Sometimes life rushes by in an ever changing jumble of activity, sometimes it crawls through mud and misery. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember it all.
If you asked me what I’ve done so far I’ll tell you about the good bits.
I’m not going to mention the bad bits – if there were any.
‘So, what did it look like?’
‘Like some sort of exotic sea creature. It had fine tendrils coming out of one side, and a long, thin papery tube coming out of the other. Amazing.’
‘How big?’
‘About like a golf ball, that was the main bit, the tendrils and the tube were sticking out from either side, it was more or less a ball, but it was flatter where the tendrils were and pointed towards the tube.’
‘Well, what colour was it?’
‘White, I suppose, well, sort of off-white, like I said, like a golf ball. With brown powdery lumps stuck to the edges, which came off when you rubbed them.’
‘Sounds like dried-on mud to me.’
‘Hmm, yes, you could be right. That was on the swollen bit, the bit between the tendrils and the tube.’
‘So it had probably been buried in the ground?’
‘Could be’.
‘And what about these tendrils?’
‘Brown, tangled, brittle, a bit thicker than a hair.’
‘How long?’
‘A couple of inches.’
‘And the tube?’
‘Oh, that was long, really long, a couple of feet – well, eighteen inches – but narrow, maybe a quarter of an inch across, and made up of overlapping sheets like fine paper. At the end, the sheets came apart and were greeny-brown and shrivelled. In fact, the whole thing was covered in this fine white papery skin that came off really easily.’
‘So what happened when you pulled it off?’
‘Oh, amazing. You see, it wasn’t really a ball, when you looked at it closely; it had ridges going up the side from the tendrils to the tube. In fact, when I turned it over with the tendrils towards me, it was this beautiful shape, not a perfect circle, but with a scalloped edge. And when I stuck my thumb nails in between the ridges, it pulled apart into little segments, shaped like crescent moons, tapering at the tube end and slightly thicker at the tendril end, covered in another layer of skin, pale red this time. Behind the first one, there was another layer of these segments, they all fitted together perfectly into the overall shape.’
‘And what was inside the segments?’
‘The skin was much harder to pull off than the outside stuff had been, but I broke the segment apart with my nails. Inside it was white and solid, a perfect oval in cross-section, and if you looked carefully you could just see a much smaller oval right in the middle, a slightly darker, creamy colour. But I’ll tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It stank. I still can’t get the smell off my thumbnail.’
Southsea Storytellers 