Peeling Potatoes 49: I Sent The Mayor Into the Time Glitch

Janita

I came into Issue 49 with a plan.

Not a gentle plan.

Not one of those “let us have a nice little Friday chat and maybe peel one emotional potato” plans.

No.

I came in with a proper Fruitloop University plan, the kind with medieval marketplaces, shiny useless bank cards, pet rocks, prehistoric butterflies, carrot cell phones, and The Mayor standing in the middle of all of it in his pajamas, trying to reason with history.

Before we even started, he said this could be his last Peeling Potatoes.

He says that every weekend.

I told him he would be fine. He always thinks this is the week he will not survive, and then he survives, and then he comes back the next week to be mildly traumatised again. It is a working system. As Ralph said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Although Ralph had also said something very dangerous that morning.

The Mayor told me about his meeting with Ralph before we came on air. They had been talking about breaking a daily routine and making the day more playful. Cooking came up, and Ralph said he hated peeling potatoes.

I mean.

He said what?

The Mayor warned him immediately that this could not pass. He told Ralph he was going to meet me at ten o’clock for Peeling Potatoes, and now Ralph had walked straight into the sacred vegetable crime department. He said he would have to speak to me about finding a suitable punishment.

I did not have an answer yet.

Not yet.

But that does not mean the matter is closed. Some punishments need time to grow legs. Like small potatoes.

The Mayor was already suspicious of me. He said I was sharpening my knife. I told him no, he would survive like every other week. He did not find that comforting, because according to him, every other week was the week he survived, and this might be the one where he did not.

Then he addressed our two listeners and thanked them for their patronage. He told them that any future questions should be sent to his successor because he would be six feet under.

I said maybe not six feet under.

I felt that was generous.

Then I opened the door.

I gave him the scenario.

The Mayor went to sleep on a regular Sunday night, but instead of waking up to his standard phone alarm, he was jolted awake by the loud metallic clang of a blacksmith’s hammer. He opened his eyes and realised he was not in his bedroom anymore. He had been caught in a massive cosmic time glitch.

He was standing in the middle of a chaotic, bustling marketplace.

To his left, knights in full armour were arguing over the price of hay.

To his right, a bewildered 1960s businessman in a sharp grey suit was trying to find somewhere to plug in his electric razor.

The timelines had fused. He was trapped in a mashup of medieval village and mid-twentieth-century town. There was no internet. No cell phone. No satellite data. The local tavern served both mead and milkshakes. The town crier was shouting the morning news through a 1950s megaphone. He had nothing with him except the clothes he had fallen asleep in, his twentieth-century brain, and a strange sense of adventure.

I let him sit with that.

He repeated the details back to me like someone trying to understand the terms and conditions of a kidnapping. Sunday night. Pajamas, hopefully. A blacksmith’s hammer. Knights in armour. A 1960s situation. No modern communication. Mild confusion.

He said I had picked the cherry this week.

I had.

And then I asked the first question.

The Mayor was back in the medieval era, but he had forgotten any useful historical knowledge. His only notable futuristic skill was knowing the exact dance from a famous pop music video. How would he use this dance to avoid being accused of witchcraft?

He tried to escape through a historical side door.

He said witches were usually female and he was male, so perhaps he would not have to convince anyone of anything because he was the wrong gender.

I closed that door.

He had forgotten useful historical knowledge.

He did not know that.

He did not enjoy being told he had to unknow something he knew. He said that was the intelligent part of the question. How could he not know something he had learned? Well, in my scenario, he did not know it. That was the rule. My question said he forgot any useful historical knowledge, so he had forgotten it.

The Mayor accused me of making up the rules as we went along.

I was not.

The rules had been there. He was just arguing with them in pajamas.

Eventually he found the clue. The song was The Safety Dance.

So his plan was to lead whoever was trying to burn him at the stake down the garden path in the safety dance. They would be so enthralled by his music and dancing skills that they would join in the fun and forget the burning. Aggression would reduce. Bad will would disappear. He would pray a little, which was probably wise, because dancing is useful but not always legally binding in a witch trial.

That was only the beginning.

He said he had nothing anywhere, but I told him he could continue with his questions like we had done the previous week. He had his scenario. I had mine.

