Here are some photos I took during a trip to the Malvern Hills back in May. I would like to apologise for taking so long to sort through these photos, but I’m not going to, because there’s not really any point. After all, it’s not as if you were waiting for them all this time is it? If you were, then that would be rather strange, because it would mean that you had some kind of psychic power. The only people on this trip were me and my dad, and he doesn’t care because he was there anyway so he saw it all for real with his own eyes. 

So, if you would like to see all the photos, click the photo above. I would have also included a “click here” text link too, but I decided that this would have given you a decision to make – whether to click the text link or to click the photo. For certain nervous types, this could have been too much. I don’t want to be responsible for someone breaking down and smashing their computer to pieces because the decision of where to click is too much to cope with.

Anyway, then I thought about it, and wondered: what about the type of people who get easily bored if there’s only one thing on offer? Or what about people who hate photos, people who hate photography so much that it makes them want to punch themselves repeatedly in the face? Well, for you I am going to also include a short story. So, here goes:

A Random Short Story About Strange Animals

Many years into the future, long after humans have died out because the world’s population grew so fast that 98% of them starved to death and then the remaining 2% (56 billion people) caught a deadly disease off the rotting corpses (by the way, I’ve just realised I’ve combined future and past tense to describe a future event, but it seemed like the best way to do it because I was talking about another time period which was the past in comparison to the future time period long after it which I am about to discuss and within which the story takes place), Planet Earth was full of animals who, finding themselves on a planet surrounded by human inventions, but without any humans, started to find ways to make use of all the human inventions still lying around.

(I should win an award for the longest sentence ever written)

While all the older cows are at home discussing knitting patterns, Mary the younger cow is foolish enough to accidentally walk into the territory of some car-driving, shotgun-wielding horses. At the point that this photo was taken (by a cheeky squirrel) Mary has just realised the danger of the situation she has just walked into, and has frozen on the spot in fear. Although the stilts will make her appear taller and more threatening, they will also stop her from running away fast, making her stumble forwards awkwardly and maybe even fall over. She just hopes there are no rebel chimps around, who might suck on her udders without her permission. Bananas and milk, the guilty pleasure of naughty chimpanzees.

It was of course the giraffes who had the upper hand in this situation, being the ones who were able to steal the vast majority of the bananas from the trees, ensuring that they easily had enough banana currency to pay the chimps to sort them out with Rollerblades. However, sometimes they would be thwarted by the sheep who would hang-glide from tree to tree and steal them first. The sheep in turn could also be thwarted by the horses, who had by then mastered both shotguns and cars, and who would come out in gangs and shoot many sheep down out of the sky and bundle all the bananas into the cars and then drive off.

So as you can see, things were never straightforward. Bananas were a highly sought-after currency, because the chimps helped everyone. Sometimes a chimp would be lucky enough to get an extremely well-paid job, such as building a new barn for the cows to shelter from bad weather, or using the wool from the dead sheep shot down from the sky to make coats for any old sheep who had gone bald. This would earn the chimp enough bananas for him to eat for a good number of days, and he could then take the rest of the week off. Of course, thefts often occurred from other chimps, naughty ones who weren’t brought up properly, whose parents were probably prostitutes and/or heroin addicts.

Don't click this image.

Head of the Buddhist badgers was Mike the Badger, or to give him his full name, Michael the Badger. Or to give him his very full official title, “Oh Wonderful Michael, the Big Buddhist of Badgerland”. Some people referred to him as King Michael, but this is incorrect, as the last King of Badgerland was King Simon, whose death (by infected trousers) coincided with the abolishment of the Badger Monarchy.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The End.