Dear Diary

The End of Term Competition for the writers' group was to write something on the theme of 'circus tricks' - comments welcome!

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

It’s time to apologise for all the times I have used your pages to spew out my rantings and ravings about the imperfections of my fellow man, because today I learned a lesson. I left the house this morning with my head held high and my arrogance intact but returned this afternoon a more humble woman, after an experience I could only describe as chastening. But it did make me laugh!

I went to lunch with Amy today. She’s a nice enough old lady but the deafness, the endless sniping at the waitresses, and her need to constantly remind everyone how well her grandchildren are doing, was making me irritable although I was far too polite to let it show.

Whilst she was sipping her milky coffee I excused myself to go to the Ladies, and just as I walked in a young woman came out of the single cubicle. We smiled at each other, and as I passed her, she began to sing and wash her hands. I listened for a few moments – she had a lovely voice – and heard her leave before noticing that the toilet seat was dripping wet.

'How could anyone be so rude?' I thought.

'And how did she manage to pee all over the seat? Was she standing on it?'

As I cleaned the seat with some toilet paper I tried to recreate the scene. I imagined she must have stepped out of her shoes because she would have needed bare feet to keep from slipping. And she wasn’t especially small so how could she have bent her knees wide enough to spray across the whole seat?  Surely there wasn’t enough space?

I decided she was probably an acrobat. You will remember, Dear Diary, when I wrote about that trip to the circus last month which I glossed over because I was too busy complaining about the price of the tickets and how ungrateful Rupert and Henry were. They never thanked me once despite the wonderful entertainment.

I apologise for the omission because I did want to write something about the acrobat. She was amazing. At one point, high up into the roof of the tent, she stood on a tiny piece of wood at one end of the high wire, like a little wooden lily pad it was, and she got up on her toes like a ballet dancer. The next second she was doing a handstand, gripping the sides of the pad with her legs bent right back so she was doing the splits upside down. With a trick like that the toilet seat would have been no problem.

After that she produced three coloured silks – she was probably a magician too – and twirled them from her wrists and ankles before she shimmied down a rope, twirling round and round till she arrived at the ground head first and somersaulted into a low bow to make her exit.

Maybe the toilet was some sort of training exercise. Or perhaps it was what they called performance art.

‘Mucking about cos they’re too lazy to get a proper job’ – that’s what my Mum would have said, and she was probably right.

As I wiped the seat I visualised running after this trainee contortionist and giving her a piece of my mind. Whatever her reasons, she could have stopped to think about the women using the toilet after her. Or better yet, she could have cleaned it up.

And why the singing? Was that part of the act? Was she practicing to be the first singing acrobat? Or was she just taking the mickey? Was she washing her hands with a tra-la-la thinking about me lowering my bottom onto a wet toilet seat and sitting there too embarrassed to complain out loud? Well, she might have had a lovely voice but her mother should have taught her some manners, then she might have had a reason to run away and join the circus!

I rolled the final piece of toilet paper into a tight soggy ball and dropped it into the bowl. By now I was really quite desperate for a pee but I thought I should flush before I used it so I pulled the handle and went back to the sink to wash my hands.

Returning to the cubicle with my skirt already halfway up my thighs I was just in time to watch the water shooting up out of the bowl and flooding the seat.

Sometimes you just have to see the funny side so I just stood there, quietly laughing at myself, pulling my skirt up, until the door opened and a woman came in. I turned to the wash basins, sang a little song,  then left, hoping that one more person would learn something useful about themselves today.

800 words

The Hospital Blues

 The homework at the Writing Group was to write something around the theme 'Why Me?'.

The Hospital Blues

I’m lying in this hospital bed thinking ‘Why Me’ and instead of stopping there like I normally do, for once I try to answer the question.

The doctor said my heart attack was an infarction of a segment of heart muscle, probably due to occlusion of a coronary artery.

After that he said that an infarction means an area of dead tissue caused by a loss of blood supply. I forgot to ask him what an occlusion was. I was too busy remembering what it was like - the crushing sensation in my chest, the pain in my neck and jaw, before it spread into my arms, and wrists, then my shoulder blades and my back.

At first I tried changing my position but lying down didn’t help so in the end they called an ambulance.

‘Why Me’? When I thought a bit more about it I suppose the answer is laziness. I never exercise and I’m about two stone overweight and to be entirely truthful, and I think the time has come to be as honest as I can, the extra weight is not because I eat too much fruit and veg. It’s probably the bacon sandwiches dripping with butter, but it could be the chips, or possibly the ice cream, and the chocolate cake might play a part. Not to mention the cream doughnuts. I could murder a cream doughnut right this minute.

