I was sitting in my back garden this afternoon - still recuperating, or being lazy, enjoying the sunshine and listening to argumentative starlings & gossipping sparrows in the hedge, when I was distracted by a bumblebee going about his daily tasks.

I was reminded of the time in Primary 6 when every composition seemed to start with the words: A Day in the Life of a....

The teacher began chalking up A Day in the Life of a . And we would all wait in anticipation of the next word. She would always choose something either intriguing, or else quite absurd. I vaguely remember A Day in the Life of a Bumblebee. Can't recall his whole day, but he definitely stung a bad boy, while the good girl had the sense to run away screaming!

I liked A Day in the Life of a Field Mouse. My mouse slept all day in a communal bed, behind our skirting board, with his siblings, dreaming of his night-time adventure. He sometimes nibbled crumbs of cheese & lumps of marmalade. (I was always dropping chunks of marmalade off my knife and never found them on the kitchen mat. And I was no lover of cheese, so dropped bits of it onto the floor for no other reason than that.)

Then Field Mousie went on his midnight assignment. He buddied up with a toad who made him eat a slug. But the slug was too slimy & chewy & tasted of liquorice. He outwitted a tomcat and shot under a log to avoid the extended talons of a barn owl.

He didn't wear clothes, or talk English. This wasn't Beatrix Potter. Instead he ran naked. Always in fear of his life!

There was A Day in the Life of a Picked Flower. The teacher suggested a chrysanthemum, and reminded us where the dictionaries were kept. (Chrysanthemum was in the Top 100 Hard Words, along with the likes of accommodation, Mississippi and rhododendron. Even if you were in the top spelling group, when she mentioned dictionaries, you always doubted yourself.) As for a picked flower, I reckoned it had a limited life.

But the potentially shortest day could have been A Day in the Life of a Snowflake. When the teacher chalked up Snowflake, everyone else groaned. But I couldn't wait to start. However, I decided that my snowflake would fall on an extremely cold day and become part of a snowman's head. It would be the most adventurous day ever!

I was sitting next to Hugh Jenkins. He had written: I am a fractal - a perfect hexagon. I exited a Nimbostratus cloud. The solar rays affected my microstructure and reduced me to H2O.

That's a porky-pie!

He actually wrote: I fell from the sky. The sun came out. I melted. The End.

So I wasn't surprised, when 6 years later, Hugh was awarded the Dux Medal for both Physics AND Chemistry.

In the class, I'd been so surprised at his composition's brevity, that I'd asked, 'That you finished?'

'Yip. Nothing more I can add,' he replied, smugly. Then he had looked over at my effort and seemed surprised that I'd finished 2 paragraphs, and wasn't even half-way through.

But that's fiction for you - so full of what-ifs. And as long as you like!