Publishing "Her Royal Highness" by Kate O'Toole

This piece was written in the Writing Salon in Thailand, March 2005, by Kate O'Toole, an actress based in Connemara, Ireland. Like the others we will publish, it is an unedited first draft written under a slightly forgiving time limit. The prompt was: Write for ten minutes, starting with an unattractive physical characteristic. This exercise unfailingly produces fascinating work, focused on characteristics ranging from the truly repulsive to things so minor that only one character notices them – but obsessively. There's a huge amount of juicy conflict and contradiction to be found in the tensions between health and happiness, between attractiveness and the need to be liked, and in how characters judge each other according to appearance and give aspects of appearance a moral dimension. Why not try it? Begin with an unattractive physical characteristic and write for ten minutes. If you like what write, we'd love to see it, so please feel free to email it to us.

Let your imagination amaze you!,
James Nave
Allegra Huston Her Royal Highness by Kate O'Toole Ordinarily, I should stand at five foot eight. Thanks to a lifetime of fast food, physical inactivity and the misfortune of having been born with female hormones (now all depleted), at the grand old age of thirty-eight my full frame has stooped and stunted down to an irksomely small five foot three. The missing five inches have bunched up into a gnarled fist of flesh and deformed bone which starts at the base of my neck and then ends up by sitting on my left shoulder like an interfering guardian who can never leave me alone. I call this useless lump of redundancy Her Royal Highness, the Princess Diana. When people look at me they fail utterly at trying not to notice Her Royal Highness as she peers up at them from the top of my bent back. She makes walking such a painful and labour intensive exercise I often have to use a stick, which makes me feel as if I’m 109. In fact the stick makes me so angry about everything that’s gone wrong I avoid using it for fear of turning it into a weapon against the world. There are different ways to use a stick or a crutch. Blind people possess an interesting juxtaposition of tentative confidence with their flexible white canes, people with freshly broken limbs and the loaned metal crutch have a far clumsier, nouveaux technique. Hill walkers use their wooden sticks like pins with which to pierce the hills they walk on and then, when they have no hills left on which to deploy their sticks they forget about them and leave them behind in the pub. Old people own their canes, befriend them, and are as comfortable with them as with a pipe or a favourite hat. Mine I will never get used to. It angers me. It becomes a weapon to wield against the unfair world which contrived to lumber me with this burden.