'Everything I Did This Morning...'

Ava says SHE would never pee anywhere she shouldn't...

I am currently doing an Open University course, a level two Creative Writing. Loving it, and hoping to do the level three next year, providing I pass this one, of course. Most of this is done at home, but last weekend we had the second of two all day tutorials.

The first exercise we had to do was to write out everything we had done that morning, before getting to the tutorial. So I did. Unfortunately my mornings generally are far from usual, and my narrative contained such gems as 'washed the kitchen floor with cat disinfectant because the mancat had sprayed it during the night', 'make bed and place the incontinence mats carefully on the top so I can let the horrid girlcat out', and 'sniff clothes to make sure they hadn't been sprayed on before putting them on'. And using an entire lint roller on my coat, seperating scrapping mogs and so on and so on... you get the idea.

Clearly the disinfectant had gone to my head, and I didn't think 'WHY are we writing this?' and yup, sure enough the tutor had us read them out. Oops. Well, you can imagine, can't you? The other students just sat there, utterly appalled. It was very embarrassing.

One person was rolling with laughter though- the tutor herself. Oh my! I'd clearly found a kindred spirit! She confessed that she, too had four cats, none of whom got on, and yup, they also widdled everywhere and she did the clothes sniff every day too, recalling an unfortunate incident at Yoga where she didn't realise until half way through the class, what with the heating up of the body and so on, well you can imagine. Brilliant... and I, too, have done this. And there's no mistaking the smell of cat wee.

The point of the exercise, incidentally, was to show us that we edit even without thinking about it- things we don't want people to know or that we don't think are appropriate (ahem!!) not one of us wrote that we'd been to the toilet, for example, despite the fact we clearly must have been at some point, at least once!

You may be sure that in the next piece we wrote I was much more careful what I put! Still, it gave everyone a giggle I suppose.