A whisky named after you!

I’ve got just over two weeks to think of something for our writers’s group. I chronicled my struggles for the last meeting when the topic/challenge/subject was the contents of a kitchen drawer. I thought about our kitchen drawers at home, which remarkably are quite well organised (remarkable for me, a most untidy person) I thought about kitchen drawers from my childhood – a much emptier kitchen in those days, with only two drawers in our cabinet. Neither seemed charged with either interesting or original possibilities, and in the end I produced a rather poor offering about two sisters having to tidy the house of a relative who’d gone into a care home. I introduced an unlikely third party who broke in while they were there, to steal something which (of course, blindingly obvious) in the kitchen drawer. I was quite ashamed to be honest. So with that thought in mind, I am determined.

Yes, I am determined… except this time it is a real challenge, much as one of the other topics we wrote about ‘breaking the third wall’. This time we are challenged to write something surreal. My first thoughts were of surreal art – especially since on the wall of the accommodation, we rented on our recent writing fest was a picture by Salvador Dali – “Autumnal Cannibalism“. I then thought about films I had seen when I was at college, many years ago – they had seemed so weird at the time (as indeed they were) because I knew nothing about surrealism then. “Un Chien Andalou“, was one I remember, and another where there was a large dinner party in a grand chateau where the guests were half-naked! A 1968 film which made a great impression on me, but is rarely talked about these days is “If...” starring Malcolm McDowell which shocked but intrigued me when I saw it. I only realise now it was surreal in its true sense, not as it seems to be used now to mean unbelievable or weird. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

A satire of English public school life, the film follows a group of pupils who stage a savage insurrection at a boys’ boarding school. The film is notable for jump-starting McDowell’s and Anderson’s careers as well as using black-and-white and colour switches throughout the film along with blending surreal and realistic elements.

I was wondering if I had read any surreal novels, and then remembered the magnificent “2666” by Roberto Bolaño – a very long, unfinished novel which is on my list of all time favourite novels although I have only read it once. Stephen King says: “This surreal novel can’t be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory.” It is indeed impossible to describe but Wikipedia has a detailed entry about it. I suppose at the other end of the surreal literature scale is “Alice in Wonderland“, and “1984” also has surreal aspects.

This isn’t getting me any further forward in deciding what to write, although it has triggered many thoughts, including surreal jokes such as:

A white horse walks into a pub and goes up to the bar. The barman says “We’ve got a whisky named after you!” and the horse says, “What? Wilfred?”

My featured image is not of “un chien andalou” but of “un câine românesc” – yes he’s our Romanian dog, Reg!