As suffering artists went, Dimbleby suffered more bolts of anguish and spurts of pain than your average struggling writer cursed with more ambition than good sense. His writer’s block was now bigger than the Hoover dam, behind which all his verve and zest remained impounded, seemingly forever out of reach.
He would pray at the altar of his Muse daily and light incense sticks in an attempt to cajole her out of seclusion. But she, the snooty mistress that she was, needed to be wooed and wowed, glavered and regaled. Flattering unction was the order of the day and Dimbelby procured it by the bucketful. He curried her favour with the exotic spices of adulation, and pandered to her every whim. If flattery got one everywhere, then poor Dimbleby just had to be ubiquitous.
Every once in a rare while, if the mood suited his Muse, she would condescend to blow him a kiss of inspiration from afar.
This was enough to send him into a frenzy of writing. Whimsical stories poured forth from his giddy, fevered brain. Fictional narratives were spun out of thin air like Rumpelstilzchen twirling gold out of straw. Fusty characters and fanciful situations were depicted within a plot that unraveled itself like Rupunzel’s golden locks.
Soon he began to think big. He wished to write a novel. – A novel utterly novel in its novelty – new and unusual, fresh and unique. His muse however had other plans. She had locked her self in her ivory tower and was busy laying the bricks to build the next towering writer’s block.
Poor Dimbleby. The dash of his pen and flair of his quill was now a distant memory. In desperation he sang her choral songs to the accompaniment of a beseeching lyre and a pleading flute. However, his attempt to serenade her into a scribbling bed to do the deed and birth a baby book met with abysmal failure.
His muse would have none of it. She raised her nose in disdain at his feeble scrawling and idle doodling. She mocked his scribing venture and laughed raucously at his flaccid quill. She commanded him to expunge this stanza or lop that line away and then snorted brazenly at his blank sheets.
In frustration he dumped his muse, mounted the Steed of Helicon and dug his spurs into its flanks. But the Pegasus had withered and declined over the aeons and was merely able to shamble its way over a few lacklustre paragraphs and dreary clauses. Stale and worn out, it finally met its death at the hands of a few rabidly split infinitives and a posse of desperate clichés.
In despair, he decided to travel to the land of the Arabian Nights hoping that he might be imbued with the Scheherazadean spirit of crafting tales to delight the masses.
He landed in Dubai, the city of superlatives. He gawked and gazed, gaped and gawped. Everything was more and over the top. This, this was just what he needed. The well of inspiration that had been so dry rapidly began to fill.
He reached for his pen and wrote: “Look at all that fucking sand!” Just in time he remembered he wished to be new and unusual, fresh and unique. So he scratched it out and wrote instead: “Observe all that sand. It fornicates.”
