Monolithic Age

 “So, what do we think about the monoliths?” I asked my family at the end of Jay’s quiz, hoping to start a discussion before we all went off to our separate rooms and I returned to 1882 to learn about horses and the hunt.

I caught the look they gave each other. It was a mix of confusion and worry that I had really truly lost it this time. I admit that the question came out of the blue but I wasn’t sure how anyone who follows the news could have missed it.

In case you are also looking to book me into the funny farm I’ll fill you in on this weird piece of news.

I first saw it in the Guardian at the end of November. A helicopter pilot had spotted a huge metal Toblerone  in a canyon in the Utah desert. 

It was the kind of story you could flick past. It might have been there all the time, Utah is big and weird anyway. Then, it disappeared. That’s fine, someone saw it on the news and stole it. Who wouldn’t want a huge metal monolith in their garden? Ed Milliband’s  was rather fond of the idea, maybe it was him.

Then another two appeared. One on a hillside in Romania and one in a Californian desert.

“Someone’s having a laugh, aren’t they?” my daughter said, factually, once they realised what I was talking about.

I think it’s a lot of trouble to go to for a joke but then I have words, which are definitely easier.

In the last Monolithic age (which I think should have been called the Mesolithic age but I grew up in the Seventies when education was from the mouth of a teacher in a floral skirt without access to the internet) they built Stonehenge, dragged women about by the hair and even though they could use a dinosaur to pull their car they still ran their bare feet along the ground. Oh wait! Have I just slipped into an episode of the Flintstones. I was going to say that the last Monolithic age saw the death of the woolly mammoth but clearly my education on ancient history is a bit lacking.

I have been wondering what history will make of these times. 

The New Monolithic Era, where aliens put big metal poles in various locations and took them away again, to give conspiracy theorists something else to think about other than Bill Gates making a virus so he could inject all the over 80s and people in care homes with a microchip to see what they are up to. 

I hope that someone is looking at the locations of the monoliths to see what three words they match with on the emergency services location finder tool. Whether it’s aliens or people having a jolly good laugh. I’d like to think that they haven’t missed an opportunity to send us a message.

Alien Postcard - Place is nice, people are weird, wish you were here