to remember the story of the Princess and the Pea. It ends when the princess is finally proved to be royal by suffering a disturbed night atop 16 or so mattresses beneath which hides a single pea. Is that spoilt, or what?
Many years ago I discovered a sleepless night often follows the eating of toast in bed. Not sure if that proves anything, other than foolishness.
Someone once told me of this woman who took to her bed and stayed there for 30 years, wees and poos aside that is. By all accounts she liked to chop wood in bed, with an axe, for the fire. As the years passed and her eyesight weakened she took to lopping not just wood but also bits of leg as well. Slowly, almost imperceptibly she chopped her way upwards until only the arms, shoulders and head remained. She convinced her children it was the right thing to do by claiming it would make for a cheaper funeral. Finally the day arrived when she was reduced to one arm and a head. The children, by then tired of their mother's eccentricity but inspired by her thrift decided not to wait for death. Instead they turned what was left upside down and made a nice hanging basket for the garden.
The moral of this story is: don't piss your children off by chopping wood in bed.
7 comments:
one would think that after a year of reading your blog I'd no longer let you sneak up on me. There is something in the way you start a matter-of-fact story and then a bit at a time all hell breaks lose that I just don't learn to anticipate, sigh.
caught again.
Hayden,
I think of it more as a task to keep you on your toes.
xx
This is what we can call a good bed time story, eh Dan?
G,
Honest, every word of that story is true. I learned it from the chap who provided the bedding plants.
The idea of staying in bed for 30 years appealed to me at first, before the gruesome end of your story. It's like an Aesop's fable really isn't it?
Annie,
It is a fable of modern times. The revenge that children will visit on their parents if said parents don't behave properly.
Sigh.
ps,
30 years in bed isn't all it's cracked up to be.
pps
Or so I was once told.
ppps
by a hanging basket
Something about being stuck in a bed for several years gives me the creeps.
One of my high school mates got hit by a car and is in a kind of catatonic state most of the time and is stuck in a bed since he was 15.
Post a Comment