I see that a British civil servant has won first prize in a competition for bad prose. He took top honours and a modest cash prize for his opening sentence for an imaginary novel.
It ran as follows: "Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracking paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life."
It's not "Call me Ishmael" but it's not all that bad, surely. What happened to poor Stanley, anyway? Was the catastrophe all that terrible, or did he really hold onto his Telecom shares for too long? Can I be the only one who isn't put off by awful prose and just wants to know what happened next? Have to find out then.
Stanley trudged to his ill-appointed, grime-encrusted kitchen, the same foul den in which his aforementioned wife, sister, brother and three children had met their hideous fate, after a simple meal of chips, jelly and icecream, at the hands of the psychopathic axe-murderer who had haunted the gloomy rundown low-rent district and successfully evaded the couldn't-care-less police for five long years.
This was the same grim meal which Stanley now prepared for himself, which he had prepared each Monday evening of the nine years in order not to let slip the memory of the moment when he had walked in on the grotesque scene of the murderer, a cadaverous figure dressed all in black, heartily tucking in to the remains of his victim's meals as they - the victims, not the meals - lay breathing their last in glossy pools of blood around him.
At least, the thought suddenly dawned on Stanley now, like a strange beacon on a deserted moor, at least the murderer had not been the kind of person who let food, however awful, go to waste. It was a redeeming factor. Certainly the man was a psychopath. Driven by cruelty and evil, of course. Violent, obviously. Insane - completely. But the man was not entirely bad. He had also used a napkin.
It was a comforting thought, or would have been if Stanley were willing to be comforted, if there had not been that within his deeply sensitive nature which rejected easy comforts when misery dropped its all-embracing pall, and rather turned to asceticism and deprivation and aloneness and all the pain of life.
Stanley ate a chip.
After his glum but strangely filling repast, Stanley Ruddlethorp placed his dirty dishes carefully on the precarious pile of similarly soiled china atop the worn work top and heroically resolved to - well, to make a resolution - something, anything, somewhere, sometime.
Afterwards, exhausted by his resolution to make a resolution, in the dark dank womb that was his livingroom, shrouded by rotted brown velvet curtains that were ready to disintegrate at the touch, and seated on the stinking remains of a gaudy red velour-covered sofa with its springs poking through, Stanley allowed him self - not without guilt and humiliation and heartfelt personal recrimination, for these were ever his lot - the relaxation of looking at television for a single hour.
His set was a prehistoric black and white portable, constructed in the dawn of time by His Master's Voice. It had not functioned for many decades, but Stanley stared at it transfixed, vicariously sharing the experience of the vast worldwide multitudes as they too paid silent homage to the hypnotic eye, the ever-changing image, the never-changing image, the same old screen, the same sad sordid story told in a thousand ways.
Now it was time to go to work. Stanley rose slowly in a cloud of dust and small dead insects from the rotting sofa and trudged towards his study, a pygmy-size open cubicle under the sagging, damp, mouldy, woodworm-infested staircase. He placed his used napkin under the cracked leg of the aged picnic table that served, reluctantly, as his desk.
He drew towards him his work materials - old cornflake packets turned inside out, used envelopes, blank cardboard detritus of every kind. From the torn inside pocket of his ragged tweed jacket, Stanley produced a leaking disposable biro. He began to write.