Ok, this one is a stinker. I had to give someone a weakness, and then write about something intimidating them. I drew a serious mental blank, as such this is very, very, ordinary.
Love you long time, click the pic.
Hamish
Week Three – Intimidating – 29MAR15
He sat at the kitchen table and moved the remnants of his children’s activities to one side, forming a space to place his ‘Spirax A4 Notebook (120 pages, 7mm ruled)’. Stepping backwards, he places his bare left foot onto one of the world’s most cunning and evil creations. A Lego block; red.
Cursing he pulls out the high backed kitchen chair, glares at the five year old giggling to itself at his discomfort.
Perfection: curse of the writing man.
With an inward grown, ‘Byzantium’ takes in the blank page before him, his ‘0.7mm Papermate® Grip Roller’ teases him through inactivity, and he thinks “Shouldn’t I be writing drunk and editing sober?” Fear of the empty page and the wrath of a wife halts that thought. Yet all the while the piece for the page mocks him.
A gentle hint of fear nudges him, yet his arrogance swats it to the subconscious.
He stands, turns, moves, and stalks to the white plastic kettle; he flicks it on. The page, empty, laughs at him across the room, and a child, random, attaches itself to his leg, slowing his movement toward the blank page of misery.
Coffee lounges beside a page as empty as Byzantium’s mind, and the child remains on his leg beneath the table. “Nothing! Damn its eyes and the eyes of the exercises creator!” springs to the fore of Byzantium’s mind. “Think you Muppet! It isn’t that hard!” now, however, he will not look at the page; a small voice from beside his knee tells him that “I want to be a superhero like James Bond.”
Half an hour sludge’s by, and all Byzantium has achieved is another coffee, two cigarettes, and detaching the limpet from his shin. Fear now has shifted gear and has made to a conscious region of his brain, sucking the moisture from his mouth and placing it onto his forehead as it does so. “It is just an exercise, you can get away with not doing it.” Say the devil into his right ear. “Get on with it.” Say’s an angel into his left, as he flatly refuses to sit beside the blank canvas.
“Write damn you!” Nothing. Desperation claws at him, and he cannot believe that at the age of 42 that he can be so grotesquely intimidated by a blank page. Byzantium, flushed tries the kids, then the wife, one black and white cat, and a dog named Bob for inspiration. Blank looks and silence.
Whinging openly to himself now, time drips through his fingers and mind, and his wife lifts her gentle face toward him. People fear her beauty, and in true marital style his wife offers love filled advice to him. “For Christ’s sake Byzantium, just write the bloody thing, I need the table to feed the kids. Just write about not knowing what to write, and bloody well get on with it! A grown man intimidated by an empty page is absolutely pathetic!”
So here I sit for all to see, my page is full, and I am no longer sitting at the kitchen table.
Fin
N
The World Turned Upside Down 
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