Yesterday, whilst rifling through the dusty box of childhood memories that I store under my bed, I found a dog-eared envelope, home, for god-knows-how-many-years, to a yellowing piece of carefully folded paper.
Proficiently typed upon the yellowing piece of carefully folded paper was a story.
A story crafted by a very young me.
Points of interest:
- Overall, I think my grammar and spelling is highly proficient for a young un’. Just sayin’.
- The main character Owen, is called Owen Owen. Which is awesome! And slightly odd.
- Ellen Owen wanted to buy a hen from the petshop. I don’t think I have ever witnessed the selling of poultry in a petshop. Why my young self chose a hen as Ellen’s desired pet, is a mystery to me. Why not a hamster? Or a kitten? I do have an inkling, however, that I wrote this story around the time that I was obsessed with the idea of keeping chickens in the backyard. This particular plan was continuously thwarted in its infancy by my cruel and inconsiderate parents. Clearly, I was articulating, in an extremely passive aggressive manner, the extreme annoyance I felt towards my parents’ decision, by highlighting the fact that Owen Owen’s Mum allowed Ellen to have a hen. “Fuck you, Mum and Dad”, is basically what I was attempting to convey.
- Continuing point 3; Owen Owen’s Father obviously shared the same opinion as my own Father about having a hen as a pet. So they had to wait until he died until they could have one. Freud would totally love this.
- I chose the rather middle-class character names of Ellen, Hughie, Owen and Tom.
- I hail from working-class roots and my friends had names like Shelley, Daz and Tracey.
- An elephant?
- An ELEPHANT? I wish I still possessed such a colourful and animated imagination. Life would be far more interesting.
- “People were whipping and jumping about”. I LOVE this choice of verb. Such a scene setter. Chapeau to me.
- The police lady, Joan Ald was clearly a very accomplished and capable woman. Unlike the foolish and dim-witted General Bellow, who couldn’t get his shit together. Nice to see that my opinion of women being the higher race had already started to form in my innocent mind.
- Never one for writing a rousing conclusion, I end the story, and subsequently this blog post with “but then they had to go to bed”.