Little Rimmer - Chapter One

Once upon a time, there was a teddy bear by the name of Little Rimmer. He was called Little Rimmer because he was only three inches high. There was nothing extraordinary about him, apart from the fact that he was three inches high, and checked. Being checked was something that came so naturally to Little Rimmer, that he couldn’t remember why it was so important.

Not long after his mother kissed new life into him, he blinked both eyes, shook his head, stretched his paws above his head and strolled off into the world to see what he could see. This task was a bit inevitable, but nevertheless compelling, as up until that moment he had only seen his mother and was quite unused to seeing in general as his eyes were so new. The irony was that it was only the sweet kiss of his dearest mother that had planted an adventuring spirit his soul in the first place, together with a song in his heart and a faint, indistinguishable thought in his mind of something quite altogether bigger than himself (this not being hard since he was so little). Although parting with Rimmer was something that made his mother sad, she knew it was something that had to be done for him to be able to stand on his own two paws. Perhaps his adventure would give him the answers to the questions that had just been awakened in him?

One day, not long after he had left the comfort of the only home he had ever known, he was strolling through a luscious and leafy glen. Singing a merry tune as he wandered, he quite mistakenly and not at all on purpose came across a frog hopping about near a little stream.
‘Hello!’ said Rimmer to the strange creature.
‘Ribbit!’ said the frog, bouncing up and down and up and down.
‘What are you? You seem to be talking some kind of foreign language!’ exclaimed Rimmer as his head followed the bouncing frog, up and down and up and down.
‘I is a frog,’ replied the frog, up and down and up and down.
‘Oooooh! How lovely!’ said Rimmer, ‘What is a frog? I mean, what does a frog do?’
‘We bounce!’ said the frog, up and down and up and down, ‘What do you do?’
‘Not sure yet!’ said Rimmer, a little puzzled at the question. He knew that he could sing a little, but not much else apart from that, and since he had always known how to sing, he didn’t consider it that clever or that unusual. Suddenly, Rimmer had a brainwave! He wandered if maybe he could bounce too! ‘Um, Mr Frog, do you think that I could bounce as well as you?’
‘Well there laddie,’ said the frog, ‘Why don’t you just try it? Ribbit!’
So, taking a deep breath, and squeezing his eyes shut, he bent his knees and pushed off from the springy turf.
‘Ooooh!’ Rimmer exclaimed, as he came back to land on the ground, rather more quickly than he had anticipated ‘I don’t bounce!’ he said, quite forlorn, ‘I only went up half an inch and you’re bouncing way up above my head! And when I came back down, I just seemed to stop!’
‘You’re not trying, laddie, try again!’ said the frog, up and down and up and down.
Rimmer took another breath, scrunched up only one eye this time, and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth like he was concentrating very hard, bent his knees and pushed off from the springy turf…
THUD! He came crashing back down to earth in a mess of checked limbs, ‘Oh no!’ he cried, ‘I’m not bouncy at all!’
‘Ahhhh,’ said the frog, up and down and up and down, ‘you must be missing the vital ingredient!’
‘What’s that?’ asked Rimmer, his gaze following the frog up and down and up and down.
‘You is not a frog!’ said the frog, up and down and up and down.
Rimmer started to get quite cross. He decided that he was not going to take any more of this nonsense, ‘Listen here, frog, what makes you so special that you bounce, then?’
For once, the frog stopped bouncing and came to land just next to where Rimmer had collapsed in a heap.
‘Laddie, I don’t mean you any disrespect, but you don’t look much like you were designed to bounce!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Rimmer, a little perplexed.
‘Well, can you see these long, strong legs that I’ve got here?’ asked the frog, extending a rather slender and well-proportioned limb in Rimmer’s direction.
‘I can, now that you’ve stopped bouncing,’ said Rimmer, whose head wanted to move up and down and up and down but had just grown tired of it.
‘These long strong legs are what give me my bounce! And would you like to know a secret?’ asked the frog.
‘Oh yes please!’ asked Rimmer eagerly.
‘When I bounce, I am the happiest frog in the land, because I know that it is what I was made to do! Why else would I have such long strong legs if it were not to bounce?’ And with that, the frog started bouncing again, up and down and up and down.
‘Oh dear!’ thought Rimmer. Although he was happy for the bouncy frog, he was sad for himself because he couldn’t bounce. He leant over and looked at his reflection in the stream. ‘I’m just a little check bear with no place in this world.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the reflection of the frog bouncing up and down and up and down in the stream. For a minute, he had to look twice, because he almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The frog that was in mid-bounce looked like a slimy green bouncy thing. But when he looked at the frog in the reflection, the frog not only seemed to have a translucent glow around him and be a better looking sort of frog, he also seemed to be bouncing higher than the frog in real life! In fact, the more he looked at the bouncing frog in the reflection, the more he was convinced that what he saw in the reflection was more real than what he saw on dry land! Rimmer was so captivated that he moved closer and closer to the water’s edge. Soon, he had bent over so far, he was looking at his own reflection. He almost dared not look, because he didn’t want to frighten himself, but he closed one eye and stuck his tongue out of one side of his mouth and really looked…

But all he could see was a checked Little Rimmer. He slammed down his paw on the surface of the stream which sent a splash of water all over himself. ‘Oh bother!’ he said to himself, shaking himself off and picking himself up. He was now not in a very good mood at all, ‘I’m not a very special bear in the slightest!’ and trudged off in the opposite direction from which he came.