Why Me? When I’d finished visualizing menus in my head to the point where I felt full – in a virtual way – I thought maybe my hypochondria could also be an issue. I was always at the doctor’s surgery for something or other and they generally end up putting me through all sorts of tests then telling me they can’t find anything wrong and that can be very stressful. So I’m sure the anxiety of being a hypochondriac hasn’t helped, not to mention all the running around from the doctors to the hospital to the pharmacy. I’m too old for all this. And I’m sure I know why the family are the ones who have correctly diagnosed my condition and not the doctors. None of the medical people have ever called me a hypochondriac – not to my face anyway – and the reason for that is they’re trying to save money. I know there’s a cure for hypochondria because I read about it – it’s called a Placebo. I asked for it at the chemists and they just laughed at me so they’re involved in the conspiracy too.

Then I took some long slow breaths, just to bring my pulse down a bit, because I was getting a bit excited, all riled up about my untreated condition, then another thought popped into my head.

Why Me? Why Not Me?

There are millions of people around the world with heart disease and I’m just one of them. The symptoms I have are no different to those being suffered wherever you look. Old people, the middle-aged, and even children – everywhere you go there’s someone with heart disease and many of them are a lot worse off than I am, lying in this comfortable hospital bed with a plaster cast round my leg.

That’s when I woke up and remembered I’d broken my ankle falling down the stairs. That’s why I was here. A nurse was standing in the middle of the ward shouting ‘Why Me? Why Me?’ then the Chinese lady in the bed opposite shouted, just as loud,

“I’m Wy Mee, that’s my name. I’m Wy Mee. I was asleep. What you want?’

My writing group's End of Term Competition in July 2013 - the theme was 'What's Up With Nancy - up to 1000 words:

What’s up Nancy?

Nancy watched the traffic lights turn to red and slumped back into the deep seat of the cab. She re-folded her headscarf for the twentieth time that afternoon and flinched as she caught sight of herself in the wing mirror. She had been told what to expect but somehow she never thought it would come to this.

It was the evening rush hour.  Londoners rushed past the window, hurrying towards the bus stop or the Tube station, or perhaps to a theatre or dinner date. A twenty-something hurtled towards the taxi and touched the door handle before realising it was not empty, turning away in frustration. She was in such a hurry. Everyone was in such a hurry.

The girl reminded Nancy of herself at that age – full of nervous energy, with long blonde hair down to her waist. She could remember the days when there weren’t enough hours in the day. She had been ambitious, hungry for success, certain all her dreams would be fulfilled.

When she wasn’t working she was partying. She was known for her dancing and for her resemblance to Barbara Streisand in the movie ‘What’s Up Doc’.  She would stand alone in the centre of the room, swaying in time to the music, staring at the floor, her head moving in ever-expanding circles so her hair spread out two feet in front, then behind. When the music stopped everyone would clap and shout ‘What’s up Nancy?’ and she would laugh and get another drink.

Later on, much later on, she found out that it was her hair that had first attracted Mike. Although it took dozens of parties where he loitered at the edge of the dance floor, and threw long lingering looks from the shadows, he eventually plucked up the courage to ask her out. A year later they were married and a month after that her beautiful twin boys were born.

As the cab pulled away Nancy tried to remember the plans she had made before meeting Mike, and couldn’t remember what they were. The fact that she could so easily forget the internal dialogue that had occupied her every waking thought (and many sleepy ones too) for so many years - that shocked her.

She watched an argument develop outside a pub just as the verbal insults morphed into mild physical violence and she flinched, remembering last year’s mugging. She was suddenly there, smiling indulgently at two girls mock-fighting as she tried to enter the cinema. She saw, too late, that her maternal indulgence had been misinterpreted as a mocking gesture, which was rewarded by both girls turning on her. They knocked her to the ground then kicked her till she was comatose. Witnesses said the girls had pulled her to her feet by her hair and smashed her head against the wall before being pulled away by friends. She didn’t remember the police arriving, or the ambulance journey, but she remembered coming round from the first operation and seeing Mike’s concerned face before he remembered to hide his anxiety with fake cheeriness.

He said “What’s up Nancy?” and she laughed, not knowing what she was doing there.

She hadn’t laughed a lot since then. There wasn’t much to laugh about. Although her body healed, her mind was like a wayward child, unable to concentrate on anything for very long. She tired easily and the endless visits to the doctors, then the hair specialists, wore her down.

The medical experts all agreed that the attack had caused her hair to start falling out. Twisting and pulling hair was a common cause of alopecia, apparently, and given the initial severity of her head injury, they said it should come as no surprise that she was losing a bit of hair. Although they never actually accused her, the sideways looks and the understanding smiles seemed to be telling her to stop being so ungrateful.  After all the hours of surgery and devoted nursing care that her saved her from losing her marbles, they seemed to say, why worry about losing a bit of hair?

