‘Grim fairy tales…’

This is grotesque but brilliant – nicked from Dwight Towers. The fairy-tale rhythmic language is note-perfect – ‘little pig, little pig, let me in… I won’t by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin’ – which then makes the punchline all the more horrible:

I’ve just read “The Star Chernobyl” by Julie [sic] Voznesenskaya, which I would heartily recommend. Lots in there about loyalty, duty, liberty versus freedom etc. But that’s for another post or two. Right now, this, from a passage relating how people are coping in the immediate aftermath of the disaster is funny as; “And listen to this one from the kids where one of my friends works,” Tatyana broke in. “It’s a joke fairy-tale: “A cottage-loaf is rolling through the wood when a fox comes along. ‘Cottage-loaf, cottage-loaf, I’m going to eat you up.’ ‘I wouldn’t advise it, I’m not a cottage-loaf, I’m a hedgehog from Chernobyl.’” (page 122)