This time of year always reminds me of that game we used to play as kids when you pretended that you were the only ones on earth still awake and moving, while everyone else had been frozen. Nicholson Baker's The Fermata explores this perfectly, except his narrator uses stopped time to undress women and, when we were young, even the thought of that would have been DISGUSTING. Although now I think about it more, if we had have come up with that idea, some of us might secretly have found it exciting ... which is surely what being an adult writer is all about - keeping the ideas and playfulness of childhood and yet giving them an adult slant. But, no, our childhood - or at least mine, I'm starting to wonder now suddenly about my fellow playmates - fantasies merely involved us creeping into kitchens and eating cakes, particularly the kitchen of a certain neighbour who had fresh homemade cakes presented to her every day after school. Imagine that. We did a lot of eating food in our games, if I remember, mainly because we seemed to be perpetually hungry. And of course Sleeping Beauty is all about this too - the one person awake in a sleeping land. Hmmm... the Prince should have just gone to the Palace kitchen and had a good breakfast, saved himself the cost of a bunch of roses this Thursday.
And my writing prompt for today is ... she didn't like her routine changed ...
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