Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
Grandchild being in this case a major understatement, but seriously, chickens are amazing. Amazing and amazingly weird.
Take the whole issue of eggs for example. It takes a hen about 26 hours to produce an egg. But when the hen sits on a whole batch of them – up to a dozen – they all hatch around the same time, not at 26 hour intervals for a fortnight. (Assuming a rooster was involved prior to egg-laying. Otherwise no business results and the hen gets bored after a while and wanders off.)
Some years ago, I lived in a house with a passive-aggressive electronic doorbell. Not only would it ring when someone pressed the button next door, it would also reprogram itself. No matter whether you selected a classic bing-bong or something more reminiscent of Big Ben in a jolly mood, what you got, sooner or later, was Oh, Susanna. Which would insist on playing right to the very end, regardless of how soon you had opened the door, thus inhibiting conversation with the unsuspecting perpetrator.
Not surprisingly, this (and the other ills which electronics are heir to) rather soured me on electronic doorbells. Instead, I yearned for a classic old-fashioned mechanical doorbell, such as had resided on the door of our previous residence. This yearning only grew when we moved to our present home and discovered that you could still see the marks on the door where such a mechanical doorbell had previously been.
As the long-running readers of this blog will know, when I finished the first draft of my first novel five and a half years ago (to be honest, it feels more like a decade), I bought a celebratory fountain pen.
Possessing moderate quantities of that desirable intangible, self-control, I resisted the urge to repeat the procedure every time I finished a draft. But self-control is none the worse for having the occasional treat, so once I was within hailing distance of getting The Wound of Words off my hands (not just the first draft but the whole thing, published and all), I ordered another celebratory pen. (Just a tiny one…)
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