Snow White

I had dozens and dozens of urgent jobs to do this morning, and I have hardly done any of them at all.

Instead I took the dogs out for a long walk and thought hard.

By the time I came back down I had thought of a story which needed to be written so badly it was practically spraying out of my ears and leaking down my neck. I finished the end of the walk at a jog and tugged my boots off to dash up the stairs to the keyboard.

There were lots of things I should have been doing even once I got as far as the computer. I should have written a letter to BOC Gases and filled in some paperwork for Barclays and sent an email to the university, but I did not do any of that either. Instead I sat down and typed: Once Upon A Time.

The point of the story was supposed to be that I wrote it to hand in for an assignment which we were set in class last night. The tutor, who writes fantasy books, had been rabbiting about fairy stories, and at the end of the class she told us to rewrite one of them, in any way we liked, in four hundred words or less.

I had decided to write an alternate version of Snow White. I knew before I had even got out of the park that there was absolutely no way I was going to write it in four hundred words, and indeed I haven’t. I have been writing it on and off all day and I am about halfway through. So far I have written two thousand, six hundred and forty one words, and she has only just met the Seven Dwarves.

I have liked writing this very much, and all day the words have just squirted out of the ends of my fingers like tomato sauce out of a new bottle. It was a wrench to tear myself away, but I knew I must.

I had got to do at least some of the other things about which I was beginning to feel uncomfortably guilty because tomorrow we are setting off to collect Oliver from Scotland. I have got all day at home, until Mark finishes work, and then we are setting off. We are collecting Oliver on Thursday teatime and coming home on Friday, when Lucy will be arriving as well, so we will have a full house. Hence I went shopping yesterday and purchased pizzas and pasta and yoghurt and orange juice, and today I had to do some cooking.

I made mayonnaise, because we always need that, and biscuits, because we always need those. I cooked some sausages for Mark’s dinners and made four trays of cornflake cakes. Cornflake cakes are supposed to be easy because there is only one pan and just a lot of mixing, but I was distracted, and it all seemed to get very messy.

In the end I was rushing round in circles clearing up before Mark came home. Obviously he asked what I had been doing and I had to admit that I had been a bit of a domestic slacker, but he read the story and it made him laugh quite a lot, so it was all right.

I considered sloping off back to it after dinner, but I didn’t. Instead we watched another film, this one a shocking dreadful affair about British spies in the horror of France during the German occupation. It was very gripping and awful, worse even than the police turning up at our street party when there was bat flu. They jackbooted about a bit, but didn’t shoot anyone.

We had been going to drink the celebratory bottle of champagne whilst we watched it, but in the event we decided we were probably too tired to start drinking. This turned out to be just as well, because the film had just finished when somebody telephoned wanting a taxi.

We were very pleased about this, because going to Scotland is jolly expensive and we are now twenty quid up.

I will share Snow White with you when I have finished it.