Cover the letter

I tried to cover the letter, but failed, doing this instead.

The first thing I need to know is, are you a genius? Don’t rush to answer. And if you can’t put your pyjamas on the right way first time, or make a marmalade sandwich that doesn’t collapse the second you pick it up, then you’re not one. And you can jolly well pack your bags up, rent a motel room, and bathe in honey. Because the world neither requires your inept lunch assembly skills, nor your illogical methods for applying nightwear to your own body.

I’ll tell you who is a genius. It’s not me, so cool your giblets. It’s my friend, Alan Abattoir. He used to live down the road from me, but his ambition got the better of him, and his common sense defeated his ambition, and his ambition fought back, and they called it a truce, and this combination began to bear fruit. The glistening peach of a summer morn, not the festering swollen baubles we select from supermarkets in the hope of redemption from chocolate.

Tony Blair told my friends and I that we needed to go to university or jump off some cliffs. So at nineteen I went, and by the end of the first week, I could nervously heat soup. While I was trying to form sentences in front of girls, Alan was already making renewable robots, all of whom were finely tuned to carry out tasks preprogrammed the night before. While my academic peers were discovering the limits of their livers, old Abattoir was writing his first thesis, An antidote to marriage, which then informed his second, Your wife or your cheese board sir, you choose? These titles propelled him beyond measure, and I found myself grovelling at his first book signing. I couldn’t face him with word of my own palsy achievements, which amounted to a paunch, a bottle of lemon squash, and three lines of an argument on the use of technology in Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four, which a visiting professor described as being ‘over-opinionated, lacking evidence, and written using pastels, which is odd on its own’.

On Alan’s arm at the book signing was his wife, Alexandra. Now many have been short-sighted enough to think that Alan philosophised his way into this woman’s pants. But the routes of mass opinion are often wronger than the wrongest of wrongnesses. Only a person with a distinct talent for reading character could’ve guessed that Alan had manufactured his wife. From head to toe, made in a lab, which he dedicated to churning out beings to cater for his multifaceted personality.

So you see, it takes more than a stable sandwich and putting pyjamas on correctly to live on the strongest of winds.

What makes real genius is not for me to say. In any case, I am Alan’s closest friend, and one of nature’s simple stenographers.

PJC