The whole lustrous shell was picked out by a palisade of blisterweed, the lacy umbels of which trimmed the entire shoreline.Ĭarl remembered how this ground had been in buddout, each rip mounded with a mixture of moto dung, seaweed, birdshit and roof straw. The waters intensified the beetle island's myriad greens: its golden wheatie crop, its purple, blue and mauve flowering buddy spike, its yellowy banks of pricklebush and its feathery stands of fireweed. Wot if Eye woz up vair, Carl thought, up vair lyke ve Flyin I? He put himself in this lofty perspective and saw Ham, floating like a water beetle, thrusting out angled legs of grey stone deep into the placid waters of its ultramarine lagoon. The sea mist had retreated offshore, where it hovered, a white-grey bank merging with the blue screen above. As he gained height and looked back over his shoulder, Carl saw first the homely notch of Manna Bä, then the shrub-choked slopes of the Gayt rising up beyond it. Although it was still early in the first tariff, the foglamp had already bored through the cloud and boiled the dew off the island. Arpee-English With Some Alternative Mokni OrthographiesĬarl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor.14. Getting Out from Behind the Wheel: February 2003.

Five hundred years later, the 'Book of Dave 'is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet. Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Fearing his son will never know his father, Dave pens a gripping text-part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of 'the Knowledge' learned by all London cab drivers. When cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife of five years deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, he is thrown into a tailspin of doubt and discontent.

Greylegs the silent age of conan