The Mayor Of Snottingham

 Now gather around, if you’re not too refined,

And leave all your manners and good taste behind,

For this is a story of snot, slime, and spite,

Of two rival mayors and one very green night.

So pull up a cushion, don’t fuss and don’t moan,

Though I warn you right now: you should read this alone,

For parents and teachers and aunties will say

That stories like this should be thrown far away.

They’re wrong, naturally. Now. Let us begin.

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Part One: Two Towns, One Midlands, No Dignity

In the heart of the Midlands, if you know where to look,

There sat a fine city straight out of a book,

With its lace and its fountains and towers of white,

Its pavements so polished they flickered with light.

Yes, Nottingham shone like a star in the sky,

Where the air smelled of roses and warm cherry pie,

Where the citizens strolled with their chins in the air,

And nobody — nobody — ever got phlegm in their hair.

The Mayor of this city was one Sir Reginald Proper,

A man so immaculate, shinier than copper,

His shoes were buffed daily with six different rags,

His handkerchief hand-stitched with little Brit flags.

He waved at the people. They waved right back.

He’d never once sneezed without keeping on track.

He was loved. He was lauded. He smelled of fresh bread.

He was, quite frankly, the most boring man not yet dead.

*

But travel a mile to the east (if you dare),

Past the signs that all say DO NOT BREATHE THE AIR,

Past the bog and the fen and the perpetual fog,

Past a heron that’s weeping face-down in a log,

And you’ll find, if your boots have sufficient thick soles,

A town built entirely in several large holes.

Snottingham.

Oh, Snottingham, Snottingham, crusty and grey,

Where the gutters run green at all hours of the day,

Where the buildings are yellow (or possibly beige),

Where the windows have sealed themselves shut in a rage.

Through its centre there flowed the Great River of Green,

A substance so thick it was barely a stream,

A river of mucus, of bile, and of phlegm,

That smelled, when the wind blew, of problems, of them —

That specific dark odour that clings to the back

Of the throat when you’re coming down with a knack

For being repulsive and boggy and vile.

The locals, of course, hadn’t noticed in a while.

They walked through their town with their handkerchiefs out,

Permanently leaking from each nostril and snout,

With their eyes running freely and chins slightly damp,

Their socks always squelching, their walls always damp,

Their pets permanently sticky, their ceilings — don’t ask,

Their children all wearing a small bucket as mask.

And presiding above all this glorious goo,

In a mansion made largely of hardened residue,

Sat the Mayor of Snottingham: Cornelius Mucus,

A man whose great destiny seemed to elude us.

He was squat. He was pallid. He wheezed when he sat.

He wore seventeen scarves and a perpetually flat

Expression that said, to the world and the Midlands:

‘I am tired of being the punchline in rhymes, lads.’

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Part Two: The Golden Booger Gala

One morning in autumn (the grey kind, not nice),

A letter arrived sealed in wax and in ice,

With the crest of Her Grace, the Grand Duchess of Stuff

(She collected strange towns; she could not get enough).

Mayor Mucus read slowly, his brow deeply furrowed,

His third set of nostrils considerably narrowed.

‘To the Mayors of England, from Fen to the Shore:

We seek the Most Splendid Town in Our Realm, and what’s more,

The prize is a chest full of gold, pearl, and rings,

And a lifetime supply of our finest Silk Things —

Including (and here the whole court was quite moved),

One thousand Silk Tissues, Her Grace’s approved.

The judging shall take place on the first of December.

We expect your best effort. We trust you’ll remember.’

Mayor Mucus read twice. He read seventeen more.

Then he sat in his chair and he looked at the floor.

‘Silk tissues,’ he whispered. ‘A chest full of gold.’

His eyes became glassy. His heart became bold.

‘Sir Reginald Proper will win. Yes, he will.

He always does. Always. It’s making me ill.’

He sneezed with some feeling across the whole room.

Then he sat back and thought, which is often his doom.

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Part Three: The Super-Snot-Sucker 3000

When villains start thinking, it never ends well.

They always cook something spectacular up to sell

Themselves on the notion their scheme is quite clever

When actually it is the worst plan forever.

Mayor Mucus called for his chief engineer,

A woman named Bogworth whose specialism was clear:

She’d built the great sewers of Snottingham’s vale,

She’d designed the whole bog-drainage system (it failed),

She wore rubber waders and thick rubber gloves,

And kept all her blueprints rolled up in old tubes.

‘Ms. Bogworth,’ said Mucus, with gleaming damp eyes,

‘I have a commission of enormous surprise.

I need you to build me a machine — something vast —

That can suck up all Snottingham’s slime, really fast,

And redirect it through the tunnels below,

To arrive in Nottingham’s fountains and flow

Across every pavement and plaza and street

On the morning the Duchess arrives for her treat.’

Ms. Bogworth said nothing. She wrote in her pad.

Then she said: ‘This is probably quite, quite mad.’

‘Yes,’ said Mayor Mucus. ‘Build it by Thursday.’

She built it by Thursday. (She billed him on Friday.)

The Super-Snot-Sucker 3000 stood tall

In the centre of Snottingham, wider than walls,

A cathedral of copper pipes, bellows, and brass,

Twelve enormous steel nozzles and tanks made of glass.

It hummed. It vibrated. It glistened and groaned.

It smelled, from a distance, of something that moaned.

Mayor Mucus surveyed it with actual tears.

‘This is the finest thing built in five hundred years,’

He announced to the citizens gathered around.

Nobody clapped but there was a wet sound.

