Obfuscation

Dr Bartholomew: I think fog might be trying to contact me.

Leslie Bath-Morgan: Why do you say that?

Dr Bartholomew: I just checked my phone and I have a mist call.

***

The above is an extract from my new play called I Haven't The Foggiest, which will be performed this spring. It's five hours of fog puns, but is also a thickly-veiled allegory of Black Wednesday.

All seats are obscured-view, so prices are low. There are still quite a few remaining because I refuse to tell anyone what or where the venue is. Leave that to the marketing people, I say.

I've got an itchy hand. It might have been bitten by something small. Scratching your hand makes you look suspicious. No-one trusts someone who can't marshal their own skin.

I'm going to try not to think about it.

It snowed this morning. I really wish I hadn't destroyed all of my sledges last night. Even at the time, I thought: "if it snows tomorrow, I'll regret this". But I'd had a few to drink and a few to stay, and we were merry and carefree, and our axes were burning (figurative) holes in our hands, and the sledges were all over the beds and we wanted to go to sleep.

How were we to know that it would snow?

Thinking about it, it might have been snowing at the time. We didn't raise the blinds to check. It would have been easy, but we didn't do it. If we had raised the blinds, and seen the beginning of a mighty blizzard, the destruction of the sledges might have been averted, or at least toned down.

But the snow and the axes fell, oblivious of each other, like two friends driving to the same party, unaware that they might have saved on petrol money by sharing a car.

Life is never as tidy as we think it should be. Things only make sense in retrospect. Decisions are only correct when you look back. In fact, decisions are only decisions when you look back. At the time, they're just guesses at random, darts on a board, the toss of a coin, the selection of a playing card from under a shawl. The four of diamonds? No. Of course not.

Choice is plummeting down a ravine, landing at the bottom, and claiming to have chosen the jutting skull-breaker on the way down.

I had no sledges this morning. It was snowing, and I had no sledges.

We did have several sleighs, though. They were extremely comfortable. The loss of the sledges wasn't much of a concern. We all climbed aboard our sleighs, pulled by neighbourhood dogs, and threw axe-heads to the local children.

I love Mondays.