With Snail and I

Fjordie

Aristophanes told a good story. Well, Plato made him. The former claimed that the gods, being angry about something (as per usual), decided quite literally to split humans in two, to make them sorry and afraid (the way all gods work in fact). At the time, your average human was a hybrid male and female, with four of everything we now have two of. Knitting jumpers was a challenge but you were never alone and you could always see where you had been as well as where you were going, simultaneously.

Once split, humans would forever be searching for their other half. Ha ha ha said Zeus, or Apollo or whoever, before nipping off to be a white bull for the evening.

Now, my Dad told me that story and no one made him. I was five years old at the time and expecting Thomas the Tank Engine, but hey, you can’t have everything you want. Sometimes, as a wise man once said, if you try hard you can get what you need* though.

Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you meet up with your other half as in the Aristophanes tale, and actually recognise them as such. Or slowly come to realise that they are the other bit of the jigsaw. Admittedly, a bit of a rubbish jigsaw in that it only has two pieces (and one of them is a nondescript colour that doesn’t seem to go anywhere). Lose one of them under the sofa or let it be chewed by a dog and you can pretty much write the thing off and take it to the charity shop.

I was really, really lucky.

No, really REALLY lucky.

Thank you Snailofhappiness for twenty years of being a complete jigsaw. Please don’t lose me under the sofa or let me be chewed by a dog.

♥♥♥

* That wise man being Dr Gregory House (or possibly Mick Jagger)