Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
Yes! It is at last that exciting time again, when I have done to the Work In Progress about all I can do for it at present, short of remembering all the Oxford commas and/or setting it on fire.
I am therefore preparing to send it out to a select group of dauntless volunteers who will do their level best to read it and then tell me (ideally uniting civility and truth) what they think of it. Or, failing that, upon what page the book lost the ceaseless battle with that struggle we call Life.
It is often said that one half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. I had no idea that this was true of brains as well. I have long been aware that there is a part of my brain that does the hidden work of creating characters and so forth. What I hadn’t realized is that this bit of my brain has such different tastes and interests as to verge on being the Other Half.
What has the Other Half been doing to spark these wild surmises, you wonder. Playing chess? Concocting recipes for a new and improved pain au chocolat? Alas, no. What I caught the other half of my brain doing, shortly before I woke this morning, was writing a country song.
Flannel petticoats, where have you been all my life?
Last winter I made myself a flannel petticoat. I can’t remember why – it was just one of those sudden certainties that seize upon me (like the Dishonour Cow). I just knew that I needed a flannel petticoat, eftsoons. (2. (now archaic), soon after.)
And how right I was. You don’t notice any sudden change when you put it on of a chilly morning, but believe me, you notice when you take it off. Off your outer layers come, with scarcely a change in your temperature. And then you remove the flannel petticoat and suddenly YOU ARE COLD.