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Part Four: The Night Before Judging

On the eve of December the first, cold and black,

Mayor Mucus put on his best mayoral mac,

His official thick scarf and his ceremonial boots

(Reinforced rubber for handling the roots

Of whatever grew under the bog in the deep),

And he stood at the lever that would end Reginald’s sleep.

‘If I cannot be clean,’ Mucus said with a wheeze,

‘Then Reginald Proper shall live in a sneeze!

Snottingham cannot be splendid, I know,

But Nottingham’s fountains will green up and flow!

The Duchess will arrive and she’ll see what I’ve done,

And the Most Revolting Town will have technically won —

For there’ll be no town less splendid than Nottingham then,

And I, Cornelius Mucus, shall never lose again!’

He gripped the great lever. He cried out a bit.

(He’d got something in both of his eyes. That was it.)

He positioned his wellies. He took a deep breath.

(The breath of a man who has no fear of death,

Or at least has grown somewhat accustomed to damp.)

He pulled the great lever.

The machine — it went CLAMP.

Then it went GROAN.

Then it went CHURN.

Then it went WHIRR-WHIRR-WHIRR-

CRITICAL MUCUS RETURN.

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Part Five: The Great Backfire

Now here is the detail that Mucus forgot:

The pipes of old Snottingham — goodness, they’re clot.

Not cleaned since the reign of King George Number Three,

(Or possibly earlier. It’s hard to foresee

The year that a pipe gets completely blocked through

When nobody’s ever attempted to view

What’s happening inside of the pipes, down below,

Where nothing runs swiftly and everything’s slow.)

The Super-Snot-Sucker sucked hard. Sucked and hummed.

The pressure built skyward. The couplings went numb.

The tanks filled with green to the very last inch.

The whole of Snottingham began to flinch.

Then Bogworth, who’d quietly sidled away,

Called out from behind a large tree: ‘Happy day!

I did mention, if you recall, round about

The question of pipe-age, that there was a doubt —’

But the rest of her sentence was lost in the BOOM.

The machine reached what engineers later called doom:

A state of Critical Crustiness — seven times worse

Than anything covered in physics or verse.

The tanks cracked. The nozzles reversed. The brass bent.

And upwards, in one single glorious vent,

A geyser of green shot into the black sky,

So high that a passing small aircraft flew by

And the pilot reported (this part made the news):

‘Encountered green weather. Am changing my shoes.’

The slime came back down.

Oh, it came down all right.

It came down on Snottingham all through the night.

It landed on rooftops and statues and lawns,

On bicycle sheds and on people’s front doors,

On the heron (again), on the bog, on the street,

On Mayor Mucus himself, head to feet.

When morning arrived with a pale yellow glow,

The town of Snottingham gleamed in the snow —

Well. Not snow exactly. But something that clung

To every last surface and gate and top rung

Of every last ladder in town. Something thick.

Something green.

Something absolutely cosmically sick.

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Part Six: The Duchess Arrives

At nine on the morning of judging, the carriage

Pulled up with the Duchess (who’d long since dismissed marriage

As less interesting than science), accompanied by

Her senior consultant, Professor McVie.

They looked at Nottingham first. Sir Reginald bowed.

The streets were so lovely the Duchess said: ‘Proud

Of this lovely town. A fine effort. Well done.’

And she made a small note and moved on, in the sun.

Then they drove to Snottingham.

The carriage stopped slow.

The Duchess stepped out into four feet of glow.

She looked at the buildings, encrusted in slime.

She looked at the river. She looked at the rime.

She looked at the townsfolk, embedded in goo.

She looked at the mayor, who was also goo through.

Then she turned to McVie and she said: ‘Are you thinking

What I am thinking, without even blinking?’

McVie had a clipboard. He scraped off a smear.

He smelled it. He tasted it. (Goodness, oh dear.)

He said: ‘Madam Duchess, this slime has a base

Of natural adhesive at cellular phase,

With anti-inflammatory mucus compound

And a tertiary protein not elsewhere found.

This substance is worth’ — he consulted his chart —

‘More money than Nottingham, plus all its art.’

The Duchess smiled broadly. She turned to the crowd.

‘Snottingham wins,’ she announced, rather loud.

‘Its natural adhesive is glorious and fine.

The gold and the tissues are very much mine —

To give,’ she corrected, ‘to this splendid town.

Now, someone please help me back up. I slid down.’

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Part Seven: The End (Such As It Is)

Mayor Mucus, once excavated, was rich.

He was so very rich that, without even a hitch,

He bought up all Nottingham, fired Reginald Proper

(Who retired to Bath and bought a parrot named Cooper),

And he gave every citizen — Snottingham, hear! —

A lifetime supply of pure green, once a year.

He built a great statue of himself in the square,

Entirely from slime (it’s still standing out there).

He issued a bylaw, which many found bleak:

No tissues in Snottingham. Not even one. Not this week,

Not any week. Not for the next thousand years.

Use your sleeve. Use your elbow. Use joy. Use your fears.

And the river runs green to this very last day,

And the town smells the same as it always has, they say,

And if you stand outside on a cold winter’s night,

You can hear Mucus wheeze with contented delight.

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The moral? Ah yes. There is always a moral.

Don’t try to be someone you’re not. It’s immoral.

Or possibly: mess with the pipes and they’ll burst.

Or perhaps: if you’re boggy, be boggy — go first.

But mostly, I think, it is simply this, friend:

The sludge always rises. It just needs to blend.

The End. Wash your hands.