The 'Dam

Here's a writing exercise that I performed back at the end of October. I subsequently lost the hand-written copy under a pile of mail and paper- until this week.

Organiser Oz brought in a series of photographs from glossy magazines as prompts. The pictures had been folded in at the edges, showing only a part of the picture. We picked one from which we took inspiration and scribbled out a vignette. I picked this picture:

I guessed (correctly) that it was a shot of Amsterdam. I didn't get as far into the scene as I'd hoped before the 10-minute timer blew, but I scribbled out this:

It looked like a stamp, only a little bigger. It had been perforated before it was torn off a bigger sheet and slammed into my hand. I would never do this kind of thing back home.

Honest.

“You just put it on your tongue,” Murphy said.

I looked around for police, some of whom would have been British I think. It might be the 'Dam, but it's not a free-for-all out here.

No police were around as far as I could see, although I'd already sank numerous Goldschlagers, so that was questionable. Just the canal, not looking that different to Saddleworth or anywhere else back home if you dropped in a few crumbling office blocks.

And on the subject of dropping, I thought...

I pressed the tab onto my tongue and sucked. It tasted like brown paper.

“Okay,” I said, and zipped up my coat. “To the pub.”

Reed and Chan were already sniggering, waiting for me to do something more ridiculous than usual. We started walking, the November air startign to feel like cold fingers smearing something on my face.

“Don't let me fall in the canal,” I mumbled, although I already couldn't tell if my voice was audible.

The buildings were starting to distort, like someone had sprayed a hosepipe over the window of my vision. I pictured the yuppies stumbling down their melted staircases on the way to work.

Try picking out a few unusual pictures and cropping them to obscure the scene portrayed. See how your group interprets the reduced pictures.