Homebody is Hysterical

Worse than being a regular fat homebody is being a fat homebody teacher at exam-time with no life at all. You sit at the dining table (which is the closest you will ever come to having an office space) and pore over bad handwriting and grammar and then collapse in tears of laughter, hysteria and depression – in that order – over your students’ brilliant creativity.

Case in point: Describe a food and the memories it brings to your mind.

I am sitting before the table, staring at breasts. Not human breasts. Breast of chicken a la kiev. They are round. They are plump. They are chicken’s breasts. I look at them and then I decide to eat them. The desire of my mouth overcomes the desire of my eyes. I pick up a ---- (space left for me to fill because he can’t remember that ‘kaanta’ translates into fork) and cut into the bossom of the chicken. (Yes, you’re right. Bosom. Not bossom.) I cut a piece and put a dollop into my mouth. I am eating breasts. I am enjoying breasts.

Well, at least it’s written correctly, right? It’s better than this:

Write a story in which things begin to happen in slow motion.

She didn’t got time to climb the seerhi. She couldn’t breathe because hot air was passing. She needed to go up. She looked down at the stairs and then bent her neck (a remarkable feat of cervical flexibility) and then bent her leg and her hip and put her feet on the first stair. Then she singed to me: ‘Mohammad! Come help your grandmother! And when I come to help her, she finds it easy. She starts hovering like a hovering craft.

My the breath also begins to come in short gusts like a waterfall and the tears that flow from my mouth to my tongue like the wind of a fan. So I bend my knee and my ankle and spring up from my chair on which I am sitting and then walk over to the fridge and reach for a ‘Kit-Kat’ which is in inverted commas because I have decided I need to get marks on the punctuation as the well.

It’s homebodies like me who keep the chocolate industry going. You’re welcome, Nestle!