Creativity Sunday - Short Sharp Shock
There was a short, sharp shock.
He remembered the piece he'd had to repeat in speech class -
"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock
In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
By a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block."
It came back instantly, in full. He'd never realised it was originally from a play; one he'd seen even, The Mikado, performed with commendable enthusiasm to a matinee performance of school children and sleeping old people. One of them had thrown up, he remembered, and no one he knew had ever been able to say for sure which of the two groups had been to blame. He remembered that, but those lines, the exact same ones that were later drilled into him as a means to ensure correct enunciation (the difference between enunciation and pronunciation, he had also learned in these classes, was that the former was done by a better class of people than the latter), he had thought them little beyond random doggerel for years. It wasn't until he was confronted by someone else quoting them that he even realised that his speaking tutor (always tutor, never teacher, for much the same reason as the previous distinction) hadn't simply made them up herself. And yet even despite all that, even so many years later and so far away, he felt his back stiffen reflexively as it all sprang back to him.
There was, at least, a little comfort in that. Given the circumstances, he decided he'd take what he could get.
He remembered the piece he'd had to repeat in speech class -
"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock
In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
By a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block."
It came back instantly, in full. He'd never realised it was originally from a play; one he'd seen even, The Mikado, performed with commendable enthusiasm to a matinee performance of school children and sleeping old people. One of them had thrown up, he remembered, and no one he knew had ever been able to say for sure which of the two groups had been to blame. He remembered that, but those lines, the exact same ones that were later drilled into him as a means to ensure correct enunciation (the difference between enunciation and pronunciation, he had also learned in these classes, was that the former was done by a better class of people than the latter), he had thought them little beyond random doggerel for years. It wasn't until he was confronted by someone else quoting them that he even realised that his speaking tutor (always tutor, never teacher, for much the same reason as the previous distinction) hadn't simply made them up herself. And yet even despite all that, even so many years later and so far away, he felt his back stiffen reflexively as it all sprang back to him.
There was, at least, a little comfort in that. Given the circumstances, he decided he'd take what he could get.