I once was looking after a nephew of mine. With a bit of luck he is not reading this
and so will not recognise himself.
There was a large bunch of people in a meeting at the university and my
nephew was the only child, so was bored out of his mind. I had a book to write in and a pen so for a
while he was happy to draw things on one page.
Then, when he got tired of that I drew the only two things I can draw an
elephant and a pig. See below for my
incredible artwork.
However, even this brilliance began to bore him. So, on impulse on a blank piece of paper in the book I
wrote poo. His face was shocked
and when I pushed the pen in his direction he very reluctantly scribbled pee. Then I wrote bastard and his face
became a picture. He thought long and
hard then giggled and wrote shit.
I took the page and hid what I was writing from him. By now he was hooked and could not wait to
pull the book away and read what I had scribbled. His hand flew to his mouth and he gasped as he saw I had written
the dreaded F word. He could not
believe it and covered it with his hand so no one else might see it. But then with a pen that was pressed deep in
the paper he wrote in capital large letters FUCK. I took the book and wrote the same word even
bigger. He could not wait to pull the
book back and wrote FUCKING BASTARDS across the whole open page in the
largest letters he could manage. I was
surprised this was a boy who did not curse.
What had I unleashed? This
continued for a whole half hour with every curse word we could spell and a few
he could not. Talk about a
catharsis. We both looked in horror at
the open page covered with these filthy words.
I whispered that I had better stick the two pages together later so no one
else could see what these pages contained. Later we used glue stick to accomplish this.
Once it was all sealed the only things visible was the pig and the
elephant, we had drawn earlier on the preceding page.
I have that book and the sealed page to this day. My nephew is now all grown up and thankfully
a normal healthy young man despite his mischievous and naughty aunt’s tricks. But just
sometimes, when life gets on top of either of us and we want to curse most dreadfully
and loudly, scream at the unfairness of things, we just draw a pig or an
elephant and the other knows exactly what we would really like to write. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand
words.
