The Grey Prince and the grey sea

Once upon a time there was a prince, a prince who was destined to be king.

However, the prince’s mother, the Queen, refused to die, and reigned for a long, long time. The prince grew old and grey waiting for the throne to become his, growing increasingly frustrated, for this prince was a man of great ideas, one who saw himself as the greatest and wisest man in his kingdom, and he could implement none of his plans while his mother was still on the throne.

Eventually the Queen began to show her age, and though she would not give up her throne and title, she agreed to give the prince some of her powers, and the new title of Prince in Ascension.

‘I am nearly king’ he thought, finally. And yet, my kingdom is not really worth of me. It’s such a grotty place. For the Prince In Ascension had travelled widely, visited many kingdoms around the world, and all of these, he had observed, had magnificent, wide-blue oceans, yet his kingdom, the one he was on the verge of inheriting, had the most horrible grey oceans.

‘What must people think. I mean, it’s the first thing you see, when you sail to a land, the sea.’

“It is a great misfortune your majesty,” his minions said, “you are right, the sea is not worthy of your greatness. But there is nothing to be done. You can hardly change the colour of the ocean.”

“Nonsense,” the prince said, for he was a man of great ideas.  "It’s the same sea that is purest blue in other lands, it must just be the water near our shore that is grey, remove that and we too will have a sea of the purest blue."

And so his first act as Prince in Ascension was to issue a proclamation that all fit people in his kingdom should go to the sea and remove the water, a proclamation that was obeyed, by his army, by his own tenants and by almost the entire population, all grabbing buckets, pans, hoses, whatever they could find, to remove the horrible grey sea that caused the prince such offense.

Yet great as the prince’s plan was, it proved ineffective. No matter how much water was removed the sea remained grey. Many of his subjects abandoned the project, returning to their jobs. Even his tenants returned to their farms, claiming they had to plant crops for the next season, until only his army remained.

Another problem was what to do with the water. By this time all the rivers had become flooded by the excess water. The land itself was also flood, with great plains drenched in water, like in a biblical flood. There wasn’t a bath or bedpan in the kingdom that wasn’t full of the dull, grey sea water.

A further problem arose, however, and it arose out of the sea itself, in the form a  giant and angry god, Neptune, who was ired by the removal of his waters, and seeing a soldier on the shore remove water with a bucket, he seized the soldier between his thumb and forefinger, brought him right up high into the sky to be level with his eyeline, and shouted at him.

“What are you doing, stealing my waters?” he demanded.

The terrified and hapless soldier explained about the prince’s orders and Neptune became more angry than he had ever been before, angrier than the sea on the stormiest of days. He flung the soldier away, like unwanted driftwood, and placed a curse on the Prince in Ascension.

“He likes blue does he, this prince,” he bellowed to no-one in particular, as by this time the king’s entire army was fleeing from the raging god. “Well I’ll give him blue.”

And with that he placed a spell on the king. The king’s hair turned from distinguished, wise grey to sapphire blue. The prince’s skin too, he turned to the colour of a blue sky on sunny, cloudless day. And the blood flowing through the prince’s veins Neptune changed to the colour of the perfect-blue oceans the prince had so admired on his travels.

Well the prince saw his skin change colour and realised he had been cursed. To appease the gods he revoked his proclamation and called his army back from the shores. But it was too late, no matter how much he washed and scrubbed the blue skin remained.

The Queen died and the prince became king. But he never got to implement the numerous schemes he had ready to improve his kingdom, his idea of giving trees the vote, his plan to turn all the grey squirrels red, a far more pleasing colour, no, all of these plans, thousands of the ideas he had accumulated whilst prince, were all put on hold, as he refused to leave his palace, refused to be seen in public, spending as he did every minute of every day trying to scrub the blue from his skin.

The blue blood too continued to flow through his veins, and indeed through the veins of his children, for blood is inherited.

Blue blood continues to flow through the veins of the prince’s descendants, not just royalty, his heirs to the throne, but all the great and the good, the descendants of the prince’s bastard children who were granted land and titles and wealth from public taxes.

Which is why, to this day, the ancestors of the king are marked by the blue blood in their veins. For Neptune realised that idiocy is an inherited trait, thus he marked the descendants of the idiot prince to serve as a warning to the red-blooded majority to ignore every proclamation and law passed by the idiot blue-bloods who wished to rule us.