Then The Mayor tried to turn the conversation toward paradise.

He remembered the story in the Bible where there were two people in the Garden of Eden. Everything was hunky-dory. Then along came the serpent, offered Eve the apple, she bit into it, and boom. Game over. Do not pass. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Straight out of paradise. Jail time.

He also remembered that we had once twisted the paradise story into something involving Bohumila. I remembered a little bit too, but I said I did not think it should be recorded.

So he asked me: what if Eve had not accepted the apple and bitten into it?

I thought about the movie I had watched with my son, King of Egypt, the story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt. If Eve had not bitten into the apple, maybe there would not have been slavery. Maybe that whole story would not have happened. And if we fast-forwarded a few thousand years, maybe we would not even have clothes to wear, because that was when they started covering themselves according to the Bible.

The Mayor said that would assume people were weatherproof, or that the climate was so ambient that modesty and temperature did not matter.

Maybe it was.

Maybe clothes were simply not necessary in paradise.

Then I pulled him back into the time glitch.

He found himself in a 1920s coffee shop. Same mixed-up period. He tried to pay for a cup of coffee with a bank card. How would he explain the shiny piece of plastic to the barista without being accused of theft or illegal magical practice?

The Mayor immediately saw the whole problem.

He said it was not just the bank card. He would have to explain the whole infrastructure behind it. The bank. The system. The invisible money. The machine. The network. The paper trail. He imagined sitting in the café for years, drinking coffee and eating food, waiting for history to catch up to the payment method. Then, when card payments finally existed, he could get up and pay his bill, which by then would include compound interest and require another card to finance the experience.

He was making it very complicated.

So I reminded him that he was wearing pajamas.

Did he keep his wallet in his pajama pants?

No.

There went his cash escape plan.

He had imagined himself in a nice dapper suit, maybe wearing a hat, but that was not the scenario. He was in pajamas, in a café, holding a bank card I had given him somewhere in the 1920s because it made the question more difficult.

He wanted to know at what point I had given him the bank card.

Somewhere in the 1920s.

The easy way out would have been to say, “Can I please wash a few dishes for a cup of coffee?” But the bank card was there to throw him off.

It did.

He eventually got there, but only after building an entire financial civilisation around a shiny piece of plastic.

That is how The Mayor thinks. He does not just cross the road. He first explains road infrastructure, pedestrian ethics, asphalt history, and the emotional life of traffic lights. Then he crosses.

After that, he asked me a question that was more my intelligence level, according to him, although I think he was just trying to recover.

We had once spoken about potatoes rolling around the floor. We had both had an intense week, most of it unpleasant. So he asked me: if my thoughts were little potatoes rolling around the floor, which one would I pick up first?

I chose the smallest one.

Because it had little legs and could not run fast enough.

“Wait for me. I’ve got little legs.”

That was the potato I would pick up first.

The smallest thought was: remember to set the alarm. Hope to God I did not wake up in the wrong era.

Then I sent him back into history.

In this historical era with knights and blacksmiths and busy marketplaces, he had the opportunity to bring his wife, a noisy houseplant, and a broken microwave. How would this change the timeline?

He immediately looked for the trap.

He thought he had a choice between the three.

No.

He had to bring all three.

I had considered a vacuum cleaner, but we had spoken a lot about vacuum cleaners already. A broken microwave was better. A noisy houseplant was better. His wife was definitely better, because that was where the trap lived.

The Mayor remembered the film Midnight in Paris, where an American author visits Paris, gets transported into the literary salons of the 1920s and 1930s, meets Hemingway and the great writers, and keeps going back because he is so enthralled. Later, someone goes even further back and chooses to stay in that earlier period, while he chooses his own nostalgic place.

So The Mayor started thinking about whether one might want to stay in a different time.

The broken microwave would be totally useless, especially if there was no electricity. But it would remind him that there was something in the future. It would be a symbol. A broken future. Was the future worth returning to, or should he live in the moment and enjoy what he had?

The noisy houseplant was a distraction. It might be useful later. It might not.

His wife would bring the timeline with her.

That was complicated.

