Norman
Photo of a standing stone in the middle of a field. The sky is cloudless and bright blue.
Some people can walk past a field with a big rock in it. Others can go on an epic adventure which involves getting chased by a herd of cows, being entranced by swallows swooping in and out of a barn, falling in a bog during an attempt to evade a second herd of cows, and discovering Norman, Vice-Chair of the Alien Interminglingatory. You’re probably thinking that I made a mistake with my language there, that I failed in my linguistic precision. You’re probably thinking, “oh, she means she found a sculpture of Norman”, but no. I mean: this Ffynnion Druidion standing stone is Norman. Or was, anyway. And will be again, if I have anything to do with it.
People are always wondering how the ancients got the stones to stand up or balance in the variety of rather miraculous ways they do. They think about the kind of technology we’d need to move or lift a stone of this size, and then get all befuddled and mesmerised by the fact that JCBs didn’t exist in prehistory. Well, I’ve got news for you, buddy: they didn’t need JCBs 5,000 years ago because back then, stones were alive and moved their own selves, thank you very much.
So, Norman. As you can tell, Norman was quite a good natured sort which is why he, of all the stones of his time, was chosen to be Vice-Chair of the most important society of prehistoric Pen Caer—the Alien Interminglingatory—the Chair of which was an alien called Betty, or Betts for short. Norman and Betts had a great working relationship for several thousand years and are the main great minds behind many of the wonders of Wales.
Betts, like every alien I have ever encountered, was from a highly advanced civilisation. I think the reason for this is because I have not managed to leave earth (yet) in order to meet an unadvanced alien civilisation, and obviously you’d need to be pretty advanced to be able to travel to a new planet. Anyway, Betts came to earth for the same reasons that a human might go into an SSSI and start poking at rotting logs to see what xylophagous insects they could find. As it goes, Betts did find woodlice but she also found Norman’s great uncle Sisko, and that’s who piqued her attention.
When Betts first arrived on earth, stones didn’t grow very big. They were all mostly pebble sized and smaller and relied on the wind and dragons for dispersal. Betts taught the land-rocks that they too were stone and showed them how to peel parts of themselves off from the land and shape themselves into faces, so as to more easily recognise one another. The land-rocks-now-stones got the hang of this pretty quickly, so Betts moved onto teaching them other things like how to command dragons, compose poems, and pretty much all the contemporary arts and sciences you can find in the academy except epidemiology because it’s a sham.
Norman turned out to have a flair for animal husbandry. Whilst Betts had shown him how to cooperate with the larger animals like whales and dragons, Norman had the genius idea, and frankly, impeccable eye for detail, to focus on the smaller ones. More, Norman was also a part-time horticulturalist, and propelled by some cross-pollinating wisdom, he invented sheep by selectively breeding Old Man’s Beard with an invertebrate and a small type of horse which no longer exists. A Wales without sheep is a Wales without Norman: unthinkable on two counts.
Of course, not all of Norman’s inventions were so successful. For instance, some were so fine and insubstantial, made as they were from snail trails and spider webs, that they floated away into the sky to become clouds. However, Norman’s least successful invention was us. He made us too much in his likeness and in our rigidity was an arrogance which said stones don’t move, talk, and chatter. After some time, the net of disbelieving human minds weighed down upon the stones and captured them in place, often mid-action. I’ll leave you to guess what our great capstones were really up to…
Betts was both sad and furious with Norman, but her exploration training told her when to quit. Thankfully, given she was an advanced alien, she had a special ray gun which went ‘pew-pew’ and protected her from restrictive human mind-nets. So after blasting a few negative Nancys to smithereens, she got in her spaceship and flew half way across the world to Easter Island and started the process all over again.