Experiments in style: hyperbole

I swore that I would never in a million years write the story like this.

Greetings!

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

The hyperbolic version

Picture created by Ideogram

OH. MY. GOODNESS. I have had the most awful week of my entire life. I had spent a brilliant day writing what I am sure will be the publishing sensation of the century. If it doesn’t get me the Booker Prize or even the Nobel Peace Prize I’ll be totally nonplussed and beside myself with disappointment. Well anyway, like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I got up to go the bathroom and I was in such a deep sleep it was more like a catatonic state so obviously I wasn’t fully awake, I was clearly sleepwalking, which I have NEVER done in my entire life before, and I ended up going in completely the wrong direction and I ended up crashing into the wall. This is an old house, and maybe when it was built they used reinforced concrete or something because I was walking so slowly that if I’d been outside I’d have been overtaken by a snail, yet despite that I almost knocked myself out. In fact, I didn’t just see stars, it was like the Milky Way.

Well, I could hardly write my own name for about three days. I probably should have just gone to bed and pulled the duvet over my face and festered there until I either recovered or died, but the lady of the house persuaded me that I ought to go to the local hospital in case I’d fractured my skull or something. So I went there and it must have taken me half a day because I could only put one foot in front of the other very slowly because of my dilapidated condition, and there was no point in waiting for a bus because they seem to come just once a week and even then they often don’t even bother to stop unless you leap out into the road and furiously wave your arms and legs about, making you look like a complete maniac. It’s a wonder I haven’t been arrested by now.

When I got to the hospital waiting room there were about three thousand people there and only two of them were wearing masks, and even then one of them was wearing it on her chin, and everybody was virtually sitting on top of each other.

After a wait of about two days, in which I was at least able to read a couple of pages of my book, I was called in to a room by a nurse who was a real no-nonsense type. Her bedside manner, if she even had a bedside manner, would almost certainly be along the lines of, “Take up thy bed and walk”, but without the healing bit first.

She ran dozens of tests, kept me in overnight for observation, booked an MRI scan, a CTC scan and an encephalogram, and at the end of it all, in which I hadn’t even been offered so much as a cup of tea, she told me I’d had a very lucky escape and that I was lucky to be alive, and ordered me to take it easy for a few months.

How ridiculous! She clearly didn’t know who I am, because if she had done she’d have known that I have important deadlines to meet, and a magnum opus to finish. (I did think of saying to her, “Do you know who I am?”, but I was worried that she’d refer me for memory and psychiatric tests as well, so I didn’t.)

I arrived home – eventually. Fortunately, despite being in the equivalent of a petri test I have so far not succumbed to any life-threatening diseases — at least as far as I know.

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I hope you have enjoyed this version of the story. Comments are welcomed, as always.

If you’re new to the series, you can see the index of my experiments here: Index.

Thank you for reading!