Humdy's Day

By half past one everything that could be done had been done, the oil was still being divided, and there was nothing for anybody to do but wait about in the heat.

"I'm SO bored," I said, luxuriously, lying on the barn floor.

I say that a hundred times a day and I mean it every single time, and the interesting thing about me — the thing nobody waits around for — is what happens about four minutes afterwards.

I looked at the ceiling. Then at Doodle's map on the barn door, with all those little dots on it, one for every hook on the entire path. Then at the pot of pens.

"Doodle. Can I colour one in every time a hook gets filled?"

"That's what they're for," said Doodle.

Which I have since found out was not quite as casual as it sounded. It was Doodle's map. Doodle had been on the barn floor on both knees for two hours doing those dots. And handed me the pens in about a second and a half.

It was quite satisfying. Then it was extremely satisfying. And then, about twenty minutes in, it stopped being satisfying and became something else entirely, because I noticed a thing.

The gate end was going green fast. The middle was not going green at all.

"Cloudy. Come and look at this."

Cloudy had been staring out of the barn door at nothing for some while, came over, looked, drifted off somewhere for a moment, and came back with: "...there's nobody working the middle."

There was not. Everybody had started at the ends, because the ends are where you arrive — you come out of the gate and start at the gate, or you walk to the far end and start there — and nobody had walked into the middle of a path to begin in the middle of it.

I went and told Tidy, who moved four fluffs, and by five o'clock the whole map was one colour.

I have thought about this a good deal since and here is the thing. I did not find that by being clever. Doodle could not have found it; Doodle was making the map and you cannot read a thing while you are drawing it. Tidy could not have found it, because Tidy was at the gatepost with the plan. It needed a fluff with nothing else to do, sitting in front of the whole thing for an hour, colouring in.

Nobody in the entire land had time to be bored except me.

I had the best afternoon in ages and I had a fairly good evening too.

I shouted something rude and affectionate at Tidy from the window seat when Beamy read out the bit about the plan, which Tidy took in the spirit intended.

The map got carried into Winky's at about nine and propped on the dresser, because four fluffs wanted to look at it, and I sat next to it for a while like somebody's uncle at an exhibition.

Humdy — coloured the dots, found the middle. That is what the envelope said.

Found the middle. Out of being bored on a barn floor at half past one.

Somebody asked me later how I knew to look, and the honest answer is that I did not look. I was colouring in. The thing about colouring in is that you have to go and find the next dot, and after a while you have been over every part of the map twenty times without trying, and a gap in a pattern you have been staring at for an hour is not something you spot. It is something you cannot stop seeing.