Alf
Laylah wa Laylah: a
fairymentary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“If
you really are interested in such rubbish, you
can write your own”, she shouted at the editor, as she slammed the
phone
down. It was futile: she had forgotten
that he was calling her on her mobile phone.
All she managed was to damage the little LCD screen and her
polished
finger-nails, and deafen him by the noise of the ‘bang’.
She
had been looking for a major opportunity to write for a national
tabloid. Novels, short stories, fashion
features,
anything – really. But not
fairy stories! Not ‘Arabian Nights’ in
A.D. 2000! I mean, how could she? She had
aspirations of
book contest awards, even of a Nobel prize for literature.
She
lit another fag; the third one within the hour.
So much for giving it up… She looked at the plume and then… she
saw ‘it’.
The
Djinn was ‘it’! ‘It’ was
there, coming out of the fag, right
in front of her. “Wait a minute,” she
thought, “this could be the beginning of an exciting story –why not
1001
stories- for the rag”. She puffed some
more smoke and saw the delicious
Fancy
that! A fairy tale based on a documented
real incident. A ‘fairymentary’ – she
just made up a word for this new ‘genre’ of writing.
The fact that most reporting consists of text
of little more credibility than a fairy tale did not appear to bother
her. This was going to make her
mark
on world literature. Just imagine:
students of journalism fifty years from now will read in the glossary
at the
back of their text-books “Fairymentary
= an advanced genre of writing, originally introduced by Shahrazad
Whitbread
writing for The Daily Buttocks at the turn of the century”.