Under normal circumstances, he said, one would be happy that she was there. But maybe it would be nice in that era. Maybe he would not want the timeline brought back. Maybe he could marry her off to a rich prince. Maybe he could sell the microwave and include a wife in the deal.

Buy a microwave and get a wife free.

Buy one, get one free.

It was a joke, yes. A dangerous little joke walking barefoot over thorny ground, but still a joke. He did not go too far, because even in a medieval marketplace, The Mayor knows when the soil gets sharp.

Then it was Friday.

I said, “Thank God it’s Friday,” and immediately I had a song in my head.

It’s Friday again.

I asked what he would do if he had a blank cheque to be totally, wildly, beautifully impractical.

Then I answered for myself.

It was winter. The sun was shining. It was not very warm, but I could sunbathe while reading a book in the garden. I would not get a tan. I would not get anything, probably. But I could try.

That was impractical.

I also said I could clean the house.

The Mayor said that was practical.

I said no, it was impractical, because if I cleaned today, tomorrow it would look like a bomb exploded anyway.

He understood that immediately. He spoke about the beige-white-grey tiled kitchen floor, the most unforgiving floor in the entire world. You mop it, and then some monkey has nothing better to do than walk across it. Or you start chopping something, and the gravitational pull of the food becomes 150 percent. Suddenly something escapes the cooking pot and heads for the suicidal floor. It decides it would rather die by jumping off the counter than by boiling.

That reminded me of Sausage Party, a vulgar cartoon movie about food trying to run away from humans so it would not be eaten. My son had wanted to watch it, but I said no. I had seen it, and it was terrible. But when The Mayor spoke about food jumping to its death, that movie walked right back into my head.

Then I went back to the time scenario.

What would happen if he accidentally stepped on a prehistoric butterfly, and when he returned to the present day, everyone used standard garden vegetables as cell phones? Carrots, potatoes, broccoli. How would he fix the timeline?

The Mayor questioned the entire premise.

Who said he had to fix it?

I said I did.

My questions. My rules.

He said there was no concept of freedom in my world.

When it comes to my scenarios and my questions, yes.

He said he was going to be an anarchist and refuse to fix it.

I told him it would look silly to hold a carrot next to your head while talking to a friend.

He challenged that too. Who says it is silly? Maybe calling it silly showed intolerance or narrow-mindedness. In Froot Loop University, he said, you do not fix it. You embrace it. It is colourful. It is different. It uses imagination. It explores quirkiness. Everyone’s reality is different.

If a carrot works as a cell phone, brilliant.

He even brought Ralph back into it. Ralph had told him that morning, “Don’t fix a working system. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Fine.

But what about the butterfly?

He had killed it.

Did he feel guilty?

At first, he did not seem very remorseful, because the psychology of the question had distracted him from the poor butterfly lying there. But then The Mayor became serious.

He said he would save a mouse from one of his cats if the mouse had a chance of survival. He would rescue a bee or some buzzing thing trapped against a window. He would take a glass and a piece of paper, coax it into the glass, and transport it outside so it could buzz in freedom.

But I had used the past tense.

He had stepped on the butterfly.

The deed was done.

So he turned it into the real question: do we go through life with open eyes and avoid stepping on the butterflies before us? Do we try not to destroy things, hurt people, hurt animals, or disrespect their right to be there?

If he had opened his eyes and stepped around the butterfly, that would have been better for the butterfly and for his own state of mind.

In my scenario, he had been too busy arguing with his wife in his pajamas while trying to find a place to sell a broken microwave.

That is how the butterfly died.

Then I asked about the soundtrack of my week.

If my life had a soundtrack this week, what song would play when I walked into the kitchen?

The song was “Go” by The Chemical Brothers.

It was trending because of a Netflix movie called Apex. I had watched it the previous weekend. It was a thriller with Charlize Theron, who is from Benoni in South Africa. The actor with her in the movie played a man who was a little bit crazy. He hunted people. He made beef jerky with human flesh. In one scene he played the song and told her she had until the end of it to run as far away from him as possible.

I had listened to it three or four times that week on Spotify. It has a nice beat.

Also, Instagram had taken it and run with it. A woman made a video pretending to call her husband and tell him he had until the end of the song to get home from the bar, while she stood waiting with a pitchfork or something. Parents were using the song to tell their children they had until the end of it to clean their rooms.

