Storytime

We start the day, writing stories.

I can think to write only one, and that is the peril, disaster and joy that has marked the last ten years. I am sure there were other stories in me, but they are gone along with dinosaurs and prehistory. Nevertheless, I choose one poignant moment and say I shall write about that.

I forewarn the children that writing anything at all, even a blog diary or an apology to the bank, can be lonely, painful, and slow. Expect misery. It is hard work, thinking up new words to describe ingratitude and upset, sitting for hours on a sore bum, and banging your fingers against an unforgiving keyboard.

The children fail to understand this sacrificial state of sufferance, solitude and attics, and start writing their history of the unicorn clan, seated all together round the table in complete dedication and joy. Misty, Snuffynose, Starhoof, Sparklegazer and that drama queen, Blutina, all appear in various scenes, but I note there is some sniggering when Lem is described as the miserable one who sits in a hedge.

By lunchtime, I plod on with a face like a flogged martyr, and the offspring become distracted with laughing uproariously at what they have so far achieved, before turning their hands at illustrations for their art. This seems to be cutting out unicorn bedrooms made of paper then creating posters for the walls. Painted black, the posters read Doom, Doom, Doom, All Love is Doomed, Death to all, and General Woe. As the children read them out, they are falling over the table with undisguised mirth.

By tea time I had nearly completed my elegiac tale of sorrow and mental trauma while the children were bent double with giggling fits from Squirrel's story of a blind unicorn falling horn first into a pond.

It looks suspiciously to me, with this dangerous combination of hysteria and mortality, like the unicorns may have arrived at that point of the story where they are on the frenetic brink of a manic depressive hormonal cycle. Mark my words, it will soon burst out in Don't treat me like a child, I never asked to be born, and No one understands me. Either from them or me.

Well, because we are busy with being writerly, some of us creating beautiful and sombre tales of a mad women and a toilet wipe, or others having fun at the expense of a miserable unicorn in a pit, I have nothing much else to say that is coherent. So here is a delightful picture of one of my junior authors.


She has clearly not suffered enough for her art, so I shall write a story where she is out on the razzle with a Tequila Slammer and added cherry cider, just about to be thrown out the Oxbridge club and into the Pall Mall night, from where she will meet a young man who is a bad influence and who will carry her off to new misadventures. Either that or she will be abducted by aliens.