Best-Selling Author & Writer

n every Viking horde there is always one person whose sole job it is to cook and wash up after every meal. The method employed in selecting the appropriate candidate is not only long and arduous, but also very specific. For instance, in the horde we are following, Midget Ulrich is the man tasked with planning and executing the meals.

Vikings, when they are at home in their forts only require to be fed twice a day. However, when they are on the war path which is most of the time, especially when they are low on funds and have bills to pay, they require to be fed 6 times a day. The worst week for them is the second week of every month when bills such as their mortgages on their huts come due, and the leader of the pack has on his castle. Some have found that the banks who hold their mortgage notes, don’t particularly like to be strung out and even though they charge a great deal of extra interest whenever they are late, they can be pretty vicious by foreclosing on their huts. Even the fiercest Viking is dead scared of their mortgage banker.

There was a noticeable gasp and everyone turned their attention towards me, as I sat in the back of a large ornate conference room of a law firm we had all been summoned to. I shrugged my shoulders feeling embarrassed. I didn’t know what was expected of me. Should I stand up and say hooray I won or just hope the floor would open and swallow me.

The attorney who had summoned us sat at the head of a long mahogany conference table facing my entire family. As there were only enough chairs to accommodate 99.999% of my family, and as I was deemed to be the least influential and most likely not to succeed in life, I was relegated to a broken chair brought into the room by a janitor who had showered or bathed sometime in the last century. I could tell because where he had grabbed the chair, there were distinct marks, brown marks left by his dirty hands. And I was supposed to sit on that.

“Rosa! Rosa! What are you doing? Come away from the door immediately!”

Sybil looked around for George but he wasn’t anywhere. Sybil continued. “Why are you standing at the door?” she asked again, smiling at Pawo and his family as they came in handing a present to Rosa. Sybil froze. “Did you just ask them if they had bought you a present? Oh dear. Please don’t mind Rosa, I don’t know what’s got into her,” Sybil forced a smile as Pawo laughed it off diplomatically.

“It’s Rosa. We are used to her. She’s just a child.”

“She’s 9 years old today,” responded Sybil in a panic. Pawo smiled and carried on into the nest. “Rosa!” said Sybil sternly, “what is it you’re asking people who come in to your party?”

“Hi mummy. Who’s Nancy Drew?” Rosa had just walked into the nest where she usually saw her father standing waiting to hug her, but instead it was a beautifully sunny day and he was on the deck reading his newspaper.

Sybil stood guard by the kitchen door waiting for her second youngest daughter to make her entrance. “I think it’s a book, isn’t it little one? Why do you ask?”

“A friend of mine at school says she’s a defective.”

Sybil laughed and Julia who was in the kitchen as usual at that time of day researching recipes for dinner on the internet, came out with a large smile on her face. “No, Rosa, not a defective, but a detective.”

As usual at the end of the school day, Rosa barged through the front door of her nest, throwing her book bag down and making a beeline for her father who normally stood on the other side of the front door waiting to catch his daughter in his wings and wrap her up close to his body for a few seconds before releasing her.

After that, Rosa would head down the corridor towards the kitchen to see what Julia had for her as a snack giving her mother a perfunctory kiss and wave before entering the kitchen, leaving her father to pick up her school bag. But this day was different.

“This tastes like death!”

“What!” Shouted Julia, while Sybil scolded her daughter.

“Rosa! What an awful thing to say.”

“Well mummy, the last time we had this, I told you it tasted gross and Julia told me if I used those words again then she wouldn’t talk to me for a month, so I used different words.” “Different maybe Rosa. But in fact, they are worse.”

Julia stormed out of the dining room with her wings on her hips, while George sat across the table from Rosa with an amused smile on his face, while Timmy giggled and Brenda lay fast asleep in her cot in Rosa’s room.

“It would be better to use kinder words, young lady,” it was time for George to come to the rescue of his eldest daughter before his wife got a little out of hand.

“Sorry daddy, but this is… this is.. I’m sorry, I can’t find kinder words.” She took a deep breath and pushed her plate into the middle of the table.