The bus that carried Year 4B into the countryside was designed in 1973, which was a terrible year for buses but an excellent year for moustaches. It had two functioning wheels, three that were decorative, and an aroma of old crisps and despair that had long since become self-sustaining.
When the bus finally stopped (which it did with a noise not unlike a cow sneezing into a trombone), the children poured out with the uncoordinated enthusiasm of a bucket of Lego being tipped down the stairs.
They were here, their teacher announced, to “experience nature.” This, of course, meant they would scream at it, poke it, and then ask for ice cream afterwards.
The cows stood in the nearby field, watching the arrival of humanity’s future with the kind of silent judgement usually reserved for customs officers.
It is a little-known fact — primarily because nobody wants to know it — that cows once came very close to inventing philosophy. Around 480 BCE, while the Greeks were busy arguing about whether chairs really exist or whether they are just “chair-like,” a cow named Bessie in a meadow near Athens had an epiphany.
Her thought was this: “If grass is green, and I eat grass, and my dung is also greenish… am I grass?”
Sadly, before she could fully articulate this, a child pointed at her and shouted, “LOOK, MUM, A COW IS DOING A WEE!” The philosophical movement collapsed instantly.
Instead of philosophy, cows turned to their other great pastime: tax avoidance.†
† Footnote: It remains one of history’s quiet scandals that cows have been dodging VAT on hay for centuries, largely by pretending to be “decorative landscape features” rather than “active consumers of agricultural products.” The Ministry of Agriculture has never recovered.
Far beyond the fields of Surrey, in a nondescript grey office floating somewhere near Alpha Centauri, sits the Department of Species Assignments. Its job is to categorise every creature in the universe as either:
One Thursday afternoon, Colin — junior clerk, part-time sandwich enthusiast — accidentally filed cows under both. This clerical error has haunted humanity ever since. Children now stroke cows in petting zoos, name them Daisy, and then later eat burgers without the faintest sense of irony.
Colin has been fired seventeen times, but nobody else will take the post, mostly because the paperwork on pandas is unspeakably dull.
Back in Surrey, the children advanced on the cows, sandwiches waving like flags of war.
The lead cow, Margaret, was a creature of formidable presence. She had the kind of stare that could curdle milk at fifty paces and a moo that carried the weight of ancient wisdom and mild indigestion.
Most of the children screamed, waved, or pointed out bodily functions. But one girl, holding a half-melted ice cream and dripping steadily onto her shoes, simply looked Margaret in the eyes.
Margaret mooed, low and resonant. The girl nodded. A silent treaty was signed.
The rest of the children remained idiots.
Every species on Earth obeys a set of Universal Laws, not discovered by Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, but by a tired civil servant in Swindon named Derek. Derek’s contribution to science went entirely unnoticed, because he filed it under “Miscellaneous” and then went home for a ham sandwich.
The Laws are as follows:
Derek published these findings in a small, stapled pamphlet titled Animals: Why They Don’t Care About You. Only three copies were ever printed. Two were lost in a flood, and the third was eaten by a goat in Devon.
Children on school trips are, by Universal Law, sticky. This stickiness manifests in several ways:
Teachers, meanwhile, carry clipboards. Nobody knows why. The clipboards contain lists of children’s names, emergency phone numbers, and a set of rules the children have no intention of following. The clipboard is less a tool of authority and more a psychological comfort blanket, like wine but rectangular.
Shoes, too, are a problem. No matter how carefully a child’s shoes are tied in the morning, at least one will have come off and vanished into a boggy patch of field by midday. This is not mischief. It is inevitability. Farmers in Surrey estimate that the soil contains at least three million abandoned school shoes, forming what geologists call the Clarks Layer.
Meanwhile, Margaret the cow had begun to suspect that the children were not a species of predator (too loud, too disorganised), nor prey (too sticky, too unhygienic), but some third category altogether: administrative accidents.
