I’m sure my faithful followers have been rocking in the foetal position because they’re in agony over missing my weekly blog. Sometimes a sabbatical is necessary, especially if a would-be funny writer has neither found anything funny, or has been unwilling to make up anything funny. School holidays will do that to you. That’s the real truth why JK Rowling wrote most of the Harry Potter books in coffee shops, bus-stops, tubes and such – she couldn’t get any dang work done at home.
A good friend of mine called me yesterday and said, “Oh God (used as exclamation, not calling me names), I thought of you yesterday (I get that a lot…), wait till I tell you what Peter * did yesterday”. (*name has been changed to protect the perpetrator).
She went on to tell me how Peter and his friend were playing quietly. Now just to explain, Peter’s mother confessed to me recently that she thought my sons were outright badly behaved. That was, of course, until she had a son of her own. I took it as good news actually, because up until then I thought her daughter was abnormally well behaved, and I suspected that she might be doping her. You know, using Pethadine, Dormicum, Ecstacy or everything all at once to get her to sit still and be so dog-gone bloody polite.
OK, so back to it. Poor mother – not being the veteran mom of 2 sons - didn’t realize that 2 minutes of silence is a fiercely dangerous sign. When she finally got her sheesh together and checked on them, she discovered they’d made a smorgasbord of an unholy mess with the medicine cabinet.
The blessing was – if you can call it that – was that they hadn’t decided to chug on any of the contents. Perhaps in retrospect if they had, the mayhem would have ended sooner. Apparently, the rules of the game were pour the contents of a lifetimes worth of drugs (syrup of course, pills are plain tiddlywinks) in a big puddle on the floor. Perhaps there was tribal chanting involved, who knows, but upon closer inspection she also discovered a large amount of Vicks (vapour rub) smeared generously over the furniture. The wood must have looked a bit sickly, thus the eucalyptus massage. Very thoughtful.
She told me that she was sure the best retribution was an unholy thrashing – to equal the unholy mess. I tried to remind her that unholy wackings or not, boys will be messy, destructive boys and that one only needs to look at most male sports to see that males actually don’t mind a good thrashing. What would be a more effective punishment? Make the little bugger knit.
