Friday, September 26, 2008

If I had the time and energy to think of something else to write, I would

The council estate on Bumblebee Road has been controversial from the start. While the project was still in its planning stages, Porr-Lon, the god of housing developments, manifested himself nearby and played a melody on his pewter bassoon which all those who heard it agreed meant that he felt the estate should be built on the other side of the river. The council considered re-siting the planned estate, but eventually concluded that the additional expense of drawing new blueprints, the difficulty of aligning the houses with the constellation of Aries on the other side of the river and the fact that Porr-Lon is one of the less important gods made it impractical to change the location of the estate.

Immediately after it was built, there was a space adventure involving Martians, and after that had been dealt with there were complaints from local residents that crime levels had risen and there was an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings. These allegations were inaccurate - crime had in fact been completely and totally eliminated in the entire county the day after the council estate was built, and in fact in some regions the number of reported crimes fell as low as minus seventeen every day. And while there was indeed an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings, who are we to criticise unpleasant smells? After all, most people smell quite unpleasant, if you come to think about it.

Nonetheless, the controversy reached such a level that the leader of the council, Bog Myrtle Sutherland, signed an emergency decree banning the estate from ever having been built in the first place. When it comes into effect, next Tuesday, the whole estate and everyone who lives on or near it will be wiped out of existence entirely and this whole article will never have been written. Which is a shame, but that's Bog Myrtle Sutherland for you. She's always overreacting to things. There was a time when she overreacted to a horse, and that didn't end well for anyone, except the jockey.

2 comments:

Mike said...

These stories? Are they link list creations? Or are they really stuff that spills out? I would feel safer knowing that the story translated into a segment of pi or something. Is Bog Myrtle a Harry Potter reference?
Isn't this the time of year that you start writing your one month novel?
Could you please turn your synopsis for a espionage/memory competition into a reality? I have been waiting for this book for ages now!!

Zoomy said...

Sorry if it makes you feel unsafe, Mike, but no, these things are just random outpourings of my brain. This one wasn't one of my favourites, but I just couldn't be bothered to write a real blog entry that night.

And it wasn't a deliberate Harry Potter reference, although I do love Moaning Myrtle - it's just that bog myrtle is probably the least romantic-sounding plant in the world, and I like the idea of someone choosing to call their daughter that.

And I'm not sure my synopsis would work if I stretched it out to a full book. But you never know, maybe I'll do that in November and see what happens...