Dear Octopus,
So.....the Mountain Goat left for Manila at the weekend. A whole year without him awaits.
It's fine, obviously. I don't care. I never liked him anyway, let alone respected him. In fact my week so far has been mostly occupied with gleefully imagining him and the Chipmunk failing to adjust to their monstrously opulent palatial residence in those far-flung, exotic climes: the Goat hotly lambasting the house boy for mishandling his nine iron while the Chipmunk admires the alien upholstery and fuses the labouring ceiling fan.....imperial overlords sweating in linen suits sipping imported Pimm's on the veranda......tennis at sunset......mosquito nets draped over candlelit beds. It's like something out of a Kipling short story.
(.....and reminds me of the days Party Squid and I spent in Borneo, traipsing the jungles along the Kiulu River then straining to hear the local band playing Careless Whisper over the chirping of an assembled militia of crickets and tree frogs out in the airless night. Rest assured that those last dying embers of colonialism are still burning, and I'm sure the Chipmunk and the Goat will fan them a little longer. Subject of course to the fan not being fused.)
All this tribulation raises a wider issue I suppose: how strange it is to be separated from those that you love. First the Cub departed for Chicago, now the Goat and Chipmunk to Manila. Even Party and Inky Squids are away roaming those long-forgotten fields of the West Country (wheat) or Caribbean (cane sugar). Everyone I've ever known is seemingly intent on relocating to the most distant corners of creation, to speculate digitally on the collapsing flan of my London-based existence and garner a healthy tan.
It makes me wonder who will be left in a year-or-two's time.
The Bear will probably be kite-surfing back in Antigua. The Toad dead (cause: 'by misadventure'). The Dragon disappeared a while ago. Clare will have returned to Australia, pursued by a chain of toxic debt and the violent 'good riddance' of Interpol / Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. Honksy and Fobbs elsewhere. And of course you're long gone. The only remnants of the Summer Of Love will just be Pongo and I.....freezing our knackers off in some sooty Dickensian bedsit, eating dry-packed noodles and watching Karate Kid Part III for the 856,000th time. A grim future.
If you speak to the Goat before I do, tell him I hope they're settling in to the new world, and that everything is making sense. Tell him that despite my constant denials he knows he's my best pal, and I'm looking forward to hearing soon how it's (really) going. Things aren't so dim or dire as these grey letters allude to - obviously - so conclude with the safe and inviolable truth that there is no cause for concern from our nation's capital.
Tell him I miss him, if you must.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
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