the baby, and then looked again. ‘It’s turning into a pig,’ she said.
‘So it is,’ replied the Duchess. ‘That’s because it takes after its father.’
Behind the house was a garden in which a tea party was in progress. A Mad Spaffer and a Mad March Gove were sitting at a long table piled high with bundles of fifty-pound notes. Between them sat a resident of Hartlepool, fast asleep, which they were using as a cushion. “Very uncomfortable for the resident of Hartlepool,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”
‘No money! No money!’ shouted the Spaffer and the March Gove as Alice drew near.
‘But there’s plenty of money,’ said Alice indignantly.
‘It’s all for the knaves,’ the March Gove told her.
“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Spaffer.
‘You can talk,’ said Alice.
‘I can sing too,’ said the Spaffer, and he did, like this:
‘Twinkle twinkle little bug,
How we wonder who to drug.
All around the world you go,
Like arrivals at Heathrow.
Twinkle twinkle little thug,
How we wonder, how we shrug.’
‘Have you guessed the riddle yet?’ the March Gove asked Alice.
‘You didn’t set a riddle,’ she said.
‘I didn’t need to,’ he replied. ‘They all have the same answer.’
‘I give up,’ said Alice. ‘What’s the answer?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said the March Gove.
‘Nor I,’ said the Spaffer.
Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers. This is the stupidest tea party I’ve ever been to.’
So she went on and soon she came upon an identical pair of little fat MPs wearing blue rosettes. One wore a shirt embroidered TORYDUM and the other wore a shirt embroidered TORYDUMMER.
‘If you think we’re alive,’ said Torydum, ‘You ought to speak.’
Alice walked on.
Around the next bend she came to a Hancock Turtle, sitting all by itself. By now Alice despaired of having a sensible conversation with anybody but she was curious to know what the Hancock Turtle could have learned to make him such a miserable specimen, so she asked him.
‘Reeling and Writhing,’ he told her. ‘And the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’
‘If you know so much,’ said Alice, ‘Tell me how to get out of here.’
‘There’s a whole list of countries you can go to,’ the Hancock Turtle replied, ‘but you can’t go to any of them.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Alice pointed out.
‘You’re not supposed to notice,’ said the Hancock Turtle crossly.
Alice left him sulking and walked on until she reached a flower bed of white rose bushes which two gardeners were busily painting blue.
‘Why?’ asked Alice.
‘The Blue Queen,’ they whispered. ‘Otherwise she’ll have us deported.’ Alice saw the Blue Queen playing croquet on a nearby lawn, using paperweights as balls and immigrants as mallets.
‘I win by a hundred two thousand and eleventy twelve points,’ announced the Blue Queen. Then she noticed Alice and shrieked, ‘Off with her head!’
‘But I’m not doing anything wrong,’ objected Alice.
‘You’re breathing,’ said the Blue Queen.
‘So are you,’ Alice pointed out.
‘Hold your tongue!’ screeched the Blue Queen, turning purple. ‘Sentence first, verdict afterwards.’
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon Alice.
When Alice awoke she was in a police cell which was very vexing since it meant that Blunderland was not a fantasy dreamed up by a Victorian odd-ball but was entirely for real.
© C P Jenkinson 19/05/2021
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