So, the other day I was enjoying a cup of tea and a biscuit in front of the computer. I had just bitten into the biscuit (a nicely crunchy ginger one) when the phone rang; I put the half-eaten comestible down on the desk while I dealt with the call.
Ten minutes later, phone call finished, I looked for the biscuit. And looked. And looked. But of a half-eaten crunchy ginger snap, there was nary a crumb in view. Eventually I shrugged, went back to the computer and stopped puzzling over it. (A Bible saying came to mind: “He who has nothing will have even what he has taken away from him”. But a crunchy ginger bikkie is far from nothing! And I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wondered how you can have ‘nothing’ taken away from you. So that was the Biblical explanation dismissed on two counts.)
Anyway…..
Two hours later, I glanced down at the desk. And there was the ginger biscuit! It was the very same one I’d put down in that spot two hours before – it had a large bitemark taken out of it, in the quite distinctive shape of my gnashers. It was indubitably MY biscuit.
So, why hadn’t I seen it when I was looking for it? The obvious explanation was that as the ginger bikkie was the same colour as my desk, I’d simply missed it – my eyesight isn’t exactly the best. The obvious answer. Obviously.
But there are times that I dislike obvious answers. And this was one of those times. So, I thought about the problem… What else could have caused the biscuit to disappear for two hours, hmmm?
Doctor Who suddenly came to mind. Specifically, the first episode of the new series, the one where the Doctor’s played by that Matt thingy who looks like some thirteen year old who’s just come back from a quick smoke behind the shed. In that episode, the Doctor had disappeared in his Tardis, promising the young heroine thingy that he would return for her in just minutes; instead, owing to some miscalculation with temporal mechanics, he returned twenty years later.
And the answer to my disappearing biscuit became clear. Lying on the desk, listening to me maundering away on the phone about grandchildren and central heating installation and how it’s not been very warm lately and really, that Glenys thingy is getting on perfectly well after her op whatever she’s saying… well, that poor biscuit must have got very frustrated. It’s sole goal in life, the thing that it had been made for, was to be consumed and enjoyed. Yet, there it was, half-eaten and disregarded. At the triumphant pinnacle of its existence it had been discarded, thrown down, ignored!
So, it decided that it would and could amuse itself. And it went off time-travelling. After many years and many adventures (climbing Everest in George Mallory’s pocket, for instance; when Mallory was asked why he’d bought along a half-eaten biscuit, he grandly replied “Because it was there!” to much merriment in the tent – well, there wasn’t much else to amuse them then) it decided to come back and see if I was ready to finish eating it. However, having a chunk bitten out of it had destabilised its quantum energetic capacitors – not seriously, but enough to throw out the temporal-spacial aligning co-ordinator. And so, it arrived back two hours late. Doubtless full of wondrous stories of dinosaurs and dragons, queens and quaesters, galaxies and giants.
And I immediately picked it up and finished eating it. With very great enjoyment.