A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART THIRTEEN

Hooray! We’ve reached the halfway point! This daily ordeal of putting myself through the mental marathon of sucking some ideas out of my very limited brain is now officially more than half completed. Sadly, however, the finishing line still seems almost heart-breakingly distant, and I’m still wondering if I have enough of a plot to eke it out to last the entire course, instead of stopping to squat down for a quick pee in the gutter, or giving up, grabbing my silver blanket and going home without even a cheap metal medallion dangling from a piece of bright ribbon to show for all my efforts.

Obviously, for you, if you have even managed to stay interested enough to take the time to follow these daily updates, the fact that more than half of the days of the advent period are already gone is probably not quite such a good thing to realise, as you’ll now be thinking about everything you haven’t got done yet as the juggernaut of Chrimbletide looms ever larger on your own particular horizon, and, whilst you happening to read this inadvertent and gentle reminder might have just been an unfortunate coincidence, I’d rather that you didn’t decide to kill the messenger…

As to whether you even have the time to follow the fantastical ravings of some old hack as he burbles on with another load of derivative seasonal nonsense, is a different question entirely, and one that is no doubt troubling me greatly as I mull over the fact that the latest chapters keep getting put out there, but the law of diminishing returns means that fewer and fewer people could care less about the fate of a nasty piece of work like our modern-day Mr Snatch, even though we must now face the fascinating prospect of him running into his own wicked ancestor.

I did toy with introducing a slight note of “false jeopardy” at this juncture, and warn you of the dire consequences which might ensue if ever the two versions of Mr Snatch ever actually met. You might be already familiar with the sort of thing I mean; the usual nonsense of time shorting out, or the universe imploding and  all sorts of other shenanigans which may or may not be possible. These terrifying outcomes do remain at least theoretical possibilities of course, but as our two Mr Snatches are not in fact aspects of the same person, but merely ancestor and descendant, I think that the universe can rest easy.

There is the slightly trickier matter of what might occur if the later Mr Snatch were to accidentally cause the death of the earlier one, but such things are not within our remit this morning and, despite the fact that our modern-day Mr Snatch has been painted as being a bit of a rogue, being an out-and-out killer is not really one of his primary characteristics, so I think we’re pretty safe and secure on that score.

Meanwhile, back outside in the cold and the darkness and scrabbling around on the ground in the fallen snow, Mr Snatch was bemused for a moment, and went through the many familiar routines of someone who believes themselves to be stuck inside a dream which they seem unable to wake up from, and didn’t really make much of an effort to move from the spot in which he had so surprisingly and suddenly found himself.

So that, when a coach and four burst out of the fog and sent him sprawling into the gutter, he started to believe that he was actually awake and that he must have been kidnapped and dumped somewhere in Eastern Europe, presumably in some kind of Transylvania-themed amusement park.

He didn’t get much opportunity to consider this much further, as a set of huge iron gates swung shut behind the departing coach, trapping him inside the grounds of whatever the place was and he began to wonder whether his kidnappers were as unaware of the escape that he seemed to be in the middle of as he appeared to be himself.

However, for this and several other reasons, not least the not-so-distant barking of some very large-sounding dogs, he decided that it might be best not to inform the gatekeeper of his presence and decided to have a bit of a look around to see if he could find some other way off the site that might not require him making some kind of an explanation, and he slunk off into the shadows leaving a fresh trail of footprints behind him in the snow.

This meant that he failed completely to notice the wrought-iron letters that arched above the gates through which he had just failed to pass. Perhaps this was because, from his point of view, they would have appeared reversed, advertising, as they did, to the outside world and not those poor unfortunates who had little choice but to work within it, the name of the huge factory which stood imposingly at the heart of the very grounds upon which he was now trespassing and extremely trapped within:

“The Snatch & Grabbe Company, Established 1856.”