Nana Jizel

I met them, Dr Syntax and Dr Johnson, when I was there last week.

My travailing companion had decided to take a fly around, swooping and swirling with the birds, twirling over the white peaked waves, nearly losing control as she took the full face of a blustery gust around the edge of a lighthouse.

As I watched her tumble away slightly out of control, crying with delight as the rain and sea spray streamed down her face, I felt slightly alone and left out having never learnt to fly myself.

I wanted to find the Nana Jizel.

Nana Jizel is a sagely purple dragon who lives near by.

She has reached a certain age and black spines are starting to break through her wrinkled purple skin, sore and flapping against the painful intrusions or rather their antonyms.

Dragons start out green, big and boisterous, flaming terrified villagers or flying low over herds of cows, cooking them with big bursts of fire. As they grow older they shrink and turn red becoming strong and powerful, generally acquiring unimaginable wealth of gold and jewels they mostly just sleep on. When the glitter fades they become wise and purple, magically knowledgeable of their inner power as their outer frame and fame reduces further. Eventually they blacken into concentrated intelligence and wisdom getting smaller and smaller until they finally disappear in a sublime puff of divine smoke.

Nana Jizel is still young enough to get annoyed and grumpy with her two wizard neighbours but only intervenes when their arguments get completely out of control. This is rare because Dr Johnson and Dr Syntax normally have a completely different perception of what they are actually talking about.

For example Dr Syntax might say in passing:

“Split infinitives are frequently poor style, but they are not strictly bad grammar. To avoid the split infinitive could result either in weakness or over-formality: either might ruin rhythmic force and rhetorical pattern.”

Dr Johnson would retort angrily:

“You can't use unicylcing fish to badly lubricate priest's collars because his name was Tim and making book knees without of umbrella tears or Mariah Carey, you fool!”

To which Dr Syntax would say:

“Your reply is irrelevant and not a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition. It contains the fallacy of Non Causa Pro Causa: you have identified a cause of an event, but not actually shown it to be the cause. The non sequitur is only worthy of note but not comment.”

Dr Johnson would then start choking, gagging as if something was stuck in his throat until an orange popped out of his mouth and rolled along the floor to Dr Syntax’s feet. A door would then creakily open in the orange’s side and out would jump a tiny monkey carrying an equally tiny jack. The monkey would then put the orange on the jack and start jacking it up, pausing occasionally to pant for comic and dramatic effect. When it reached Dr Syntax face a hoping mad Hara Kristina would rise up on a platform through its top, shouting incoherent obscenities – something about stealing a trampoline and frantically waving his tambourine.

At which point Dr Syntax would storm off in a huff, sweeping his cape around him brooding deconstructivism.

Nina Jizel would then close her watchful minds eye and go back to sleep.

She knows they never agree or disagree but they are both very powerful wizards so she wants to be careful.

She was a red dragon back the days of Merlyn and doesn’t want those mistakes to be made again.