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MISSION NIGHTINGALE
1st Report from Donald Campbell in 1844:
It being a Friday I decided to abort the schedule as nothing good ever happens on a Friday. I’ve clocked up too many miles on the odometer to be caught by that one.
REPORT ENDS
2nd Report from Donald Campbell
My admiration for these machines is unbounded and I heartily appreciate that holograms of Bluebird K7 and Bluebird-Proteus CN7 have been allowed to accompany me. I can show, now, what the Bluebirds are really capable of. I shall achieve this by breaking both the land speed and water speed records in the same day.
I cannot buy this Campbell bad luck, disaster, what have you. The scene here in 1844 is all rather slow and pedestrian. If I cannot break records here I would need shooting. Some fledgling trains are topping the 50 mph mark. Sorry to sound a Charlie Bighead, but my Bluebirds would drive themselves to the scrapyard if they couldn’t do six times that.
What makes these records a devil to set is needing to keep it under wraps. It would blow Victorian minds to attain the speeds I am capable of and impact history with a tremendous crash.
I will enlist Nightingale, with her statistical leanings, as my assistant. Get her mathematical brains on board to devise how to measure my speeds and her knowledge of rural Hampshire to locate secluded spots that meet my strict criteria where my records can be set.
The hologram Bluebird-Proteus CN7 will encounter none of the problems I faced at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah where the tyres were cutting up ruts up to an inch deep and even more in places. On that last run it was absolutely neck or nothing. But that’s for the distant future. I won’t be in physical contact with the old terra firma so no friction there. But the lake we choose will have to be smooth as glass. Any slight chopping and the hologram will appear to be cutting through it.
I approached Mission Nightingale with the same diligence I would tackle a record attempt. I will win her over to my side by utilizing my playboy charms. The ladies fall for that like speed records do to my Bluebirds. She’d have a love of speed by the time our encounter had run out of gas and would ditch her thoughts of curtailing it and leave her clamps floundering in the wake. I had been briefed she was a tough nut to crack, however, so the watch word was caution. Keep it in low gear with no thought of a later thrust is my mantle for this show, the correction of history is a far greater game than satisfying “The Skipper’s libido”.
Young Florence was a rather pretty thing. But reminded me of Bluebird K7, fairly stern. I could understand why Old Monckton Milnes had made little leeway with his poetry. I knew that once she seen Bluebird K7 at full throttle over the measured mile she’d consider that poetry of far greater significance. As it was, Bluebird-Proteus CN7 was at my rear when when first she viewed me in her gardens.
‘What’s that behind you?’ she asked in the poshest of voices.
‘Craig Breedlove, I hope,’ I replied. But the reference to my great speed rival was lost on her.
Over and out from now from The Skipper.
REPORT TWO ENDS
Jonty Morgan Humour Sampler 