It wasn’t the best university in the world, but Malcolm rather liked it. He loved the old grey pillars almost as much as he loved his own self. It there- fore hadn’t really registered with him that the city wanted to knock it down and build a bypass instead.
Malcolm woke at eight o’clock that Thursday morning, opened a window, saw a bulldozer and donned his dress- ing-gown. Moustache wax in hand, he noticed that the bathroom mirror was pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom win- dow.
Facial hair preened. Kettle on. Mug, teabag, pour, drink, yawn. The word yellow drifted through his mind. The bulldozer in the quad was particularly yellow. As he drank his Earl Grey, the Provost pondered the nasty headache he seemed to be suffering from. He remembered going to Sports Nite and ranting indignantly at anyone who would listen.
Something about knocking down UCL It would never happen – the Mayor didn’t have a leg to stand on. The word yellow entered his mind again, looking for something to con- nect with. Fifteen seconds later he was out of the Cloisters and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer advancing towards the steps of the Portico.
Boris was only human, though that was said to be the least of his prob- lems. He was also the Mayor of Lon- don, a role only ever held by those en- tirely unsuited to power. Unbeknown to him, Boris was in fact a direct de- scendant of a Bavarian king, though intermixing of genes had left him with little sign of this other than his ridicu- lous blond hair and a predilection for unusual curse words.
“Cripes,” he said, “are you really going to lie in the mud all day like some sort of piccaninny?” Fortunately at this point the entire world was destroyed to make way for a Vogon Hyper-Glob- al University Academy, thus saving any further tedium.