Is My Hem Straight?

Pants in Room 511 Hotel Ambos Mundos, Havana, Cuba

It's the tagging season again. I quite often ignore or foil attempts to tag me, partly because I carry the scars of a childhood spent being disastrously slow, but mostly because I'm just a crabby old set of discoloured Y-fronts. Now that I'm an adult (in a manner of speaking), I wield such power as I'm able to muster over my own blog to sniff at these Memes as I see fit. 

Having said all that, I have been cordially invited by my dear friend and benefactor Ms O'Dyne, to rise to a challenge once set for no lesser a literary lion than Ernest Hemingway to construct a story in six words. The honourable Hem solved the problem with indelible elegance thus,

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Before unveiling my far from comparable solution to the problem, I would like to indulge myself at your obvious expense, in a little reminiscence. Since it's also conveniently Wednesday, I offer this up as an EDW : Elegantly Dressed Words, and apologise for my outrageously unbotilicious attire, for it is indeed Pants pictured above, hovering over the great Hem's little typing contraption in room 511 at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, Cuba.

I stayed there in 2005 in Room 502, on the very floor on which literature's greatest economist resided for a number of years. I had completed the first draft of my novel The Full English when I went to Cuba with three of my lovely cousins. We couldn't believe our luck when the Ambos Mundos came up as a package option. It is a beautiful hotel and elegant in the most basic sense. It's spare and ordinary, but rather lavishly so. In fact, it was so similar to the little hotel that the Pants family ran on the Costa del Sol, which had inspired the one in The Full English, that I decided then and there that I'd give Papa a much bigger part and also that I'd name the hotel in the book Ambos Mundos.

The Full English already had two bullfighting scenes sketched into it. Not everyone who lives on the Costa del Sol ends up on intimate terms with bullfighters. Such is the luck of the Pants family. Although seemingly unable to turn around without falling over a bullfighter or two, I couldn't ever accept an invitation to attend a corrida. I reread Death in the Afternoon, a book I will admit I'd not understood until after I'd lived in Spain. Hemingway wrote about the great age of bullfighting and eighty years later, there is no one who matches Joselito or Juan Belmonde in reputation. When I wrote the bullfight scenes in The Full English, I drew some from the bragging of the matadors who stayed at our hotel and drank at the bullfighters bar next door, some from watching the corrida on television, and some from Death in the Afternoon. I was the wimp that couldn't go there but I can go here, so this my answer to the question can you write a short story in six words:

'Honey, should that mountain be there?'

I'm tagging the following bloggers because I know they'll love me for wasting their precious writing time. 

Ms Baroque

Velo-gubbed legs

Reading the Signs

Wise Web Woman

Scorn and Noise

Photo by OZMICRO