'A Spoonful Crime 03/11/2009 Poem by Margaret Alice

Alice looked up and saw the caterpillar lounging
on his mushroom, dreaming – she tiptoed to him
and woke him with a kiss on his forehead; he
looked up and admonished: “Where have you
been, I missed you! ”

Alice curtsied and said: 'I missed you too, Mr
Caterpillar, I got a job as government official
and did some assembly-line translations and
was stopped by a metaphysical conundrum.”

“Explain yourself”, the caterpillar ordered her,
and she continued: “Nothing I do is ever true
as in having happened unless it is registered
in a list, every list must be taken up in a bigger
list and every month we make a list of all the
lists and every three months we write an account
of every list that is part of a bigger list –
and it is confusing…”

“Sounds perfectly rational to me”, said the
caterpillar, “there’s no difficulty to see.”

“But I need to feel that I can be me without being
enlisted and recorded, described and sorted in
fifteen lists, I want to breathe without counting
oxygen molecules! ” Alice insisted.

“That is easy to arrange”, the caterpillar airily
indicated, “when it is illegal to breathe without
official authorisation, becoming a criminal and
undercover spy is your only survival and life
becomes a piece of cake! ”

The caterpillar blew a smoke ring, looking
triumphantly at Alice.

“Terry Pratchett would object, I know”, said Alice
sagaciously, “but a spoonful of crime makes the
administrative medicine go down, and living without
a list is the highest offence in a bureaucratic system.”

The caterpillar laughed and waved a kiss at Alice.

“Now you know the trick, go off into the wood, find
the Wolf and Red Riding Hood and join Robin Hood
in robbing the bureaucrats of all their controlling lists
– and have fun! ” he told her happily.

“I shall also jump on a Merry-Go-Round and start a
race against the Work-On-Hand automatic list and
have it count all my rides, then go off to the library
while turning cartwheels! ” Alice added as she danced
away and the caterpillar continued
his smoke-filled dream….

With reference to characters in:

Lewis Carrol “Alice In Wonderland”
Terry Pratchett “Carpe Jugulum”
PL Travers “Mary Poppins”