Tuesday, May 12, 2009

A Memoir


Well I've started it at last. The memoir of an English rose in the Australian outback. Here's the draft of the Prologue:

PROLOGUE

What am I doing here on this glorious spring day, lying in the dusty dirt of the sheep yards grasping a pig’s penis? Can’t the over-sexed idiot sort out his own love life so that I can peel off my androgynously unattractive work clothes and take off to town clad in crisp white linen to sip on a latte whilst overlooking the spectacular view of Esperance Bay like other girls?

No, he quite obviously is incapable of sorting out his love life, which is why I am here grovelling in the dirt trying to help him impregnate a somewhat reluctant sow. I am reminded by my husband (who is grappling the head end of the sow to prevent her running away from this incompetent inamorato), that these are the sort of things a farmer’s wife must do in order to bring home the bacon.

I should not be here. This was not the life plan I had in mind when I arrived, a fresh faced English rose at the age of twenty two, on Western Australian shores for a year of travel, fun and frivolity. As the great niece of William Hartnell, the first actor to play ‘Dr Who’, I rather fancied myself on television as a time traveller’s assistant journeying through the universe. Fresh out of University with an arts degree in English and Drama I was going to be an actress and ‘tread the boards, darling’. I had no intention of becoming a provincial yeoman.

Well, a fat lot of good that plan was. Just one look was all it took, and here I’ve been ever since, a farmer’s wife living in the middle of the Australian bush.

(to be continued)

1 comment:

  1. I've always wondered what about the sex life of a pig... all the grunting and snorting that must happen, let alone the slap of pork on pork, hmmm...

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