Sentence The Threehundredandfortysixth

“I'm not accustomed to Public Speaking, and don't particularly enjoy doing it, but yesterday I had an experience which was truly embarrassing; I had been asked to give a talk to my old school, well, the Senior classes anyway, and the trouble started when I was getting out of the car – it was a taxi – and when I slammed the door the driver moved off and I heard and felt the rip: my dress had got caught in the door and wheech! it was practically all gone, flapping in the wind as the taxi sped away; luckily I had a matching petticoat on – unusually for me, and only because it was a thin dress, and a bit breezy, but never one to cry over torn clothes, I stuck my folder under my arm and marched up to the entrance, which was when one of me heels snapped and I sprawled on the steps, scraping my knees

 

and watching my notes whirled away like confetti in the wind, and that was when I felt like bawling because I have a very low pain threshold, I'm not one of those 'Grin and Bear it' Amazons – but one of the teachers saw me and helped me up and into the building; the secretary came out with a first-aid box and cleaned my knees and stuck plasters on them – nice ones for kids, rainbows, with dinosaurs; but she repaired my heel which was very nice of her; and after a cuppa I was led into the Hall, which
was jam-packed because, it turned out, a tummy-bug had decimated their teaching staff and the entire school had been brought in to hear a series of speakers talking about their jobs: it was some sort of careers day, which isn't what I'd been told when I was invited – if it had been up to me, I'd have cancelled the whole thing and sent them all to the nearest Shopping Centre, but maybe that's why I'm not a Headmistress (or even a Teaching Assistant); and as it turned out, I wasn't on first, so I couldn't get away sharpish, I was going to have to wait for a Doctor, a Journalist, an Engineer, a champion Bob-Sleigher, a Jockey, even a Teacher, before it was my turn, a Poet – so it wasn't till after lunch, meat balls and chips followed by jam roly poly and custard, that I was asked to ascend to the bema: I don't have a head for heights, 8” heels are my limit, but because I'm only little and the microphone couldn't be lowered to my height, even with my heels, they'd put a box in front of it for me to stand on; and it was wobbly! so, I took a deep breath, opened my mouth and spoke and I sounded just like

Minnie Mouse, which got a laugh, but I hadn't intended it and that threw me – so I ploughed on: squeaky, breathless, horrifyingly nervous, and delivering a Limerick I was making up as I went along – it's the true forerunner of Rap and while it might not be considered polished enough to be accepted as true declamatory poetry, I believe itt's pithiness makes up for what it may lack in polish; I've never been a Performance Poet, me and John Cooper Clark don't see eye-to-eye even though we're about the same height, I think poetry is for reading quietly to yourself, hearing it in your head in your own voice, so my improvisational style probably sounded like Adolf Hitler declaring Peace on Earth, and just before the Punchline I sipped some water from my glass, tried to put it down and dropped it, smashing it to smithereens, the box wobbled, my heel which the secretary had mended broke again (it

 

turned out she'd only used sellotape, so plummeted in my estimation), I tumbled down and, arms and 

legs akimbo, made a right spectacle of myself, to the intense delight of all the boys in the school who got a good gander at my knickers, and that was when the whole event broke up in confusion: two paramedics arrived (they were to be the next speakers after me, and one of them – a nice chubby blonde – thanked me for getting them out  

 

of it) and it turned out I'd fractured a bone in my ankle and had to be carted off to hospital, with the profuse apologies of the Headmistress ringing in my ears and the soothing voice of Seonaid, the

lovely Paramedic, relaxing me while she held my hand; and as they left after taking me into one of the cubicles in A&E and I lay back on the bed woozy with whatever sedation I'd been given, I opened my hand and found a sweaty note with her name and phone number, and a line from Mae West: “come up some time, see me,” and I realised that during the maybe five seconds of the fall, I'd heard the entire 2 minutes and 47 seconds of The Mamas and Papas singing 'Trip, Stumble and Fall' – proof that while time may fly when you're having fun, it all but stops when you are nosediving from the dizzy heights of 8” heels and that's pretty weird, eh? oh, but the Punchline you ask, well, ithis woulkd have been the full Limerick:

A pretty girl stood on the bema and sighed,

For her lover who'd dumped her by text and and then hied,

To be by the side,

Of his affinal Bride,

and then

A pseudometeorite landed on him and he died!"

”