Bees in my Bonnet / Character Development / Short Story / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

Of terrapins and goats

I was saying to a friend of mine that, with the growing number of Covid cases and the heat, I have been keeping more to myself and reading the papers to provide some human amusement.

‘You’ve been following the contest for Prime Minister, have you?’ she asked.

‘There is far too much of real interest to bother with a squabble among politicians,’ I told her. ‘For example, Smiling Terrapins are less likely to die the older they grow.’

‘That’s understandable,’ she retorted, ‘those who keep smiling, live longer.’

As you’ll gather she’s one of those positive thinkers.

My own impression of being left alone is that it’s the ladies who smile at me who seem to vanish regularly and the grumpy old chaps who stick around forever. I’ve no sooner managed to get up the courage to chat to a well preserved old gal than her daughter hives her off to some place of safety as they call it, and I’m left with some dozy old buffer, who wants to tell me how he changed the world.

When I show amazement that they have ten great-grandchildren, the ladies blush and say, ‘Oh, I am over eighteen.’

‘I’m eighty-seven, of course,’ Bruce tells me before I can ask, ‘but I could still knock a few sixes from the bowlers of today. You see I was CEO of a company that made what-you-call-its, the name will come to me just now, and you’ll recognise it when I tell you.’

All of which goes to show that it’s not just a terrapin’s smile that extends life but the old goats who make it seem interminable.