The Mayor asked if this was standard practice in my household. Did I call my husband and tell him he had until the end of the song to get home while I stood there with a mop and bucket?

No.

He is usually at home.

Maybe it could be reversed: I had until the end of the song to get to the shops, but I must not bring back a rooster.

The Mayor then compared our Instagram feeds.

I get women threatening husbands with pitchforks.

He gets European train connections.

He had been getting reels about new train routes. From 2027, maybe, one could travel from Timbuktu to God knows where. There was also something about travelling from Istanbul to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia by train, through Turkey, Syria, and somehow into Saudi Arabia. He thought that would be an interesting trip. He had also been informed that the train from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia was back up and running, leaving at six and arriving at nine, or something like that.

So yes.

I get musical domestic threats.

He gets timetables.

We can draw conclusions.

Then I made the next question easier. Not too difficult, although I did warn him the worst was not over yet.

He woke up the next morning. It was the 1960s. No internet. No cell phones. Still in pajamas. He was hunting for breakfast, trying to find a place where he could have a decent meal. What was the very first piece of future knowledge he accidentally let slip while ordering?

He asked where he was geographically.

I let him choose.

For some reason, Tahiti jumped into my head first. Beaches. Ocean. That was because of my meeting with Chloe the previous night. Tahiti was her dream holiday destination. He had actually been to Tahiti, and he had once collected a coconut there, but he was not allowed to take it on board the ship he was travelling on. He was very upset.

Then he settled on France.

A café in France in the 1960s.

His future knowledge would be about smoking.

People smoked everywhere. My husband and I had actually spoken about that two days earlier. I remembered an old advertisement, maybe for Camel, where a woman was in hospital breastfeeding her baby with a cigarette in her mouth. Smoking was once presented as healthy, or at least accepted that way.

The Mayor said that until medical research changed things, smoking was normal. He mentioned a film with Russell Crowe where he plays a tobacco executive who challenges the tobacco company narrative because smoking is dangerous.

The Mayor is a non-smoker and always has been, although his parents smoked. So in a 1960s French café, with men drinking morning red wine and Gitanes cigarettes hanging from their mouths, he would probably be irritated by the tobacco smoke and ask for a non-smoking table or corner.

That would reveal him.

In some countries smoking is still allowed in certain public places, but where I am it is only allowed in designated smoking areas. So yes, the smoke would be noticeable.

Then I asked myself what I would press pause on in my life for one week.

I ran through school, cooking, cleaning, laundry.

But the obvious answer was time.

I would pause time.

Everything else would stand still, and I would be the only one moving. I would do the things I enjoy. I would not have to cook, drive to school, wake up early, cancel meetings, or explain myself to anyone. Everyone else would be frozen, including The Mayor and the whole working world. I would just have one week of total me-time, and when everything unfroze, we would all fall back into routine.

No one would miss anything.

No one would know.

The Mayor liked that.

I liked it too.

Because sometimes the most beautiful fantasy is not a castle or a prince or a magic microwave. Sometimes it is just one week where nobody needs you.

Then I sent him back into the medieval era.

The only way to earn money for food was to convince a room full of knights that pet rocks were going to be a multimillion-dollar idea.

The Mayor went quiet for a second.

“Please hold. Your call is important to us.”

That was his brain loading.

He said it was such a 21st-century thing: buy something you do not need because everybody wants it or everybody has it.

He had to convince a room full of knights, while still in pajamas, surrounded by every possible murderous weapon, that pet rocks were the path to wealth.

He said it sounded like Dragon’s Den.

I told him he needed money for food, so he had to sell the idea.

He started with the emotional bond. A pet rock is calm. It sits there. It does what it is told. It does not want anything. If you speak to it, it does not answer back, including with unpleasant answers you do not want to hear.

Then he found the knight angle.

Knights are not only motivated by wealth. They are motivated by power.

So he would not sell the rocks as pets. He would sell them as magical power. Once the sale was done and the gold coins exchanged, he would run for his life and have breakfast in smoky 1960s Paris, where the knights could not get him. Smoke was unhealthy, but being stabbed with a sword was worse.

