Chapter Fourteen: The Audition - Part 1

We began to make our way through the carnivalesque crowd, who were decamped under the gaily lit trees, awaiting their turn.

The grove turned into a sandy path, and the sandy path into a broad avenue, lined by manicured lawns and lime trees. Alfonso, the small grey beetle (or weevil to be precise) who has made his home on my desk, grew uncharacteristically silent. The amiable conversation about which "Hi-De-Hi!" character we would most like to have dinner with faded away, as we approached a shimmering mansion, all tall windows and spotless shutters, and there before it, a plume of sparkling fountain rising out of a stony mermaid's conch.

We crunched across the immaculately raked gravel with trepidation. From out of nowhere, a bow legged footman in a periwig shambled towards us, and swung open a door.

"The Judges will see you now, good sirs", he said, with a bow so low, his periwig came back up studded with tiny pieces of pink and grey pebble.

We strode into the unlit hall, across some very polished parquet, up the wide white stairs, past a mirror twice my height, hung with dripping candles.

Alfonso said "It's all a bit "Rentaghost" for me", but I merely shushed him, as he was needed for later.

Wandering down corridor after corridor, past gloomy oil painting of martyred animal after martyred animal (St. Cow - the patron saint of travel programmes, St. Chicken - the patron saint of January sales and so on), we finally reached two tall doors, their handles garlanded shut with a silken rope, guarded by two more flunkeys in periwigs.

"This is it", I whispered to Alfonso. I saw him clutch his little good luck Gummi Bear mascot extra tightly. (Bummi Gummi, the bearded lumberjack Gummi)

The flunkeys removed the rope with a flourish, and pulled the doors open with synchronised élan.

And there, at the end of a red carpet the length of a football pitch, on a raised dais, behind a marble topped gilt table, were the very authorities we were to submit our humble talents to:

A man, and a woman, and another woman. (Sometimes it was a man, and another man, and a woman, but not today.)

I began to speak, to explain who we were, but the man picked up a tiny silver bell and rang it sharply, which I took as our signal to begin.....

TO BE CONTINUED