Inside the Whale

I went off at a bit of a tangent the first time I tried to write this blog, so I'm going to start it again. I really like the title Inside the Whale, so I'm not going to change it. I don't know if it'll let me post two blogs with the same title though.

I ought to say before I get going by the way, that it's not my original title. It's from this book by a writer called George Orwell who was actually called Eric Blair. It's not about whales, and neither is this blog.

As I was saying, going down the stairs in our house is like being swallowed by a whale. And on the way, if you go from the attic, where it's light and like the last glimpse you'd get of the sun and the sky as you went headfirst into the whale's mouth, you go down the narrow gullet of the stairs, onto the top landing, where you can either carry on down the stairs or go into one or other of the two rooms. If you carry on, you come to the next landing, with two rooms, and if you carry on, down, down, down from one floor to the next, eventually you get squeezed out through the front door and down the steps into the street. If the attic is the whale's mouth, the rooms are like its internal organs, like its liver and its kidneys and its stomach and its bowels and its intestines. You can work out what that makes the front door, which when we open it to VISITORS we must always do with a welcoming smile on our faces. And now you know what it is I'm smiling at when I open the door.