Before that Independence Day is upon us, a cautionary tale from one of our writers.
The Fairytale That Never Was
There was once upon a time, when humankind was so enlightened it no longer believed the world was flat but very much round, when the sun continues to rise from a resurgent East in order to set in the still sinewy and opulent Occident, when the ice-capped North continues to thaw threatening cataclysmic flooding to vulnerable coastlines and other places, when to all appearances the wretched South continues to wallow in abject poverty, social inequality, curable and incurable disease, misrule, human and wealth trafficking, brain draining and Lord knows what else… A time when a woebegone sufferer of writer’s block, seated cross legged on his bedsitter camp bed, found his tortured mind thus ruminating: “Yes, inspiration has deserted me when I needed it most. The deadline for delivery of the 500 word Fairy Tale is a tight couple hours away. In my anger and deep frustration, I broke my pencil in two, gathered the sheaf of discarded drafts and flushed the whole lot down the communal toilet – blocking it…and the cantankerous Landlord and other tenants are unlikely to be pleased with this recklessness on my part. Goodness gracious, Muse, what is to be done, pray?”
The writer’s laptop, then lying dormant on his naked lap, read these desperate writer’s thoughts and immediately whirred into life: “It is nobody’s fault but yours”, the laptop cried. “You have had a whole week to think and prepare. Self-isolation is here to be taken advantage of, and you haven’t. You have this awful habit of leaving everything to the last gasp, now look at the mess you find yourself in!”
On hearing this, a quaint imitation feather quill pen with an alloy nib then flew from the writer’s cluttered desk to land on the laptop keyboard. “I agree with your candid sentiment, Comrade Laptop,” said the quill, at the same time typing these words with the metallic nib so that they appeared as spoken on the screen in Harlow Solid Italic, to the surprise and amusement of both the writer and the laptop! “Now what do you say that, eh, Mr Suffering Writer?” the quill pen continued, before flying back to the writer’s desk.
Now from the cluttered desk a rustling sound was heard, whereupon a quarto size sheet of fine parchment emerged, leisurely straightened itself before flying to the top shelf of the ramshackle bookcase where it leaned nonchalantly against one mighty tome before crying: “You can say that again, Comrades. Look at me, still blank despite having been acquired a whole decade ago! And yet the blocked sufferer possesses numerous bottles of quality red, black and blue ink to make use of, and has he ever? Has he indeed!”
As a much loved Russian writer once concluded one of his fine Belkin tale: ‘…the reader will spare me the unnecessary task of describing the denouement’.
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