Have you heard the one about...?

I made up a joke. It’s not a very good one, but I thought I’d share it:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To help it remember where the treasure was buried.

Maybe I should leave the humour to Aliya.

It’s funny though—excuse the pun and the following alliteration—my earliest efforts at producing proper prose as a young teenager were in the humorous fantasy vein (like any bookish fourteen year old worth his salt I read a lot of Pratchett, Holt and Rankin—Robert not Ian). That early work’s probably not stood the test of time, but I still have a soft spot for Gertrude the flying pet cow and her cohorts in the Cabbage Liberation Front.

Recently though, I’ve been revisiting both the world of humour—though it’s of a blacker variety—and another form I’ve not played about with for a while, and am not particularly practised in: script-writing. I don’t seem to have the time at the moment to bring adequate concentration to bear on my two works-in-progress, so this is an effort to keep some creative writing ticking over during all this work I’m doing for The New Goodbye.

I showed an earlier draft of the concept (loosely inspired by my years working at Battersea Dogs’ Home. Think At Home With The Braithwaites but with a lot of dog thrown in) to Aliya a couple of years ago. She hated it then, but I’m not sure if it was because it wasn’t funny, or because she despised dogs at the time. Maybe I should run it past her again now she’s all loved up with Harley.