For someone weaned and raised on cartoons where the princess always married the prince; if she wore two shoes and ate poisonous apples,

Or who chanted rhymes about rowing boats on streams in a life that was but a dream, – which may have been possible in the early 70s with the aid of LSD.

And reading book after book where criminals were always caught and the bang of a gavel meant harsh sentencing without three square meals, obtaining an OU degree and Sky Sports in your room.

It stands to reason that without class A s and eight cans of Carlsberg Special Brew the above is impossible to achieve.

I married the handsome Prince Tolerant, we’re on the bones of our arses living on a stream-less estate and can’t afford a boat to row,

with a justice system that is far more creative than than any cartoon I’ve ever watched.

The gap between how I thought the world worked and a collective reality is so vast, the space between the two could be earmarked for use to build homes and end the social housing crisis.

So when asked; in the neutral coloured office in which the walls were adorned by distracting, framed cross stitch,

by a women trained in methods of therapy to “think positively ” and name for her two positives in that moment, I came up with;

“I wake up with my heart still beating” and “I can breathe in and out”

If she’d had a teachers’ red pen she would have scribbled comments over my answers about sunsets, breezes through long grass and the smell of puppies.I can’t stand the smell of puppies.

For someone I’d hoped was trained in the art of the answers to life, she’d completed an awful lot of cross stitch puppies and had made many errors in her stitching.

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Tim Willows Additional Thoughts

For those unfortunates not in the know – Carlsberg Special Brew is a really strong beer.

The can tends to appear in  the hands of those who could use a few free wishes much more regularly than a genie’s lamp offers.

My impression is that breathing in and out is a much better indication of positivity than the madness of convincing others to be positive while cross stitching puppies..