Then The Mayor asked me to imagine it was 29 May 2027 and my future self sent me a postcard.

What would I write on it?

I did not need long.

“Don’t worry about the homework. It doesn’t matter.”

There.

Problem solved.

Then I gave him another one.

He walked into a 1950s disco, but now he had to explain Wi-Fi and an influencer to a teenager using only vocabulary available in a standard dictionary from that year.

The Mayor went to fairy tales.

He said fairy tales are actually quite cruel because they tell horror stories, but package them in nice language and fantasy. To explain something completely alien to a 1950s teenager, he would need that kind of method.

Space travel had not properly started yet. Sputnik had not gone up until the late 1950s. But radio signals existed. Telephones existed. So he would use those.

Wi-Fi could be explained as a message that does not travel through a copper telephone wire, but through the air like a radio signal. A magical device sends it. Another device receives it.

Then he made it Little Red Riding Hood. Imagine she could send a message to her grandmother because the wolf was about to eat her. Please call the emergency number. Please send help.

That was not bad.

But I reminded him he still had to explain the influencer.

He put the influencer into 1950s language: a pin-up girl, a cheerleader, someone on billboards, TV screens, movie screens, or in the newsreel. Everyone admires her for many reasons. The difference is that now she has something to say. She tells people what to buy, what to admire, and perhaps that the rocks The Mayor is selling to knights are magical.

At that point, my dog climbed onto my lap.

He invited himself.

He said, without saying it, that he was going to sit there whether I liked it or not. He probably wanted his morning nap. The other dog was already sleeping on the couch. Maybe his message was, “Come, let’s go lie on the bed.” Or, “Go fetch the child so we can play. I am bored.”

The child always wants to play with the dog.

Always.

Then I asked my last question.

The Mayor was still in the medieval era, but his entire modern playlist was trapped in his head. Which twenty-first-century song would he perform at a local market stage to completely melt everyone’s minds?

He thought of the scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly plays guitar at the dance and everyone is baffled.

The first song that came to him was “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.

He did not know why. It was not necessarily one of his favourite songs. He might usually go to Pink Floyd or Tears for Fears or music from the seventies and eighties. But “Stairway to Heaven” made sense because it could get him out of the predicament I had put him in.

Maybe he would sing it, and the knights who had realised they had been conned into buying magical rocks would pause. Maybe some higher being, possibly his wife, possibly an influencer, would take pity on him and decide he had been punished enough. Maybe if he believed in everything and in himself, he could climb those stairs and be taken back to Adam and Eve and paradise and freedom.

I decided he had made it back.

Unless he wanted to stay in that time frame.

He did not know.

But he did admit it had been uncomfortable.

I said it had been a lot of fun for me.

And it was.

Because this was not just a silly exercise. It was brutal because the questions looked ridiculous, but they kept opening serious cupboards. A safety dance became survival. A bank card became overthinking. A tiny potato became the anxious thought with little legs. A butterfly became the question of whether we walk through life with open eyes. A paused week became the need for me-time. A pet rock became capitalism, power, and the danger of customer complaints with swords.

The Mayor survived Issue 49.

He made it through the medieval market, the 1920s café, the 1950s disco, the 1960s smoky breakfast, the carrot phone timeline, and the magical pet rock business plan.

He even made it out of his pajamas, at least metaphorically.

But Ralph still said he hated peeling potatoes.

So that file remains open.

Conclusion

I did not try to break The Mayor.

Not completely.

I only placed him in a cosmic time glitch with no phone, no internet, no wallet, no proper clothes, a broken microwave, a noisy houseplant, a wife-shaped complication, a dead butterfly, a vegetable communication system, and a room full of armed knights who might eventually want refunds on their magical rocks.

That is different.

This is what the what-if does when it works properly. It starts as nonsense and then suddenly there is a real question standing in the middle of the room wearing a funny hat. It asks whether we overcomplicate simple things. It asks whether we notice small thoughts. It asks whether we can laugh at a horrible week without pretending it was not horrible. It asks whether we are awake enough not to step on the butterfly.

The Mayor called it uncomfortable.

I call it successful.

He survived.

I enjoyed it.

And next week is Issue 50, so obviously nothing is guaranteed.