It might have seemed that the insurance office was a luxury compared to the horrors of the trailer factory, but it brought with it an even greater horror—boredom. There was just not one thing that happened there that was of the slightest interest. Everything was done by tried and true methods, methodical, monotonous, deadening. The only thing there was to break the boredom was look at the girls, and I just wasn’t in the mood to appreciate them at the time.
Apart from my more mechanical daily duties which I had more or less mastered—although my supervisor, Slimy Duggans, did have to call me in for a dressing down on a weekly basis over policies numbered incorrectly or other general errors—there were other activities that I carried out less well.
The message in a bottle, the words mostly obliterated but enough to reveal that Captain Grant and his crew have been shipwrecked somewhere along the 37th South parallel of latitude. The Children of Captain Grant prevail upon rich patrons to embark on an expedition around the parallel to find them. It’s a pretty boring trip mostly but there are enough high points and amusing characters to keep it rolling along. The most fascinating bit takes them across the wilds of Victoria in the 1860s, and Jules Verne makes it seem pretty accurate and convincing to me, despite the fact that he had never been near the place. It was filmed by Walt Disney with mixed results—sometimes terrific, sometimes idiotic—and renamed In Search of the Castaways. The unlikely combination of Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier, of all people, head up the expedition.







