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Fug 'n me
Sep 2, 2008, 07:05 AM
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Richard
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Sep 2, 2008, 07:05 AM
I suspect that ever since Ug dragged home a freshly killed mammoth, homo sapiens – and probably Neanderthals as well if recent reports are anything to go by – have been trading assets.
It probably didn’t take long for the Altamira mammoth-belly market to get up and going, and after a couple of years sitting in front of his fire chewing on a piece of mammoth gristle, Ug’s next-cave neighbour, Fug, probably realised that he could not only sell this year’s mammoth bellies, but next year’s as well.
After all, what could go wrong?
Your actual mammoth was just a bloody big bit of vertebrate real estate that people would pay to eat, wear and furnish their caves with indefinitely.
Fug probably reasoned that adult mammoths liked making baby mammoths just as much as he and Mrs Fug (not that his offspring looked like mammoths, well not much except for little Wug, who he’d always wondered about and who’d been born shortly after his return from a year-long mammoth hunt).
Anyway, it wasn’t like they were going to stop making them or something.
'Extinct! What do you mean mammoths are extinct?'
Lug had invested every sharpened flint he owned in buying next year’s mammoth bellies. Not only that, he’d persuaded Ug, Nug, Bug and Lug – his relatives (well, relative by stone age standards) – to ‘chip in’ (suit yourselves) as well.
What’s more, Mug, the local mammoth mogul, had even lent Fug flints equivalent to 110% of the value of his next ten mammoths, which he’d used to buy even more mammoths.
Fug, Ug, Nug, Bug and Lug had spent many a happy evening visiting each other’s caves, sitting round the fire eating mammoth and discussing the rising price of mammoths, the best locations to find mammoths and how they’d bought a particularly nice bijou mammoth in Mammoth Hill that had doubled in flints over the last twelve moons.
Now, not only did he not have any mammoths or mammoth bellies, he didn’t have many flints either and the ones he had were worth less and less.
This was because the whole economy was built solely around mammoths and mammoth bellies – ever since prime mammoth minister Tug had decided that the country didn’t need to make wheels or clubs any more because they could be imported much more cheaply.
It was too late to go back to wheels and clubs as the stone quarries had been sold off to the Gauls.
This meant that the butchers were going out of business, Mammoths-R-Us (motto: ‘all things mammoth’) was looking decidedly shaky, the displays at Mammoth Workshop (furniture with a slightly mammothy aroma to it) were threadbare, and the mammoth agents were laying off Neanderthals like there was no tomorrow – which, of course, for Neanderthals there wasn’t.
Fug and his friends couldn’t beg, buy or borrow flints or mammoths for (mammoth) hide nor hair.
You’d have thought we would have learned something in 30,000 years, wouldn’t you?
I said wouldn’t you, Fug!
And the Neanderthals didn’t have the option to suspend stamp duty mammoth tax for a year to dig themselves out of the mammoth pit they’d dug for themselves.
Well, let’s hope not anyway; otherwise what chance is there for us?
Did yourself out of a hole with Taxation.co.uk.
It probably didn’t take long for the Altamira mammoth-belly market to get up and going, and after a couple of years sitting in front of his fire chewing on a piece of mammoth gristle, Ug’s next-cave neighbour, Fug, probably realised that he could not only sell this year’s mammoth bellies, but next year’s as well.
After all, what could go wrong?
Your actual mammoth was just a bloody big bit of vertebrate real estate that people would pay to eat, wear and furnish their caves with indefinitely.
Fug probably reasoned that adult mammoths liked making baby mammoths just as much as he and Mrs Fug (not that his offspring looked like mammoths, well not much except for little Wug, who he’d always wondered about and who’d been born shortly after his return from a year-long mammoth hunt).
Anyway, it wasn’t like they were going to stop making them or something.
'Extinct! What do you mean mammoths are extinct?'
Lug had invested every sharpened flint he owned in buying next year’s mammoth bellies. Not only that, he’d persuaded Ug, Nug, Bug and Lug – his relatives (well, relative by stone age standards) – to ‘chip in’ (suit yourselves) as well.
What’s more, Mug, the local mammoth mogul, had even lent Fug flints equivalent to 110% of the value of his next ten mammoths, which he’d used to buy even more mammoths.
Fug, Ug, Nug, Bug and Lug had spent many a happy evening visiting each other’s caves, sitting round the fire eating mammoth and discussing the rising price of mammoths, the best locations to find mammoths and how they’d bought a particularly nice bijou mammoth in Mammoth Hill that had doubled in flints over the last twelve moons.
Now, not only did he not have any mammoths or mammoth bellies, he didn’t have many flints either and the ones he had were worth less and less.
This was because the whole economy was built solely around mammoths and mammoth bellies – ever since prime mammoth minister Tug had decided that the country didn’t need to make wheels or clubs any more because they could be imported much more cheaply.
It was too late to go back to wheels and clubs as the stone quarries had been sold off to the Gauls.
This meant that the butchers were going out of business, Mammoths-R-Us (motto: ‘all things mammoth’) was looking decidedly shaky, the displays at Mammoth Workshop (furniture with a slightly mammothy aroma to it) were threadbare, and the mammoth agents were laying off Neanderthals like there was no tomorrow – which, of course, for Neanderthals there wasn’t.
Fug and his friends couldn’t beg, buy or borrow flints or mammoths for (mammoth) hide nor hair.
You’d have thought we would have learned something in 30,000 years, wouldn’t you?
I said wouldn’t you, Fug!
And the Neanderthals didn’t have the option to suspend stamp duty mammoth tax for a year to dig themselves out of the mammoth pit they’d dug for themselves.
Well, let’s hope not anyway; otherwise what chance is there for us?
Did yourself out of a hole with Taxation.co.uk.
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