Stream Of Consciousness

It’s all so very different from what I'd expected.
Funny really, not funny ha-ha, more funny peculiar.
But there you are,

you just never can tell in advance.

The beginning was quite ordinary.

A small family, mum, dad, and me, plus the regulation number of aunts and uncles, an assortment of cousins, two grandpas. Both grannies deceased.

I wonder why the grannies were in such a hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil before they’d had a chance to sample the easy life? Their photos show them to be a bit care-and-work-worn; they had large families, a war, and the old-fashioned type of husband, the law-giver sort, to contend with; perhaps the prospect of more of the same just didn’t appeal. Poor grannies, I wish I’d known you.

The grandpas hung around for years; cranky old men, perhaps the lack of women in their life had made them so. Sex outside marriage was not then the indoor sport it is now. One took up politics, the other religion; anything to keep the juices flowing.

You’d think such ordinary beginnings would predispose me to a life constrained by custom.

It did, to begin with, and the road ahead in my little world was straight and narrow, as the roads generally tend to be in that part of the North European plain where I come from. Ancient Roman roads, built by legionaries, for marching armies up and down on, armies meant to subdue the barbarian Germanic tribes who preferred to stick with their heathen ways deep in the forests and only came out for a spot of raping and pillaging when the mood took them.

Anyway, in spite of the straight and narrow road ahead, the good little girl turned rebellious, and a stroppy teenager emerged. Which is where the trouble started. Stroppy teenagers should be discouraged, they should  be towed out to sea and deposited on a deserted island until the steaming tide of their hormones settles down. (Hormones in teenagers are a totally disruptive force : a substance produced within the body of an animal or plant and carried in the blood or sap  to an organ which it stimulates).

Says it all, really, doesn’t it.

Couldn’t get out fast enough. Couldn’t get into trouble fast enough. Caused all sorts of ructions, gnashings of teeth, recriminations, accusations. The teenage drama queen had her way.

The parents wrung their hands, asking “where did we go wrong?” They always knew that all that reading under the bedclothes, by torchlight, wasn’t healthy; if only they’d put a stop to it! Parents do that sort of thing, they realize the error of their ways long after the damage has been done; anybody could have told them that book-reading would lead to no good in the end.

Which is why I ended up on this island long after my raging hormones had settled down and I am still here.

Too late to get off now.