Whither My Withered Buttocks

I'm as over-worked as Clare's memory stick. In fact, there was a moment during the early hours of Sunday morning when I thought I’d taken a break. Only, I was mistaken. I was not sitting on a tropical beach being sang to by the Sheila's Wheels nude choir. I’d fallen asleep in the armchair for a few minutes. Disgusted with myself, I rubbed some vinegar into my eyes and got back to work. I managed another forty pages before my body gave out and I fell into a thin restless sleep.

Before Ms. Baroque starts to worry that I was working on my masterpiece for her blog, that little gem was polished off earlier in the day. Instead, I was up late, going through the draft of my manuscript which Gabby finally returned to me, yesterday, full of her edits.

It took me seven hours to remove all her jokes. It was hard work, harder than the time I worked a room of female lumberjacks during the winter break in the Canadian log sawing season. I was picking pine needles from my underwear for months afterwards.

I don’t know what led me to lose faith in myself the other day, but asking Gabby to rewrite my novel with her own brand of humour wasn’t a bright move. When I reached page 50 of the redraft, I had begun realised that a Romanian sense of humour is a dangerous thing. Not only did most of it involve gloriously over-the-top mutilations of farmyard animals but most of the routines were stolen from Norman Wisdom comedies. Not that Norman ever went at a sheep with a machete, but you get the idea when I explain that the hero, in Gabby’s redraft of my novel, could barely stay on his feet for more than five minutes before tripping over and skewering a goat with a pitchfork. Oh, it was funny at first. But, by page 200 and the body count entering into triple figures, I was feeling pretty unwell. I'd happily never read another account of a sheepdog going tail first into a corn thresher.

So, today is a fresh gore-free day and I continue to work. I still worry about my buttocks (above) being to big. I wonder too if my comments will drop off as my visitors feel ashamed of visiting. I’m also concerned about those quiet visitors, who I value as much as any, who come here every day but never introduce themselves. How have they received my buttocks? I’d love to know.