Which way is up?

The world had been at peace for a millennium and the health of the world's populations was much improved together with a new prosperity that now covered the earth.

To avoid complacency in this new world an international think tank had been created known as the TTNTT (The Top Notch Think Tank) it had the best of brains to forecast the future and a very large budget.

The brains persons met weekly on Wednesdays, its brief was to look backwards as well as forwards and advise world governments on present trends, the only thing the TTNTT hadn't cracked was how to forecast what people thought, Professor Hardvark had sniffed out a way but kept quiet in case his wife found what he was thinking of doing with the lady representatives of Iceland and Togo.

One person though at TTNTT had serious misgivings about this new world. She wasMrs P Catsbody who felt in her waters something was wrong. She had talked to Mr Catsbody about this but his best offer was 'someone who can read tea leaves'

When her worries came to fruition Mr Catsbody still wasn't much help, he said he couldn't give a four X about maps, he wanted his tea and those Spanish omelette pills they had last night weren't all they were cracked up to be.

It had all started in Australia, a country populated with placid people. Students were surprised to find that on their return for the new term the world globe had been turned upside down, the South Pole was at the top and the North Pole at the bottom.

As world affairs go this didn't seem at first to have any affect until suddenly out of the blue New Zealand strongly objected and said that anyone found with such maps in their country would be prosecuted, fined and the maps confiscated.

The Australians immediately took umbrage arguing that the world was a globe and as such there was no right way up, or down, and they didn't see why they should always be shown at the bottom of the world.

The bomb started ticking.

Gabon produced a map showing the world turned through ninety degrees then Kenya did the same but with the place names the opposite way round. The whole world suddenly went into a frenzy of map making with global maps viewed from every imaginable angle. The USA became incensed at being bent over by Mexico and neighbour began threatening neighbour, chaos loomed.

In desperation and with the world starting to plunge back into darkness the TTNTT was hastily convened on a Tuesday and asked to urgently 'sort this crisis out'

It was Mrs P Catsbody who resolved the problem and received for her efforts that rarely awarded the world OBE (Ones Best Endeavours) medal for her brilliant solution. She had declared that the world was no longer round. It was flat, as it had been once before all those hundreds of years ago in the bad old days….