Skip to main content

Parmesan Cheese And The Aladdin's Lamp

Being a compulsive writer—in the sense that I write, I enjoy it and I can't stop doing it—I am convinced that our mind is 'the Aladdin's lamp'. All we have to do is tickle our brain and off we go: a puff of smoke containing every possible dream and desire comes out, ready to be unravelled in front of our very eyes. With a stroke of my hand i touch my Aladdin's lamp waiting for the genie to come out of my ears. It doesn't matter where I am, it can happen anytime, anywhere: while I am sitting on the bus, queing up at the supermarket, buying a sweater or chopping onions; not that I buy sweaters or chop onions that often.

...One night I found a big piece of cheese, perfectly sealed in its airtight plastic wrapper, on top of a letter box in Wimbledon. I recognized it immediately it was a gigantic piece, slice, chunk of Parmesan  glowing under the reddish-orange street light. How could anyone have missed it? Parmesan cheese under a spot light! It could have been the setting for a new add. At first I walked passed it and carried on, but a relentless voice inside my head kept saying Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese, Parmesan cheese incessantly. I turned round and rushed back to the letter box, as quickly as possible, and pocketed the cheese, still there waiting for me. As soon as I dropped it into my rack-sack I regretted it immediately. What was I doing picking up cheese that had been sitting on a letter box? Was I crazy? What if someone had poisoned it to teach a lesson to people like me? But it was too late to change my mind, I was already sitting on the underground train heading for North London.  How did the story end?
(1st ending) I must confess that I never did ate the cheese, it went down the rubbish bin the same night. What can i say in my defense? Quite simply: I just couldn't resist picking up a big lump of cheese sitting on a red letter box!
(2nd ending) The cheese sat in my fridge for a few days before I could eat it. I nibbled a little piece at first and waited anxiously for 24 hours  wondering how long it was going to take before I had to be rushed to the local hospital. But nothing happened. So I enjoyed the rest of it and decided that after all it had been a risk well worth taking!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musings on a Sunny Day

  I write for a fairly successful blog. Not in term of numbers or followers, but in terms of content: a well-written and balanced page of writing. The blog is composed of 2 fiction writers and a poet, it has a good variety of topics that might interest fellow writers and readers in equal measure. But lately I’ve felt the need to go solo. I cannot emphasize enough the feeling of freedom that writing anonymously gives you. Not knowing who is going to read you, not being judged by the people you know.  A desire for invisibility, or just freedom. Not expecting anything back. The list goes on, not to mention other unpleasant side effects of working with others.    In the middle of the lockdown I feel that the solitude I have been confined to is not enough, and I am trying to disengage from those few people I am still in touch with. Odd as it might seem I feel like breaking free from those few relationships I still have. As Sartre put it so well, ‘Hell is Other People’. But why? What has bee
Post a Comment
Read more

ASTRID AND THOR ARE BACK

PART TWO   Astrid wasn’t working anymore. Work was a thing of the past; from 2066 the global workforce had been reduced to 2%. All factories − magicians hats, as they were now called − grew underground hidden by lawns and meadows, buried under hills, so that we could count daisies and look at clovers. Thor and Astrid were relaxing after a night picnic of fruit based meals and drinks for a total calories vitamins ratio of 1/100: a vitamin intake sufficient for the next seven days. Astrid was studying ‘history in the final year of capitalism and the collapse of the last empire’. She yawned thinking how oppressive work must have been, and tried to picture herself getting out of bed every morning even when it was raining but she really couldn’t.  How lucky she was to have been born after the collapse of society, as they knew it. Of course not everything was perfect, it still rained but rain was nice if you could sit in your glass-bubble roof terrace and sip tea. In about twen
Post a Comment
Read more

THE SQUIRREL

Last year I sponsored a squirrel. I used to look at him running and jumping on the old elm tree and I decided that I wanted to know him better. He comes several times a day on my windowsill expecting to find roasted peanuts−this is what I’ve been feeding him on everyday for the last three months. I don’t know if peanuts are good for him. I am not an expert on squirrel and I haven’t read any books on these lovely rodents (maybe I should, I don’t want to kill him) but I know quite a lot about mine. Contrarily to what many people might think (or was it just me?) he doesn’t burry his nuts in the ground (my flower pots), that is a complete misconception of all times. My squirrel eats them on the spot−the windowsill−while standing next to my jasmine, which thanks to the fucked up environment blossomed just before Christmas and is in bloom still, or he disappears under a bush, which grows next to the roof. When he has enough of roasted peanuts he leaves them where they a
Post a Comment
Read more