Nancy watched her road come into view and tapped the window to indicate where she wanted the cab to stop. For some reason she didn’t want to step straight from the taxi to her front door, facing an expectant family.

Mike and the boys would be waiting to offer love and support because they knew, as they had all known for the last month, that today she would return from the clinic totally bald. They knew how nervous she would feel as she took off her headscarf to reveal the shiny bald skull which felt so wrong, so not-her.

She paid the driver, walked the final 200 yards to the house, unlocked the door and stepped over the threshold. She hung up her coat, took a deep breath and strolled, almost but not quite casually, into the lounge.

She was touched beyond words. She had expected kind words and sympathy, spoken from love and not pity. She had expected some initial reticence from the boys, and then maybe a cuddle or two as they became accustomed to their mother’s new alien-like features. She had not expected this, and she choked back the tears.

She was greeted by three round faces, one big one and two smaller ones, sat in a row on the sofa. Each face was wearing a large grin and appeared underneath a bald head. They pointed at their ears, pointed at her head, laughed out loud, and as one they shouted “What’s up Nancy?”

930 words

Learning About The Animals

A story about animals, that's what they asked for, in about 500 words. This is what I gave them:

Learning About The Animals

Honest. That’s what she said. "Have I ever told you that my parrot is the reincarnation of my dead grandmother?"

You wouldn’t believe the things I hear people say unless you knew they came from an impeccable source. Take it from me, I don’t lie. I’m a chimpanzee.

Surprised eh? I take it this is your first visit to a zoo since you discovered your new 22nd century telepathic powers. That’s what happens when one race develops an ability the rest of the animal kingdom takes for granted.

I know you are.

Yes, we can.

And we can do that too.

Sorry, no, we can’t talk. Our tongues don’t work that way.

There’s no need to be quite so flabbergasted. Haven’t you read the sign on the cage yet? The bit about chimpanzees sharing 98.6% of the human DNA sequence?

Betcha didn’t know the missing 1.4% resides in the body part we lick our bottoms with.

Really? Well don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

No, you’ve not seen me here before. I’m a visitor. Actually, I’m not supposed to tell you this but I’m on a course. It’s called Apeing the Animals which is quite witty really.

No, listen, you’ll like this. You’re the animals and we’re the apes, and we’ve come here today to, in the words of the brochure, "observe how their primitive behaviour can teach us the path to success".

Apparently, wherever you animals go you display what’s called ‘office behaviour patterns’ which closely resemble our own social structures in the ape world.

You don’t think so?

And your job is what exactly?

Impressive. So you call yourself a leader? So you’re a dominant A-type personality who stamps your feet to get what you want, you walk the walk with a puffed out chest to impress the girls, and you occasionally engage in a bit of mutual back slapping with the other alpha males?

No? That’s not what it looks like from here, I can tell you.

Well, according to our course leader, that’s the gorilla standing just over there, unless you smarten your act up and start beating your chest a bit more often you’ll never get the top job. More to the point you won’t stand a chance with the better looking mates on offer (although between you, me and these 4 chicken wire fences they don’t look much cop to me – not enough hair for my liking).

Old fashioned? Moi? Give over. You’re the one who has only just learned how to communicate. Me? I’m the higher species mate, that’s who I am.

Anyway, I’ve got to go now. Having observed you I’ve got to give a presentation in the workshop area over there by the rubber tyres. They are going to be thrilled when they find out I’ve actually found one who could hold a basic conversation. But I’d better not mention the parrot though. They’ll think I’m bonkers.

So you want to know about my worst relative?

The title was the exercise - in 500 words - so I used it to create some characters who might come in useful one day - thoughts?

So you want to know about my worst relative?

It depends what you mean by ‘worst’.

You probably don’t mean my worst-dressed relative, but for the record, that would be my godmother Alice, if non-blood relatives are allowed.  I used to blame her awful dress sense on the privations of growing up in the 1940s but I recently discovered that I was being very unfair on that decade. She lived in a generation that emulated its forebears, so she has spent the last 70 years attempting to model the very best the fashion world had to offer in about 1915, which has not been easy but I think it’s a battle that, on balance, she has won.

If you want to know about my worst-paid relative that would be my grandson, Christopher, who works in a call centre. He received extensive training in the 3 steps required to deflect an insurance claim – denial, followed by demanding copious amounts of meaningless paperwork, then agreeing the claim but delaying payment until the money sent is actually worthless. His hourly remuneration wouldn’t buy a decent book to read, despite the so-called minimum wage.

Then there’s my worst memory of a relative, which is a tough one. Would it be my father’s speech at my sister’s wedding, when he was so relieved that the cosmos could find a man for any woman, that he drank himself into oblivion before, during, and after his speech?