She mooed to Barbara, her second-in-command, who mooed back in agreement. The cows would keep an eye on the small noisy ones. Not out of fear. Not out of curiosity. But because, deep down, cows sensed that humans were the sort of creatures who might accidentally declare war on themselves and drag everyone else along.
The children had now fully committed to what military historians later described (incorrectly, since they were talking about Waterloo at the time) as a Mexican stand-off.
On one side:
On the other side:
The air was thick with tension. Well, not tension exactly — more like the smell of custard creams from someone’s lunchbox and the faint whiff of a cow fart.
The cows stared. The children stared back. Somewhere, a teacher muttered, “For God’s sake, don’t touch the electric fence.” Immediately, three children touched the electric fence.
Margaret decided to test the opposition. She took one slow, deliberate step forward, mooed with the solemnity of a bishop addressing parliament, and chewed her cud meaningfully.
The children screamed with joy. One shouted, “It’s coming for us!” which was both factually incorrect and unnecessarily dramatic. Another shouted, “It looks like my nan!” again, which suggested some serious genetic mysteries in Croydon.
The standoff might have lasted indefinitely had it not been for the ice cream girl. She dropped the cone. A splat echoed across the field, like a gunshot in a Western, except with sprinkles.
The cows blinked. The children gasped. Margaret mooed. History does not record what she meant, but scholars believe it was either, “This is beneath us,” or “Who drops perfectly good ice cream?”
At this point, it is worth digressing — as all serious histories must — into the Great Intergalactic Milk Debate, which continues to this day across three galaxies and several WhatsApp groups.
The argument began when the Andromedan Council proposed that milk should be classified as “a drink.” The Milky Way delegation (who, understandably, felt they had branding rights) argued that milk was in fact “a food.” The Triangulum Galaxy, in its usual contrarian fashion, insisted it was “a suspicious white liquid best avoided altogether.”
Into this bureaucratic brawl wandered Earth, proudly declaring: “We drink it, we eat it, we make cheese, and sometimes we turn it into tiny puddings shaped like animals and call it ‘yogurt for kids.’”
This announcement caused a galactic scandal. Delegates from six planets fainted. A goat from Barnard’s Star stood up and delivered a forty-five-minute rant about lactose intolerance.‡
‡ Footnote: The goat has since published seven books, including Milk: Humanity’s Dairy Delusion and Udder Madness: Why Cheese Will Be Our Undoing. Both are available in paperback, though they are mostly unreadable unless you speak fluent Goat.
The point of this digression, if there is one (there isn’t), is that milk is far more politically explosive than humans realise. So when Margaret mooed in response to the dropped ice cream, it was not just a sound. It was a statement. A declaration. Possibly even a vote.
Back in Surrey, none of the children understood this. One simply said, “That cow burped,” and wiped jam on his sleeve.
The fate of three galaxies balanced on that moo. The children, of course, were too busy arguing about whose turn it was to hold the football.
From a biological perspective, children make no sense whatsoever. They are small, noisy, fragile, and sticky. They possess no natural camouflage, no defensive spikes, and their primary strategy for survival is screaming until a larger human reluctantly provides biscuits.
Evolutionary biologists have attempted to explain this, usually with long, serious papers featuring graphs. But the truth is far simpler and much more embarrassing: children were an administrative error.
In the early stages of designing Homo sapiens, the Department of Evolutionary Planning (a branch of the Galactic Board of Design) accidentally submitted a half-finished prototype. The plan had been to create full-sized humans directly, skipping the whole awkward “miniature phase.” But Colin — yes, the same Colin from the Department of Species Assignments — misfiled the paperwork.
Thus, humans now reproduce in the most inconvenient way possible: by producing smaller humans who are entirely useless for the first 18 years.‡
‡ Footnote: Some argue it’s 30 years. These people usually have adult children still living at home.
The cows knew this instinctively. Watching the children stumble around the field, Margaret thought, “How did these creatures ever conquer the planet? We wouldn’t trust them to guard a fence post.”
Barbara, her second-in-command, mooed back sagely, which translated roughly as, “They didn’t conquer the planet. They inherited it by accident, like a bad will.”
