A Twisted Tale

A Twisted Tale (5th February, 2009, 9.08am)

We all know the way that fairytales have a tendency to grow,
Ending in unions between smug heroine and handsome hero;
There’s a wicked old witch, with crooked back and bad teeth,
An adventure, a rescue, or a long quest with something to seek;

Add a beautiful queen, with a mirror, who’s a little narcissistic;
Some talking animals or dwarves for the young girls’ assistance;
A tower or a castle in a land far, far away with wonderful name,
And a door-to-door hag that, word has it, might be on the game.

A white horse, a knight, an excellent swordfight, maybe a toad;
Some metamorphosis, some magic, of course a yellow brick road;
A King wasting away on his elegant throne, and a kiss to awaken
A sleeping princess (though when she wakes she’s never shaken,

Even though a strange man has sexually assaulted her in a coma)
Yes, for years I’ve been thinking that ‘fairytale’ is a big misnomer;
Born from a potent mixture of storytellers and high-quality drugs:
It’s time the poets counter-attacked with some whimsical slugs.

So let’s lay off the well-fertilized fields of imagination and magic
And attempt a tale that is altogether more logical and organic!
What if the Prince had a limp and a rather large, crooked nose,
And the Kingdom he dwelt in was called ‘Just Down the Road’;

Let’s have his stepmother blonde and rather an airheaded drone,
And his intended servant girl reading a Maths degree on a loan.
We could exchange his steed for a nice steady cob; we could alter
Our hero’s name to something normal, like ‘Bob the Adulterer’…

What if the heroine was herself called ‘Freddie’, a little gender-
Confusion to make our tale even more heady; we could send her
Up to the mansion (the Credit Crunch renders the palace ‘out’)
With mail wrongly delivered to her Gran (not a wolf) and shout:

‘Oi, Bob, your ex-wife’s child support is overdue, and, look, there’s
a final demand for your guttering, too!’ whilst shaking talking hares
off her snow-covered shoes. ‘Leave me bloody laces alone; you’ve
not got opposable thumbs,’ she hisses to the creatures just to prove

that she knows her stuff. She dismisses the talking, attributing it’s
simply to the bottle of vodka she consumed in the Union, and sits
down on the floor to wait for the butler to open the mansion door,
then is shocked to discover he’s absent: not employed any more.

‘Oi, Bob!’ she might shout. ‘Stop playing about! Open the sodding
door yourself, will you, you posh git!’ only, when he does, sobbing,
give him a cuddle and offer him a swig of cold takeaway coffee,
asking ‘What can the matter be? Never mind, have a bit of toffee.’

As Bob sucks away hard on his Werther’s Original, he takes a shine
To his neighbour, who of course is (in his eyes) somewhat divine,
(we won’t go into the surgery she’s had; a present from Mum to
make up for leaving her third Dad). ‘What’s up, Bob? Tell me true!’

And Bob fills her in on his ‘What a to-do.’ Turns out the mansion
Is up for repossession, the mortgage unpaid due to the recession;
The King’s had a breakdown; Stepmum’s moved to LA; the prince
Is alone with all the bills to pay. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’m convinced,’

Says our Maths-erella, crunching now on a mint, ‘That my loan might
Cover it, for the time being, if you let me move in here this very night;
I’m being evicted, my Landlord’s gone under, and I can get three
Credit cards without too much trouble; Bob, just you stick with me,

And we’ll get through this, somehow!’ His head on her shoulder, he
Feels happy at last, as she frowns and contemplates the possibility
Of extending the mansion into a new Mathematical research facility;
Sure that the Uni would fund it, she prays to the nearest Divinity.

And here must end our not-so-tragic tale. What’s that you mutter?
No magic at all? Not one wave of a wand? Hear the poet splutter…
Fine, the hares skip away, singing Elton John ditties, while the snow
Starts to fall, looking terribly pretty, and the world starts to glow

With a beautiful light, and the Fairy Godmother turns up in his
Spangly tights. The Prince got a job at the local theatre, ‘The Biz’,
And his new missus got a 2:1, distracted by break-dancing mice,
Which she studied Mathematically, eventually winning a Nobel Prize.

They got married, of course, (the clever girl was protecting her assets)
In the Church of the Twisted Spire, so called ‘cos a giant once sat on it;
They had two children before divorce was arrived at, called Alice
And Cindy: an attempt to jazz up the monotony of life without Magic!

Jennifer Pickup