The Little Mermaid

I used to love fairy tales when I was little. Still do, in fact. I even wrote one once (a strange tale about a princess who was virtually blind and had to hide it from her subjects. Her fairy godmother gave her contact lenses and all was merry in the kingdom).

The best fairytales are the bittersweet ones, not the sanitised Disney versions. Like the girl with the red shoes, who is forced to dance and dance and dance until her feet bleed. If you look at most tales, the protagonists, who are usually good children or virginal young women, generally have to do something unspeakably terrible to resolve the situation. Like commit murder. Okay, there is a comic twist to shoving a witch in the oven of her gingerbread house, but still…





BTW, I think that gingerbread house might look a bit like this...
(More of Casa Batllo)










Take the Little Mermaid, for example. In the original Hans Christian Anderson tale, when the mermaid walks on her magical new feet, it is like a thousand knives stabbing into her at every pace.

I imagine she felt much like I did after I was walking back from my spinning class today.

I have some new trainers. They’re really cool and groovy. But contrary to the advice my mother always gives me, I did not break them in gently by wearing them in the house for half an hour a day.

Oh, no, a twenty-minute walk up a hill to the gym followed by an hour’s spinning, then 20 minutes back. By the time I started walking home I was in absolute agony. The skin at the back of my heels was destroyed. Every step brought a tear of pain to my eyes. I minced and limped along, trying to walk on tip-toes which helped until the balls of my feet went dead, trying to bear the pain and stride it out, but each bizarre gait resulted in a new and more painful problem.

Plus I was gurning like an idiot.

As I recollect, the mermaid’s pain only went when she inevitably died. Cheery. Wow, I didn’t even have a Prince Charming to suffer the pain for.

Just HF, who did not even offer to fix me a nice foot spa.

Hmmph.

There will be trouble in paradise tonight.

More on that story later.