Historians later referred to it as the Treaty of Surrey, though at the time it looked very much like a melted ice cream, a sandwich, and a cow’s hoofprint in the mud.
Here is what happened:
The ice cream girl (still dripping quietly onto her shoes) picked up her fallen cone, now reduced to a sad puddle of dairy soup.
Margaret stepped forward, placed one enormous hoof beside it, and mooed again — a deep, resonant sound that echoed with meaning.
The girl nodded solemnly. Nobody knew what she understood, least of all her, but the gesture was enough.
And thus, without anyone fully realising it, a treaty was struck between cows and children. The terms were never written down (partly because cows can’t write, and partly because children’s handwriting is illegible anyway), but scholars have pieced them together as follows:
The teachers, meanwhile, herded the children back toward the bus with the desperation of people who had aged ten years in one morning.
The cows watched them go. Margaret mooed one last time. Barbara mooed back. It was agreed: humanity was ridiculous, but not yet dangerous enough to bother with. At least, not today.
While the children argued about who had sat on whose packed lunch, a very different argument was happening light years away.
The Galactic Cheese Council had convened. This was a body so ancient, so revered, that its minutes were recorded on dairy products. (Unfortunately, cheese moulds, so history was constantly rewritten by fungus.)
On the agenda: Earth. Specifically, Earth’s obsession with turning milk into increasingly unlikely forms. Butter, cheese, yogurt, clotted cream, whipped cream, double cream, squirty cream… The list had caused riots on three moons and at least one supernova.
The delegate from the Goat Confederacy thundered:
“You can’t just weaponise milk! They’ve got drinks, foods, desserts, cheese strings! What’s next — tactical butter deployment?”
The delegate from Earth cheerfully replied:
“We’ve already tried that. It’s called ‘slippery floors.’”
Several galaxies threatened sanctions. One asteroid threatened to boycott cheddar. The crisis deepened.
Back in Surrey, a boy sat down on a cowpat and laughed hysterically. Which, in a way, summed up humanity’s contribution to galactic diplomacy.
Umbrellas are humanity’s most tragic invention. They are designed to protect you from rain but are mostly used to poke strangers in the eye or invert themselves at the slightest breeze. Cows, wisely, have never bothered with umbrellas.
Socks are worse. Nobody in the universe truly understands socks: they vanish in washing machines, appear in drawers where they don’t belong, and exist mostly to collect mud. The only consistent law of socks is that they are always damp at precisely the wrong moment.
Now, llamas — llamas the universe actually respects. They are dignified, hilarious, and armed with projectile spit accurate to ten metres. Many cosmic philosophers have argued that if llamas had been domesticated before cows, history would have been a lot less messy and a lot more entertaining.
One theologian even proposed that God, in a rare moment of honesty, admitted:
“Yes, llamas were the original plan. But then someone in procurement ticked the wrong box, and here we are.”
This explains a lot.
And so the bus rattled away, belching exhaust and faint custard-cream crumbs into the Surrey air. Inside, the children argued about who was the loudest, who was the stickiest, and whether cows were funny or boring. (They unanimously agreed on “funny noses.”)
The cows, left in their field, resumed chewing grass with the grim determination of creatures who had once tried philosophy and decided grass was simpler. Margaret mooed one last time, low and thoughtful. Barbara mooed back. Both agreed the human species was a mistake they would simply have to tolerate — like drizzle, traffic cones, or Coldplay.
High above, in the folds of infinity, the universe considered the day. It tallied the following:
It weighed these against eternity, infinity, and the gravitational collapse of stars. And then the universe did what it always does when confronted with the baffling spectacle of human existence.
It shrugged.
Because in the end, cows would continue chewing. Children would continue shouting. Humanity would keep inventing ways to make dairy products more confusing. And the cosmos, vast and indifferent, would carry on expanding, yawning, and wondering vaguely whether llamas might have been the better idea after all.
The End.
(Probably.)