Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) by Spalding Nick

Author:Spalding, Nick [Spalding, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Racket Publishing
Published: 2010-10-07T23:00:00+00:00

In my case it just so happens to be sponges.

Don’t get me wrong, put me in a room with a sponge on the table and I’m not going to start screaming in terror and bashing up the furniture to make a crucifix. But, I will start to feel ever so slightly anxious after a while and will be happy to leave the room - breathing a deep sigh of relief as I do.

They’re just so creepy.

Take a look at one. It’s all holes and rough textures, isn’t it? You spread it apart in your hands and those holes get bigger, becoming miniature caverns leading into the heart of the monster.

Eurghh.

I can’t touch one. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.

Look… I’m shuddering as I write.

The irregularly shaped ones are the worst, the ones that come straight out of the ocean. All pointy and rough and ready to leap onto my face and suffocate me in seconds.

I can handle the shop bought ones. The rounded edges and tightly packed holes are a bit more bearable - but not by much.

If anyone ever plans on mugging me, they won’t have to worry about finding a hand gun or a knife. All they’ll have to do is wave a loofah in my general direction and I’ll hand over my life-savings and first-born.

To get to the bottom of this irrational fear, I asked my mother if there were any episodes in my infancy that might account for it. She racked her brains trying to think of one, but couldn’t come up with anything.

A few months later however, she remembered that when I was a small baby, I would like nothing more during a bath than to chew on whatever came nearest to hand.

My mother remembered she always had a large sponge with her at bath times and it would invariably end up in my gob at some point.

From this, I can only deduce that at some point in my mastication of the sponge I bit off a small piece and choked on it. I had obviously cleared the obstruction without my mother noticing, but the trauma had wormed its way into my subconscious, waiting to pop up in adult life and embarrass me at dinner parties.

Having some knowledge of where the problem stemmed from didn't make me less afraid of the horrid things, though.

On the contrary, I now had another thing to add to my growing catalogue of sponge-related horrors: choking to death on one.

…I’ve tried in the past to confront my fear without much success.

I once took a bath and had a small inoffensive sponge with me to test my mettle in the face of adversity. There it sat, on the edge of the bath, squatting like a malevolent purple, squishy monster - just waiting for me to turn my attention away for a second and launch at my head like that face-hugger thing in Alien.

Summoning up reserves of courage I didn’t know I had, I picked up the sponge and started to scrub my back with it.

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