Colchester Write Night Meeting

On December 10th, WriteNight celebrated its first anniversary and we decided to celebrate this landmark with a little party.  My friend Sonja Holmes and I made a cake in the shape of a book, as you can see below. 

In addition to many delicious baked foodstuffs and drinkies, we all completed an insane writing exercise, devised by the 'evil genius' Colin Murugiah.  

We each plucked four letters from a hat and came up with words starting with those letters.  All 49 words were then written down and we had to create a story containing all 49 of them.

The words were as follows:

blank,  fryer, green, prize, queen, golf, vehicle, fresh, orangutan, joy, angry, nodded, Nick, dance, sky, cedar, luscious, old, ugly, transmogrify, drum, excited, saliva, knife, Winter, Yule, usury, zombie, irritate, knickers, zero, pants, xenophobe, migraine, internalise, temperament, umbrella, rampant, existential, herbivore, snow, chocolate, oblivious, anxiety, starfish, jammy, dodgy, mercurial, pedagogical.

It was a very challenging but entertaining task.  Here is what I managed to come up with.  I have coloured the challenge words in green.

Disgruntled Zookeeper 

by Annie Bell 

"Pants!" I yelled as the hot fat spat from the fryer.  The aroma of frying chips filled my nostrils, causing a tsunami of saliva to build up.

As I waited for the fresh sticks of white potato to brown off, I cursed my recently self imposed herbivore diet.  Those chips would have been so much better, if they were enhanced by a tasty piece of fish.  

Working at the zoo had ruined me.  I couldn't bear to stand there at lunchtime, biting into a juicy quarter pounder, only to spot the wounded face of Queen Nick - the orangutan - gazing accusingly at me from behind his wall of glass.  It's not as if I was eating Daisy - the zoo cow!  Anyway, the guilt Queen Nick had imposed had somehow been internalised and I had transmogrified into this green eating zombie with a meat deprived, angry temperament and a zero tolerance approach to those pedagogical bastards with their blank expressions and their hands-on approach to primate development.  I'd show them a thing or two!

So back to my chips.  The tiny red marks from the fat spatters began to irritate.  I thought back to the strange events of that afternoon.

It had been an unfortunate day.  I'd woken up from a full scale, epic anxiety dream - you know - the sort where you realise, far too late, that you forgot to put your knickers on, before leaving the house.

Work had been average.  I'd taken great joy from winding up that mercurial little xenophobe Sergey, with his luscious lips, cedar aroma and bad attitude.  Jammy little git had just been awarded a top notch prize for new approaches to zookeeping.  I had done all the work for it but he, chocolate teapot that he was, had taken the credit for it.  The old witch in charge was utterly oblivious to the entire injustice and I had had enough.

With a migraine cooking my eyes and the fear of the odious usuries frm Barclays Bank coursing through my mind (my overdraft was a bit weighty), I headed for my vehicle.

As I stepped into the Winter chill, I was on the edge of an existential crisis.  The knife in my back was smarting and the sky looked dodgy; sort of grey and heavy.

My Golf sat waiting to carry me home. I climbed into the seat and turned the key.  The engine burst into life and the stereo followed suit.  My favourite band blared out.  'Ugly Starfish' rocked my world.  the beat of the drums entered my blood, aligning my pulse with their beat, until all I could do was to go ahead with that insane dance you can only do when driving.

It did strike me that a passing pedestrian might laugh as I nodded and headbanged my way home.

As I drove, the sky began to unburden itself, throwing feathery flakes of snow at my windscreen. Excited, I beamed.  It was almost Christmas.  Might we end up with a Yuletide blanket of snow and a nice payout for yours truly?  That'd be nice.

I parked my car and headed indoors, dancing rampantly to the noises in my head, my umbrella protecting me from the snow.

Suddenly, a toxic aroma awoke me from my reminiscence.  I'd burnt my damned chips! 

 © Annie Bell 2012