Never assume anything in this life for we're all one big bundle of contradictions. We contradict ourselves sometimes without even realising, until someone calls us out. Tries to make it into a big deal. When it's not, really. You can change your stance on issues as the years drift by. Principles don't always stay principles forever. An experience might alter your outlook, widen or narrow your perspective from what it was.
Anyway, that last paragraph is not the point, it's beside the point, particularly the last part because isn't that what fiction is all about? Isn't that what invented characters or plots enable us to do? Broaden our horizons if they're limited, and consider those horizons from an angle that may not have occurred to us had we been left to our own devices.
See, I've done it again! Strayed, like a bullet that wilfully misses its target, which is why I'd be no good with a plot. And even more hopeless devising believable three-dimensional characters that you only read and rifle through as you might do someone's sock drawer. Do people still have sock drawers? I do, but then I'm not a reliable example when I'm down with the olds. In favour of any-old-thing rather than new-modern. On principle or because I hate being forced? More the latter, I think. I'll succumb when I absolutely have to and not before, kicking and screaming probably as I used to do as a toddler on supermarket floors. Bejam, I think it was. None of which has anything to do with sock drawers.
Why can't I stick to the topic? And I thought I was square. A square person would stick to cold hard facts and produce a tidy report. All bases covered and no fluff. Or extra padding like those God-damn awful insert-able, removable shoulder pads in the 80s, which having been permanently removed can be found in brassieres to cushion and provide enhancement to gals who are told they fall short in that department. Next there'll be derrière pads (if I haven't missed the advent of those already!) to give that coveted Beyonce butt, though personally I think Kylie still has it.
All in all, thank God a dry and to-the-point report wasn't a goal because this would surely be marked with an F, or even, God forbid, a U.
Now, who's this? Someone's just poked her head round the door and asked if I want a cuppa. Nope, don't know her. She has a wipe-clean pinny on and has come armed with a pink feather duster. Lethal she is with it too as she dances it around the room and over picture frames. This is going to be one Supergran clean where nothing is moved out of place, just dabbed around, or poked as she's doing now to this keyboard, swatting at it as if it were a fat, juicy fly, unmindful of the fact that I'm having to both screen (for my own safety) and avert my eyes as my article gets a new paragraph, primarily of gobbledygook, inserted. Luckily, she somehow manages to end with a punctuated flourish by hitting Delete successively like she's decided this isn't the time or the place to air her linen; none of which I imagine is grey and holey like some of mine. She looks like the type of woman that might still scrub it by hand on wash day, unless she too has caught on to the miracle that is Vanish! And just like that, said in my best Tommy Cooper-ish voice, she's gone! Well, that didn't last long, just long enough to have destroyed any hope of this being a serious piece.
I don't remember employing a char-woman...? What a distraction she caused flouncing in when I thought I was finally getting somewhere, not of course to where I'd intended to take you, but this writer really can't afford to be too choosy. My advice: run with and not against figments of the imagination, even if whatever it is seems inappropriate, implausible or ridiculous for they may not wash up ever again, or in quite the same workable form.
Picture credit: Wash Day, 1945, Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses)
