This is the opening of a young adult novel that I wrote as part of my UEA admission portfolio.
..............................................................................................................
The way I see it, life is a lot like cow tipping.
I know, I didn’t believe it was an actual thing either, but it is, and it mainly consists of, well… tipping cows. I found out about it because Gerry Woolsey told me that he knows this guy who dared his cousin to do it once, and even though Gerry emits a “worlds first surviving brain donor” kind of vibe, it just sounds too absurd to be made up.
Just in case there’s any confusion, when I say tipping a cow I don’t mean giving it a couple of quid for acceptably fulfilling it’s duty as a farmyard animal, we’re not talking rewarding excellence in grazing, mooing, and ozone layer slaying flatulence here. People actually spend their time trying to push sleeping cows over. If you’re thinking that that exercise sounds completely pointless and cruel in a lets-kick-a-puppy kind of sense then I reckon you’re on the right track. Plus it turns out that pushing cows over can kill them. That’s just ridiculous.
Its actually pretty difficult to do (physically I mean, though I imagine causing Ermintrude to kick the proverbial milking bucket would leave you with some level of mental scarring) but if by some herculean surge of strength you managed it, what would you have really achieved? Other than a horizontal bovine, nothing. There’s only a certain amount of satisfaction you can get from toppling a cow, once that initial pride has worn off there’s not a lot you can do. You just carry on ritually humiliating cattle, I suppose.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, everything you do in life is essentially pointless. Sure it can make you happy, it can make other people happy, but that never lasts so why do we even bother? You can spend your life pushing and for what reason? You can push for love, a career, an experience, a person, money, even incapacitated livestock but it all ends the same: You’re happy and then you’re not.
*******
The day that I broke up with my first pseudo girlfriend was a steam hot Wednesday in July. It was the last day of my last year of compulsory education. Not even the law could force me to learn now.
The girlfriend in question was Mary Clover, a shortish, plump-ish girl with red-ish hair and a pale-ish complexion. In fact, the only thing about Mary that wasn’t in any way “ish” was also the source of our thirteen year romantic relationship; her remarkable forehead.
And yes, I realise how weird that sounds but bear with me.
My first Mary Clover encounter was on my first day of my first year of primary school. I was that kid (every school has one) who tended to stick any available object into any available orifice, she was the girl with the forehead. Her eyes met the pencil in my ear, mine got lost in the great expanse between her green-ish eyes and frizzy-ish hair, and from that moment we fell in convenience. We became boyfriend and girlfriend simply because we were both outsiders, despite the fact that we believed it involved an instant baby order being placed at the stork administration offices. We stuck with each other through the “Bluebirds over the white cliff of Clover” phase and the accusations that there were several inanimate objects meandering around my bloodstream. Fortunately I grew out of most of my bad habits, unluckily for Mary, the forehead remained.
You know those days where suddenly everyone in the school acts like your best friend, even though they’ve ignored you for the past however many years, just because its the last day and they might never see you again? The day that I broke up with Mary was one of those days. The smell of the summer holidays quivered in the air, intoxicating the entire student body. They’d tipped the secondary school cow and it was time to move onto a new one. Freedom was within their grasp.
. There was no way that this was going to end well. In fact I was highly certain that I would not live to see the next day. I was about to push my final cow…
“You’re breaking up with me?!”
There’s a very fine line between good eye contact, and the piercing stare of a psychopath. Mary Clover was on the wrong side of it.
