I have written a very horribly shocking story for my latest university assignment.
Sometimes I really don’t know what gets into me.
So far I have had to write three things, and when they have appeared on the page, they have all been Literature To Shoot Yourself By. The first was a story of a chap who found a dead baby on a beach. The second was about a feckless old gidget who was gambling all of his wages on a horse race, and the third was about a man being furious with his weedy son who had grown up to become a flasher, which was not at all the career outcome his father had had in mind.
I don’t quite know how this is happening. I do not set out to write depressing dirges, it just seems to be what is on the page when I look at it after I have finished. I don’t even want to read any of them, never mind write them, and I am certainly not going to include them anywhere on these pages. Nobody wants to start their online reading for the day with small sticky corpses or explosions of blood.
Well, probably nobody.
Indeed, I have been beginning to wonder if my Inner Soul is actually a place of nightmare darkness peopled with monstrous ghouls.
In fact I rather suspect that my perspective upon life might have become a bit cynical, and wonder if the egalitarian and benevolently tolerant enthusiasm of my more youthful fellow students might be rather bringing out the contrary worst in me. It turned out the other day that I was the only person in the class, or at any rate the only person who was owning up to it, who thought it was important to know quite early in a book whether the protagonist was a boy or a girl.
Some people seemed to think that it did not matter at all, maybe I am just a dinosaur.
Mark has said resignedly that he can see the moment of being chucked out beginning to loom.
I hope not, maybe I should remember his advice about keeping really really quiet about anything that I think. Whatever your opinions are, shut up about them. They will only upset everybody else.
I am only thinking about writing dreary pieces of prose in my spare time, however, which is not very much at the moment.
I had to take Oliver back to the orthodontist this morning, and we will be going again on Friday. He has had a 3D image made of his mouth, which was utterly brilliant. I could see it on the screen, it was the weirdest thing ever. I almost felt as though I shouldn’t be looking, how very odd to see almost inside another person like that. All the same it was intriguing to see how his teeth looked one against the other, they way they fitted together tidily, and I am looking forward to the next developments with great interest.
We ambled through town and were irresistibly drawn in by the suddenly beginning-to-be-popular Christmas Shop, which is where Game used to be before everybody started playing computer games remotely, over the internet. Oliver was sorry that it had gone, but not sorry enough to start buying games on discs again.
The Christmas shop has been there all year, although nobody is interested in June. I am always interested, because you can never have enough red and silver tinsel and artificial snow in your lifetime, even though all of the Christmas pictures seem to present a bygone pre-Greta Thunberg era, with lots of scarf-wrapped blonde children merrily ice skating beneath snowy Christmas trees.
Mostly Christmas day in Windermere is fairly damp.
Our enthusiasm was not damp, however, and we examined everything with great interest. As always, our favourite was the carol-singing reindeer’s head. It was just like magic. You pressed the blue button and all the shop assistants glared at you.
We pressed it several times, captivated by the wagging head and rolling eyes, until we got bored and went to examine the little Christmas trains, buzzing round and round their tracks.
We resolved to come again, and pressed the blue button again on our way out.
There are sixty seven days until Christmas. It said so on a board in the shop.
That is very soon indeed.
I had better get on with my Christmas paintings.
