Ant City

I have recovered my senses somewhat thanks to some nimble thought-work on my part. Realising that the ants aspired to enfeeble me through pillaging my earwax and nostril gunk, I began to replace these substances with surrogate versions comprised principally of chocolate.

These have worked tolerably well as I am now restored to a state of robust physical health, though I am still unable to recite the Apollo Creed, a worrying deficiency which tells me that my wits are not yet wholly replenished.

While I was incapacitated with fever, the ants went to work turning my undefended home into a network of ant cities. Only my bedroom/office remains free of their constructions. Immediately outside my bedroom door is a series of tiny buildings and roads (the ants ride on the backs of woodlice and earwigs as we ride about on horses and trams). The topography of this city suggests strongly to me that this is a miniature replica, accurate right down to the Starbucks coffee houses and the fountains, of the English town of Hull.

On each street corner an image appears in poster form. This image can be seen again in the forms of sculptures and statues everywhere. I note that each time an ant walks past any of these images, it pauses to bow. How curious!

I struggled to recognise who the human figure depicted in the statues and the posters was, but after the expenditure of much thought I have remembered that it is the author of You Can Do the Cube!, none other than child prodigy Patrick Bossert. Bossert will be familiar to you as the genius that the popular press dubbed 'schoolboy cubemaster' when, in 1981, he became the only person in the world to solve the Rubik's Cube. He wrote a book detailing his 6-year struggle to complete the puzzle, with hints and solutions on offer to those who sought to repeat his success with their own cubes. Unfortunately, the Cube is so difficult that no one has ever been able to follow his instructions, and Bossert now holds the world's only completed cube, which he makes available for public viewing at the Tower of London on most bank holidays. He is a modern-day folk hero.

Why his image appears repeatedly throughout this vast Ant metropolis, I cannot imagine.

Schoolboy Cubemaster Patrick Bossert bamboozling a dullard