Hi. Welcome back to Altopia
Last summer Mrs Altopia and I took a trip to Glastonbury, which surely has to be one of the strangest towns in England. Most of the shops are dedicated to selling candles, incense sticks, statues of Buddha, crystal balls, packs of tarot cards and in fact everything that falls within the category of esoteric. The place is filled to the brim with aging hippies, whose personal needs are also catered for in the emporiums up and down the steep high street – I saw more colourful kaftans there than in Carnaby Street in the 1960’s.
It was very entertaining but we hadn’t driven all the way to Somerset to take in the local populace. I had been booked to speak at a Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit, of the sort that takes place regularly in Glastonbury. As we were going there anyway we decided to fill the car with copies of my books and take a stall at the indoor market attached to the festival. I was talking on both days so it would give us something to do in-between and maybe swell the family exchequer at the same time.
Upon arriving we were directed downstairs into the bowels of the ancient building, to a large, bleak, stone tomb of a place, which we were soon told had once been the condemned cell for Glastonbury’s 18th century miscreants. This immediately cheered me up no end. There we set up shop and since business was slack whilst talks were going on upstairs, we had plenty of time to look around and to get to know our fellow stallholders.
Mrs A was much taken with the stall immediately to the side of ours. In addition to many colourful books it carried what looked like hundreds of tiny, polished stone paperweights, each of which carried the incised design of an animal of some sort. The lady running the stall explained that she dealt in ‘animal guides’. She assured us that we all possess an animal guide and that if we were to carry a representation of whatever our animal was, it would be sure to bring us good fortune.
One has to be open-minded at this sort of gathering, and particularly so in the case of a man such as me who has spent half a lifetime moving about from one universe to another, so I tried to hide my natural scepticism. Mrs A meanwhile was intrigued. After a brief consultation it was decided that my animal guide was an otter, whilst hers was a turtle. Thanks to the salesmanship of our new friend, in no time we each had a tiny stone paperweight depicting our animal, and about a dozen books to tell us what to do with our new found friends. I haven’t been very good to my animal guide – in fact I’m not at all sure where he is. Mrs Altopia's attitude was very different and she started to take Myrtle the Turtle (as she soon came to be called by me) everywhere with her.
The whole point of this story is to explain the weird set of circumstances that has prevailed ever since Myrtle the Turtle came into Mr's A's life. As they are naturally aquatic creatures, and since we are land dwellers, human beings don’t tend to see turtles all that much. However, I did casually scan through one of the books we had bought and apparently having an animal guide, and concentrating on it, means that other representations of the same animal will crop up all over the place – just to let you know that your guide is working on your behalf. Clearly this didn’t work in the case of my otter, because I don’t think I’ve seen another example from our time in Glastonbury until now. Mrs A, on the other hand, has been positively deluged with turtles.
Hardly a day has gone by during the last five months without us seeing a turtle in a shop window, in a magazine, on an advertising hoarding or somewhere totally incongruous. We even saw turtles in the form of bars of soap whilst out shopping. This has caused Mrs A to gloat somewhat – though I countered her naturally believing attitude by pointing out that once one’s attention has been forced in a particular direction, one is bound to notice specific things more than one would have done before. “Fine,” she said, “So where are all the otters?” I changed the subject rapidly and announced that I was going for a bath.
I maintained my sceptical stance, even when the other day Mrs A came home from school and told me that during a lesson in ‘signing’ for the special needs children who can’t speak, she had been specifically taught how to sign ‘turtle’. I freely admit that I might have overegged the pudding of my doubts during the early part of that particular evening, to the point where Mrs A became somewhat prickly about the situation and told me that I could doubt all I wanted, but she was certain that new incidents of ‘turtle appearance’ would soon be forthcoming to end my unfortunate attitude regarding Myrtle.
Later in the evening we finally sat down to watch a little television. In our present universe there is a documentary series on the BBC at the moment about the Great Barrier Reef, which we both enjoy and on this occasion it was dealing specifically with creatures inhabiting particular islands along the reef. The program centred on one specific, tiny island off Queensland, a place positively teaming with birdlife, to the extent that the unfortunate creatures look more like sardines than birds. But as far as the island is concerned even this is not enough, because for a month each year, there is another sort of visitor – this time one that arrives not from the sky but from the ocean.
I had a shrewd suspicion what was coming, and so did Mrs A because she shot me a sly smile, of the sort which says in her inimitable style “And that’s what you get for being a know-it-all smart bottom.” I didn’t have long to wait because up the beach they came. There were turtles in the waves, turtles on the sand, turtles all over the rocks and turtles in the dunes. Meanwhile the narrator droned on about the fact that this particular visitation of turtles was the greatest ever. Believe it or not there were 67,000 of Myrtle’s relatives on that tiny island, and every one of them was either winking at me or sticking out its tongue. Mrs A said nothing – which was the most infuriating part of the whole business!
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