Or perhaps it would be taking Uncle Frank shopping last year. It was our own fault, we hadn’t seen him for a while and our guilt led us into taking him shopping, despite Aunty Alice’s warnings. We wanted to browse the chinaware in John Lewis so we left him watching TV in the electrical department. He insisted that he hadn’t seen the episode of Poirot being relayed simultaneously across 35 television sets  - that’s dementia for you – and said he always watched this programme on a Saturday afternoon, sat in the lounge with a coffee and a biscuit. So we bought him a coffee and a biscuit at the café and sat him down, and went off together. How were we to know that his ritual also included celebrating the finish of the coffee and biscuit by stripping down to his underwear and shouting out the clues?

OK, you’ve had enough prevarication, I admit it, I know what you mean. You want to know about my worst behaved relative, and that’s an easy one to answer. That would be the one who never cooks a meal or does the washing up, or cleans a toilet. He stuffs himself with sprouts on Xmas Day then blames the dog for the fallout. He complains about the quality of TV these days but is too mean to go to the cinema. I could go on but I won’t, because he is obviously the worst relative in my family, and this man is me.

(P.S. This is a work of fiction . . . . .)

Why do some writers insist on making their work difficult to read?

There seems to be a modern trend towards breaking the rules of grammar and asking the reader to work out what the new rules are. Sometimes I spend so long being a grammar detective, working out who is saying what to whom, that I just give up because I have stopped reading the actual story altogether.

For example, if I had the imagination of Patrick McCabe, and I had worked so hard to craft a book such as ‘The Stray Sod Country’, which I recently tried to read, I would want everyone who had the ability to read and the motivation to want to read, to have full access to it without putting barriers in the way.

The fourth line of Page 1 gives me a clue that he has caught the bug that prevents him using speechmarks:

- O isn’t he the lucky beggar gasped Happy Carroll.

But this is even more difficult than others who adopt this style because the ‘-‘ doesn’t simply replace opening and closing speechmarks - the text after the hypen includes both direct speech and non-speech.

I lasted until page 3 where the following fragment posing as a complete sentence made me realise I was never going to get to a point where I could get past the style to the story:

‘Tentatively extending his large red hand – for the purpose of inspecting some raindrops.’

If this was self-published I could have more sympathy, but this is from Bloomsbury! I’m pretty sure (actually I’m 100% positive) that if I submitted something with the first page from this novel it would have been binned immediately, so how has this happened?

Rant over – what do you think?

Celia - in 500 words

The brief was to write a short piece which included a secretive wife, a stuffy bungalow and a sports car - comments welcome!

Celia

Celia finished her cappuccino, dabbed her mouth with a serviette, and stood to leave, pausing for a moment to check that the private investigator had finished his panini. He had been trailing her around town all morning and she felt responsible for the boredom emanating from his every pore. After all, she had led him a merry little dance for three days now and hadn’t given him anything to report. The poor dear.

It took Celia back to the days when she had to drag her Simon to the shops in the hour between leaving work, picking him up from school, and Frank coming home from work. Just like then, she felt guilty for imposing her needs on someone who clearly wanted to be elsewhere, and like then she couldn’t fully concentrate on the task in hand because she felt responsible for someone else’s safety and wellbeing. Is he watching out for traffic? Is he avoiding that dog mess? Has he finished that bloody panini yet?

She sat on the bus and wondered what she was suspected of this time. Thirty years ago her first private eye arrived the week after she had drunkenly joked about fancying a younger man in the office. That one had looked like a retired policeman in his dirty mac and bow tie.

The next one appeared eighteen years ago, when she had taken advantage of local adult education facilities to learn conversational French, a surprise for Frank, who was already fluent. On that occasion she asked her professional stalker, a nice young man with tight jeans and bulging triceps, if he would like to join her in a cup of tea. When she found out how much Frank was paying to feed his self-indulgent insecurity she hit the roof, and she didn’t calm down until her second cup of tea, which was drunk an hour later, at 3 p.m., in the Premier Inn whilst the trainee detective pulled his trousers on. A whole hour! No wonder she was ready for a second cup.

Of course she felt guilty for a few days but all this was Frank’s fault. If he ever left the bungalow, or looked up from his cameras and his dark room to open the curtains and windows once in a while, he might notice she was there for him. If he had even met her halfway she would never have needed distractions, a career, or dreamed of a better life, one full of light, and air, and sunshine.

As it was, three jobs and two promotions later, she had once again started sneaking out to evening classes, this time on car maintenance, in case the second-hand sports car she had bought with her last bonus let her down on her planned escape from suburbia.

She passed the detective on her way off the bus and gave him a brief once-over. He was about forty, fit, well dressed and he had a nice smile. Maybe, she thought, maybe she could offer him a little bonus for all his trouble.