Warming Up

He’s going to get away with it. Amazing to see anyone swallowing the story about going on a 60 mile drive with your family in order to check that your eyesight is good enough to drive. But there we go. We’re shagged.

Making an effort to get to a first draft of the book why close of play on 1st June. I’d done quite well, coming up with a new chapter by lunchtime, which I think really helps the flow of the book too. But I came downstairs to discover that my daughter had tossed off a literary masterpieces as I worked, dictating the story to her mother.

This is what she’d come up with.

"There was a poo and it pooped and that other poo pooped

And they fell in love and got a family poo. And they had a mummy and daddy.

Then they eated an ice lolly together.

And they maked a poo ice cream.

And it was so yummy they said “yum, yum, yum”.

And they said “Hooray!”

And then they made sandwiches together and it was peanut butter and honey.

And then a bee stinged their mum and dad on the head

And then their kids and babies turned into poo poo bees."

After lunch she dictated another two pages of story to me. My only slight nudge was a comment on whether a poo bees hive would have poo in it instead of honey, which she briefly ran wit. But ultimately the poo bees are thrown out by their parents, return when their parents are asleep and then get persuaded to leave by a stranger. The stranger who takes them to a hotel room and laughs and tries to wipe their memories (which is a bit dark) but luckily the ghosts of the (presumably murdered) poo poo bees kill the stranger, throw him in the bin and then send him to jail.

It’s not on a par with the Thriing Three, but it’s good to see my daughter has the story telling bug and the literary chops to tackle the very real issue of poo marrying poo that it has itself pooed and of baby poos turning into bees and being molested in hotels. And that the content and style and use of yum, yum, yum is essentially a parody of my act.

I love this freeform creation of a story though, using bits of autobiography (our family was created when a poo pooped another poo and the poos fell in love - also Ernie was stung by a bee on the head) and the importance of family and the confusing fears bubbling underneath with enough understanding of stranger danger to create a plausible and unsettling scenario of why you shouldn’t go anywhere with one.

But mainly just finding poo funny. 

It was her bedtime story tonight and like the arrogant author that she is, she loved it. @1000-monsters had illustrated the story on Twitter and she was very pleased, though critical of their misunderstanding of what poo ice cream was and annoyed that they hadn’t done the whole story. Though to be fair they hadn’t seen it.