Connaught Hall. First Floor.
Precies in het midden van de gang is een conference room.
Met een venster in de deur.
Melanie kijkt graag stiekem naar binnen.
Naar de mannen in pak.
Of de Anonieme Alcoholisten.
Of de zakenvrouwen die schema’s maken op blackboards. Zoals Lynette in Desperate Housewives.
De vergaderaars kijken ook graag stiekem naar buiten. Als de voorzitter het niet ziet.
Naar Melanie als ze op blote voeten en met onfatsoenlijk kapsel uit de douche komt.
(En zo vlug als ze kan voorbij het raampje rent.)
Het beste aan de vergaderingen is wat er overblijft als iedereen weg is.
Koekjes. In papiertjes. Vele soorten. Vooral de Custard Creams zijn heerlijk. Onweerstaanbaar.
Soms is de drang te groot. Dan sluipt Melanie naar binnen en steelt de Custard Creams. Ze kan het echt niet helpen.
Achteraf voelt ze zich schuldig. En vooral zeer stom. Volwassen mensen stelen toch geen koekjes. De andere bewoners van Connaught lopen voorbij het venstertje zonder zelfs hun pas in te houden. Zonder zelfs de moeite te nemen naar binnen te kijken.
Melanie begrijpt niet goed waarom zij zo anders is dan de andere bewoners.
Tot vandaag. Vandaag heeft Melanie op het vervloekte Facebook een nieuwe groep gejoind:
Connaught Floor ONE! You wish you could be on it.
Beschrijving van de group:
The luckiest people in Connaught...
Just one flight of stairs...
And constant supply of biscuits and tea in the meeting room...
Vanaf vandaag kan Melanie met een gerust hart koekjes stelen.
4 comments:
Mmmmmmm dat koekje ziet er inderdaad delicious uit... Mag ik mij aansluiten bij de koekjes-group?
Dear Melanie,
I am struck by the remarkable combination of tarts (you call them cookies, custards, biscuits) and guilt in your last letter. It brings back to my mind the Trial of the Stolen Tarts. Have you ever read my detailed report on it in the most popular of my books? Well, I am a very old man now and, to be honest, my memory is waning, so I had to turn over the pages for quite some time to find my report of tha trial in the eleventh chapter. There it was, bearing the title ‘Who stole the tarts?’ And look, almost immediately I hit upon some crucial lines. Reading them in the light of your Adventures in Londonland, I suddenly realised that, without being aware of it, I had reported on a major judicial error. The real thief was not the poor creature standing before the King and Queen, ‘in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him,’ no, it was… Well, be patient for a while and let me explain how, with your help, Melanie, I discovered the real thief.
Let us start with the corpus delicti as I described it:
“In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them--`I wish they'd get the trial done,' she thought, `and hand round the refreshments!'”
So, those tarts were what the trial was all about. Now, let us skip to the accusation. It was read by the White Rabbit:
`The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!'
After the accusation it was time for the witnesses. First the Hatter. While he was giving evidence something very unusual happened:
‘Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again.’
This, my dear Melanie, was nothing more than a detail in my report of the trial, because at that time I failed to see the importance of it. Now, thanks to you, thanks to your description of your own feelings in the case of the Connaught Hall First Floor Biscuits, I understand that the growing of Alice during the trial was nothing less than the materializing of her feelings of guilt and remorse caused by the fact that she herself was a thief of tarts. Well, read the rest of the eleventh chapter and of the twelfth, in which Alice is a witness herself, and you will see that every word, every gesture, every thought of her confirms this hypothesis.
So, thank you very much for the insight in Alice’s soul, dear Melanie. The clue to the crime is
already present in my first quote above. How, for God’s sake, could I overlook Alice’s overt greediness to taste the tarts?
Of course, after all those years, justice cannot be done anymore to the poor Knave of Hearts, who has disappeared in the Eternal Tide of Time, but let it be recorded as a footnote in the Golden Book of the History of Literature that the Knave was innocent and that
'Alice, Ace of Hearts, she stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!'
As to your Connaught Hall First Floor Temptation, Melanie, I will not refer to the word of Oscar Wilde saying that the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. No, I simply try to imagine how I would feel passing the biscuits. As the best among the Romans put it: Homo sum et nil humani a me alienum puto. It sounds more virtuous than the word of Wilde, but make no mistake: it means the same.
Yours sincerely,
Lewis
Volgens mij huren jullie een ghostwriter in om zo'n reacties op jullie blog te zetten, dit is niet meer normaal ;)
Nou ja, Bram, ghostwriter of geen ghostwriter, toeternietoe. Zolang het maar een keitoffe blog blijft. Doe zo voort, meisjes.
Groetjes uit Antwerpen. (Ook van Stoffel.)
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