Boards
my fable for the obesity generation: "wee billy bum"
There once was a little boy called William Lucey who loved sweeties so much that he ate them almost all the time, and as a result his rear end grew very large and all the townsfolk laughed at him and called him “wee Billy Bum.” But this didn't bother Billy, as he just took consolation in even more sweeties and so his bum grew ever larger and so the taunts grew more constant as he languished in sugary bliss. And so to everyone he became simply, not even when they particularly wanted to get a rise out of him, Wee Billy Bum.
Then one day as Billy walked in from school, his mother said to him: “Billy, I've been very busy today and haven't had anything to eat. Here's ten pounds: go and buy us some nice meat from the butchers.” So Billy took the money and ran back from home to the town, to the nice butcher's, which as it happened was next door to the sweet shop.
As Billy approached the butcher's, he couldn't help it but his eyes were drawn to the sweet shop. Before he entered the butcher's, he stopped and pressed his face to the glass, looking in. They had just got a new delivery and the jars inside the sweet shop were full to bursting with rainbows of gum drops, citric cauldrons of lemon drops, molassing mountains of sugar mice, trim parcels of fudge, and so on and so forth. Billy's mouth began to water, and his saliva trickled down the windows of the sweetshop, becoming a sizeable puddle on the pavement below. He could feel the ten pound note his mother had given him unfolding in his hand, and his heart begged for the beauty of the sweeties- in his mind's eye he was in a magnificent gold gummy-leafed palace, bathing in the succulent secretions of the confectioner's craft. Yes, he yearned for sweeties. He knew he had to buy his mother the meat, but compared to the perfect aesthetic heights of the sweeties, how could meat ever hope to compare, slammed willy-nilly on the butcher's shelf, like dull grey hunks of flesh as dead as the dodo.
Countenancing this, Billy could not move from the sweetshop window, until finally, out stepped the owner of the sweetshop, resplendent in moustaches and clad in a candycane apron, beckoning Billy into the shop, where he was enticed to spend his mother's ten pounds on the sweeties he so truly desired and, knowing what he done, he begun on his way home, weeping and munching down those delicious sweets, savouring every mouthful even as he shovelled them down his massive gob.
But Billy knew his mother would be angry with him, and so he came up with a plan. He cut off a chunk of his famously ample bum big enough to feed his whole family, wrapped it up in yesterday's newspaper, and handed it to his mum.
“Oh, good!” declared his mum, examining the meat. “Rump steak!”
And so Billy's mum cooked up the section of her son's behind in a lovely stew, and served it to his family, in a meal which they all enjoyed very much. In fact, they enjoyed it so much, that Billy's mum decided to ask him to get the meat again the next day.
“I don't know how you found such nice meat, Billy, but maybe someone at the butcher's likes you! So I'd like you to get the same today, darling!”
Well, yesterday had gone so well for Billy that he couldn't believe his luck: this time he headed off down the shops without a care in the world, spent the ten pounds on all the sweets he could eat, and on the way back cut off another piece of his bum to serve the whole family. And so this process continued, day after day, for several months. Of course, his family couldn't help but notice that Billy's bum was diminishing significantly over this time, but they just put it down to the additional exercise he was getting by walking to the shops.
Until, one day, alas! Alack! Billy went to the shops as usual, gourged himself on sweets – just as usual! And set off home... but this time, when he tried to cut off part of his bum for the family's meal, he found that there was nothing there to cut. He didn't know what to do. So of course he had no choice but to go home to his mother, and confess that he had spent the money on sweets, and did not have any meat today for them to eat for dinner.
Billy's mother was livid, and had no choice but to pull down Billy's trousers, and give him a good thrashing, on the bum. But when she pulled them down, there was nothing there! And from them on, he was only called Wee Billy Bum ironically, forever more.
The End.