Lower Wombley Festival Replaces Every Town Clock With A Yoghurt
Residents gather for the annual celebration of fermented timekeeping, despite nobody being able to explain what time now tastes like.
LOWER WOMBLEY, The village of Lower Wombley opened its annual Yoghurt Clock Festival on Saturday. Every public clock had been replaced with a chilled dairy product pointing, where possible, towards the nearest pudding. Organisers said the event celebrated local patience, mild confusion and the old belief that breakfast ought to keep time.
By midday, 43 yoghurt clocks stood around the square. Each turned slowly on a wooden base while the brass band played in the approximate key of Tuesday. The largest was a six-foot strawberry affair called Big Spoon. Someone left it beside a radiator, it lost three minutes, and the market opened yesterday before closing next week.
Marnie Quibble, the festival director and Senior Keeper of Unnecessary Dairy, said the clocks had been calibrated with moonlight, a damp envelope and the sound of a spoon dropping into a sink. “We wanted something that could measure time while also needing to be eaten before it becomes a problem,” she said.
“We wanted something that could measure time while needing to be eaten.”
Visitors then took part in the Village Time Trial, carrying a pot of yoghurt across the square without arriving before they had left. Ivo Plunk won in no seconds. He had persuaded the finish line to move closer, which saved everybody the trouble of objecting.
The local clocks appeared to be taking it well. A spokesperson for the Committee for Accurate Pudding spoke through a knitted hat attached to a weather vane. “Several of them have stopped ticking and are now asking for spoons,” the spokesperson said. “This is considered a major step forward in civic participation.”
The town hall had meanwhile surrendered its doors to two cream crackers and issued a timetable on edible rice paper. Residents were told to attend the noon ceremony at 11.40, 12.15 or “whenever the raspberry one looks ready”. A passing breeze ate the timetable before anyone had time to challenge it.
At dusk, the yoghurt clocks glowed faintly. They began showing memories from the future: a parade due last Thursday, and a cheese stall that had not yet been imagined. Organisers called the festival a success after the whole square agreed it was probably still Saturday. Then they served 600 spoons of celebratory air.