There was a little girl who lived in a big house, with loving parents, attentive servants and all the toys she could desire. Her bedroom was painted sky blue with puffy white clouds on the ceiling and walls. Some people thought she may be the luckiest little girl in all the world. She even had a dog.
Luck was, as a matter of fact, the only thing she never caught. Every morning she woke up under the weather. Not the picture postcard weather of her walls but poor health and illness.
“Nanny,” she would yell.
“Yes ma lady?” Nanny would reply.
“I don’t feel well,” she would answer.
And she didn’t. She wasn’t faking, she was sick. Always. Everyday. Poorly. Off-colour. Infected or ailed.
“Ma lady has a cold today master,” Nanny would tell the Man of the House.
“Ma lady is suffering tuberculosis,” Nanny informed the household.
So it went.
It got to be that the staff made light of it. What else could they do in the face of such a bleak milieu. On the rare occasions they were unwell, they would send word. “I won’t be in, I’m laid up in bed with a malady today.”
Instalment Seventeen
Floating out in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, is an island. An island of trash, caused by the convergence of currents and wind. And humans. Constantly growing as evermore of our litter is added to its shores. It is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, though once, some time ago, two hermits called it home.
They had not always been hermits. At one time they had been friends. But living in a garbage pile can test even the closest of friendships. Brawling for the few organic scraps amongst plastic detritus. It was easier to go their separate ways than fight each other. It was easy to give up on humans when roving across the floating wreckage of life. They had been sailors once, these two hermits. On a stormy night, one fell into the grey and angry boiling sea. Drawing straws, the captain sent the loser after the lost man. So together they floated, adrift in the currents, until, much like our rubbish, they came to the island. The missing men and the discarded, unwanted debris of modern life. Till the end of their days they roamed the refuse, the two hermits, Flotsam and Jetsam.
They had not always been hermits. At one time they had been friends. But living in a garbage pile can test even the closest of friendships. Brawling for the few organic scraps amongst plastic detritus. It was easier to go their separate ways than fight each other. It was easy to give up on humans when roving across the floating wreckage of life. They had been sailors once, these two hermits. On a stormy night, one fell into the grey and angry boiling sea. Drawing straws, the captain sent the loser after the lost man. So together they floated, adrift in the currents, until, much like our rubbish, they came to the island. The missing men and the discarded, unwanted debris of modern life. Till the end of their days they roamed the refuse, the two hermits, Flotsam and Jetsam.
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