A Stay at Home Monk and the Mosquito Holocaust

This week in writing class: no-one got voted off the island, I probably need to ask forgiveness and I couldn’t find my French Fancies in time for the pot-luck.

I started the exercise too late this week – the assignments were to write my obituary, and also to read out a piece of work. My obituary started out,

“He died as he lived his life, late and a little unprepared. Piecing together the events from his homicide note (like a suicide note only other people bought the farm too), it looked like he had planned to lace some French Fancies with belladonna. These are cuboid icing encrusted cakes topped with a cream-filled teat…”

In true self-prophetic style, I didn’t get to finish the obituary. Then again, I’m still alive and have a vast array of different directions I can still go in. I have many different men to see about many different dogs, and many French Fancies yet to eat.

So, scratch the obit. I thought, and read out some work. I had printed out an old blog post about B52 Wreckage and was reading it at red lights on the way to class. I realized it wasn’t as clever as I had remembered, having written it in a hurry in a sweaty internet cafe in Vietnam eight years earlier. So I turned up empty fisted, loaded to the gills with Cherry Bakewells with narry a Fancy in sight.

Two pieces of positive news:  first I was regaled with some excellent work from my classmates. The phrases which stuck in my mind were “stay at home monk“, “she died on her favorite day of the year“, and “nightly mosquito holocaust“. Each deeply resonated and set some paths ablaze between some favorite neurons. We have a stay-at-home dog. My number one son was born on May 4th. And I can never forget a holocaust.

Second, my lovely wife has suggested I continue to take Thursdays as a writing night, while she looks after the kids. I’m sure she secretly hopes that I will hit the big time with some kind of infomercial blog. I wonder now if the title of this post looks like it was automagically generated to allow spam email to penetrate the junk filters and deliver a new weight loss infomercial payload?

So is there any conclusion to this set of random, half-formed thoughts? Yes! The conclusion, unrelated to the post, is that someone asked me to describe a cherry bakewell as I shoved them under her nose. I was at a loss for words. It’s a cherry bakewell. It’s like trying to describe overdosing on laughing gas to someone. You just have to try it. To break it down to the sum of its parts denies the holistic synergy of the matter.

So my exercise for next Thursday evening  is to make a cherry bakewell infomercial.