Fairy story

Long post today but I hope it amuses you.... it was supposed to have photos but I've mislaid my camera lead. Sorry.

Once upon a time in a land far, far from Blogland there lived a Man. Just so you are clear, there wasn’t a Goldilocks, Cinderella or a fair maiden called Rapunzel. (At least, if Man knows what is good for him there had better not be.) There was however a Wicked Witch.

Mr Man was a clean person. He liked his house to be clean. He liked his hands to be clean. He also liked his politics to be clean but, as he lived in the UK in which we get to dictate a benign dictator who is periodically interviewed by the Police, we shall not get into that.

So, one sunny Sunday afternoon, Mr Man was minding his own business. He had settled down in his clean armchair, wearing clean clothes to drink some delicious coffee from a clean mug when – suddenly- his house was invaded by the Wicked Witch.

Of course like all cunning evil characters she did not actually look like a Wicked Witch. She looked quite nice actually because she had just bought some new trousers from Wallis and a fetching top from the Per Una Range of M&S. Nonetheless if you looked beneath the veneer she was an evil woman. She crooked a finger, bumpy with quilter’s callouses and needle scratched fingernails at Mr Man and cast a spell over him.
“Hubble Bubble Toil and trouble,
Come quick help me, on the double,
Eye of Newt and toe of frog,
No, I don’t want to have a dialogue.”

Soon Mr Man was following her with a confused look on his face.
“Right. We are going to make a set of paper mache Persian slipper and then when that is done we are going to make a model of a building, OK?”

Mr Man remained confused. That was partly because he was, as I have already explained, a Man. And partly because the Wicked Witch’s magic was not strong enough to actually give him creative powers. After all she was a nice girl underneath its just that she ate an apple that was touched with a drop of blood from when Ricky Tims pricked his finger on Kaffe Fasset’s spinning wheel and she got infected with quilting madness and ended up being a mad evil City and Guilds type person.

And so Mr Man was forced to make mess. He tried very hard to make paper mache without touching the glue but his fingers got all sticky. He tried very hard to visualise how the Costa Coffee straws the Wicked Witch was making him roll up in Brown paper parcel were going to help create a Cameroonian Chiefs compound in conjunction with a San Miguel box, a polystyrene packing piece from the new freezer and a left over bit of table protector. But he failed.
And the Wicked Wicked Witch made him do it anyway.

At one point she asked him whether it was not relaxing playing with childlike things.
“No,” he replied. Then more hopefully, “I could go and clean my shoes. That would be relaxing. And they’re not even dirty.”

But the Witch wouldn’t let him go and be clean. She made him roll straws in glue and fetch scissors and hold down hinges dabbed with PVC adhesive. She made him bend over a patio table that was too low for his bad back just to place layer after layer of nasty, unclean, sticky gluey, paper over a cling film wrapped Moroccan slipper. (The nasty witch was not too bothered about spoiling her slippers because she gets to go shopping again in the souk they came from in three weeks time.

After a while Mr Man worked out that even a Wicked Witch might turn back into a princess if she was persuaded to stop panicking about the incomplete state of her Form portfolio and to sit and watch a double episiode of Grey’s Anatomy. So he gingerly and bravely pointed out that the Wicked Witch had promised to cook tea and it needed to be ready for 8pm.

The wicked witch narrowed her black cat like eyes and gave him an ugly look.
“Well, you’ll have to help me clean up then.”

So the Wicked Witch got to slice a chicken breast and stir fry it with tinned bamboo shoots and a packet sauce whilst Mr Man got to clean up the glue box and the strips of paper, the stencil paints and the left over cardboard that was sticky with PVC adhesive. He got to scrub the unclean kitchen floor and scrub the unclean kitchen worktops and to scrub his unclean hands from all that stencil paint he had scrubbed away from elsewhere. He got to put his now clean hands under the freezing water of the outside tap to wash out an unclean pallet of acrylic paints. He got to hoover and put away the craft knives and to wonder how the Wicked Witch could multi task by painting with one hand and stirring with the other.

And then, just at the stroke of 8pm as the pumpkin was turning into tea he finally got to sit in his clean armchair and eat his tea from a clean tray and then, he fell asleep, a deep sleep that felt like a thousand years. And when he awoke, there was no sign of the Witch, only a serene woman curled on the sofa watching Mc Dreamy. He checked for gnarled hands just in case but no, her fingers were long and smooth and he shook his head and assumed it was all a dream.

Poor Mr Man never saw the tube of Udder cream slipped between the sofa cushions. He did wonder where that model came from though