pages 87-91

“Why are we using flamingoes?” exclaimed Alice. She felt that she may be arrested any minute for misusing a flamingo.
“They are like serpents!” spat The Queen, “Their legs are far too long for them to be strutting around loose. They should not be allowed to be loose!”


“They upset the caterpiller’s sense of direction!”


“This is what we’ll do”, said The Queen, “We’ll see how long it takes us to hit the ball with the legs into the hoop and then that will be the next person accused of stealing the tarts. AND we’ll just destroy every 7th card as we go.”
“What a waste of cards”, said Alice.
“I know!’ and here the Queen turned suddenly very very nasty.
‘You have to help me with this”! she snarled. “There’s a factory in the rose garden that keeps spitting them out.” Then she sighed and almost seemed to sink into herself as she sat on a chair. The Queen had her moods swinging like a bat which worked to a pendulum and any minute now. . . .. . .


Alice was forced to make decisions to help the Queen. She played the string game to illustrate the balance and interconnectedness of the non-stop production of cards, the economy, population control, morality and the continual advancement of the checks. She came to the conclusion that she needed to find the bottle so she could grow bigger and step on the Queen as if she was a cockroach. After all a thirty year old couldn’t be expected to solve other people’s problems.


The duchess, one hand resting on her ample stomach, was expanding on the underlying reasons for the Queen’s neurosis.
“ Too many tarts”, she said with a snort.
“She gobbles heaps of them when no-one is looking and then claims that someone has stolen them.
“Flamingoes don’t eat enough meat and that’s why their legs are so long . . . . . . and even broken sometimes.
“If everybody ate six cloves of garlic per day we’d all look much more fashionable! You for one , wouldn’t be wearing puffed sleeves.”
The caterpillar suggested that everyone wore far too many clothes.