Shiritori

Boy yacht toy young gorilla apple egg

Okay this isn’t working, I just watched a TED talk video on how this simple game can be used to harness creativity. Think of word and then take the last letter of that word to think of a new word. The guy who gave the talk was really enthusiastic about how he got this fountain of ideas after coming up with a few words. Well, for the life of me, I cannot link gorilla, apple and egg. And I’ve gone on to twenty words. It’s getting harder to see the point of the exercise. But perhaps I wasn’t trying hard enough. Okay, here goes.

I once knew a boy who owned a yacht! Don’t get too excited. It was a 3 foot-tall toy yacht. I had always thought kids who played with over-sized toys while the rest of us struggled with our paper boats cum hats, were snotty and spoilt. Robert, to be metaphorically correct, was a young gorilla. Rude, raucous, rough and ridiculously rich. While the rest of us brought water and plain slices of bread summing up to a rather dry and tasteless meal time, Robert’s mother packed him a bright and shiny red apple and a tumbler of apple juice to go. At 4 I knew enough to appreciate that apples grew in England. Enid Blyton taught me that much. But this meant that every day a single apple was flown in from the UK to be fit into this detestable boy’s grimy little lunch box. This is how I know that Robert was rich.

Now although it looked spectacular in a way only a shiny red apple can, no one really fancied eating a single fruit for lunch. And I knew Robert secretly lusted after our thin margarine coated slices, as he bit into the hard mildly sweet fruit and hurt his little teeth. This thought gave me immense satisfaction. 

One day, Robert brought a hardboiled egg that was still in its shell! I love boiled eggs! After mummy peels them, they are soft hot and tasty enough without needing any salt and makes your tummy full after just one. As I opened my own lunch box and caught sight of the predictable oily sandwich that limply lay there, I looked up and eyeballed Robert who was getting ready to peel his egg. He lightly knocked it on the table top. I shut my eyes that very instant, and prayed hard that it was a raw egg that would crack open spilling stinky yolk all over his rich boy pants.