I returned home from work yesterday to discover a white china bowl, which had previously contained one red pelargonium, smashed to tiny pieces and scattered all the way down the front steps.
Evidently the bowl had been toppled from on high by a mysterious agency, but what of its contents? The pelargonium plant itself is nowhere to be found, although a few petals and one solitary leaf still garnish the steps like a minimalist Thai salad.
The third pelargonium (or The Third Pelargonium, as it shall henceforth be known) remains intact - but for how long?
If this was real life, The Third Pelargonium would be packing its bags and hieing itself to a safe house in Starfield Road. But this appears to be a third-rate psychological thriller in the vein of Sleeping With The Enemy, so for the sake of audience titillation, The Third Pelargonium has elected to stay put in spite of the clear and present danger.
I can barely bring myself to leave the house (which is no bad thing, because I have a lot of work to do). Who knows what will happen next? I can but watch and wait...
* Not 'geranium'. Never that. (Thanks for the clarification, cello!)
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I suspect nothing will happen if you watch. Try turning your back for a moment.
Or better still, come and watch our cricket team play its (imaginary) match this afternoon. We serve Earl Grey.
It's the cat wot dunnit. Case closed.
When I read the title of this, I imagined that the geranium was being held to ransom. You know the kind of thing, "We will send you your flower piece by piece until you pay us."
I reckon it was the postman. He knocked it over, and was overcome with guilt."I know. If I remove the geranium, she'll forget it was ever there..."
You've been working very hard recently P, are you sure there ever really was a geranium in the first place?
Yes, it was right there on the windowsill, next to the pink elephant and the mutant organic typewriter...oh.
Mutant organic typewriter? Are you turning into William Burroughs? Stay away from the bug powder dust.
My William Burroughs days are well behind me, Billy. Thankfully.
I did love that film, though - and I've just read *the* most pretentious review of it on Amazon, which has made my evening.
Ooh I love the Naked Lunch film. Nothing much to do with the book but that would have been impossible.
I remember being obsessed with Cronenberg when I was younger and watching Dead Ringers with my mum, surely the definition of a freudian nightmare.
That's a film I always meant to watch, but never did. Maybe that should go next on the list.
Oh, and ERRATUM: the ultra-pretentious review I just read was on IMDB, not Amazon.
did we ever find out what happened to the other geranium? (I know, I ought to trawl through the archives, but hey).
No, the fate of both geraniums remains a MYSTERY.
Cats. Not the musical. Real ones I reckon. Or high wind.
I reckon it was the pixies that did it, damn those Geranium thieving pixies I say.
Thing is, when you touch a Geranium you get that horrible smell on your hands from it's leaves.
This leaves you with the potential for a Poirot-esque conclusion to your mystery as you gather all the suspects into the one room and sniff them.
Well, you could... if you really wanted to.
My guess is the plants are indulging in a spot of Princess-Di-like self-harming - hurling themselves down steps - because of the deep pain you are causing by calling them geraniums when I bet they are really pelargoniums.
Heather: I have now sniffed all the suspects (of which there is precisely one), but I fear Suspect A is too clever for me.
cello: Oo-er. It appears you are right. Of course I could have been harking back to Linnaean taxonomy, under which the pelargonium and the geranium were one and the same sort of plant, but as a feminist I am obliged to have an axe to grind with Linnaeus with regard to his designation of hairy, warm-blooded animals as 'mammals', and thus will defer to Charles l'Héritier's later separation of pelargoniums into one family, and geraniums into another.
With thanks to Wikipedia for informing the above comment.
I think that your plant has turned into a Triffid and is now terrorising small children, white haired old men and glamorous women. It's the glamorous women it's interested in.
Or...it wasn't a geranium in the first place...it was actually a very small woman...approximately two feet tall, wearing a small white dress..not dissimilar to a plant-pot in terms of shape...with a large hat that looked like a geranium. She wanted to escape. And has been wanting to jump for weeks as she has shopping to do.
I think I've been working too hard. Sigh. I'll just go back to my Burroughs book I think.
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