Hartnell’s Law

 I tried my best by an adept use of foresight, but my best turned out to be not quite good enough. Meddling with the middle, and trying to topple its top, then rooting out rot at its fundaments seemed enough kinetic manhandling to deal with the upright thing but it stayed tantalisingly out of range, a thing that looked like a Dalek all wrapped up in an old pink tarpaulin, standing in the garden of a derelict house in Aickman Road, evidently without any interference to it, perhaps literally for centuries. Whether the colour was exactly pink did not seem to be important at the time, but now, in hindsight, any doubt expands until such doubt becomes all consuming. Time as a phenomenon entails that colour must stay out of kilter with monochrome, and I am old enough to remember the colour injections in the early 1950s to which we were all made to submit and then airbrush from our memories, except for the odd person like me who somehow recalled it all happening, with the repeated assurance that further injections would not be needed and new babies from then on would not be colour blind at all by dint of some other process the details of which even I myself have forgotten. The long and the short of it is, I doubt it is a Dalek at all. But I hope to have enthralled you with its truncated tail.