“Well?” said Arthur proudly, “what do you think?”
“Er, it’s, its…” said Guinevere, searching for the right word. “It’s round,” she eventually finished lamely.
“Indeed it is,” said Arthur. “It’s my Round Table.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Rectangular Table’ doesn’t have the right ring to it,” said Arthur.
Guinevere looked around the rectangular Great Hall, with its huge rectangular fireplace, small rectangular windows and unspoken-of rectangular commode.
“Haven’t you ever heard of Feng Shui?” she asked.
“Er, no,” said Arthur, “who is he?”
“Never mind,” sighed Guinevere. “It’s just ….. it doesn’t fit in.”
A frown crossed Arthur’s kingly face. “It’s unique,” he said. “None of the other Ladies will have one, and will envy you. One would have thought one would be a bit more grateful.”
“Would one?” snapped Guinevere. “Then tell one, where should one shop to get one a feckin’ round tablecloth for one’s feckin’ round table?”
“I reckoned Merlin could magic one up.”
“Merlin?” snorted Guinevere. “He’s fine at pulling a stoat out of a helmet, but when it comes to real magic he’s bloody useless.”
“I say, that’s a bit harsh,” protested Arthur, loyally but a touch dubiously.
“Is it? Look at when he tried to conjure you up a sword. Instead of it arriving in your hand it appeared stuck inside a stone miles away. By the time you found it half the countryside had tried to nick it.”
Even while she was speaking Guinevere was thinking of another problem. With a rectangular table she had been able to allocate seat-placings, and at Sunday dinners, when the traditional roast-pig-with-an-apple-in-its-mouth had been set upon the table, she had always gleefully arranged it so that Arthur’s mother spent the meal staring up the pig’s arse.
“How will people know where to sit?” she asked.
“Well, one hoped …” began Arthur, then faltered in the ice-cold blaze of Guinevere’s glare, “I mean, I hoped that you might embroider some place-names.”
“Yeah, well that’d be fine if you had friends called Mick, or Tom,” replied Guinevere. “Instead they have names like Sir Bleoberis, Sir Ector deMaris and Sir Glockenspiel. Ok,” she conceded, as Arthur raised an eyebrow, “I made that last one up. The point is, it would take ages to embroider place-names for them all. I’ve better things to be doing.”
“Really? Such as?” asked Arthur.
To Arthur’s surprise, Guinevere blushed. “Well, I’ve been giving Sir Lancelot, er, dulcimer lessons,” she said.
Arthur, who was brilliant in battle but brainless in romance, beamed at the mention of his friend. “Ah, yes. You’ve become great friends with dear Lancelot, haven’t you, my Queen?”
“Let’s just say I know why he’s called Lancelot,” muttered Guinevere. Aloud she sighed and said “oh, very well, we’ll keep the bloody thing. What are you going to do with the old one?”
And Arthur said (and please bear in mind that this was a long time ago, the environment hadn’t been invented yet) “oh, I’ll dump it in the lake at the end of the road”.
******************************************************************************************************************
Arthur hurled the giant rectangular table (yes, he could lift a table that used to seat 25 knights, he was able to pull a sword out of a stone, remember) out into the lake, watched the giant splash, and had turned back toward Camelot before the ripples ceased. Thus he didn’t see an arm, clothèd in white samite, emerge from the centre of the lake, brandishing the table.
“Bastards!” yelled the Lady of the Lake. “Stop dumping stuff in here! Swords, tables, supermarket trolleys (and I don’t even know what they are), I’m sick of it.”
She hurled the table out of the lake, from whence it landed high in a tree.
“That’ll baffle future archaeologists,” she muttered, slipping back beneath the waves.
