PROSAIC PACHYDERMS AND SUSPICIOUS MUSHROOMS

Said wayward Prince was finally starting to get the hang of this survival thing. At first, he’d tried living on coconut, only to discover that man does not live on coconut alone (or at least not for very long, all those romantic survival stories with a marooned hero are, for the most part, written by pillocks who don’t seem to realise that coconut will run a road right through your digestive system, then run a stampede up and down said road constantly. Trying to survive on coconut will put way more than a rumbly in your tumbly, and they never even mention that leaves make lousy toilet paper. Also, all that seawater? It does a real number on your hair, and there isn’t exactly a local shop you can nip out to to pick up replacement razors and that dagger? It’s gonna get rusty faster than a singer who never practices.)

Eventually, though, he started to learn, starting with the basic lesson rubbing a stick in a log only works if you have dry grass as tinder. Otherwise, you only get the mother of all blisters, which all the local mosquitoes will see as an all you can eat buffet, and a slightly warm bit in the log. The next lesson was always always ALWAYS boil your water (this lesson was brought to him by Kevin, who was still around and still wanted to smack him one, but knew how much paperwork and retraining he would be subjected to if he did that. The other half of the lesson was brought to him by a fresh set of tumbly rumblies and the need to move his camp further downwind.

Next came figuring out fishing, which, given the absence of fishing line, required him to make use of his VERY blunted by now dagger to sharpen a stick into a spear, which turned out to be bloody useless. Even when he finally learned the lesson to aim ahead of where the fish was now and towards where it would dart to, he was a little too thick to understand the refractive qualities of water, resulting in a jabbed foot from a, mercifully not as sharp as he thought it was, spear. Eventually, he gave up on that and twisted vines to make a very rough and ready yet strangely accurate sling.

The next lesson was no matter how pretty the colours, maybe do not eat the local mushrooms. They are not as tasty as they look, are probably not good for your health, and will leave you off your face for probably several days. This lesson was brought to him by Kevin and a choir of particularly prosaic Welsh singing purple pachyderms, who made that lesson very clear, despite the sociolinguistic barriers. (Apparently pretending to smack somebody on the nose with a hallucinatory newspaper while shouting NA was not so easily understood, but anybody who has ever been a toddler anywhere ever understands AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH shouted in a disapproving mother voice, and even if that hadn’t worked Kevin finally getting pissed off enough to damn the rules and smack him one right upside the head may have helped to reinforce the lesson somewhat.)

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The final major lesson was while slings are fun to use, they are, to say the least, challenging to get the hang of, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is a dirty, dirty liar who should be ashamed of themselves. When Tyrone first started to learn, it did not take long for him to figure out that when using a sling, the stone will go wherever the hell it feels like... Including 3mm in front of the thrower 20 meters behind them. Landing on their toes, or worst of all, directly upwards. (There is absolutely nothing more embarrassing than being clobbered by one own projectile on the descent while you look around desperately to figure out where the hell it went. If you ever have to ask yourself that, the answer will be in the overwhelming majority of cases above you, so you had better hope you brought a helmet.) Once he got the hang of that, it took him even longer to realise that spinning the damned sling around and around did not, no matter what you may have been told, read, or otherwise picked up, make your projectile go faster, further, or anything else, all it will do is ensure your shot will go off at random, and you will look like a complete and utter numpty. The best shots come from a single spin and a sharp flick. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably planning to have a right old laugh when you inevitable clobber yourself one with your own stone. (That means you, Kevin, shame on you, shame.)

Eventually, he’d figured out that there were many things on the island that did, in fact, eat coconut, many of which it turned out were edible by him. Oh, and those turtle shells make great cooking pots and even come pre-packed with a meal big enough to last a few days. Though you never turn your back on food unless having your lunch purloined by pilfering primates was on your to-do list (it could be, in which case you do you.)

He’d even managed after much swearing, cursing, and more than a little bit of praying to whichever god happened to be listening, to produce a passable shelter (which when it collapsed was replaced by another, and another, and another, until eventually he managed to make one that worked. He could have kicked himself when a week later he found the perfect cave for the job, but them’s the breaks, and this folks is why you do proper reconnaissance if you ever find yourself marooned. Remember this; it may save you a lot of cursing and swearing somewhere down the line.)

So it came to pass that Crown Prince Tyrone, the most wanted man in the world at this moment (we’ll get to that), learned to survive all alone, well, except for Kevin, of course.